Richard D. Russell

On October 22, Dan Wang premiered my new piano solo, “Dantes Variations” at a two-day conference sponsored by the journal 19th-Century Music and hosted at Fordham University in New York City. It happened to be the 200th birthday of Franz Liszt, and many Liszt pieces were included in the concert.

The interdisciplinary conference was organized by the musicologist Lawrence Kramer, editor of the sponsoring journal, who asked me to compose a piece for the concluding concert. The topics of the two-day seminar “… range as widely as the contributors’ imagination can compass…” including…

“…portrayals of music or musicians in nineteenth-century literary works, musical representations in nineteenth-century music of literary genres, characters, or texts, literary opera, incidental music, aesthetic theories, models of performance, treatments of nineteenth-century music in twentieth– and twenty-first-century literature and film, treatments of nineteenth-century literature in twentieth-and twenty-first-century music, including opera and film music, and the list goes on.

My piece was a theme and variations based on Edmond Dantes from Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. Here are pictures of Mr. Kramer, Mr. Wang, and me. (Click image for larger size.)

Lawrence Kramer opens the concert

Dan Wang performs “Dantes Variations.”

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[T]he two-day conference is Oct. 21–22, 2011, with a concert to conclude the festivities. This concluding concert will include my new composition, Dantes Variations, a theme and variations on an original theme which is intended to evoke Edmond Dantes, the hero of Dumas’s book, “The Count of Monte Cristo.” This concert will meet at 7:30pm, October 22 at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, 113th West 60 Street at Columbus Avenue, 12th floor. (ADDRESS CORRECTED)

For more information about the whole concert, see: http://tiny.cc/yhd8u

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But if you consider the hero myth as an overall aesthetic goal–the heroic journey–you begin to hear it all over Beethoven’s music. In fact, it is so dominant that Scott Burnham wrote a book about it called Beethoven Hero (1995).

I’ve just completed a new piano solo called Dantes Variations in which I start with a heroic theme and submit it to many variations. Quite late in my composition process I came across this image from Wikipedia, and I thought I would share it here. Consider all the fantastic ways you can take your music if you think of some of these ideas: “call to adventure,” “threshold (beginning of adventure),” “helper,” “death and rebirth,” transformation,” “atonement,” “gift of the goddess.”

It sounds like a recipe for a great piece of music! And inspiring: what would be meant by the “helper” in a musical composition? Perhaps a secondary theme, but also perhaps simply an insistent pitch, or even a rhythm.

But I also wonder about how things can be changed up. For instance, what if some of these ideas were taken out of sequence? What if “gift of the goddess” comes first and then “death” with no rebirth?

One last consideration: There are so many variations of heroes. The tragic hero, the anti-hero, the super hero: Can any of these be expressed in a distinct musical way?

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