By my calculations, the Super Bowl should be over by about 10:00. Just in time for this week’s edition of “The Lost Chord.” Who do you think you’re fooling, anyway? You’re never going to get to sleep tonight, with that belly full of buffalo wings and blue cheese dip. So why don’t you pour yourself a nice, cold glass of water and kick back for an hour of music about Nordic enchanters?
We’ll hear selections from a Finnish film, from 1952, called “The White Reindeer.” Set in Lapland, it tells the tale of a lonely herder’s wife, who visits a local shaman and is transformed into a shapeshifting, vampiric white reindeer. The film was honored at the Cannes Film Festival with a special award for Best Fairy Tale Film, and at the Golden Globes as Best Foreign Film. Einar Englund wrote the score.
Icelandic composer Jón Leifs saw the play “Galdra-Loftr,” by Jóhann Sigurjónsson, in Reykjavik as a teenager in 1915. He determined at once to set it to music, and carried the idea with him for nearly a decade while he acquired the technique to make it so. Loftur Þorsteinsson, a semi-historical character, was kind of a Faustian figure, a student at the Latin school in Hólar in northern Iceland, whose fascination with black magic ended in tragedy. We’ll hear Leif’s “Loftr Suite.”
Finally, Gandalf, a beloved figure from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” is said to have been inspired in part by the wizard Väinämöinen from “The Kalevala,” the Finnish national epic. Väinämöinen is familiar to music-lovers, perhaps, from his appearances in the works of Jean Sibelius, especially the symphonic fantasy “Pohjola’s Daughter.”
In 1996, Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen completed his Symphony No. 7, on a commission from the Gothenburg Symphony, which he subtitled “The Dreams of Gandalf.” The origins of the work were in a projected ballet inspired by “The Lord of the Rings.” However, the composer hastens to add that the symphony doesn’t actually depict any of the events in the story, but rather its atmosphere and its poetry.
The music is bound to be more enchanting than the Super Bowl. I hope you’ll join me for these “Blizzard Wizards,” this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Väinämöinen, inspiration for Gandalf, offers his own alternative to buffalo wings
