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John Greening

Strauss

conducts Don Quixote at the Queen’s Hall, November 1936: the acetates hiss and clank like old cattle trucks over their clickety rails as the engine pulls them on to the lyrical uplands — “Never look encouragingly at the brass,” he says, and the wind-machine blows the steam away into the dark foggy London air that he so hates, dreaming of Garmisch, and the top brass filing into the front row seats for the premiere of his last opera, and not of the bomb that will drop on the Queen’s Hall soon.