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No. 474: Play me a song, you're the piano man

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Play me a song, you're the piano man

First | Previous | 2021-01-21 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/itoons/?comic=474

Strip by: Conor

Lucy: You think Beethoven was great...
Lucy: Well, what about Chopin, Bach, Mozart, Bloch, Bartok, Berlioz, Bizet, Brahms, Delius, Debussy and Dvorak?
Lucy: What about Elgar, Franck, Glinka, Grieg, Handel, Haydn, Humperdinck, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Schubert, Sibelius, Tschaikowsky, and Vivaldi?
Schroeder: They were great, too...
Lucy: So why don't you ever play any of their music?
Lucy: Play me Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition! Play me a Schönberg Klavierstücke! A Telemann Fantasia! Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives!
Lucy: I'm sick of Beethoven! You have hundreds of years of choices! How about Rzewski, Couperin, Britten or Szymanowski? Lili Boulanger? Anything but Beethoven again!
Schroeder: Look, this is a toy piano. The black keys are just painted on! I can't play any of that! So I put on one of my Beethoven LP's and pretend to play.
{Schroeder appears to play the Arietta from Beethoven's Sonata op. 111, while Lucy looks furious.}

The author writes:

I enjoy the occasional suggestions that Lucy is far more knowledgeable and more of a classical music buff than she usually lets on; so, let's take that idea to its logical conclusion. I happen to rather like Beethoven's music, but mostly I'd side with Lucy here, and her additional 'requests' are all keyboard pieces or composers I'm also fond of. Schroeder doesn't always play Beethoven (he's occasionally seen playing Bach, Schubert, and Rachmaninoff, and said to play Chopin) but that's still a pretty narrow repertoire for a pianist of his apparent level.

Original Peanuts: 1966-08-20.

Original Beethoven: Sonata op. 111 as published by Edition Peters.