Mazeppa was a Ukrainian war hero of the late seventeenth early eighteenth century, celebrated in a poem by Byron, which inspired Franz Liszt’s etude Mazeppa. He is tied to a wild horse and the tone poem evokes his struggle to survive the ride. Russia is invading Ukraine, and Mazeppa makes it over the Polish border and fnds allies.
Still in the spirit of Eastern European resistance to Russia, after the Berlin Wall fell, I got letters from several Easter European musicians who had heard Tone Over Tone on VOA and were encouraged by those composers to go on experimenting in their own work.
