Franz Liszt / Avenue Q

On this day in classical music: Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt died at age 74 in Bayreuth, Germany. Equally accomplished as a pianist and composer, Liszt left an extensive compositional legacy, including two piano concertos, numerous orchestral tone poems, and countless works for solo piano. The latter includes three suites titled “Years of Pilgrimage,” the well-known “Sonata in B Minor” and several transcriptions of works by other composers. Listen  to a performance of Liszt’s transcription of Robert Schumann’s “Widmung.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5cpTHSLB5I

 

 

Musical musings: Having written the musical “Avenue Q” with the songwriting team of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, I’m glad none of us knew what lay ahead once we were done. If we had known, we might have frozen in terror and never been able to finish. Blissfully unaware of our futures, we wrote the show during marathon sessions at Starbucks, in diners, in each others’ cramped apartments. We’d get actors together to perform it, bare-bones, for an audience, and we’d take what we learned and go back to work — at a humid theater festival without air conditioning, at least once in a park, and frequently in our director’s living room because, unlike us, he actually had one. Writing “Avenue Q” forced Bobby, Jeff and me each to develop a strong set of audience-listening ears. During previews off-Broadway, we rewrote nearly half of the show in a month based on what we heard. Was the audience laughing? Did we seduce them into silence? And most important: Were they, on some level, moved? I’ve always felt that what makes “Avenue Q” subversive is not that the puppets swear or have a love scene so flagrant that Tommy Lee would blush. There’s a moment in Act 2 when the audience becomes utterly silent, that beautiful silence when nobody dares cough or rustle, because they’ve come to care about a character going through a difficult time. This character, I might add, is made of foam and fur and googly eyeballs and sits on a puppeteer’s arm. The audience uses its own imaginations, not CGI, to relate to someone who couldn’t be less like them on the surface. What could be more subversive than that? – Jeff Whitty

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