The wolf always gets the bad rap, I’ll tell you.
I’m not sure when it all started, but by 1697, Little Red Riding Hood found trouble with a wolf posing as her granny. We see this time and again. Take the Three Little Pigs, who came around in 1886. They had to deal with that old huffing, puffing wolf.
But perhaps none is as sweet as the furry beast in Peter and the Wolf. It was on this date, May 2, 1936, when Sergei Prokofiev’s musical “Peter and the Wolf” premiered in Moscow.
To hear this music is magic. And ingenious.
It all started when Prokofiev was commissioned by the Moscow Children’s Theatre to compose a piece for kids. For whatever reason, he focused on a wolf. He told the story of a boy and his animal friends. They went out and caught themselves a wolf.
To tell the story, Prokofiev magically assigned each character a musical instrument, or a whole class of instruments.
The bird was a flute.
The cat, a clarinet.
The duck came around with the oboe.
But wait. There’s more.
Peter’s grandfather was identified with a bassoon.
The wolf appeared when horns played.
And the hunters hunted when the percussion began to sound.
Then there was Peter. He was given the entire string section. Not only that, he has his own little melody. It is light. It is gleeful. I think he almost has to be blond.
There was an original set of rhyming verses of the story, but Prokofiev dumped those. Instead, he wrote a simple prose narrative to tell the story.
After it came out, the work got very popular, very quickly. This was true, especially after it was released as a sound recording. It didn’t take long, and it was adapted for ballet. After that came the Disney film — an animated version in 1946.
The story told all about Peter. The kid lived with his grandfather, and his grandfather warned Peter about going out of their garden. “Don’t do it, Peter. Ever.” This was because there were wolves around.
Well, guess what. One day Peter went right out the garden gate. Now right here, I think he should be gulped down by the wolves and never seen again. This would be a great lesson for kids to mind their parents. But Prokofiev didn’t see it that way.
Instead, Peter saw a duck swimming in a nearby pond. The duck was arguing with a little bird. Peter noticed a cat approaching and warned the little bird. So the bird flew into a tree. The music played. You could tell who is who by those instruments.
The grandfather caught Peter out of bounds and really gave Peter the “what for.” They went back into the garden, and his Grandfather locked the gate.
Right then, the wolf showed up. The cat climbed into a tree to escape the meanie. Smart kitty. But, the quacking duck was swallowed by the hungry wolf.
Now is where it gets dicey. Peter acquired a rope and climbed over the garden wall into a tree. The bird distracted the wolf, and tricky Peter lowered a noose and caught the wolf by his tail. Yowza.
The trouble doesn’t end there. The hunters came out of the woods and fired at the wolf. But Peter dashed in front and stopped them while wearing his bullet-proof vest. Not really. But he did stop them.
In the end, they took the wolf to the zoo. Happily ever after. Except of course, for the duck. He could be heard quacking in the wolf’s stomach. And except for the great, great wolf. He was behind bars.
So there you have it. Another story where the wolf gets the bad rap. Of course, in real life, they eat things, like ducks, and birds, and even snotty kids. As we’ve seen in other stories, they will eat little pigs too. Or girls in red hoods. They get hungry, just like we do.
Hey, look. We eat cows, and pigs, and birds. Thank god no one has a gun and is shooting at us all the time.
Oh.
Wait.
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“Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.”
― Stephen King
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“The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally
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“I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even ‘hari-kari’ if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!”
― Alan Alda
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