Europeans certainly do make a composer feel at home. No sooner had I stepped off the plane in Copenhagen than the Bureau d’Exchange handed me several pictures of Carl Nielsen:
In Basel I turned in my Danish Kronens for pictures of Arthur Honegger:
And the Swiss went the Danes one better: not only was their most famous composer on the front, but the reverse of the Swiss Franc sported an actual excerpt (a mere repeated dyad, admittedly, but all the more characteristic withal) from Pacific 231 (detail only):
Somewhere around here I have an old, pre-Euro, five-Franc note bearing a likeness of Claude Debussy, but I elected not to bring home the soon-to-be-extinct British twenty-pound note with a drawing of Sir Edward Elgar. The exchange rate being what it is, $46 USD seemed a little dear for the author of Pomp and Circumstance.
I’ve got an old lira-denominated Italian bill with Bellini.
KG replies: I seem to recall they had Verdi, too.
And in Holland, we used to have J.P. Sweelinck on one of the bills. The Euro bills, however, won’t admit any culture, since the European Union as such – as opposed to its members – doesn’t have any.
The Romanian 5 lei note has a portrait of Enescu on the front and a excerpt from a work for cello on the back. Of course, other and probably better composers born in Romania (Ligeti, Kurtag, Eotvos, Xenakis…) are not so celebrated because they aren’t the right ethnicity.
Honegger: The most obscure composer ever to appear on a piece of national currency. Undeservedly so! Honegger is one of my favorite composers. Top ten? Probably.
Err, I should probably clarify that his obscurity is undeserved.
Honegger struggled with orchestration…
KG replies: Hey, not as much as I do. I sometimes have to farm mine out. :^)
The old 20-mark note in Finland had a picture of (who else?) Sibelius on the front. I left for the Christmas break, and when I came back the Euro had swept the nation, so I never got to own a note of Sibelius, as it were.
“Not a composer, but … an inventor – of genius”
I have a Belgian 200 Franc note depicting Adolphe Sax.
And how terribly appropriate is it that Elgar is being replaced by Adam Smith! That’s capitalism for ya.
Matthew, the 20-mark note had a picture of Väinö Linna, the novelist. Alvar Aalto, the architect = 50 mk, Sibelius = 100 mk
Juhani Nuorvala
Germans had a nice blue 100mark note with Clara Schumann and we have in Estonia 50 kroon note with Rudolf Tobias, the first Estonian professional composer.
KG replies: Amazing.