The Composer Is Dead but author Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, is very much alive and narrating the orchestral work.

The good news for fans of the children's book series Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events is that Mr. Snicket lives on, even though the 13-part series is over.

"I always intended Lemony Snicket to carry on. I imagine we'll never stop hearing from him until we stop hearing from me," says Daniel Handler, the San Francisco author who adopted the Snicket nom de plume to provide literary narration to the best-selling saga of the always-imperiled Baudelaire orphans.

And indeed, the morbidly flowery and dryly humourous Snicket is back on the scene, narrating The Composer Is Dead, a new orchestral work for children, with a score by San Francisco composer Nathaniel Stookey and text by Snicket.

Snicket is to narrate this today in front of the Toronto Symphony, although what's invariably happened in the past is that the fictitious character is a no-show, and Handler himself is left to apologize to the crowd and handle the speaking part himself.

On the phone from his San Francisco office, one listens for snippets of Snicket in Handler's voice. And indeed, they are both prone to dry asides. The trusty phone system in this place was apparently on the fritz when the author first tried to phone me, and he reports, "I got a recording that told me I'd made an improper choice, which I found a little judgmental of the Toronto Sun."

Of The Composer Is Dead, which will soon be released in a book/CD package featuring music by the San Francisco Symphony, he says, "the plan is you could listen to the recording or read the book or both -- or neither, but I hesitate to recommend that option."

So how do Snicket and Handler differ?

"He's not a voice in my head, but a narrative voice I find useful," Handler says. "I guess the difference is he has the courage of intellectual convictions that are not thought out well."

Hence the plot of The Composer Is Dead, in which Snicket "more or less comes to the conclusion that there's a conspiracy going on, seeing as how so many well-known composers are dead, and so few well-known composers are alive. There's really no other explanation."

Thus does Snicket (or his stand-in Handler) go about singling out orchestral sections looking for suspects. The Composer Is Dead was inspired to some extent by Peter And The Wolf, "as a piece for narrator and orchestra that can serve as an introduction of the orchestra. I actually think that Peter And The Wolf, though it's a beautiful piece of music, doesn't succeed in introducing people to the orchestra very well. You can hum a lot of things frowm Peter And The Wolf, and even remember the story -- although the story is almost entirely without narrative content -- but if you ask, 'Who plays the fox?' no one has any idea."

The project came about after he accidentally bumped into Stookey, a high school friend he hadn't seen in 20 years and who had gone on to be a composer in residence for several orchestras. "He was the glamorous blond boy who ran off to France and had a girlfriend. That's really all the high school rep he needed," Handler recalls.

It helped that Stookey retained his sense of humour. "I think classical musicians tend to either have an excellent sense of humour or no sense of humour whatsoever," Handler says. "I have yet to meet a classical musician who was somewhere in the middle. And one of the things that was interesting about putting this piece together and rehearsing it with other orchestras is to see who thinks it's funny and who thinks it's outrageous.

"I think there's a certain sensibility in some classical musicians where, if you're performing the work of a living composer, you're already trespassing across several boundaries -- let alone the work of a living composer that is comical in nature and even makes fun of orchestras."

And, he adds, "I think it's best not to mention Bugs Bunny to them under any circumstances."