When Stravinsky wanted to compete with the Beatles and other hilarious musical tales

Martin Llade already warns at the beginning of this new book: “That reality bursts in with its simplistic and scarcely imaginative logic would be very undesirable for the author, and he hopes that for the reader as well.” The idea is original: why not use humor to imagine what never was? Why not bring together a mature Mozart and a Beethoven who hears again? Why not conjecture that Rachmaninoff had an extra hand and that Dvorak lived with an Indian tribe before writing his New World Symphony? There are times (many times) that to better understand the truth you have to resort to fiction and humour, and Martín Llade knows this well. Since 2007 he has been delighting us on Radio Clásica with his stories about musicians and about music, and also in the pages of the Scherzo magazine, from where a large part of the stories now published in ‘The Chimerical Horizon’ (Musicalia Scherzo-Antonio Machado Libros ). Martín Llade is one of the great names in popular music in this country, indebted, among others, to Fernando Argenta and José Luis Pérez de Arteaga, to whom he pays homage by placing him in the sky among an audience of musical geniuses ready to listen to his admired Mahler. . Martín Llade develops in these stories a fertile imagination to place the greatest musicians in unlikely situations, but which, curiously, shed light on his true personality. He locks the child Mozart in a cell for several days to prove to the skeptics that the brat is the one who composes, and not his father; or he places a ten-year-old Albéniz –’El Chamaco Gachupín’- at the head of a gang of Mexican outlaws before fleeing to Spain. Martín Llade, presenter of Radio ClásicaNIUSPuts musicians in the most unlikely situations: Holst is surrounded by aliens admired by ‘Los Planetas’; to Haydn in astral trips that explain his prodigious inspiration; to Ennio Morricone in a Cinema Paradiso in the ditto (“what do you want the cinema in heaven to be called?, asks his soul mate Sergio Leone). Can Martín Llade imagine that a jealous Stravinsky wanted to set up a pop band to compete with the Beatles, that Johann Strauss Jr. composed a work entitled ‘Radetzki, márchate’ to overshadow his father’s ‘Radetzki March’, or that the plumber Philip Glass discovered his muse in the perpetual drop of a broken faucet. Through the book a Saint-Saëns complains of being buried in Montparnasse and not in Père Lachaise, next to Chopin, Bellini or Bizet; to a stunned Gerswhin at a concert in Harlem, surprised by those blacks who naturally knew what he had such a hard time learning; to a cold and moody Nadia Boulanger, who she discovers thanks to a student that she also has a heart. No need to gut the book further. Just to add something: that humor of Martín Llade, so compatible with his musical erudition, is sometimes related to that of Groucho Marx or Woody Allen, as in the scene where Wagner hides from Cósima to play, dressed in a yarmulke, his Jewish opera ‘King David’.