ADENOID IM GRAL 

Music for the event: 

Von Wagners "Lohengrin" zu Charlie Chaplins "Der Grosse Diktator"

for piano  

Paolo Colombo between the descendents:

Michael Chaplin and Gottfried Wagner

performance: Friederike Haufe 

(realplayer 584kb)

The composition was performed in Schwerin, in Germany, during the Festival "Verfemte Musik 2004", in which some survivors from Nazi concentrations camps (like Terezin's girls) were present. Jewish prisoner composers' music was performed during this Festival.

The most important moment of the Festival was the proiection of the film The great Dictator by Chaplin, in the context between Wagner's music and Third Reich.

For this reason the great actor and director's son, Michael, and the German composer's great-grandson, Gottfried, were present at the Festival.

In this context Paolo Colombo had the honour to seal the event with one of his original composition, Adenoid im Gral, musical parody of the melodies by Wagner and Chaplin.

The composer and the pianist 

Adenoid's Graal
It's a musical parody.

The fanciful mingling, the modified version, the juxtaposition of these melodies mock the Wagnerian solemnity  with the Chaplinian thoughtlessness.

For this reason Adenoid im Gral is a musical parody of the melodies so near to the Reich, just like the film was a parody, tragically exact, of the Nazi dictatorship.

 

 

The Great Dictator