Saturday, September the 15th, 2018

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Tales Of Duntblau—IV

Nimrod Im Duntblau is an opera by Horst Gack, the contemporary composer famed for his startling bouffant, ill temper, and near-fatal coughing fits. It is both unfinished and unperformed. Several extracts have been recorded, at gunpoint, by the Loopy Von Straubenzee Jug Band accompanied by one-time popstrels Ingmar & Hetty, the so-called “terrifying singing twins”. Horst Gack himself pointed the gun.

In Act One, Scene One, Nimrod arrives in Duntblau. The “mighty hunter before the Lord” is, appropriately, on a hunting expedition. He sings that he has heard much about the fabled Chicken of Duntblau, which he means to hunt down, pinion, and strangle with his bare hands.

He is overheard by Schwindi, the Duntblau Postmistress, who is hiding behind an arras. When Nimrod exits, she appears and sings the plaintive ballad “Must we swim yet again in the blood of chickens?”

Horst Gack has yet to write scenes two and three, but in Act One, Scene Four we find Nimrod, alone in the graveyard of St Bibblybibdib's church, leaning insouciantly against a tombstone, smoking a fag, and muttering to himself. Because the muttering is punctuated by occasional thumps of a kettledrum, Horst Gack counts this as an arietta.

The only other scene yet completed is Act Seven, Scene Forty-Two. Schwindi is standing outside the Duntblau Chicken Sanctuary, holding a placard and singing a dirge. Critics have been sharply divided over this lengthy number. In the Macclesfield Tomato Sellers' Weekly, Trilby Baxter dubbed it “a dire dirge, the direst dirge I ever heard”. (This sentence was abstracted by Dennis Beerpint, who used it as the first line of one of his twee verses, where “heard” is rhymed with “bird”, “curd”, “furred”, “bird” again, and “erred”.)

On the other hand, writing in the journal Dirges By Gack, Giles Pipstraw commended the piece as “possibly the most magnificent dirge moaned by a postmistress holding a placard outside Duntblau Chicken Sanctuary ever committed to sheet music by your friend and mine, Horst Gack!” (The overexcited Pipstraw in fact added nine more exclamation marks, which I have omitted for reasons of space.)

Other critics have ignored the dirge entirely, waiting, some would say wisely, for the opera to be finished before they pronounce upon it.

CDs of the recorded extracts can be obtained at jumble sales, charity shops, and as part of the contents of a jamboree bag available from spivs lurking in insalubrious alleyways in certain ill-starred seaside resorts, but not in Duntblau.

Ingmar & Hetty are currently on tour with their “Eighty Years In Showbiz And Contemporary German Opera” special extravaganza.