Alex Soteros asked:

>Can you think of any artist who is both a composer and an author?

and mentioned

>the late Anthony Burgess

Assuming that figures like Wagner are not what he has in mind, one would
have to include E.T.A. Hoffmann, who was an able (and, in the case of the
opera UNDINE, historically significant) composer in addition to being one
of the major figures of German Romanticism.  Perhaps not quite at this
ambidextrous level, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had his opera LE DEVIN DU VILLAGE
performed before Louis XV.  Nietzsche, of course, aspired to this status,
but his musical compositions that I am familiar with are not the work of a
composer in a particularly elevated sense of the term.  I believe Weber
intended to write a novel, though I don't recall that anything came of it.
And one should not forget the cases of Schoenberg, a talented painter, and
that composer for flute, Friedrich II, a talented king.

Nick
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