987 Words with The Salieri Effect: On Parody

Salvador Dali as Mona Lisa (1973)

Today, we usually associate “Parody” with something funny. The Onion satirizes the news with far-fetched “take-offs” which over the years, as we've sadly discovered, have become increasingly challenging to determine which one is true? Perhaps “Saturday Night Live,” approaching an event from a different context, might point out an absurdity that could otherwise go overlooked.

To someone studying music history, a “parody” can also be the way a Renaissance composer would build on a piece of pre-existing music and use it as a foundation for his own original composition.

When someone asked Igor Stravinsky about his borrowing a bit of Bach for his “Dumbarton Oaks” or Tchaikovsky for his ballet “The Fairy's Kiss,” he said rather pithily, “All composers borrow. Great composers steal.” They could've mentioned his quoting real Russian folk tunes in Petrushka, but apparently Anonymous isn't afforded the same level of concern.

In literature, there are only so many plots to go around before someone says “you're ripping off Shakespeare” who no doubt ripped it off from some earlier source, not for lack of any imagination. But how are you ripping it off? Changing the names and calling it “recycling”? Or reinterpreting it with your own insights?

DaPonte's play written for Mozart's Cosí fan tutte wasn't based on an already-existing play typically about Roman history or Greek mythology. It was supposedly inspired by court gossip, a bit shocking in its day.

If Handel incorporated another London composer's tune into his Messiah, we think nothing of it today because we've lost any familiarity with the original and the idea of plagiarism at this distance is moot. Handel's excuse was “it's a great tune but he had no idea what to do with it,” and, apparently, Handel did.

With Stravinsky, listening to “Dumbarton Oaks” and Bach's 3rd Brandenburg side-by-side, we can hear the difference and recognize which is whose. For Stravinsky, Bach's a jumping-off point, catching a ball and running with it.

Stravinsky meets Brahms' critic

When somebody pointed out the similarity between Brahms' big chorale in his 1st Symphony's finale and Beethoven's “Ode to Joy,” as if this were something unethical, Brahms typically replied, “Any ass can see that!” Beethoven's spirit, this giant treading behind him, infused the whole symphony, consciously or not, as if paying homage to The Master.

If the opening of my Salieri Effect seems familiar, it's meant to be. Since references to Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu permeate the trilogy's first novel beyond its title, In Search of Tom Purdue, the appearance here of something straight out of the opening of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice may be surprising.

What are the implications of this reference? It's more than a mere tip-of-the-hat to Proust's famous opening line when, in my first volume, Alma Viva, the initial victim, gets off the bus for work.

But Salieri opens on a deeper parody: readers familiar with Mann's opening will imagine Aschenbach walking around Munich and running into a weird stranger, left with the impression he should visit some exotic place. Readers may make connections to my character which, as adventures unfold, might lead them to discover more insights along the way.

My character Dr. Richard Kerr (“famous among my friends”) isn't dissimilar from Mann's once-confident Aschenbach: both middle-aged men, Aschenbach's name means “Ash-Brook,” and Kerr's comes from “Ricercar,” meaning “to seek,” as in “musical detective.” Both are experiencing creative difficulties; both, primarily logical in their approach to life, are about to make sudden, irrational, life-changing decisions.

Call these references “Easter Eggs,” treats left for perceptive readers, but to anyone unfamiliar with Mann, it's just another scene. “Self-referential,” “inside jokes,” or just “me showing off,” they're another layer of perception.

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Another key element of Mann's story is the conflict between Aschenbach's logical mind and his emotional response to meeting young Tadzio who becomes the writer's obsession, an internal conflict that leads to Aschenbach's death. While there may be no “Tadzio Component” in my mystery, the duality between logic and the irrational is a principal theme. Kerr prides himself on his intellectual approach (he knows a lot of facts) but, as in past novels, it's these leaps into the irrational, the “gut-feeling” Cameron points out, that always crack the case.

There is another level of reference with Kerr's stranger who, unlike Aschenbach's, has a name: Dionisio Ciapollo. In Mann's story Mario and the Magician, the evil hypnotist is named Cipolla which means, literally, “onion.” Cipolla is a study in the rise of Fascism, the story published in 1929, four years after Mussolini became Italy's dictator.

Aschenbach, being a writer, imagines his stranger's story; Kerr's hands him a card which, like him, is nearly unintelligible, then disappears. Ciapollo is both Dionysus and Apollo, wild Romantic nature and Classical clarity combined. Apollo represents the logic of structure, the focus of balance; Dionysus is ruled by the emotions and abhors staying “inside-the-box.”

The creative conflict between emotions (the Dionysian Right-Brain) and intellect (the Apollonian Left-Brain) is a key component of the entire trilogy. The Sisyphian Rhapsody will add another layer of parody involving Greek mythological characters.

There are lesser levels of parody, sometimes a simple reference of a name (which I'll get to in a later post). Two minor characters in Venice will become more prominent in the 3rd Volume, musicologists Pentheo Agavinelli and Tiresio Creontini, named after roles in Euripides' The Bacchae, at the very core of this Logical-Irrational Conflict.

The whole family at Phlaumix Court, originally introduced in The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, is a parody of TV's Downton Abbey. Names for the Ravensmoors, Lady Vexilla's ancestors, are references from Edgar Allan Poe.

Famously, Mann's Venetian novella ends with the plague, however you view the symbolism. Without giving away any spoilers, aside from having finished my novel during the Pandemic of 2020, there is no plague here.

The Salieri Effect is set in 2016; The Sisyphian Rhapsody ends in December, 2019, before the outbreak of Covid-19. And yet...?

- Dick Strawser

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You can read the previous column "Behind the Scenes in 987 Words" - the novel's Origin Story - here. The next one may be "Place-Names: The Place" and should be published sometime soon...