Guardian Prize Puzzle 26,208 by Puck

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A musical theme for this week’s prize puzzle from Puck.

The preamble referred to a 300th anniversary celebration, and although the year 1714 did not immediately mean anything, it soon became clear from the musical references that we were dealing with a composer.  A little research soon came up with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, son of Johann Sebastian (who also puts in an appearance).  My solving partner Timon and I found this to be a satisfying and educational challenge which passed a pleasant hour on a Sunday morning before we set off for our respective allotments.  Thanks, Puck.

Across
1 CPE BACH Theme of one book ignored by cheap BBC production (3,4)
*(CHEAP BBC – B(ook)).  At first this simple anagram did not seem to produce a phrase, but the penny soon dropped.
5 HAMBURG Where death was from fast food? No hesitation there (7)
HAMBURG(er).  Where the composer died in 1788.
9 INSET Teacher training via the internet during March? (5)
E (as in email etc) in INST.  INSET is an acronym for InSErviceTraining.  Thanks to Timon for parsing this for me.
10   See 19
11 ORGANISERS Those making arrangements of rare songs, I suspect (10)
*(RARE SONGS I).  The first one in for us.
12 CODA Final passage of concerto lacking content father cut (4)
C(oncert)O DA(d).  A nod to the theme.
14 ASPIRATIONAL A flashy black market hawker not against thinking of lofty aims and hopes (12)
A SPI(v), RATIONAL.
18 SOLFEGGIETTO Well-known piece of T.S. Eliot play about breakfast food (12)
EGG in *(OF TS ELIOT).  Here’s a link to the piece in question.
21 OPIE Work that is written for a collector of nursery rhymes (4)
OP I.E.  The reference is in fact to a married couple, Iona and Peter Opie.
22 ANGLOPHONE Popped along to the pub with single English speaker (10)
*ALONG, P.H. ONE.
25 SINFONIAS Works with wrong fellow, working with one adult son (9)
SIN F(ellow) ON 1 A(dult) S(on).  Another nod to the theme: this spelling of symphony is used in several recordings of Bach’s works.  Thanks to Timon for spotting it.
26 ALARM Territorial Army’s warning device (5)
Hidden in Territorial Army.  I thlnk the ‘s is the indicator.
27 DEEP-FRY Cook sea fish (4-3)
A very concise charade.
28 STEINER Type of school that’s arranged 9 mid-term (7)
*INSET, (t)ER(m).  These schools follow the philosophy expounded by Rudolph Steiner.
Down
1 C MINOR 18’s key gets car to start — about to leave the Isle of Mahon (1,5)
C(ar) MINOR(ca).  Isle of Mahon refers to Minorca, of which it is the capital.  The Solfeggieto was written in C minor.
2 ENSIGN Officer standard (6)
Double definition.
3 ASTONISHED Very surprised concerning name taken by one setter (10)
AS TO N(ame) 1 SHED.
4 HOSTS Composer’s avoiding Liberal party givers (5)
HO(l)ST’S.  “Party” is part of the definition, but the surface cleverly links it to Liberal.
5 HIBERNATE Drug in the brain produced sleep over a long period (9)
E in *(THE BRAIN).
6 MASS Work for church and state, briefly (4)
MASS(achusetts).  Another nod to the theme.
7 UNICORNS Horny beasts implying trouble afoot for third-level students? (8)
UNI (tertiary, or third-level education) CORNS.  This one jumped out from the definition.
8 GENIALLY Good to note Yankee embracing Irishman in cheerful, friendly manner (8)
NIALL in G(ood), E, Y(ankee – as in phonetic alphabet).
13 BIRTHPLACE Auntie’s former boss rebuilt chapel in 20 (10)
(John) BIRT, *CHAPEL.
15 INGENUITY Great inventiveness, fashionable, good menu — pity no starters! (9)
IN G(ood) (m)ENU (p)ITY.
16 ESPOUSED Backed by electronic piano got hold of by drunk (8)
E(lectronic), P(iano) in SOUSED.
17 ALLIANCE Brad looked just a little upset during one marriage (8)
L(ooked), NAIL (both rev) in ACE.
19,10 JOHANN SEBASTIAN Father uses one to get into can before wine is added into baked beans (6,9)
AN in JOHN(or can), ASTI in *BEANS.  The more famous father.
20 WEIMAR City of former republic in Italy, with millions into sport (6)
I(taly) M(illions) in WEAR.  The composer’s birthplace.
23 LISTS Catalogues composer’s broadcast (5)
Sounds like Liszt’s.
24 DOFF Remove dead composer right away (4)
D(ead), O(r)FF. Another musical reference.

*anagram

21 comments on “Guardian Prize Puzzle 26,208 by Puck”

  1. Thank you, Bridgesong (and Timon, too) for a fine blog of a fine puzzle.
    There’s not much to say about the cluing other than it being really good. For me, another Saturday crossword that wasn’t very difficult (once the theme was cracked) but also a satisfying solve.

    I was delighted to see CPE being highlighted today.
    Many people (including our beloved Arachne) rave about his father but I am someone who prefers the lightness and more melodic (read: less mathematical/technical) side of his sons CPE and JC.
    [by the way, JC is Johann Christian and not Jesus Christ. Also not John Cleese or Johan Cruyff (who was, however, the Messiah for many Catalans)]

  2. Thanks, Bridgesong and Puck. Got 5a but didn’t see why ‘where death was’ and assumed it pointed to a film or book title. Duh! 16a and 22a caused me the most problems. This was a worthy Saturday diversion.

  3. Thanks to Puck and bridgesong. This was tough because my knowledge of the Bach composers begins and ends with Peter Schickele (PDQ Bach). However, I was able to finish because of the excellent
    cluing.

    Cheers…

  4. Thanks to bridgesong for the blog. You explained a couple where I had the answer but not the parsing.

    Sadly for me I fell a cropper on 1d: I settled on C MAJOR because I did not recognise Mahon and I also failed to look up 18 🙁 This also meant that I failed on 9a as well. It did not help that I did not know about in service teacher training.

    I have a major complaint about the Grauniad. The preamble said 300th anniversary. I knew that CPE had his anniversary about now but that was the previous Saturday. I spent quite a while searching for other anniversaries but found nothing relevant. After all the paper managed to publish the St Patrick’s Day puzzle on the correct day so why fail on this one?

  5. Thanks, bridgesong. A very fair puzzle: I was able to complete it without references despite never having heard of the composer! I think I prefer Puck when he’s having a bit more fun, though.

    One of the things I did check afterwards, out of curiosity, was INSET – Chambers says: IN-Service Education and Training.

  7. Enjoyed this. Always find it a bit misleading that clues such as 1ac are shown as (3,4), rather than (1,1,1,4). Got there eventually though.
    A few days ago the playwright O’Casey was clued as (6) rather than (1’5). Perhaps it would make the answer too easy? Any thoughts?

    Thanks bridgesong.

  9. I enjoyed this a lot – got CPE Bach very early and thought my knowledge wouldn’t be up to it, but it all fell into place quite nicely, though it took me a while to see WEIMAR and then BIRTHPLACE (and to realise why HAMBURG was right). I also got a bit confused trying to fit Solfeggio into Solfeggietto, but saw the light before too long. I think enumerating CPE as 1,1,1 would have made it too much of a write-in, but I can see the point AdamH @7 is making.

    Thanks to Puck and bridgsong

  10. A little disappointing as a Prize and a Puck.

    The special instructions indicated a theme and the first clue easily gave it away. Naturally my knowledge of CPE was very limited so it was just a case of checking the facts given away by the fairly easy themed clues.

    The only difficulty was 18a which obviously was an anagram with egg in it. Unfortunately the Wiki complete CPE works doesn’t list SOLFEGGIETTO!!! I’d deduced it might end in EGGIETTO from the fodder. This lead to a wasted 15 mins looking for other possibilities!

    The rest was all pretty pedestrian.

    Thanks to bridgesong and Puck.

  11. I thought this was a good Prize puzzle, and I managed to complete it without resort to aids despite not knowing much about CPE Bach. I’d actually solved most of the themed clues before I got 1ac, although SOLFEGGIETTO was my LOI after I decided it was the most likely answer from the wordplay and the anagram fodder. I might have saved myself some time by the use of Google but where would have been the challenge in that? Each to their own.

  12. Andy B @11

    I am amazed at your patience in waiting 7 days to see if your guess was correct.

    In my case, having had the same challenge as yourself, I had the extra challenge of first determining that that SOLFEGGIETO apparently wasn’t a piece by CPE BACH and then even more “fun” in discovering that it actually was 😉

  13. Thanks for the blog.

    I’d never heard of CPE BACH. I agree with AdamH @7, CPE isn’t a name… or a word at all.

    SOLFEGGIETO? That piece which is apparently so well known that it doesn’t even appear on C.P.E. Bach’s Wikipedia page? Oh yes, let’s clue that as an anagram… genius.

  14. I can’t now remember where I found SOLFEGGIETO but I see that it is shown at the bottom right hand side of the Wikipedia page on CPE Bach to which there is a link in my introduction.

  15. Further research (are there any classical music buffs out there?) suggests that the work does appear in the Wikipedia list but is wrongly labelled as Solfeggio – see the entry for H.220 in the list of solo keyboard pieces and hover the cursor over it for a further link.

  16. B(NTO)@12 – I don’t have that sort of patience so what I did was check it out post-solve. Although the word wasn’t on the Wiki page for CPE Bach a quick Google of “Bach” and “Solfeggietto” produced plenty of links to confirm that my guess was correct.

  17. As a former piano student, I do have to say that the Solfeggieto is pretty well known. It’s one of the easiest super-super-fast pieces, so intermediate piano students love playing it: it sounds way more impressive than it is. Teachers like assigning it, because it teaches good finger skills. Anyway, at any gathering of intermediate piano students, you’ll find at least one person playing it to show off.

  18. Thanks, bridgesong.

    I enjoyed the puzzle, though it wasn’t one of the púca’s more challenging ones so I didn’t have too much trouble with any of it. I did get the birthday boy (known to his family and friends as Emanuel – why do so many people persist in trotting out all of his Christian names in full?) very early, which helped. Though as a listener rather than an executant, his SOLFEGGIETTO was a new one on me – but it couldn’t realistically be anything else, given the fodder and the crossers.

    WEIMAR took a while because it was not flagged up as thematically related, until I finally decided it probably was and ran through the towns that I recalled Sebastian B had lived and worked in (background knowledge does help). Good clue.

  19. As someone who knows nothing of music SOLFEGGIETTO is utterly unknown to me, I only got it by bunging the fodder into Chambers anagram machine an googling the result, I haven’t the patience to work out such esoteric stuff. But it didn’t ruin a rather good puzzle which at least stretched me a bit unlike a certain other offering.

  20. Re AdamH’s comment on the enumeration for initials, or quasi initials, we had “TV” clued as (2) recently, and it seems pretty general.

    It’s an implied fiction I think we’re perhaps better to forgive, as otherwise many such solutions would be banally given away as he suggests.

    Thanks all.

  21. Thanks Puck and bridesong

    Always enjoy this setter and no exception here. A composer that I was completely ignorant of previously and appreciated the learning from this. As had been said the clear clueing enabled one to derive the answer … and for me the need for some electronic help to verify the why.

    Many clever constructions and a demand of general knowledge or research (John Birt, other composers such as Carl Orff, etc.) to make it a worthy prize level puzzle.

    Only quibble would be the use of fellow Guardian setters in a clue may be a little parochial and would be impossible for a newcomer to hope to parse – I know it’s been used before by other setters too. Only very minor :).

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