An Ode

I have always been a fan of fairy tales.

I'm not sure why, but it must be the little kid in me who doesn't want to grow up and thinks that there is a parallel universe where wishes can be made to come true and you can conjure things up with the muttering of a few spells. But then again my favourite tales are those with a healthy dose of realism in them - the original tales had elements of violence and sex before they were numbed down for the appetite of children.

Some of my earliest childhood memories consist of my parents reading such tales to me. And as a child, my interests ranged from the Slavic Baba Yaga to Enid Blyton’s adventures of Jo, Bessie & Fanny in the Enchanted Wood to Aesop’s Greek tales of morality.

I can’t say things changed much during my teenage years, especially with the blurring of the boundaries between fairy tales and the genre of fantasy. This included comics, the Lone Wolf gamebooks (in which I worked so hard to gain the level of Kai Supreme Master), to more obscure stories of Odin and Loki and other fantastical tales that kept me going during those boring lessons in school (which coincided with my period of Clancy, Ludlum, Grisham and le Carre among others). Even the extended essay for my International Baccalaureate was about fairy tales in modern literature.

Yes, I am quite the geek at times.

It comes as no surprise then that some of my favourite works have elements of fairy tales ingrained within it – Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bill Willingham’s Fables, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. It was to a performance of the Russian master’s work that I dragged Omar & Karin (Shanti didn’t need to be dragged) a couple of weeks ago at The Sage, and methinks it was a performance worth being dragged to.

I absolutely adore 19th-century Russian classical pieces (my ring tone is a tune of Prokofiev's) but of all of them, my favourite composer has to be Tchaikovsky. He didn't really like the Suite himself and considered it inferior to his other ballets. The tunes in this ballet are easy to listen to and they do not reach the complexity of his 6th Symphony (The Pathetique) for example, which has to be one of the precursors for the bands today that thrive on music-to-slit-your-wrist-to.

Nevertheless, this is one of his works that I admire the most and could spend all day listening to. Perhaps its beauty is in the very fact that it so accurately reflects the ballet in its rather simplistic and innocent theme. One needs to bear in mind that he lived and embodied the Romantic period of classical composition, where modern ideas like atonal keys were the order of the day and his suppressed homosexuality was frowned upon by society, leading to not only other great works of music but also a severe case of depression.

Anyhow, this reminds me that I should get back to my revision of psychiatric disorders. Yawn...