The Music’s Loose: Peter and the Wolf
When I was a child I spent many a summer afternoon with my Sears record player and my stack of albums, among them Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. My copy featured the narration of Boris Karloff, who later voiced the original animated version of How the The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Just as I enjoyed The Grinch because it was scary, I enjoyed Peter and the Wolf for the same reason. I was like Jason, aged 3, son of poet A.E. (Alicia) Stallings.
“Now my son (3) would just as soon listen to ‘Peter and the Wolf,’ which he says he ‘watches,’ because I guess to him it is like a movie, only scarier, perhaps, since the wolf as a sound rather than image on a small, two-dimensional screen seems freer to roam about the room and lurk in the dark corners of the house.”
Here is the poem Stallings wrote for her son about the sound of the wolf:
Read the rest at Tweetspeak Poetry
https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2022/06/24/by-heart-listening-to-peter-and-the-wolf/