DISCUSSION THREAD March 2020 75-Word Challenge

Congrats @Daysman.

Thanks for the mentions folks. Tried to do something a bit different, maybe I should have gone with the Dark Lord and the circus werewolves.
 
Well done, and congratulations, @Daysman. Looking forward to seeing your choice for the next challenge.
 
Congratulations Daysman!

(Have to quickly say a stunned and grateful thanks to @Ursa major for the vote, it was not my original story - obviously - because the original had dinosaurs in it)
 
To save people even a mimimum of DuckDuckGoing (or even Googling), my story is about the (in the story, magically conscious) main theme of Liszt's Piano Concerto No.2 (it's Searle** catalogue number being S.125).

I was a bit worried that I'd got the timing wrong, i.e. that the march-like treatment of the theme was not 15 minutes into the work. (As usual, I was writing the story at the last minute -- I'd only got the basic idea on the 22nd -- so I had no time to check.) As it happens, the first version*** I found online (I've no way of linking to the various version of the piece I have on CD) proved me -- well, the narrator -- more or less correct.

Speaking of the narrator.... Not being the one being transformed ("mangled"), I strongly disagree with the Main Theme: I like themes to appear in various guises in a piece... so not as Leitmotifs were once described: as there to help those listening to the (Wagner) opera who have lost track of what's (meant to have been) going on. I therefore neither damn Liszt nor the technique of the transformation of themes****.


** - There are a number of different cataloguing schemes for Liszt's vast output, but the most commonly referenced one (for recorded performances) is that devised by the English composer, Humphrey Searle (1915-1982).

*** - I found this only yesterday evening. The sound on the YouTube video is, on a mercifully very few occasions, not always of the best quality -- there are a few seconds of what sound like distortion -- but this may be have been a problem with my laptop. The picture is fine.

**** - This is also known (though not commonly) as the metamorphosis of themes, the phrase that first led me to the concept of my story.
 

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