Fantasia: Music from the realm of imagination!

00:00:00

John Banther: I'm John Banther, and this is Classical Breakdown. From WETA Classical in Washington, we're your guide to classical music. In this episode, I'm joined by WETA Classical's Evan Keely, and we're going on a journey through time with the fantasy, an elusive type of work that's also defined by what it isn't. From composers and works you've never heard of to the defining works of the genre, we're off to discover how the fantasy captured our hearts, ears, and imaginations for centuries. Plus, stay with us to the end as we read your reviews from Apple Podcasts.

I think we are set up for a fun journey with the fantasy, Evan. So many of the forms in classical music developed with a lot of music theory, a lot of technical aspects in the symphony, sonatas, concertos, songs, and even dance forms. It gets rather complicated, but this is different, as we'll learn, because the fantasy isn't based on something within the theory of music really, but rather an aesthetic. And we can trace it back to vocal music, what we call motets, from the early 1500s. Evan, this might be the farthest back we've ever intentionally gone on Classical Breakdown.

00:01:10

Evan Keely: We've never wandered into the late Renaissance or even this is almost getting into the late medieval period at this point.

00:01:18

John Banther: Oh, yes. So the question that we're going to explore is how do we get from a 16th century motet in Italy to the 20th century work that we're hearing now, a fantasy for clarinet and piano by Sarah Feigin from 1996.

So let's start, Evan, with the Harvard Dictionary of Music definition of fantasy.

00:01:37

Evan Keely: Product of the imagination. An ingenious and imaginative instrumental composition, often characterized by distortion, exaggeration, and elusiveness resulting from its departure from current stylistic and structural norms.

00:01:54

John Banther: I love this definition because of that word current in there. That seems pretty important, doesn't it? A departure from the current styles and norms. What might be a fantasy today might not be recognized as one 300 years ago, vice versa. It seems like an element of what the music isn't. A current style or form is what makes it a fantasy.

00:02:15

Evan Keely: Yeah. And I think the word departure is also very important in that phrase.

00:02:19

John Banther: Yes. Outside of the Harvard Dictionary, I describe fantasy as something that feels, sounds improvisatory. There's something extra in the music. There's elusiveness, maybe something self- indulgent, exaggerated, basically a lot of imagination as even the non- musical Webster definition describes the word. I think another way to bring this to everyone's minds is think about the last century and the word rhapsody or rhapsodic. I think a lot of those elements cross over with the fantasy.

00:02:52

Evan Keely: Right. And one of the things we'll encounter as we explore the whole question of fantasy is deciding what's a fantasy and what's not, and things that maybe aren't called a fantasy could still be regarded as one. These are all some of the elements of the things we'll be exploring.

00:03:08

John Banther: And we'll probably say the word fantasy in different ways because we have fantasy fantazia, fantasia. There's different languages of just the word itself.

00:03:18

Evan Keely: Exactly.

00:03:20

John Banther: Okay, so Evan, we are in our time machine. We're off for early 1500s Italy. It's the middle of the Renaissance period. And it's so far back, the pizza is unrecognizable. They don't even have tomato or cheese on it at this point. So what music might we hear when we arrive? A motet.

00:03:37

Speaker 3: ( singing)

00:03:52

John Banther: Beautiful music that really evokes an older time, and a motet really it's like a concerto or symphony in that it's a type of work. Motets are short, sacred works for voices coming from the Renaissance period. We're thinking around 1400 to 1600.

00:04:08

Evan Keely: Right, we hear them in liturgical forms. They're part of worship services. The word motet comes the French word M- O- T, mot or mot. We have the word bon mot in English, we say that. Simply means word. Motet is a thing that is a setting of words.

00:04:25

John Banther: Yes. What happened was lute players, this predecessor to the guitar that we know today, sought to imitate this style of the motet, this kind of free, open sound, and it really, it gave us the first fantasies. Luis de Milan, who was born in 1500, lived to 1561, wrote a fantasia. Really one of the first ones. And it doesn't sound like I think a fantasy we would expect today, does it?

00:04:53

Evan Keely: Well, and this is an important innovator in the practice of the playing of plucked instruments. Luis de Milan was a maestro of the vihuela, which is a Spanish Iberian instrument, which looks sort of like a small guitar, tuned more like a lute. And this, like you said, John, this style of playing, this very fantastical manner, which is in some ways derived from the motet style of writing, but also kind of goes beyond it in some ways.

00:05:22

John Banther: Yes. And just speaking of the writing, music notation is in transition, I think, still at this point. It is not what we expect today. Even in Bach, there was not all the kind of information in music that we see on our pages today.

One thing you can really listen for, a characteristic of the motet, is you hear them singing and they're often twisting and turning around a couple of notes and they're doing it on the same syllable. We call that a melisma.

00:05:50

Speaker 4: ( singing)

00:05:57

John Banther: And I think you can listen for that same aspect in the lute or in the organ because the organ was also an instrument used for these fantasies or fantasias. So Luis de Milan, along with another composer, Francesco da Milano, they were the first ones really to write fantasies. This is nearly 500 years ago. And for more context, these composers, musicians were born nearly 200 years before Johann Sebastian Bach. That is quite a perspective, I think.

00:06:29

Evan Keely: Right. So this is a tradition that's going way back.

00:06:33

John Banther: Later in the 16th century, organist and composer, Jan Sweelinck, a composer I think I've never really heard in the United States, but still popular in parts of Europe, he was writing fantasies for himself at the organ, and they have this still improvisatory feeling, like we have something sustaining in the left hand, and then the other hand is kind of meandering around maybe playing those melismas we just described or ornaments and trills. Basically, it's like one thought finishes and then it goes to another. It feels very open.

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Evan Keely: Well, we're in the 16th century and getting into the 17th century, I think the word fantasy is perhaps more commonly being used to describe something that can't be described some other way. So very often, a work that's called a fantasy has this very elaborate style. There's a lot of virtuosic writing for the instrument. But again, if the form of the piece is not a form that can be described any other way, fantasy is often a good term.

00:07:34

John Banther: So at this point, some music is still written out, not fully like we expect today, as we already mentioned. And some of it is unmeasured, meaning that while the notes and rhythms are written on the page, how exactly they're played together or stretched out in that rhythm is determined by the musician. Think of it like a 12- inch ruler that has no markings on it. You know the entire thing is one foot, you know it contains 12 inches, but where exactly those inches start to begin or differ, maybe that can be up to you.

00:08:06

Evan Keely: Yeah. The idea that you should adhere very strictly to what's written on the page is a much later concept. So in the 19th and 20th centuries, as we get into that attitude. You really don't see it in the 1700s or before.

00:08:19

John Banther: And remember, we don't even have cheese on our pizza yet at this point.

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Evan Keely: Exactly.

00:08:23

John Banther: So far the fantasies that we've heard, they fall into the first category as described in that Harvard Music Dictionary definition, and it's described as the fantasy of quasi improvisation. This was between 1500 and 1600, and it's basically everything we just described. This improvisatory element is part of being a musician and part of playing the music as well.

So now we start to move into the 1600s with what Harvard describes as the fantasy of learned polyphany. This is music that's more written out and cohesive, isn't it?

00:08:57

Evan Keely: Yeah, we were mentioning Sweelinck earlier, and one of the works that I think of with this title Fantasy is the Fantasy of Cromatica, which is a keyboard work that's about, typical performance is maybe just under 10 minutes. And it begins with what sounds like a fugue. Now, I think I hear the word fugue. I think that is one of the strictest forms in music.

00:09:20

John Banther: Yeah.

00:09:21

Evan Keely: I mean, it's almost this very academic kind of a thing. So why is this, what is it about this that's a fantasy? Well, maybe that's a description of the harmonic adventurousness of the piece. Maybe it's the description of very chromatic writing. Maybe the form of the whole piece doesn't really have any other way of being described. So this is again another example of how the word fantasy could really have a great breadth of meaning.

00:09:47

John Banther: Yes. Polyphony or polyphonic music, that is a lot to describe. I think for our purposes, we're just thinking of polyphony as how we make melodic lines sounding at the same time sound cohesive. So maybe there is that crossover element with the fugue, Evan, in that what you just described sort of matches some of the motets in that there's multiple lines happening at the same time, less strict, I think, of course, than a fugue, but I guess it comes from that in some way at least.

00:10:15

Evan Keely: Yeah, an imitative counterpoint is components of European music throughout the centuries and different styles and so forth. And when we're talking about fantasy, there's no reason why imitative counterpoint, even fairly strict imitative counterpoint, even fugal writing can't be a component of fantasy.

00:10:35

John Banther: Fantasy, the Fantazia, the Fantasia, it spreads in Europe. Actually, it starts to leave Italy in the 1600s. After 1620, there's not really anything from fantasy in Italy. But it spreads, especially with organists, to places like what we call Germany and also France. Charles Racquet wrote a fantastic fantasy for the organ.

So as things start to shift in the Baroque period, we can look to a composer like Johann Sebastian Bach with I think a great example of what the fantasy can result in, Evan, because everything that we've been describing leaves so much up to the musician, to the player to determine for themselves. So if we take a Chromatic Fantasy by Bach and we play just the opening statement here, I'm going to play the opening statement from three different musicians.

And that's what I love about this kind of music, Evan. You get so many different interpretations. I don't hear that so much with music from the 19th and 20th centuries.

00:12:18

Evan Keely: And if you're playing something that's in a stricter form, like a piano sonata and like the minuet of a third movement of a piano sonata, there's a pretty strict form. There's a particular tempo that you're supposed to play a minuet at. You have some leeway, but you're kind of bound by a certain set of expectations. With a fantasy type of writing, there's almost no wrong way to do it. And that's one of the things that's exciting and also a bit scary for a performer about deciding how to interpret what's written on the page.

00:12:49

John Banther: Oh, that's a good way to put it. And the people we just heard were Jeremy Denk, Glenn Gould, and then somebody I recognize, Jaco Pastorius, the bassist there at the end. So many different ways that you can play this.

And after this, it seems like there's a little bit of a lull in fantasy works between Bach and between Beethoven. I think it's understandable given the large aesthetic developments that happened in music in the 18th century as we start to move away from the Baroque period. But we still have a lot of great examples and we'll get into those right after this.

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So the music we heard by Bach just a moment ago, that was from around 1710 to 1720. Moving on, we can see that sometimes a fantasy is actually a movement within a larger work. The second movement to Weber's clarinet quintet is a fantasy, and that's also the same work where we get our theme for this podcast. And I think that's interesting. I wonder, Evan, if that is also at play with the departure of styles or norms or forms when you have this piece and then you add something in the middle that's fantasy. I imagine you can have a lot of liberty there, almost no wrong way to play it compared to what's happening around it, which is much more strict maybe.

00:14:31

Evan Keely: And this is an interesting question about, especially if we're talking about the late 18th and early 19th centuries a composer like Weber you just mentioned, and the whole question of the musical aesthetic in Europe in this time. We get to the end of the 18th century and these very strict forms really become the norm. You think about the development of the symphony, for example, and there's a very particular way that these pieces get structured.

So within that context, composers like Mozart and Haydn, and you mentioned Weber, a little bit later on, are still writing fantasies occasionally. And what are they doing that's different in a work that's entitled Fantasy? Well, one thing they're doing is maybe they're taking those strict forms and kind of disregarding them. Some of it has to do with some of the harmonic language you find in some of these pieces as we get into some of these other things we're going to talk about. They may be a little bit more harmonically adventurous if it's called a fantasy.

00:15:32

John Banther: Yes. Mozart wrote a fantastic one, the K. 397. It was actually published after his death. Haydn's 1789 Fantasia also has the subtitle, Capriccio. And I think we see that a lot as a substitute as well for fantasia, a language thing. Sometimes capriccio and fantasy, they're kind of meaning the same thing, aren't they?

00:15:57

Evan Keely: Yeah. And this particular piece by Haydn is an interesting one. He takes an old folk song, The Farmer's Wife has Lost Her Cat is the English translation of the title of the folk song. And in a lot of Haydn works, we see a theme in variations kind of structure. A very famous one would be the slow movement of the Surprise Symphony, very strict theme in variations. Here in this Capriccio, The farmer's Wife Lost Her Cat, he takes this folk tune, it's kind of like a theme in variations, but much more freeform both in terms of the structure of the piece, but also if you look at the harmonic directions this piece goes in, it starts in ends in C major, but he goes into just, I wouldn't say every key on the keyboard, but really wanders around quite a bit harmonically in a way that you would not find very often in one of his symphonies, for example.

00:16:48

John Banther: Well, when you lose your pet, I mean you look under any cushion, any couch, anywhere you can look.

00:16:53

Evan Keely: Is my cat hiding in A major chord? Is he hiding in a B flat major chord? Where is my cat? It just kind of wanders around in this crazy and fun way. And of course, Haydn's humor really shines in that piece.

00:17:06

John Banther: And talk about a missed opportunity for a much better subtitle instead of Capriccio, I'd be much more interested if it said The Farmer's Wife Lost Her Cat.

That brings us to the 19th century, which also means on a timeline that these composers are closer to us than the ones that started this whole fantasy thing off, Luis de Milan.

So now that the fantasy is more developed, composers start to take it in all kinds of directions, I think, as we see with a lot of things in the 19th century. And the Harvard Dictionary describes this time as simply the fantasia after the 18th century. A great one, Evan, that we mentioned a little bit in a much earlier episode was Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. And that's because this has a very interesting tune that makes an appearance here that we also know, of course, in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. But this one seems like it was a little bit closer to the original idea of a fantasy because he does a lot of improvisation in the beginning. Beethoven that is actually at the premiere. He didn't actually write any of the music down for the opening until after he played it at a premiere.

00:18:13

Evan Keely: This piece gives us a real great insight into Beethoven as a performer. We know from contemporary accounts that Beethoven was a very skilled improviser. He really would move audiences. He would sit down at the piano and he would just play whatever came to his mind. And of course, he was such a genius. We know that within certain forms, like a sonata form for example, he was able to do extraordinary things. But what the Choral Fantasy shows us is in a more freeform style, he's also able to carry us on this incredible journey.

So the opening piano solo of the Choral Fantasia is this, what's the structure of it? It just kind of wanders around, and yet it's this very compelling journey that we go on musically. And the themes that he introduces there then become part of the piece as a whole when the orchestra comes in and then the choir comes in with this hymn- like tune, which as you said, John, is very similar to the very famous Ode to Joy theme of the 9th Symphony.

And Beethoven is this composer, I think perhaps more than any of the other romantic composers, is taking the inherited forms, the very strict forms of classicism, the late 18th century, and not departing from them, not throwing them out all together, but really stretching them. And when you have Beethoven writing a piece called The Fantasy, he's really stretching those things beyond the limits and going into a realm of imagination that's hard to describe any other way other than to say it's a fantasy.

00:19:49

John Banther: And as people will notice, we aren't talking about fantasies for solo instruments like piano or organ so much after this point, some. But now we have a soloist often accompanied by piano or with an orchestra. This also means that we're improvising a little bit less. Yes, Beethoven was able to do that in his own way with that Choral Fantasy. But for everyone else, as time moves on, improvising is less something that is required as being a musician. And it's more about this interpretation. And so you see different interpretations of music, but not so much improvising. Some people still do, and they're geniuses too.

But we can look at another one. This is from 1830, Fanny Mendelssohn's Fantasy in G minor for cello and piano. For me, Evan, this is so emblematic of the Romantic period. I mean, it sounds like this belongs in the soundtrack to a drama. There is something really fantastical about this one.

Another one would be Schumann's Fantasiestucke. He wrote a couple of these, right? One for piano, and my personal favorite, one for clarinet and piano. I love to play the Opus 73 originally for clarinet. It's also played by cello, tuba, oboe, all kinds of instruments. Every note has some kind of emotional weight, some kind of direction. You don't even have time to really think when you're playing this. You are just solely committed and fully within the music. But we also see him writing one for the solo piano, right?

00:21:30

Evan Keely: Right, the Fantasiestucke, Opus 12, Robert Schumann, which is a kind of a similar piece to the Carnaval, the Opus 9. It's a suite of short piano pieces and you have these two characters in Schumann's Imagination, Florestan and Eusebius, and they represent different aspects of his personality. There's often kind of a storyline. Sometimes we don't always know what the storyline is. Schumann very sort of autobiographical composer, very poetic in his imagination. You look at the Davids Bundlertanze and these other pieces where he's kind of writing about himself and his marriage and his friends and their sort of artistic and creative struggles and triumphs and so forth. And there's this whole little drama going on.

So we're not looking at a suite of dance pieces like you'd see in the 18th century with these strict forms, like the allemande and the courante and the minuet. You're seeing instead this flights of imagination and these little piano pieces, these short piano pieces or other works, works for other instruments where there's more of a focus on storytelling and conveying emotion outside of the bounds of a strict musical structure.

00:22:45

John Banther: A famous example that a lot of people love and it's still played a lot in concert and on the radio, that is the Carmen Fantasy by Sarasate. One of the more popular ones for soloist and orchestra. I think in part that's because the imaginative color, energy, and harmony of Carmen works in this format, but also because he's using all these hit melodies and they're, can be quite different from each other, so you have that contrast, that current departure from the form and style. And we start to see this as something included as fantasy, what we might call a medley or a compilation of something today.

00:23:30

Evan Keely: Right. So these were tunes that people would've known. This is the early 1880s. Carmen came out in 1875, a flop at first, but then it became very popular. And these tunes were well known to audiences.

What Sarasate does and what a lot of composers writing in this particular fantasy genre at the end of the 19th century are doing, taking familiar tunes and really, you might say jamming with them, really doing these crazy riffs. So rather than just playing the vocal line, you could just sit there with the violin and go, which is a wonderful thing, but he really creates that quasi- improvisational style. But it's all very strictly written out. So we're creating, it's almost like this magic trick where we're creating the illusion of improvising when in fact it's very carefully thought out, carefully planned out. And any violinist will tell you hours of practice are needed for this very virtuosic writing for the instrument.

Sarasate was a great showman, quite a skilled composer, an amazing violinist by all accounts, and was certainly not ashamed to write music for himself to play that would really show off his ability. And so to take these familiar tunes and reinterpret them through this lens of this quasi- improvisational style and this flights of fancy with a really virtuosic solo part becomes a very popular genre at this point.

Franz Liszt also wrote a number of these kinds of pieces for solo piano. He didn't often use the word fantasy to describe them. He often called them Reminiscences, Reminiscences, Reminiscences of Don Juan is one of the most famous ones where he takes tunes from Mozart's Don Giovanni, and again, he doesn't just sort of transcribe them for keyboard, he makes it into this really exciting voyage through which we hear the familiar tunes from Mozart, but they're reinterpreted in a very Lisztian way. And it becomes a tribute to Mozart, but also very much in the voice of Franz Liszt.

00:25:39

John Banther: And with so much of that breakdown of form even in the 19th century, there's works that don't have the word fantasy in them, maybe just like reminiscences or whatever, but they still fit the, not the definition so much, but they still fit the style. Sometimes it feels like the fantasy itself was a vehicle to get the symphonic poem underway even at this time.

00:26:03

Evan Keely: Right. And what's the difference between a fantasy and rhapsody? What's the difference between a symphonic poem and a concert overture? I mean, the title is often, we can get hung up on why the composer used this term or that term to describe the piece.

00:26:19

John Banther: Yes. And we especially see that going into the 20th century, which is where we're going now. The fantasy declines in popularity. But one businessman and also amateur violinist in England, Walter Wilson Cobbett, actually tried to revive it, creating a competition for composing fantasies. And it actually led to fantasies by big composers like John Ireland, Frank Bridge, and also Benjamin Britten a few years later in 1932.

Another composer from the 20th century, Ralph Vaughn Williams, wrote a couple of fantasies, famously the Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, and more famously, the Fantasia on Greensleeves, which I think we enjoy on repeat almost as much as the Pachelbel Canon, didn't we?

00:27:08

Evan Keely: Well, and they're both great pieces, very popular. And again, why are they called fantasies? Well, I'm not sure what other term to use? What's the form? It's not a form. It's not a minuet. What's the form? It's a marvelous, imaginative meandering around grounded in these very old English tunes.

00:27:32

John Banther: This is a great example, I think, of a fantasy and also a combination of what we've talked about earlier. This is Amy Beach's Opus 87, Fantasia Fugata. I mean, talking about combining, like you said before, it's one of the strictest forms, fugue, with this thing that has no form, the fantasy. So this is a great work. In the middle, there is that fugue. If you haven't heard this one, I recommend it. It's dramatic. And this is definitely something that would get a huge applause as an encore at the end of a concert or something like that.

00:28:10

Evan Keely: Amy Beach, certainly a great composer who, among other things, had a great knowledge of the forms of classicism and how romantic composers had reinterpreted those forms. So she was able to use her vast imagination to create this marvelous piece.

00:28:32

John Banther: Now, I think if you say the word fantasia to just most people in the general population, I think on average most would think of Disney's Fantasia, the cartoon, and the orchestra, and the music from all of the different composers. I think this still works as a fantasia, Evan, in its own way. One, it's imaginative. It departs from current styles and norms, I think in both music and in film. I don't think there was anything quite like this before or even really since.

00:29:01

Evan Keely: Yeah. It really kind of stands alone in its own way. I admit I have mixed feelings about the film. There's a lot about it that's quite imaginative, and there are things about it that they're a little hard for me to take. My favorite part of that, of Disney's Fantasia is the opening section where we hear the orchestra playing a Tarkovsky transcription of the Bach cantata and fugue in D Minor.

00:29:26

John Banther: Yes.

00:29:26

Evan Keely: And unlike the other scenes in the movie where you have characters in a story, you have animals dancing around, or you have Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice or whatever, in that very first section, there's just this sort of disembodied splashes of color. You see some string violin bows sort of wafting disembodied in space. And to me, that's the most fantastical of the fantasia elements of that film. And that's my favorite part of the movie.

00:29:55

John Banther: That brings us to our most recent example, in time that is, from 1996, that fantasy for clarinet and piano by Sarah Feigin that we mentioned at the top of the podcast. This is a shorter one. It's just under five minutes. But it takes you on such a journey and it's so evocative. And I just want to maybe push people for a moment here, in that some of these works are very short, but that doesn't mean they're not as thought out or not as hard to play or to compose. This is not a symphony. Sometimes you listen to a symphony by a composer and five minutes goes by and you're not sure if anything's even happening, for some of these symphonies that are an hour and a half long.

Evan, I've been playing a lot of Game Boy, the original Game Boy recently with that terrible tiny green screen. And when you play it, there's such a world inside those little one and a half inch screen, there's so much happening and you zoom out and it's like, Wow, all that's happening right there." I think it's the same for the fantasy. It may be short, but there is such a world and there's so much happening within that small space.

00:30:58

Evan Keely: And it's the sense, I think the Game Boy metaphor is a valid one, John, in that with a fantasy, we're dealing with a world of play. We're dealing with a world of imagination. Where we're dealing with a world maybe of the unexpected, where we're confronted with a set of tasks, we're listening to where the music is going. We don't know what's going to happen. And part of what makes a fantasy work exciting and beguiling is that sense of the unexpected, the sense of adventure, the sense of possibility.

00:31:33

John Banther: Yes. And while we don't have, I've not really found much fantasy, fantasia music composed in the last 20 or so years. In part, that's because, well, we have our own descriptive titles for these works. Fantasy just isn't a title that I think works for maybe the average listener. They see it and they're not sure exactly what it is. And we have the language now and the ability to really describe something in just a few words and a piece of music that may have been called a fantasy on something else 200 years earlier.

00:32:06

Evan Keely: Well, we end where we began, which is that Harvard Music Dictionary definition of a departure from current forms. Well, what are the current forms of 2023? I'm not sure how I would describe that.

00:32:19

John Banther: Yeah.

00:32:19

Evan Keely: So how do you make a fantasy on those current forms when maybe the current form is formlessness?

00:32:29

John Banther: Yes. This was a fantastic 500- year journey that we just took, and it makes me wonder what are we doing right now that may be the seed of something 500 years into the future? We'll have to see, I guess.

So now it's time to get to your reviews from Apple Podcasts. Evan, what do we have?

00:32:51

Evan Keely: We've got a five- star review from, I'm not sure how to pronounce this, U- S- A- F- X- E- N- A, usafxena, maybe?

00:32:59

John Banther: That's exactly how I would say it.

00:33:01

Evan Keely: All right. That's the username on Apple Podcasts who gave us a review on March 10, five- star review. " Unique and informative!" Was the exclamation that begins it, and the person continues, " I'm a long- term listener to WETA and an amateur musician in the DC area. The episode on the bassoon caught my attention. It's my instrument. And that was the first episode I listened to. I've since listened to them all and look forward to each new release. I've played many of the pieces you've discussed and it is fun to learn more about the music and the composer who wrote it. This podcast is unlike any other that I'm aware of, so interesting and informative. Keep it coming." Well, thank you so much, usafxena, or however you might pronounce your very creative username on Apple Podcasts. We will keep them coming.

00:33:51

John Banther: Yes. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown, your guide to classical music. For more information on this episode, visit the show notes page at classicalbreakdown. org. You can send me comments and episode ideas to classicalbreakdown@ weta. org. And if you enjoyed this episode, leave a review in your podcast app. I'm John Banther. Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown from WETA Classical.