“I took the book, having risen from a sleep,

And I read in it…”

A silly pompous verse by N. Nekrasov was already mentioned by me in the article “There have been worse times…”

“I heard the song when I got up from sleep.”..

From the very morning, the idiotic song “Steppe and steppe all around …” began to spin in my head. To the words of Ivan Surikov. (Not Vasily the painter) and the melody of the composer Sergei Sadovsky.

And suddenly such a strange question popped up:

Can COMPOSERS be “musically deaf”, that is, not deaf at ALL (Beethoven, for example, became deaf from excessive drinking, and died, apparently, from cirrhosis of the liver), namely, to lose the “sense of music”?

Probably, yes.

The same Beethoven, in his symphonies, programmatic works, having begun something majestic in march, suddenly turned into a squat dance, completely inappropriate and incompetent. Well, it happens when Inspiration, which had just been peacefully sitting on a hanger and whispering beautiful sound combinations, suddenly flapped its wings and flew away, leaving the composer with something enticingly beautiful, but at a broken trough.

But he needs to KEEP COMPOSING!

But there’s no sound in my head, so he has to replace Inspiration with a familiar and ordinary CRAFT!

There is nothing to say about the fourth part of the Ninth Symphony – complete incompetence, camouflaged by the power of hundreds of throats of the choir and the crescendo of the orchestra.

Bulat Okudzhava, who in the song sympathizes with the lady, the owner of the most ancient profession, “The roosters crowed all night …”, suddenly gave her (the song, not the lady) the rhythm of the march!

And in the note “Steppe and Steppe all around…” mentioned at the beginning, the composer also became musically deaf and forced the dying coachman, who was giving instructions to a comrade in his profession, to get up from his deathbed and spin to the rhythm of the WALTZ!

An anecdote from the Brezhnev era immediately popped into my mind:

“Brezhnev: Comrades, we urgently need to do something about the growing senility of the Central Committee members!

Yesterday, for example, at Comrade Suslov’s funeral (By the way, why is he absent from this meeting; no discipline!), so, yesterday, at Comrade Suslov’s funeral, when the music started playing, I was the only one who thought to ask a lady to dance!”

“Sensing the hour of death…” the coachman and his friend sailed away, spinning to the rhythm of the Strauss waltz, sorry, Sadovsky.

Esprit’s next “discovery” — musical and otolaryngological.

You can see right away that he’s A SPECIALIST!

Faciant meliora potentes.

23 V 2025

P.S. Suddenly, “Lara’s Waltz” by French composer Maurice Jarre sounded in my mind for the mediocre film “Doctor Zhivago”, with excellent actors like Julie Christie, Rod Steiger, Alex Guinness, Rita Tashingham and the absolutely stupid and incompetent Omar Sharif, portraying the Greek Zhivago. paired with the equally incompetent Geraldine Chaplin.

This waltz is talented and very good, TOO GOOD for a weak film based on an even weaker novel by Boris Pasternak, to whom the Nobel Committee, known chade concern, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. How then, appeasingly, gave to the thief Sholokhov, as “compensation” for Zhivago, they say, we are sorry, dear Soviet comrades, the mistake came out!

BUT THE MUSICAL RESEMBLANCE to “Steppe…” “caught my ears.”

Although the waltzing dying coachman is much weaker musically than the “Waltz of Lara” by Maurice Jarre.