Leonore

An old woman sits on a park bench.  She talks to the 

pigeons about her thirty years as an orchestra musician.

She occasionally plays a passage for the birds, 

and ends trying to create her own piece.

Click on the picture to listen to Leonore.

(Real Media sound file at 176k)

Click on the picture to listen to Leonore.

Abbie Conant, actress and trombonist

William Osborne, text and direction

Pond (the trombone solo) was composed by William Osborne and Abbie Conant

Premiered in Munich -  Nacht der Experimentelle Musik, November 1983

(The premiere was recorded by the Bavarian State Radio, but the tape was later destroyed.)

If you would like to perform Leonore and/or Pond, please send email and 

we will email back the text or score free of charge.

Our email: william@osborne-conant.org

Notes

Leonore was written in reaction to Abbie's experiences in the Munich Philharmonic.  Some of the topics the work addresses are still taboo in Germany and Austria.  Due to our continuing activism against discrimination in orchestras such as the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, and at the conservatory where Abbie teaches, we are strongly ostracized by segments of the German-speaking musical community.  

I have also written a musicological analysis of orchestral patriarchy entitled "Symphony Orchestras and Artist-Prophets: Cultural Isomorphism and the Allocation of Power in Music.

Click here for a version in German.

Below are a few excerpts from a recent article about the reception of Goetz Aly's new book Hitler's People's State.  It might help those unfamiliar with Germany better understand the reactions Abbie and I have confronted.  As Aly notes, German perspectives continue to evolve.  It has been 23 years since Leonore was premiered.  We know the day will come when a wider spectrum of the German and Austrian music world will approach the ideas the work considers.

How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer

By Jody K. Biehl in Berlin

Hitler not only fattened his adoring "Volk" with jobs and low taxes, he also fed his war machine through robbery and murder, says a German historian in a stunning new book. Far from considering Nazism oppressive, most Germans thought of it as warm-hearted, asserts Goetz Aly. The book is generating significant buzz in Germany and it may mark the beginning of a new level of Holocaust discourse.

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.
[...]

"The book could have been written 10 years ago, even 20 years ago," he says. All of the documents were there. We just weren't open to them. Personally, I didn't have the questions then.  I am not trying to turn the history of National Socialism on its head," he insists. "But I think -- despite all the time that has passed -- it is still important to ask the most fundamental questions, namely how all this happened. What were the most important elements that allowed this criminal regime to thrive? So much came out of the German middle class. That is the most troubling aspect of the history."

[...]

Current politics seems to mirror this sentiment. These days, making use of an agile word and mind flip, Germans have begun to insist that they -- like the rest of Europe -- were also liberated on May 8, 1945. They say it marks the day they and their children were freed from Nazi oppression. Still, in 1945, says Aly, Germans didn't think they were being liberated. "They had to be liberated from themselves," he says. "That's the problem."

[...]

Scholarship and even more delicately, German Holocaust sensitivities, too have progressed in recent years. In January, the first post-war German-Jewish comedy, "Alles Auf Zucker" (Bet it all on Zucker) was released and became an immediate box office hit. Before its release, film and television executives had long held that any productions involving Jews and Germans meant poison at the box office. Germans are also starting to talk about their own suffering during the war, particularly during the relentless Allied bombing of German cities such as Dresden. Aly accepts such suffering as truthful, saying talking about it shows that Germans have made advances from the shame-faced decades just after the war when no German academic could look at the war objectively. The question, he says is, "how do you relegate that suffering? We were also victims of our own aggression."

The important thing, he says is that German perspectives continue to evolve. He sees his book as an important part of that process. "I think in 10 years, because of this book, our understanding will be very different than it was a year ago," he says. "That's because my book contains a large number of short descriptions and sketches, and I am quite certain that the questions I ask will be investigated by my colleagues. That will definitely give us a lot more information. I notice it already in the echo from the book. I am getting letters from families who corroborate what I write. I'm sure more of that will come."