Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

“He was physically restless, quick-witted, sociable, flirtatious, and obscene,” New Yorker music critic Alex Ross wrote of Mozart. “But he often gave the impression of not being entirely present, as if his mind was caught up in an invisible event.”

Donald Jay Grout’s ponderous History of Western Music echoes the impression: “Mozart lived his real life in the inner world of his music, to which his everyday existence often seems only a troubled and shadowy parallel. There is a touch of the miraculous, something both childlike and godlike, about this.”

 

Separating the myth of Mozart from the facts is difficult when so much—including a great deal of fiction--has been written about him. Some impressions of the composer are based on Milos Forman’s 1984 film “Amadeus”, an award-winning cinematic treatment of a play by Peter Shaffer which the playwright himself called a “fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri.” Alexander Pushkin wrote a play about Mozart and his contemporary Antonio Salieri in 1830, and even Rimsky-Korsakov was drawn to the subject, writing a seldom-performed opera.

Mozart was the son of a respected Salzburg musician and teacher, Leopold, who early on dropped all other activities to educate and promote the boy. Has there ever been such a prodigy? By the time he was six years old, he was a virtuoso on the clavier, and he soon became a good organist and violinist as well, though the viola was always his chosen instrument to play. He wrote his first symphony before his ninth birthday, his first oratorio at eleven, and his first opera at twelve.

Biographies write of Constanze Weber, the giddy girl Mozart married—after months of pleading for his father’s permission-- in August of 1782. Less well known is the fact that the couple had six children, four boys and two girls, in their nine years of marriage, and that only two of these survived infancy. By most accounts, Mozart and Constanze were happy despite their profligate spending, which led to their being constantly short of money. They moved 12 times in their nine years together.

Certainly Antonio Salieri—despite the implication of the stage plays and film-- had nothing whatsoever to do with Mozart’s death and was hardly even considered a serious rival. Both Constanze and Wolfgang were frequently in ill health, hers complicated by constant pregnancies and his by overwork. What does seem to be true is Mozart’s premonition about the commissioned Requiem on which he was working when he died. He said that he had the curious sensation that he was writing his own funeral mass.

Mozart was buried in an anonymous communal grave in Vienna. For those who would mourn his early passing or celebrate his singular life, he left the deathless memorial of his perfect music.

DRAWERS

                         Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock spoke of     
                           “too much change in too short a period of time"
                             and coined the term “information overload.”

            “I need new underwear,” he said. He was rebinding an old philosophy book, but he put down his tools and pulled at the waist of his trousers.

            “What’s wrong with your old underwear?” she asked.

            “It’s too tight around the middle,” he said. “I need a bigger size.”

            “I’ll order you some from Amazon,” she said. “Large instead of medium.” She was not very skilled with modern technology, but she did know how to send e-mail and ask Google questions and order things from Amazon.

            Amazon, it turned out, had thousands of types of men’s underwear. She looked at page after page, trying to find something like what he usually wore. He didn’t want boxer shorts or white Y-fronts, so that left something called briefs. Some of the offerings were suggestive and others were downright naughty. She was fascinated (and a little scandalized) by the offerings. Finally she found something that seemed like what he was used to wearing and ordered four pairs in Large.

            When the package arrived, two days, Amazon Prime, he opened them, liked the colors, and held up one pair to his waist. Then he looked at it more carefully.

            “It doesn’t have a, well, you know.” The briefs were designed with a decisive curve in the front seam, but no front opening.

            “Well, how are you supposed to go to the bathroom?” she asked.

            “It looks like they’re more interested in showing off the little man than accommodating him,” he said. “Could you maybe sew an opening or something?”

            She raised her eyebrows. “That would be pretty complicated. I mean, you can’t just cut a hole in them. You have to have more fabric and stuff.” After a moment, she asked again “What do you suppose people do? Is this some new thing?”

            She went to her computer to Google it.

            How do men use the bathroom when their drawers don’t have a fly? She typed, not really expecting an answer. But there were lots of answers. She read posts on one thread, explaining various techniques for men urinating while wearing briefs with no front opening. Undo belt or don’t undo belt. Right hand hooks around the elastic while the left takes aim. Sit down. There were many arguments for and against various types of men’s underwear and many helpful technical hints, one even using the word micturition. She was torn between surprise and hilarity.

            “I can’t believe what I’m reading,” she said.

            “Maybe they don’t make the regular kind any more,” he said, sadly, in a voice that had lamented the gradual demise of many different regular kinds of things: Woolen dressing gowns, trans-Atlantic ocean liners, dial telephones.

            She repacked the underwear and took it to UPS. He went to a nearby Ross store and found some drawers that had the proper front opening. They were enormous, however, so he used his bookbinding cord and needles to take some tucks in the waistband.

            “Well, you are nothing if not resourceful,” she said. “You might have used staples.”

            “Staples would rust,” he said.

THE DAY THEY BURNED MY BOOKS

            There was a sign on the front of the house saying we were quarantined. Nobody but the family was allowed inside because I had scarlet fever.

            Scarlet fever, a strep throat with a rash, is rare now, but there were no antibiotics back then, and the disease was contagious. There must have been a public health nurse around somewhere to make sure we were observing the quarantine, and it must have been she who said my books had to be burned.

            I had learned to read the year before, sitting in Miss Ella’s lap at Miss Ella’s kindergarten, and I must have loved my books, though I don’t remember feeling sad as my parents and I fed them into the big old coal stove that heated the house in Leitchfield, Kentucky.

            1942 was an eventful year. At school, we collected scrap metal for the war drive. Since I could read, the teacher took me out of first grade and put me in second, where I was utterly bewildered. There was a tornado that pulled up the fence in the back yard. Big Jo, an orphaned relative only a few years younger than my mother, came to live with us. My little brother was bitten on the face by a neighbor’s dog. He and I got measles, whooping cough, and then the scarlet fever.

            In retrospect, it could have been a real plague year. It must have been tough, supporting five people on a teacher’s salary. But Daddy went fishing sometimes, and once he brought home frog’s legs which Mother fried, screaming when they jumped in the pan. There was a cherry tree in the back yard. Daddy built whatever we needed, and Mother made most of our clothes. We must have had a garden for vegetables.       

            So many years later, knowing how it all turned out, it would be easy to read emotions into all those events. But in actuality, a child’s view of reality did not (and does not) contain many innate judgments. The books were burned; I can remember how the flames in the old stove ate up the pages, brown, black, orange fire, ash.

            I imagine some kind of serene detachment, backed up by promises of new books to come. But in reality, the day they burned my books was just like any other day, filled with wonder, never quite long enough.

A Scandal

The final edition had hit the streets, and the newsroom at the News-Sentinel was down to night staff: The news editor, the wire service men in their own cubicles, a copy boy, me on the copy desk, editing teletype stories and wondering if the baby-sitter would get my note about dinner.

            Across the room, a phone rang. In a few minutes, Ralph Millett, the news editor, came toward me, looking all around, waving a piece of newsprint. “You need to go interview this girl in Lenoir City,” he said. “She’s Bobby Baker’s secretary, visiting her parents for Christmas.”

            “Me?” I asked. I wasn’t a reporter any more. “I don’t have anybody else to send,” he said. “Jack will drive you. Jack!” he called.

            “What’s this about?” I asked.

            “Scandal at a high level. Nobody has said a word so far.” Then looking at me under his bushy eyebrows, he said in the best Hollywood newspaper-movie fashion, “Get that story.”

            Early in 1963, Bobby Baker, a protégé of  Lyndon Johnson and a major power on Capitol Hill, had come under investigation by the Senate Rules Committee for allegations of bribery and arranging sexual favors in exchange for congressional votes and government contracts. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were involved peripherally in the investigation, as was Johnson himself, though the vice president’s name was dropped from the inquiry after John F. Kennedy’s assassination November 22, 1963.

            Carole Tyler, Tennessean and former Miss Loudon County, was Bobby Baker’s personal secretary and lived in a house owned by Baker in Washington.

            I had Jack stop at a drugstore on the 30-minute drive to Carole’s parents’ home. I bought holiday boxes, giftwrap and ribbon, made up several cheerful-looking packages, only hesitated a moment once we arrived at a modest-looking house in Lenoir City.

            Since I looked for all the world like a friend bearing gifts, when I asked for Carole at the door, a relative let me in. A pretty but tired-looking woman in a satin dressing gown came out  of a back room, accompanied by a little dog that immediately jumped on me.

            “Kukla!” the woman scolded.

            “Ah,” I said. “A Greek name. It means ‘doll,’ you know.”

            “Who are you, anyway?” the woman asked.

            “Carole?” I asked. She nodded.

            “I’m from the Knoxville paper.”

            “Oh, no. No, no.”

            “You don’t really have to say anything,” I said quickly. I put the fake presents down and showed her that I wasn’t carrying a note pad or pen. “We just wanted to see how you’re doing with all this.” She sank on to a sofa nearby and picked up the little dog.

            After a half hour or so, I went out with my empty Christmas boxes and got into the staff car. “No way to get a picture?” Jack asked. “No, I don’t think so,” I said. Jack drove fast while I wrote down everything I could remember that Carole had said.

            One thing she told me, wistfully, was how she had posed for repair work on the model for the 19-foot-tall statue of Freedom that stands atop the Capitol building. “So it will have my arms,” she said.

            Even though it wasn’t hard news, the story got lots of attention because of the seedy nature of the investigation and the way the principals had been so closed-mouthed about the whole thing. It was on the front page of the News-Sentinel with a picture of Carole in front of the Capitol (you could barely see that there was a statue atop the building.) The Associated Press picked it up and Newsweek mentioned it, along with my name. There was a bonus in my paycheck that week.

            The Journal, our rival newspaper, complained on its own front page that a spokesman denied Carole had given an interview. (We had gone through elaborate steps to hide the story until it was in print, since the two newspapers used the same technical crew.)

            “You were really there, right?” the news editor asked me. “Of course I was,” I said. And Jack, who had waited outside in the car, verified that he saw me go in the house and stay a half hour or so.

On the strength of the mention in Newsweek, I took the Greyhound to New York City and applied for a job on the Herald-Tribune. Managing Editor Murray Weiss had seen the story. He said I would be the Tribune’s first woman copy editor.

But the job never materialized. I moved to New York, but there was a newspaper strike, a hiring freeze, the Tribune was in trouble…and I took a much tamer writing job at one of the United Nations delegations, researching puff stories at the New York public library.

            In February of 1964, Carole Tyler was questioned at the Senate hearing. She took the Fifth on every question. Never said a word. In May, 1965, she was killed when a single-engine biplane in which she was a passenger crashed into five feet of water only 200 yards off the Maryland coast.

            I still feel guilty about manipulating my way into the woman’s house with my fake Christmas presents. It’s the sort of thing a paparazzo might do without a second thought, but I was (and am) mild-mannered and anxious not to offend. I can’t even imagine where the idea of the wrapped boxes came from. I think it was probably a matter of my being more afraid of the news editor than I was of tricking an unknown woman. A woman who died at 26 years of age. A woman whose arms are replicated on the statue of Freedom.

Cops and Nobles

British detective thrillers, whether in novels, films or on PBS Masterpiece Mystery, are sometimes mystifying to non-Brits in an odd way.

For starts, there are all those acronyms: CID, MI5 MI6, all the letters before the police officers’ names. Does everyone know that MI stands for military intelligence? Or that the CID is Crime Investigation Division? Or that the ranks of police officers ascend from PC or DC (police or detective constable) through DS (detective sergeant) to DCI (detective chief inspector)? Calling a DS a DC might cause offense.

If you are reading, as I am, Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley books, you have the additional problem of figuring out which Lord or Lady is up to whatever mischief, since sometimes the characters’ given names are used and at other times they are called by their titles. Lord Asherton, for instance, is DCI Lynley or simply Asherton, or Tommy to his friends.

Here is the cast of characters for Payment in Blood, the second of George's 19 Inspector Lynley books--very helpful when, on page 300 of some 430, you can't remember who Denton is (he's Lynley's servant.) Of course, you might prefer just to read the book or watch the video and assume that eventually everything will be understandable. But in the interest of de-mystifying some of the roles and titles, I give you the list of Cops and Nobles.

1. DCI Thomas Lynley, Eighth Earl of Asherton.

2. DC Barbara Havers, demoted from DS, Lynley’s partner. Lives with her parents.

3. Lady Helen Clyde, daughter of the Tenth Earl of Hesfield (ongoing love interest).

4. Simon Allcourt St. James, forensic scientist.

5. Deborah Cotter St. James, photographer, his wife, daughter of his valet.

6. Francesca Gerrard, widow, owner of mansion on Loch Achiemore, Scotland.

7. Philip, her late husband, buried on an island in the Loch.

8. Stuart Rintoul, Lord Stinhurst, “Midas of the Theater”, Francesca’s brother.

9. Marguerite, Countess of Stinhurst, his wife.

10. Alec Rintoul, deceased, their son, loved by No. 12.

11. Elizabeth Rintoul, their fortyish daughter.

12. Joy Sinclair, playwright (deceased), sister of No. 13, cousin of No. 19, former lover of No. 16.

13. Irene Sinclair, former actress, previously married to No. 16.

14. Joanna Ellacourt, famous actress, married to No. 15.

15. David Sydeham, her husband and manager.

16. Robert Gabriel, famous actor, formerly married to No. 13, now sleeping with No. 12 and many others.

17. Geoffrey Rintoul (deceased), brother of No. 8, grave discovered in odd place.

18. Jeremy Vinney, journalist, drama critic for the Times.

19. Rhys Davies-Jones, theatrical director, presently lover of No. 3. Prime suspect.

20. Gowan Kilbride, handyman at the mansion of No. 6.

21. Mary Agnes Campbell, maid at No. 6.

22. Hannah Darrow, deceased, subject of a book by No. 12.

23. John Darrow, publican, her husband.

24. Teddy Darrow, their son.

English police: Chief Superintendent Hiller; Superintendent Webberley, Lynley’s superior; DC Raymond Plater (Mildenhall); DC Winston Nkata.

Scottish police: DI Ian Macaskin of the Strathclyde CID; DC Kevin Lonan.

Military Intelligence: William Vassall, Sir Kenneth Willingate, Sir Andrew Higgins.

Servants: Denton, Lynley’s valet. Caroline Shepherd, Lady Helen’s maid. Cotter, valet to St. James (No. 4) and father of Deborah St. James (No. 5).