From: henning@acsu.buffalo.edu (Karl senile Henning)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: The Tale of Two Gabes (Ask Dr Music)
Date: 30 Jul 92 17:37:49 GMT
Organization: UB


			    ASK DR MUSIC
			    ============

Hello, everyone.  Earlier, there was some confusion over the two
Gabes, Weiner & Wiener.  This was unfortunate.

Fortunately, among Richard Taruskin's most closely guarded sketches,
some of which have with great cunning and a little luck been skimmed
and reconstructed by careful scrutiny of the indentations made on
discarded blotters, there is now documented musicological speculation
which promises to dispel the fog of confusion from over these two
shadowy figures.

In the early 18th century, when Napoleon Buonaparte, contrary to the
promise of Republicanism which gave rise to his meteoric career,
gave the low countries back under the dominion of the Spanish crown,
two Dutch brothers, Lars and Pieter van Geeb were sent into exile
by Juan Carlos II of Castile, under suspicion of having sabotaged
the royal tulip-beds.

The Geeb brothers went to Austria, where they had heard that their
fellow Dutchman, Ludwig van Beethoven, had scratched Napoleon's
name from a visiting-card (practicing, as it turns out, for the
now-famous incident involving the title page of the Opus 55).
One settled in Vienna, Geeb Wiener (Gabe the Viennese);  the other
planted vineyards further down the Danube, Geeb Weiner (Gabe the
Vintner).

Here, musicological interest in the two grizzly Gabes of indeter-
minate height and uncertain loyalties would have died a natural
death, if it were not for the rare coincidence, that they both
married women composers.

The news of Napoleon's inadvertent contribution to the misfortunes of
of the Geebs, awakened the Russian Tsar Aleksandr to the possibility
of fomenting insurrection in Napoleon's neighbor-states, through the
agency of the well-documented moral force of music;  Aleksandr
negotiated a match between Geeb Weiner, and one of the Tsar's distant
cousins, the repetitive and musically annoying Philippa Geebvrouw
Glasnost, on condition that Geeb repatriate to the Spanish
Netherlands, where Philippa set a little-known libretto by Pushkin
(his only work in Dutch), depicting with heart-rending vividness
the domestic stress created when the husband is both deeply involved
in covert political action, and eager to try novel breakfast cereals.
The name of the opera, /Akhnaten/ is a homey Dutch phrase inimical
to exact translation, roughly rendered as "Nut & Honey".

Geeb Wiener, on the other hand, was known for his allergies
to fruits of the nightshade family, and for writing politically
incendiary verse;  so it is not to be wondered that, upon
marrying the American folk-composer Dylan "Burnt Alice"
Zimmermann, they collaborated on a chilling opera condemning
inorganic gardening practices, and combining artistic elements
which later came to be associated with Georg Buechner, and
the Frugal Gourmet.  The 1822 riots among the Piedmontese
/giardineri di pomodoro/, when /Die Tomaten/ opened at La
Scala, were drawn-out and brutal, and live on in infamy.

Karl Philip Emmanuel Prescott Rosicrucian Mudpuppy Henning (non Haas)

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