Word: steppenwolf
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...late '60s and early '70s, the spine-cracked paperback editions of Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Magister Ludi) stood in a haphazard pile beside every mattress on the floor, next to the roach clips and Earth Shoes. The American counterculture claimed the Swabian mystic as a guru of its own discovery, its subterranean priest. That was perhaps an instructive case of self-absorbed audience imitating self-obsessed author. In fact, Hesse during his astonishingly long career had been appropriated by three other generations (in Germany, anyway) as their own secret voice. Hesse possessed a strange, lifelong affinity for adolescents...
...fable enveloped in the incense of the East. The effects could be silly: " 'Govinda,' said Siddhartha to his friend, 'Govinda, come with me to the banyan tree. We will practice meditation.' " Hesse hung his earlier stories with necromantic swags. In the middle period of Steppenwolf, he contrived a surreal kind of existentialism. In his masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game (or Magister Ludi, the English title), composed during precisely the years when Hitler consolidated his power, Hesse invented his own classical serenity, all civilization encoded in an infinite chess game to be played like the Pythagorean music...
...movies are in fact following Goldsmith's lead into orchestration. Hit movies of the '60s were often scored by individual artists and rock groups: The Graduate by Simon and Garfunkel, Easy Rider by The Band, Steppenwolf, etc. Today, directors want a more symphonic approach. The Jaws theme is played by a 75-piece orchestra. Disaster films have enhanced the value of lush orchestral work. "Imagine," says Newman, "The Towering Inferno, for instance, raging to the obbligato of a Fender bass and a wah-wah guitar...
Minnie and Moskowitz, 4, 7:35; Steppenwolf...
...this film, made from his most popular novel, Hesse takes a fearful pummeling at the hands of one Fred Haines, who visited similar punishment on James Joyce in his screenplay for Ulysses (1967). The protagonist of Steppenwolf, the book's readers will recall, is Harry Haller, a writer enraptured with despair. He plans suicide, if only he can work himself up to it. He is also schizoid: he sees himself as both a bourgeois and a fierce maverick, a prowling, implacable wolf of the steppes. An encounter with a beautiful young woman of mystery, Hermine (Dominique Sanda), brings...