suzanne vega, xtc

[jw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU]

> Can someone tell me who Caspar Hauser is/was?  As in the subtitle to
> Suzanne Vega's _Wooden Horse_ (off her second album).
 
   Good to know someone is actually paying attention to song lyrics
(okay, I know that all good love-hounds are, but it is still alright
to give credit where it is due.)

   Well, the question seems to have been quite adequately answered
already, by Jeff Dalton. For my two cents worth, I would like to add
that a play called 'Kaspar' played early in the year somewhere in Boston, and
gave a fictionalised treatment of the story. I didn't see it, but
I did see another play (I don't think it was the same one) on the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year. [Jeff, did you see it?] The play 
was quite good, but a bit similar to 'The Elephant Man,' the play about 
John Merrick which makes the point that it is Merrick's teacher, and not the
deformed man himself, who is the monster. In the Kaspar Hauser play,
the doctor who takes Kaspar in and teaches him about the world does
not exactly exploit Kaspar, but is unwilling to let him outgrow
his new home.

   I heard Suzanne Vega at her Wellesley concert (the night before
the album was released!) and I was very pleased to hear a song
on this subject. I got the impression that most of the audience
shared your understandable ignorance of this particular footnote to history,
however. Suzanne gave a brief explanation of the story, which was
necessary and sufficient to a proper understanding of the song,
but I think she could have said a little more.

   Incidentally, is _Solitude Standing_ forever to be referred to
as "Suzanne Vega's second album"?

> I have my first XTC album, 'Skylarking'...
> wondered if anyone could give me a good tip on the next one to try.

   Congratulations! Another person discovers the greatest band
ever to come out of Swindon, Wiltshire! (my home town, o boy)
For what it's worth, my recommendation is the double-album
English Settlement (in the British version if you can get it).
Lots of good tunes, too numerous to be evaluated at length here,
and the names wouldn't mean anything to you anyway...look, just
go out and buy it.

                                                 JULIan west
                                                 mathemaTiKs
                                                 M    I    T