My Dinner With Anton

About once a year, our marketing staff sends around questionnaires to all the musicians in the Minnesota Orchestra designed to gather new and interesting info for our online bios. In recent years, they’ve begun adding personal “playlists” – our favorite concerts of the upcoming season – and something called “Fun Facts” to each of our bio pages. For the fun facts, we get a list of questions, and are allowed to choose which of them we feel like answering. (I think you actually learn less about us from our answers than you do by tracking which questions we choose to answer, and which we don’t.)

There’s one question on the list that I’ve never answered, for the simple reason that the answers that jump into my head when I see it are almost always deeply sarcastic. There are troves of research proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that 82% of the public is incapable of recognizing sarcasm when it is displayed on a computer screen, and those 82% tend to get very upset when they misconstrue sarcasm as serious opinion, and then I’m the bad guy. So I just leave the question blank, every year.

But this morning, as I was perusing my “fun facts” list and trying to decide which questions I could answer in reasonably non-sarcastic fashion, it occurred to me that I have a blog. And that I have frequently been sarcastic on the blog in the past, and have only rarely been savaged by angry commenters as a result. What better place to lay down my various answers to The Question That Shall Never Appear On My Bio Page?

Okay, so the question is this: Which composer would you most like to have dinner with? And what would you serve?

Pretty simple, and a nice cross-reference there by our marketing folks to the fact that musicians, as a breed, almost all seem to love to cook. (This is true – our orchestra potlucks are ridiculously gourmet, right down to the homebrewed beer and hand-rolled pasta.) Many of my colleagues have had no trouble answering it seriously. (I particularly like Matt Young’s answer.) But for some reason, every year when I read it, something like this pops into my head:

Bruckner. Not sure exactly what we’d eat, but whatever it was would take three hours to consume and leave you strangely undernourished at the end.

Yeah, I said it. Bruckner’s long-winded and lacks depth. Who wants a piece?

It’s a fun game, actually. How many other great composers can we unfairly disparage with food references?

Mahler. I’d serve a couple of hundred spinach puffs, but claim there were a thousand. Then I’d force-feed him foie gras for 90 minutes before smashing the dessert tray with a giant hammer.

Haydn. I’d prepare a year’s worth of food, but every meal would taste exactly the same.

Tchaikovsky. Pizza with extra cheese and no meat.

Gershwin. One of these:

See? Fun! Who else wants to play?