The Composer is Dead (2006)

The show was a delightful success, which — as Mr. Snicket himself might say — here means “an evening of family-friendly music, and a fun introduction to orchestral music, delivered with Lemony Snicket’s inimitably wry, doleful humour…”

In order to help listeners to recognize the diverse, skilfully interwoven musical quotes that would make up the grand finale of the performance, Stookey, with the help of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, introduced us to excerpts from different well known classical pieces. These included Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony. After hearing all the different bits and fragments, we were ready to hear the actual funeral march from The Composer Is Dead, which juxtaposes the different excerpts we had heard, and many more. It was worth the wait. Having been primed for it by hearing each of the musical references in their original contexts, it was great fun to then see how Stookey had interwoven these quotations, without changing any notes from the original. The funeral march was remarkable in that it wasn’t simply a medley of the different classical pieces — a kind of patchwork with nominal transitions to lead us from one portion into the next. Instead, it actually layered the motifs, fading one out, while sustaining a second theme and bringing a third in on top, all the while blending them together in such a way that the whole thing held together as a credible, enjoyable piece in its own right. A remarkable composition, for all that Stookey hadn’t written any of the notes themselves. The skill lay in the way they were excerpted and interwoven. The second half of the performance began with the lugubrious entrance of Daniel Handler, Lemony Snicket’s “social representative.” What followed, in The Composer Is Dead, was a witty and engaging murder mystery, replete with humorous bathos and clever wordplay. In the tradition of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, The Composer Is Dead is a fun and engaging introduction to the different components of the orchestra, aimed at a new generation that is more cued in to elements of irony and self-parody.

Everybody loves Peter and the Wolf,but as a young person's guide to the orchestra, it lacks a certain quotient of murder and mayhem. Combat and danger, certainly, but not even the wolf is actually pushing up daisies as the curtain falls.

Leave it to Lemony Snicket to correct that little oversight.

In The Composer Is Dead, a deliciously morbid entertainment in the vein of his "Series of Unfortunate Events," the San Francisco writer whose real name is Daniel Handler teams up with composer Nathaniel Stookey to lead young audiences on an investigative stroll through the ranks of the orchestral instruments.

…when the piece begins, the composer is already moldering lifelessly — or, as Snicket suggests, "decomposing" — and has presumably been done in by a party or parties unknown. The perpetrator is probably lurking somewhere in the orchestra, and as the unnamed inspector interrogates each group of players in turn, Stookey takes the opportunity to range a musical spotlight across the entire ensemble.

So the violins twirl their way through a vivacious waltz while the cellos and basses provide oom-pah-pah accompaniments and the mournful violas sing their undervalued countermelodies. The flutes do bird imitations, the trombones tango and the tuba, in the piece's sweetest and funniest moment, enjoys a moment of quiet domesticity with his landlady, the harp.

But as the piece progresses, it emerges that not every corpse implies a murder mystery. In fact, just about any place you find an orchestra playing, there's a dead composer somewhere on hand.

It's a tale of woe, of course. The composer in the title is, well, quite dead and someone on stage did it — a felonious flute, perhaps, or crazed xylophonist. Or maybe those suspicious-looking foreigners, the French horns. It's up to the narrator, voiced by Snicket with hilarious musical accompaniment from Stookey and the orchestra, to figure out whodunit.

…there's music education woven into the hilarious and frequently insulting instrumental descriptions. Flutes are wimpy, Snicket explains, the concertmaster is a show-off, and the first violins may have "trickier parts to play," but the second violins "are more fun at parties."

It's edgy and tartly funny, particularly when the narrator starts accusing the conductor of malice aforethought.

"Wherever there's a conductor, there's a dead composer," Snicket points out. "Beethoven — dead! Bach — dead! ... Schubert — unfinished, but dead!"

True, the instruments reply, but it's conductors and orchestras who keep their music alive centuries later.

It's a wildly cheering audience that leaps to its feet at the close of Saturday's premiere, and the rest of the world will hear the irreverent work soon. Recording sessions start Monday and the whole "Composer is Dead" package — new Snicket book and San Francisco Symphony CD — will be published by HarperCollins later this year or next.