Waterfall was a stately Niagara of languorous melody, but Strange Magic stands as ELO’s finest smoocher. Strange MagicĬome 1975, as Lynne tried out his newfound orchestral superpowers on early disco ( Evil Woman), colliery hoedowns (Down Home Town) and Poker, in which – trollbait alert – ELO predicted UK punk, his primary strength was still in bombastic balladeering. Operatic choirs, sonata pianos and a dash of mystic mystique – at least until the verse where Robin Hood, William Tell, Ivanhoe and Lancelot all get together to rob a bank, presumably calling themselves the Green Tights Gang – made this simple ballad sound like the backing track to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan opium reverie. Eldorado Overture, with its fantasy intonations about mythical cities and its oceanic strings, tossed and tumbled into Can’t Get It Out of My Head, the album’s grand panning shot settling on Lynne, alone, adrift on some midnight shoreline as a vision of Neptune’s daughter “walking on a wave” imprinted on his memory forever.
#Electric light orchestra hall of the mountain king full
Hiring in a full orchestra gave ELO the authentic oomph the concept demanded, and instantly they blasted class. “I said, ‘Bastard! You rat! I’ll show you a tune!’” “My dad said to me one day: ‘The trouble with your tunes is they have no tune,’” Lynne said in 2012. On the Third Day refined the recipe by sifting Lennon tributes like Bluebird Is Dead and Oh No Not Susan from their take on Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, but it wasn’t until 1974’s Eldorado that Lynne struck on the magic formula, thanks in no small part to his father telling him he was crap. In 1973, after Wood departed to form Wizzard, ELO 2 upped the tune tally, but buried them within lengthy classical structures to mimic a five-movement pop concerto. Though the first ELO song, 10538 Overture, perfected the formula from the off, their 1971 debut album let the classical dominate pop hooks played second fiddle to lengthy baroque evocations of English civil war battles that couldn’t have been more prog if they’d pulled on a fox’s head 24 minutes in and announced supper. The Move’s Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne first conceived their side-project Electric Light Orchestra as a way to “pick up where the Beatles left off” by bringing classical instruments into their songwriting, but their early experiments lurched lopsidedly between the two. The tempo gradually speeds up to a prestissimo finale, and the music itself becomes increasingly loud and frenetic.Like meringue mix and Outkast, symphonic pop requires a craftsman’s balance too much of either ingredient and you end up with a watery mess. The two groups of instruments then move in and out of different octaves until they eventually "collide" with each other at the same pitch. After being stated, the main theme is then very slightly modified with a few different ascending notes, but transposed up a perfect fifth (to the key of F-sharp major, the dominant key, but with flattened sixth) and played on different instruments. The simple theme begins slowly and quietly in the lowest registers of the orchestra, played first by the cellos, double basses, and bassoons. The piece is in the overall key of B minor.
In the play, Dovregubben is a troll king that Peer Gynt invents in a fantasy. "Gubbe" is used along with its female counterpart "kjerring" to differentiate male and female trolls, "trollgubbe" and "trollkjerring". Dovre is a mountainous region in Norway, and "gubbe" translates into (old) man or husband.
The English translation of the name is not literal. Its easily recognizable theme has helped it attain iconic status in popular culture, where it has been arranged by many artists (See Grieg's music in popular culture). It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. About "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (Norwegian: I Dovregubbens hall) is a piece of orchestral music composed by Edvard Grieg in 1875 as incidental music for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen's 1867 play Peer Gynt.
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