Fortean-themed music, from opera to metal

Prompted by some comments on a previous post, I thought I'd write something about "UFO-themed songs". But after looking into it, I decided there isn't really anything I can add to the many times it's been done before (even Wikipedia has a list of songs about close encounters with aliens). Instead, I've decided to focus on a selection of more substantial musical works (e.g. operas and concept albums, such as those pictured above) that fit my broad definition of "fortean". These include several less well-known items, including some I discovered while researching my two books about music - SofSFM (2020) and SofM (2023). Here's what I came up with, grouped under the 6 headings of Aliens, Ghosts, Atlantis, Esoteric Traditions, Science Fiction and Comics.

ALIENS

Christus Apollo (1969) by Jerry Goldsmith. An obscure work by a far-from-obscure composer, this was one of several interesting discoveries I made while writing SofSFM. It's a religious cantata with words by SF writer Ray Bradbury, portraying Christ as a spacefaring super-being known by different names on different planets.

Alien Encounter (1996) by Phil Thornton - a purely instrumental album with tracks including "Arrival of the Mothership" and "Visions from the Homeworld". It comes from one of my all-time favourite CD labels, New World Music, which was particularly popular in the 1990s. I've got quite a collection of these  - other artists on the label include Medwyn Goodall and Terry Oldfield (brother of Mike Oldfield).

GHOSTS

There's never been any shortage of operas with supernatural themes - several of them featured in my Fortean Opera post. Here are two more:
 
The Lighthouse (1980) by Peter Maxwell Davies - another discovery I made while writing SofSFM. It's based on the same real-world "Flannan Isle incident" as the 1977 Doctor Who serial "Horror of Fang Rock". In the latter, the mysterious disappearance of the lighthouse-keepers is down to an alien; in the opera, it's caused by a series of ghostly apparitions.

The Turn of the Screw (1954) by Benjamin Britten. This is based on the classic "psychological" ghost story of the same name by Henry James - but whereas the ghosts turn out to be imaginary in the original version, in the opera they're very real.

ATLANTIS

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that one of the CDs pictured above also featured in my recent post about Lemuria - and that's the 2004 album of that name by the symphonic metal band Therion. But there are two other albums worth mentioning in this category that I only have in intangible form in my Spotify library:

Atlantis (1969) by Sun Ra. A fascinating individual who claimed to come from the planet Saturn, Sun Ra featured prominently in SofSFM. But not all his albums are about outer space - this one has tracks called Mu, Lemuria, Yucatan and Bimini, as well as the really excellent 22-minute title track.

Atlantis Ascendant (2001) by Bal-Sagoth - another symphonic metal band, and definitely my favourite (their music always makes me think of a Masters of the Universe cartoon, for some reason). Their concept albums also have really great plots; according to Wikipedia, this one "centres on the exploits of a fictional 19th-century archaeologist and adventurer who has dedicated his life to the field of antediluvian anthropology".

ESOTERIC TRADITIONS

Voyage of the Acolyte (1975) by Steve Hackett - the esoteric tradition in this case being the Tarot. All the tracks are inspired by specific Tarot cards, such as "Hands of the Priestess", "The Hermit" and "Shadow of the Hierophant". There's also a Tarot connection in The Lighthouse, as PMD explains in the liner notes: "The structure is based on the Tower of the Tarot, whose number symbolism is present in all the music".

Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) by Yes, based on Hindu mysticism. In its original form as a vinyl double album, each of the four sides comprised a single "movement" relating to the four categories of Hindu scripture: the shruti (revealing), the smriti (remembering), the puranas (ancients) and the tantras (rituals).

Zos Kia Cultus (2002) by Behemoth. A previously unsuspected music genre I discovered while writing SofM was what you might call "highbrow" metal, and of the bands I listened to, Behemoth was the one I liked best. This particular album is based on the occult writings of Austin Osman Spare, who I first heard of when he featured on the cover of Fortean Times in March 2001.

Masonic Music (1783-91) by Mozart. I mentioned last week that The Magic Flute was featured in my Fortean Opera post, one reason being its inclusion of a Masonic-style secret society. Mozart himself was a Freemason, and this CD contains several works incorporating Masonic ideas. One in particular, the "Little German Cantata" of 1791, must have seemed as blasphemous to some listeners as Goldsmith's Christus Apollo, with its reference to "the creator of the universe, whether named Jehovah, or God, or Fu, or Brahma" (Fu being a Chinese deity and Brahma a Hindu one).

Also featured in my Fortean Opera list was Wagner's Parsifal, which could equally fit here with its strange fusion of the Grail legend with the mystical writings of Schopenhauer. It features quite strongly in Philip K. Dick's novel VALIS (1981), which brings me neatly to the next item...

(Fortean) SCIENCE FICTION

VALIS (1987) by Tod Machover - a short opera based on Dick's novel. Most of PKD's writings are fortean to some extent, but none more so than the mishmash of metaphysics, religion, alien super-intelligence and conspiracy theories that is VALIS. As for the opera, it's discussed in some detail in SofSFM, so all I'll say here is that anything that combines Wagner and rock music has got to be worth a listen.

The Chronicle of the Black Sword (1985) by Hawkwind. There's always been a close connection between Hawkwind and the writings of Michael Moorcock, but this album (their best, in my opinion) has particularly strong fortean credentials, being based on the adventures of Moorcock's sword-and-sorcery hero, Elric of Melniboné.

(Fortean) COMICS

The Power Cosmic (1999) by Bal-Sagoth. No excuses for mentioning this band a second time, as even the album title reflects one of Marvel's more fortean superheroes, the Silver Surfer. He's also referenced, under his real name of Norrin Radd of Zenn La, in the song "The Scourge of the Fourth Celestial Host", together with several other Marvel characters, including Arishem of the Celestials - the archetypal "ancient alien".

Miss Anthropocene (2020) by Grimes. There were two reasons I sought this album out while writing SofM: (a) I was under instructions to include popular young artists, and (b) she'd spoken out in praise of AI in music, which was one of the topics in the last chapter of the book. I have to say I enjoyed her style much more than I expected, and was pleasantly surprised to find two songs inspired by the distinctly fortean comics that Jack Kirby did for DC in the 1970s: "Darkseid" and "New Gods".

While I could have found plenty more items to go in the preceding categories, that's not true here, as beyond those two albums I'm not aware of any other fortean comic-inspired music (unless you want to include "Grimly Fiendish" by The Damned). But there's a picture of Doctor Strange on the cover of the Pink Floyd album A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), and he's as fortean as superheroes get (see my post Master of the Mystic Arts). The picture, drawn by Marie Severin, is taken from Strange Tales #158, and it's quite hard to see unless you peer very closely. Here's a photograph I took of my CD version, where I've  contrast-enhanced the relevant part (and outlined it in red), to make it a little clearer:
 

Anthology Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a subjective thing. It’s not just a function of time period (e.g. 60s, 70s or 80s) but also how old you happened to be at the time. This struck me recently when I was looking at some so-called “Eighties nostalgia” blogs on Tumblr, which were all about toys, games and children’s TV. Personally, I associate those with the 1960s rather than the 80s, by which time I was in my twenties. To me, 1980s nostalgia means things like Dallas, Miami Vice, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Traci Lords.

But the height of nostalgia for me is not the 60s or 80s but the 70s – my teenage years. During this period I went through a number of fanatical interests, from amateur radio and Marvel Comics to astronomy and science fiction. In those days, the latter usually meant short stories and novelettes rather than blockbuster novels and movies. At least two-thirds of the SF books I read during the 70s were multi-author anthologies. Wherever possible I bought imported U.S. paperbacks, for the perfectly logical reason that they smelled better than British ones (I mean a lot better – almost as good as comics).

Seven of the books pictured in the photograph above are my original copies from the 70s (Nova 2 and Dangerous Visions 2 are signed by their respective authors, Harry Harrison and Harlan Ellison). The odd one out is the battered-looking one in the bottom right-hand corner – Omega, edited by Roger Elwood. I bought it online last week on a nostalgic impulse. It wasn’t a completely random choice, though – I noticed that several of the stories had a potentially Fortean sound to them:

• “Amfortas” by Laurence M. Janifer. Amfortas is a character in Wagner’s most Fortean opera, Parsifal (the science-fictional aspects of which I’ve discussed elsewhere). The story starts with a quote from the opera, but it only has a tenuous relation to the plot – which is pretty Fortean in its own right, about a transplant recipient who takes on the personality of the donor.
• “Beast in View” by Miriam Allen de Ford isn’t Fortean in itself (it’s about how to deal with a murderer in a futuristic crime-free society), but the author is. She was mentioned by Charles Fort himself in New Lands (“Miriam Allen de Ford has sent me an account of her own observations”) and in Wild Talents (“Clipping sent to me by Miriam Allen de Ford of San Francisco”).
• “Symposium” by R. A. Lafferty consists of philosophical musings by semi-sentient building-blocks in a futuristic child’s toy box. When one of the blocks, labelled with an archaic mediaeval letter, is told “You just don’t fit in!” it replies “You can’t get rid of the awkward. It does not really dispose of a thing to call it Fortean.” Lafferty was one of the most frequently anthologized authors during the period we’re talking about, and his stories often mention Charles Fort (as Daniel Petersen pointed out in a comment to my blog post about Charles Fort in Fiction).
• “Running Around” by Barry N. Malzberg is about a loser who decides to commit suicide by the paradoxical method of travelling back in time to kill his grandfather (and then his father, when that doesn’t work). Like Lafferty, Malzberg was a regular contributor to these anthologies, and another of my favourites at the time (both for his offbeat writing style and his propensity for sex scenes – he’s one of the authors I was trying to parody in Six Dimensional Sex).
• “After King Kong Fell” by Philip José Farmer is the only story in the book that I’d already read in another anthology. It’s basically an eyewitness recollection of King Kong’s rampage in New York by someone who was just a child at the time. On re-reading it, I noticed a few things that would have gone over my head when I read it back in 1976 – such as the cameo appearances by pulp heroes Doc Savage and the Shadow. Also I can see now that the calculation of the length of King Kong’s penis (which fascinated my 18-year-old self) is based on a misapplication of the square-cube law... although I suspect that was intentional on Farmer’s part, for humorous effect.

The Waste Land

When T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922, it was one of the most avant-garde poems in the English language. It’s also a long poem – about 3000 words, divided into five sections, and followed by more than 1500 words of detailed endnotes. Both the text of the poem and the notes are packed full of quotations and allusions on a wide variety of themes, some of them distinctly Fortean – the Holy Grail, Eastern mysticism and Tarot cards among them.

The poem is Fortean in its structure as well as its content. The concatenation of seemingly unrelated fragments, in different styles and sometimes even different languages, is reminiscent of Charles Fort’s own writings, where he strings together quotes from newspaper clippings. Eliot wanted to produce a similar effect in the poem – a fact that would be clearer if the work was still known by the title he originally gave it.

The poem’s actual title, “The Waste Land”, is a reference to the desolate area surrounding the castle of the Grail in Arthurian legends. However, during the early stages of composition Eliot’s working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. This silly-sounding phrase is a quotation from a novel by Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, in which a woman describes how her son reads newspaper stories out loud. Eliot’s use of this title suggests he conceived The Waste Land as a Fort-like compendium of press clippings – something that was apparently more obvious in earlier drafts of the poem than in the final published version. The critic M. C. Bradbrook wrote: “The original title, He Do the Police in Different Voices (applied to reading newsprint in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend) would be applicable to some of the excised stories; the riotous scene in Boston might have fed a newspaper column, the heroic deaths of the fishermen certainly would; and the lady Fresca must have featured in gossip columns.”

Eliot’s notes to the poem are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and he deliberately overstates the Grail connection: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance... Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do.” Besides references to the Grail and the Arthurian “Fisher King”, the poem includes quotations from Tristan and Isolde (“Mein Irisch Kind, wo weilest du?”) and Das Rheingold (“Weialala leia Wallala leialala”). In Wagner’s opera, the latter words are sung by the three Rhine-daughters – in Eliot’s poem they are attributed to the three Thames-daughters!

The Waste Land may be one of the few works of mainstream English literature to feature that New Age favourite, the Tarot pack. “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant, had a bad cold, nevertheless is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, with a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor... Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, and here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, which is blank, is something he carries on his back, which I am forbidden to see. I do not find the Hanged Man.”

In his notes, Eliot says “I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later... The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.”

The hooded figure that Eliot refers to is an interesting Fortean phenomenon in its own right: “Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together but when I look ahead up the white road there is always another one walking beside you. Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded, I do not know whether a man or a woman—but who is that on the other side of you?” In the endnotes, Eliot explains that these lines “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.”

Two of the poem’s five sections take their titles from works of Eastern mysticism – again, not the usual subject matter for works of mainstream literature at the time. Part III is called “The Fire Sermon”, after a sermon of the Buddha which Eliot says “corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount”. Then Part V is called “What the Thunder Said”, in reference to a fable from an ancient Hindu text called the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad. Eliot even includes a Sanskrit quote from the work: “datta, dayadhvam, damyata”, which he translates in the notes as “give, sympathize, control”. Then he concludes the poem with another Sanskrit word, shantih, repeated three times, which he describes as the formal ending to an Upanishad.

The Flying Dutchman in Comics

2013 is Wagner’s bicentennial year, and one of the more unusual celebrations I saw mentioned on the Wagnerian’s blog was The Flying Dutchman: The Comic Book. This reminded me of three other “Flying Dutchman” comics I’ve come across. I don’t mean adaptations of Wagner’s opera, but alternative takes on the Dutchman legend. Since these happen to be the work of some of my all-time favourite comic-book creators, this gives me a good excuse to indulge in another nostalgia session!

Rather than embed half a dozen images in the blog (and since I’ve been wanting to try out iMovie) I thought I’d make a short video instead... with a Wagnerian soundtrack, of course (Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer featured earlier this year in Fortean Opera).

Chronologically, the first of the three Dutchman adaptations appeared in issue #4 of Out of This World, published by Charlton Comics in June 1957. This was the work of Steve Ditko, who I’ve mentioned at least once before, in Giant from the Unknown. I first came across Ditko in reprints of early Spider-Man and Doctor Strange stories... and also (even more strikingly when I was 10 or 11) reprints of the short, quirky pieces he did for Marvel in the pre-superhero days. He also produced similar stories for Charlton comics, although I only became aware of these relatively recently when they came into the public domain – they can now be read online at http://comicbookplus.com/. That’s how I came across Ditko’s “Flying Dutchman”... although sadly it’s well below his best both in terms of storytelling and artwork.

A funny animal comic may seem an unlikely place to encounter the Flying Dutchman legend... but not when the funny animal in question is Scrooge McDuck. Created by Carl Barks, the Uncle Scrooge stories of the 1950s had less in common with Mickey Mouse than with Doc Savage – in terms of his globetrotting adventures, at least: “The Secret of Atlantis”, “The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone”, “The Lost Crown of Genghis Khan”, “The Mines of King Solomon” and dozens of others. “The Flying Dutchman” first appeared in March 1959, although I would have seen it in a British reprint circa 1964. I used to love the exotic adventure genre in those days... almost as much as I do today!

The idea of an elderly Scottish duck travelling around the world in search of adventure puts a modest strain on the imagination, but it’s nothing compared with the third and final comic on the list: The Silver Surfer. The idea of a silver-plated (but otherwise perfectly normal-looking) humanoid travelling through intergalactic space on a surfboard is – well, it’s downright silly, isn’t it? Not when you’re 11 years old, it isn’t – it’s just the totally coolest thing imaginable. Even more so when the artwork is by the incomparable John Buscema and the peerless prose is by none other than Stan Lee himself. In issue #8 (September 1969), the Surfer’s arch-nemesis Mephisto conjured up the ghost of the Flying Dutchman for the perfectly logical reason that he needed to steal the Surfer’s soul, and this was the simplest way to go about it.

After producing the video above, which is really just a fancy slideshow, I thought I’d try my hand at something more creative. Some time ago I wrote a post called Philip K. Dick, music critic, about a short story called “The Preserving Machine” in which various works of classical music are transformed into living creatures. Here is a video I’ve just put together on the same subject:

Spooky Action at a Distance

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a popular account of quantum entanglement that failed to mention Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” quote. That’s not surprising, because quantum mechanics is a notoriously difficult subject to communicate to the non-specialist. It needs all the memorable sound-bites it can get... especially ones that a layperson can relate to. If you saw an experiment in which an electron in one location seemed to know what another electron somewhere else was doing, then the word “spooky” might well spring to mind.

Part of the appeal of the quote is that “spooky” is a colloquial word, rarely encountered in serious writing. It’s quite a recent coinage, as you can see from the Google Ngram chart below. “Spooky” was virtually unknown before the 20th century, and its usage only really took off in the 1970s and 80s. When Einstein used it in a letter to Max Born in 1947, the word was still quite novel (you can view the original context here – it’s on page 158 of the original, on the left-hand-side of page 90 of the scanned PDF).

There’s a catch, however. Einstein’s letter is translated from German, and what he originally wrote was not “spooky action at a distance” but “spukhafte Fernwirkung”. The Ngram stats for spukhafte (or spukhaft) are different from spooky – the word was at the peak of its popularity around 1947, and its usage has declined since then. This led me to wonder if “spukhaft” might have a slightly different meaning from “spooky”.

Spooky comes from “spook”, which is an informal, rather playful term for ghost. The German word Spuk also means ghost, but as you can see from the chart it’s been around longer. The word occurs in the first scene of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (mentioned a few weeks ago in Fortean Opera)... a gloomy Gothic tragedy, which isn’t the sort of place you’d expect to find a childishly jolly term like “spook”. The Norwegian sailors, on hearing eerie voices emanating from the Dutchman’s ship, say: “Welcher Sang! Ist es Spuk? Wie mich’s graust!”... which is rendered in the English version as “What a song! Are they ghosts? I’m filled with fear!”

If “Spuk” simply means ghost, with no cosy Halloween or Scooby-Doo overtones, that makes me wonder if “spukhaft” is better translated as “ghostly” rather than “spooky”. If so, it would place a somewhat different emphasis on the Einstein quote. If you say something is “spooky”, that’s not so much a description of the phenomenon itself, as your reaction to it – something is “spooky” if it makes you uneasy because you can’t explain it. On the other hand, if something is described as “ghostly”, that’s saying something about the phenomenon itself. It’s being labelled as supernatural, non-physical and possibly even irrational. For a scientist to refer to something in these terms is tantamount to saying it’s not real.

The closest idiomatic phrase I can think of would be “mystical action at a distance” rather than “spooky action at a distance”. If Einstein objected to “mystical action at a distance”, he wasn’t the first one. As I’ve mentioned before, this was the reason Galileo heaped ridicule on Kepler for his suggestion that the Moon was responsible for the Earth’s tides (see Galileo wasn’t always right...). Soon after Galileo’s time, Newton explained the tides—and the motion of the Moon and planets—as consequences of the gravitational inverse square law. On the face of it, this was nothing more or less than “action at a distance”, and many people objected to Newton’s theory on the metaphysical grounds that action at a distance was illogical and therefore impossible. Numerous mechanical explanations of gravitation were put forward to try to get around the need for action at a distance.

My understanding of the German language is only marginally better than non-existent, so I really don’t know what Einstein meant by spukhafte Fernwirkung. He might have meant “spooky action at a distance” in the sense that English-speakers would understand the term – i.e. that he found the concept unsettling, if not downright scary, because it was seemingly supernatural. But I’m not convinced the emotive overtone of the word “spooky” was intended at all. He may just have been saying “I don’t believe in it, because I don’t believe in the supernatural”.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Einstein meant. “Spooky action at a distance”, as the phrase is commonly understood, is a perfect description of quantum entanglement. Wittingly or unwittingly, Einstein gave quantum physics one of its most accessible memes, right up there with Schrodinger’s Cat, the Many-Worlds Interpretation and the God Particle.

Fortean Opera

I recently came across this gothically surreal image, which illustrates an early 19th century opera called Der Freischütz. Reading up about this, it turns out to be quite a Fortean opera, which started me thinking. A Google search for “Fortean opera” turns up nothing of relevance, so I decided it was time to rectify the situation. Two or three titles sprang to mind, in addition to Der Freischütz, and some further research turned up a few others. In the end I came up with the following list (in chronological order of composition):

Il Mondo della Luna (The World of the Moon) by Haydn (1777). As the title suggests, this opera features a trip to the Moon and an encounter with its inhabitants. That wouldn’t be particularly Fortean... except that the “aliens” are fakes and the journey to the Moon is all a big hoax. As such, Il Mondo della Luna is probably the first opera ever written about a fake Moon landing – all the way back in 1777! It isn’t a well-known work (Haydn is more famous for his symphonies than his operas), but I found this clip on YouTube from a recent performance in New York. It looks quite jolly!

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart (1791). This is a famously nutty opera that turns fairy tale conventions on their head. It begins with the hero, Prince Tamino, running away from a giant snake and fainting with fright. He is saved by three young women, followers of the Queen of the Night, who give him a magic flute and a mission to rescue the Queen’s daughter Pamina from a man named Sarastro. And why is this Fortean? Because it’s all a lie! When Tamino eventually catches up with Sarastro, it turns out he isn’t a villain at all, but a wise priest of Isis and Osiris (I should have mentioned this takes place in ancient Egypt). It’s true that Sarastro abducted Pamina, but only to free her from her mother’s clutches. He was keeping her safe so she could marry Tamino... but only after the latter has proved himself worthy by undergoing an arcane, Masonic-style initiation ritual. Strange as it may seem, he is assisted in this task by his magic flute, which was given to him by the evil Queen of the Night... who incidentally also steals the show.

Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter) by Weber (1821). This is a Pact with the Devil story.... the specific pact in this instance relating to the manufacture of magic bullets which always hit their target. The catch is that the seventh and last bullet does what the Devil—or rather the demon Samiel—wants it to... after which he takes your soul as per the standard agreement. The picture above illustrates the Wolf’s Glen scene, in which the magic bullets are forged while various spirits and demons look on. The whole scene is viewable on YouTube in two parts, here and here.

Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) by Wagner (1843). The tale of the Flying Dutchman is a distinctly Fortean piece of folklore, about an old, ghostly ship that is occasionally glimpsed by sailors, its captain having been cursed to sail the seas forever. The original legend dates from the 17th century, but the opera turns it into a characteristically 19th century gothic romance. This is very early Wagner, and he went on to bigger and better things. It’s always struck me that, if the only thing that was known about Wagner was his operatic subject-matter, he would be considered an archetypal New Ager! You’ve got Celtic legends in Tristan und Isolde, the Holy Grail in Parsifal and paganism in the Ring – including this awesome invocation of the Earth Goddess!

La Nonne Sanglante (The Bleeding Nun) by Gounod (1854). Writing about Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796), H. P. Lovecraft wrote “In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor.” This sounds like a great idea for an opera, but unfortunately Gounod’s attempt at it was a complete flop. Interestingly, the libretto was also offered to Gounod’s great contemporary Verdi, but he turned it down. If he hadn’t, The Bleeding Nun might have been up there with Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata!

The Makropulos Case by Janáček (1926). I watched a production of this on a portable black and white TV when I was a student more than 30 years ago, and even then it occurred to me that it’s one of the few operas where the plot actually makes sense. The central character is a young woman named Emilia Marty, who takes an interest in a legal case that has been running for a century – and who talks about events of the 1820s as if she had been there. It gradually emerges that she’s lived for hundreds of years, using various different names all having the initials EM. But there’s an explanation for this which makes perfect sense. Anyone who is familiar with the story of John Dee and Edward Kelley will know that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552 – 1612) was obsessed with alchemy and the search for eternal life. Rudolf was based in Prague, which is where The Makropulos Case is set (Janáček was a Czech composer). When an alchemist named Hieronymus Makropulos offered Rudolf a life-extending potion, the Emperor asked him to test it on the alchemist’s daughter, Elina Makropulos, first. This caused her to fall into a coma, and the Emperor changed his mind about using the potion... but when Elina woke up a week later she discovered she had stopped aging! Hence her survival into the 20th century.

Wagner Dream by Jonathan Harvey (2007). Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in February 1883, at the age of 69. But, according to this opera, he didn’t give up without a Tibetan Book of the Dead style struggle. He was just embarking on his last opera, Die Sieger, and he argues with his spirit guide Vairochana that he ought to be allowed to go back and finish it. Wagner Dream is an opera within an opera (Wagner’s opera Die Sieger, as imagined by Harvey, framed inside Harvey’s own opera about Wagner’s battle against death). Die Sieger is set in ancient India, where the Buddha is busy setting up his community of monks. The hero is a young monk named Ananda who is trying to persuade the Buddha to allow women to join the monastic order. But isn’t that a bit far-fetched? Wagner may have been into a few New Age beliefs like Paganism and Celtic mythology, but surely not Buddhism? And feminist Buddhism at that? But it’s all true. Back in the 1850s, Wagner really did write a synopsis of Die Sieger along exactly these lines, and he really did return to the idea shortly before his death. I was aware of that (it’s mentioned by Philip K. Dick in VALIS, and in turn I referred to it in my Worldcon talk about Parsifal as Proto-SF)... but I’ve only just found out about Wagner Dream. Now I’m kicking myself that I missed its London performance last year – although there is a short clip of an earlier Dutch production on YouTube.

Philip K. Dick, music critic

For an icon of popular culture, Philip K. Dick had a decidedly uncool knowledge of classical music. In an article written several years ago I mentioned his interest in Wagner's opera Parsifal, and the numerous references to it in VALIS. But classical music features in one way or another in many of Dick's works. Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is mentioned in the introduction to A Maze of Death as the source employed for some of the material in the book. Mozart's Magic Flute is described, in considerable detail, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the hard-boiled cop Rick Deckard is an opera buff, naturally). In Ubik, a helicopter plays Beethoven's Missa Solemnis (one of the most sublime musical works of the nineteenth century) as background muzak. In The Game-Players of Titan, a teenaged kid forks out 125 dollars for a vintage recording of a Puccini aria. And so on.

But long before any of these novels were written, one of PKD's very first short stories was (in my opinion) a pure exercise in classical music criticism. The Preserving Machine was published in June 1953 when Dick was 24 years old. It's about an eccentric scientist who, worried that Western civilization is on the point of collapse, invents a machine to preserve musical works for future generations. The machine accomplishes this by encoding the music in the form of living creatures. Unfortunately, as soon as the creatures are released into the environment, they start to adapt to it by evolving into different forms, and the music becomes distorted beyond recognition.

The Preserving Machine is generally perceived as the time-honoured tale of a scientist whose invention has unforeseen consequences, and/or a satire on the fragility of human civilization. Of course it's both these things, but if either of them had been Dick's primary intention when writing it, the story would have had less emphasis on the composers and their musical works, and more emphasis on the machine itself and the way the creatures get out of hand. As it is, I can't help thinking that Dick's original intention was to make a point about the relative resilience of different composers' works, and that he came up with the story simply as a vehicle for symbolizing that point.

One reason for this view is that the story, taken at face value, is pretty ludicrous. At the time it was written, audio recordings in the form of 78 rpm records were well established (in fact PKD's first work experience was as an assistant in a record store). But the preserving machine doesn't use audio recordings, it uses printed scores. What use would those be to future civilizations? They could understand audio recordings of music, but dots and lines on paper would be meaningless to them! On the other hand, to a classical music buff, the score is the true work of art -- not any particular interpretation of it. This was obviously Dick's view at the time the story was written.

The real significance of the story is in the description of the forms taken by the works of different composers. The Mozart work (not a popular piece like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or the overture to The Marriage of Figaro, but the much more highbrow String Quintet no. 4) takes the form of a miniature peacock-like bird... presumably symbolizing beauty and delicacy. Bach's Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues come out as small spherical bugs, presumably representing mathematical precision (although their geometric perfection is soon marred by the development of poisonous spines). Brahms, that most conservative of composers, is represented by a low, flat, many-legged centipede... the ultimate in stability and unflappability. The Schubert animal is a sheep-like creature, playful and immature, which is soon torn apart by the Wagner animal -- a fierce, wolf-like creature.

The most interesting creation, and the one that I think the story is really all about, is the Beethoven beetle. Of course, beetles symbolize resilience and survivability, which is the whole object of the exercise... so there's a hint there already that Beethoven's works are the "best" in this respect. But more significantly, the Beethoven beetle is the only creature that doesn't change itself in order to adapt to its environment. At the very end of the story, the beetle has built a little mud house for itself... quite a sophisticated one, since the beetle is described as "snapping the door firmly shut behind it". In other words, the Beethoven beetle has adapted the environment to suit itself, rather than the other way around!

Postscript (December 2013): Here is a short video I put together on the same theme as this blog post...

A Wagnerian Thor

Back in 1980 I had been a fan of the Marvel comic Thor for twelve years, and of Richard Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen for two years. Thus I was well-placed to appreciate the storyline that began in issue 294 of Thor (cover-dated April 1980), which bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Wagner's magnum opus (a fact heralded in the Bullpen Bulletins for that month: "Thor #294: Beginning this issue - the Quest for the Ring of the Nibelung!").

The story in question, written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Keith Pollard and Chic Stone, is called 'New Asgards for Old', and is based on the intriguing notion that Ragnarok (the Twilight of the Gods of Norse mythology) is cyclic, occurring at the end of each astrological age of approximately 2150 years. The previous Ragnarok-cycle was the one relating to the traditional Norse gods (the Aesir) that feature in the Icelandic Eddas and in Wagner's Ring. The present cycle is the one relating to the Marvel Comics characters (Asgardians) with the same names as the old Norse gods.

The "Wagnerian" storyline actually starts on page 20 of issue 294 (see detail at left), when the dwarf Alberich steals the Rhinegold from the three Rhinemaidens. Now, you might think that this isn’t specifically Wagnerian at all... that it's just a case of Roy Thomas drawing on the same Eddaic material as Wagner. But the Rhinegold (and Alberich's theft of it from the Rhinemaidens) isn't in the Eddas -- it was invented by Wagner as a McGuffin to hold his opera cycle together! The fact was that Roy Thomas liked the story of The Ring and wanted to do a comic adaptation of it. Eventually, in 1989, he did produce a "proper" graphic novel of it: The Ring of the Nibelung, illustrated by Gil Kane. But back in 1980, graphic novels hadn't been invented, and the pages of Thor were the next best thing!

The way in which Roy Thomas contrives to tell the story of The Ring -- pretty faithfully, all things considered -- is to have "our" Thor as a passive observer of the past, watching the events of the previous Ragnarok unfold (except it's Wagner's version he witnesses, not the traditional Eddaic one!). The mapping of Wagner's operas onto the comic books, following on from the beginning of Das Rheingold in issue 294, is as follows:

Issue 295 ('The Price and the Pride') presents the remainder of Das Rheingold, ending with the creation of the Rainbow Bridge by the god Donner (the German rendering of "Thor")... who looks almost exactly like our Thor!

Issue 296 ('From Valhalla a Valkyrie') corresponds to the first two acts of Die Walküre, with the character Siegmund looking suspiciously like Thor (and the valkyrie Brünnhilde looking exactly like the comic-book character Valkyrie!).

Issue 297 ('The Sword of Siegfried') presents the last act of Die Walküre and the first act of Siegfried (and now Siegfried is the one who looks like Thor!).

Issue 298 ('Dragon's Blood'), depicting the second and third acts of Siegfried, is the first instalment to give Wagner a name-check in the credits: "Based on the opera Siegfried by Richard Wagner".

Issue 299 ('Passions and Potions') bears the credit "Based on the opera Götterdämmerung by Richard Wagner"... and it does indeed cram in more than two-thirds of that gigantic opera!

Issue 300 ('Twilight of the Gods') manages to tie up the remainder of Götterdämmerung in its first seven pages. But that's not quite the end of the story...

Strange as it may seem, these issues of Thor weren't Wagner's only comic book appearance in 1980. The Summer 1980 issue of the Marvel magazine Epic (aimed at "Mature Readers") contains an eight page story by P. Craig Russell entitled 'Siegfried and the Dragon', which is credited as coming "from the story by Richard Wagner". As so often with comics aimed at an adult audience, this story is (in my humble opinion) considerably limper than the one meant for younger readers. You can compare the Epic version (upper) and the Thor version (lower) in the following details from their respective splash pages. Somehow I feel Wagner would prefer the latter!