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Jeff C. Wendt
Jeff R. Charles Wendt is a university music professor and composer from the short novel Veni, Vidi... Wendt by Richard Stern, originally published in the Paris Review, Spring 1970. He's working on an opera, Enstehung de Walpole's Love (Opus 43). He also composed Drang Nach Bach songs (opus 9).
Yes, the opera. In this day and age, surrounded by aleatory gamesmen, ratic pasticheurs of Mozart, phony pholkistes, electronic adolescents, employers of blow-torchers, Caged mice, and concrete crapistes, I fell into this antique pit.
And it's no surrealist cop-out, no twigged-out Clarsic (Carmini Catulli or miserable Yeats play with less action than a cigarette ad), no neo-Wagnerian Geschwatz but something new, fresh, off the morning paper. Urban dew. In brief, the story's about a police sergeant and a black hooker he woos with precinct and other stories. In particular with the old eighteenth-century story-he's a nightschool reader-of the icy bachelor Horace Walpole, blind old Mme. Du Deffand who loved him hopelessly, and then, decades later, young Mary Berry, whom the old Walpole loved and who milked him of his wit and knowledge as he had milked the old Deffand. Girl and cop conjure between them the characters, who show up on scrims, on a screen, and on the stage (like the Czechs). The musical lines drift with the actors, or, like motifs, fade into other time schemes. No dominant style (the sign of this century), no batting the company into shape. Deffand sounds like Scarlatti and J. C. F. Bach, Walpole like Haydn and early Beethoven, Berry like Beethoven and early Wagner, the sergeant like Arnold Pretty-mount, Igor the Penman, my dear Webern (the musical laser) plus a bit of Elliot C. and Pierre B.; the hooker will swim in every love song, east and west, that can squeeze into the tone row. Yet the lines are never to blur, there are but chordal shadows round the sparse, informative line.
Two measures of music are actually included within the novel, and were composed by Easley Blackwood:
