Competition! I have one wrong but haven’t been able to pin it down. First one to spot the mistake gets a signed copy of William Byrd’s The Thieving Magpie.
Edit: I’ve now identified my mistake but shan’t spoil the fun by correcting it just yet.
A bevy of composers to identify here, some of them clued by what they would have written in a world ruled by nominative determinism. I found it great fun once I cottoned onto the device. Other composers, and a few other musical items, are clued more conventionally.
A bit of musical knowledge is distinctly helpful in parsing 11 across, where I had to seek help when the penny refused to drop.
In my continuing bid for innovation, I’ve tried yet another variation on the format. Comments appreciated.
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Notes:
The Composers – WOLF, Hugo, who should have written Peter and the …. 1a. KRAKATOA .. from Clive James’ memorable days as the Observer’s TV critic. I still remember the first time I read his paragraph on Konrad Bartleski (par 6). The McEnroe quip is in Dan’s Winning Lob, indexed on the same page 8a. RASPE – (Pears)* … author of the Baron Munchausen tales. I’ll admit I had no idea who wrote them. I’ll use the excuse that Raspe hid is authorship for many years, fearing lawsuits from the real Baron M (who apparently had no sense of humour — imagine that!) 11a. SPRINGER – Tricky one to parse. Schumann’s 1st symphony is known as ‘Spring’. The fifth and sixth letters of Mahler are -ER 15a. RATES OF EXCHANGE – Dr Petworth (also called Pitwit, Pervert, and Petwurt by his Soviet-bloc hosts) is the professor of linguistics in Malcolm Bradbury’s 1984 Rates of Exchange who finds misunderstanding and romance in a small eastern European country. The sort of thing I used to read in my youth but which seems to have dated badly. Maybe it’s just me but it feels like satire is a dying genre in the 21st century. Perhaps we’ve created a self-satirising world 18a. FRIENDLIER – I think ‘whisky’ is the rather novel anagram indicator. The fodder for it is (relief in dr) 20a. PLUM – PG Wodehouse tended to sign his personal letters “Yours, Plum”, a pet name I always take a while to recall 23a. ANANKE – Nan (or The Tragedy of Nan) was one of John Masefield’s plays 1d. KERB – ‘break’ reversed with the first of ‘angel’ removed. The reference to the Priestley novel is a red herring 5d. ASAR – hidden in ‘Sands as a rule’ (edit: as Z8 points out, more accurately in “as a rule”). The answer seemed inescapable, yet verifying it caused me much head scratching. Chambers does have it as “A kame or esker”, and spells it Swedishly as åsar
7d. My Brilliant Friend is one of Elena Ferrante‘s so-called Neapolitan Novels
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The musical theme gave this added interest, and I think Prax just about got away with the Ode to Joy pair, Bliss more than Gluck. ASAR was my last in, justified as you did, except that the Sands bit doesn’t intrude as part of the hidden section. My knowledge of the area covered by the Dulcibella doesn’t include whether you might find eskers and asars in the region (not that sort of sand, I think) but perhaps the clue was not meant to be that tight.
I definitely had to check back over my own grid to see your mistake here… it’s all Greek to me, in exactly the way Greek isn’t.
For reasons unimportant I was looking up Richard Hell and the Voidoids – punks who apparently helped Malcolm McLaren shape the Sex Pistols back in the day (1976) – and see that Richard Hell was forced out of his previous band Television by differences with another founding member… Verlaine.
What does it all mean?
Rob
Musical knowledge might be useful to parse 11ac but fortunately, not to solve it, Axel Springer being the only German publisher I’d heard of. Asar is/was an Apple product, an offline book reader, which I assumed is what 5d referred to, at the time anyway.
That’s a truly lovely blog Sotira, but please stop raising the bar now 🙂
I didn’t know any German publishers so I stared at the S_R_N_ _R tempalte for a long time, with things like Spranger and Strander all seeming possible.