Hello, everyone. It's been a little bit hectic in these parts this week, what with our leaders marching us off the cliff, then turning round and running away, so I thought you might appreciate some escapism. This post is exclusive to those who have already pledged to 'Ghost Variations', by way of a big thank you while we wait for the book itself to come through.
I originally wrote this story for my friend Philippe Graffin, the French violinist. He and the violist Nobuko Imai were making a recording of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante and some of the violin and viola duos. He called and said he'd been thinking of asking me to write the programme notes, but on reflection would prefer me to write a short story. This was quite a surprise, if a nice one. The result was Too Much Mozart, which was duly published in the CD booklet. I've now revised and updated it a bit. The title is, of course, used ironically.
I hope you enjoy it. Thank you a thousand times for all your support!
“You can stand coffee cups on them.” She’s unwrapped it; glittery ribbon lies discarded near the bin. “That’s what they used to say, when they first invented CDs.” The silver disc catches rainbows from the early morning. “Oh, it’s Mozart. Isn’t there too much Mozart these days? Don’t you remember Salzburg? Heaving! And those beastly chocolate balls full of marzipan…”
“That’s not Mozart’s fault,” he remarks. “He hated Salzburg. Wouldn’t you like to hear a bit?”
“Later, maybe.”
“I could take the disc back and change it, if you don’t like it.”
“No, no, I’m sure it’s lovely. Now, did you call Cecilia about dinner?”
“ Yes, she’ll be here. Happy birthday, darling.” He gets up, turns away. “I must get moving, I’ll be late.”
“Oh - thank you, dear. Sorry. I forgot to say thank you.”
He pulls on his coat, takes an umbrella, closes the door behind him. Icy air; incipient rain. The train is late, as usual. He waits, musing. The Mozart she hasn’t played resonates through his brainchatter. The Sinfonia Concertante: his enchanted garden. His memory blends with it until he can’t tell which image is his and which is Mozart’s. If one thing would give him pleasure in their partnership, it would be her sharing of this love. Yet she thinks there’s too much Mozart.
Violin and viola, together but separate, walking side by side. None of that romantic individual-against-society ethos here, thanks: this is conversation. Mozart and friend, toying, arguing, making up. Working as equals, distinct but united. Teasing. Outdoing each other. How carefully they have to coordinate that trill in the cadenza. It’s all in the timing. He could meet his match in music the way he never could in life, and wasn’t that what he wanted, and Mozart too? A partner who evened him out, self-contained but with her voice defined by his, and vice-versa? Not simple in the 18th century. But it wasn’t Constanze, not yet. It was her sister, Aloysia the singer, whom he loved and lost.
Twenty-three? You never love, nor lose, as hard as then.
He remembers: woodland. He’d been twenty-three then; so too was she, not the woman who thinks there’s too much Mozart, but one who played it with him. Violin (her) and viola (him). Music irons you out; if you play your best, the sound is the distilled essence of your inner self. As Mozart must have known. Not that anyone dare suppose in the 21st century that a composer’s emotional world might have affected the choices he made, chaining his notes to the staves. You can’t know a composer through his music any more than you can truly know anybody you love, or live with. Or so they say.
They’d rehearsed, then walked through the wood in the evening sun. What had they talked about? He can barely remember. Perhaps they’d fixed the problems of city centres, in fifteen minutes flat. They talked without touching. She’d worn daft shoes, spiky heels leaving pinpricks in the earth. He ran to a stretch of grass to see whether he could still do the back flips he remembered from school gymnastics. Watching, she’d laughed, clapped, cheered. Together but separate, at their best. They’d given their concert to a flight of hands clapping like wings.
Plato’s ideal, he’d learned, was love, equal partnership, with a purpose: for your project, choose your partner. A duo. It’s the spirit you need: a soul that matches yours. But destroy that balance with touch and you wreck something greater than yourselves: your creation.
The slow movement. Don’t tell me someone could write such music without knowing pain. Mozart watched his mother die in an alien, wintry city; broke the news to a father he feared and a sister he missed. Nannerl. Perhaps he grew up knowing from her, his first partner, the essential kernel of all a duo could be. He lost Aloysia. Who’s to say her sister Constanze wasn’t a substitute? Partnerships: mother, sister, lover, muse. His affection was with the lower voice, his choice; the violin was his father’s – those scratching pupils, that infuriating treatise. Add Mozart’s Oedipus complex to the mix. How many partnerships left themselves distilled on his staves? Did he preserve them, like bottled fruits that keep their flavour long after the tree is dead? Don’t think about that. There’s too much Mozart.
Express or sustain, then, love and regret – but why not use it, too? Revenge. He was in the loathed Salzburg; 1783, before anybody thought of Mozartkugeln or selfie-sticks; his friend Michael Haydn, Josef’s brother, fell ill after finishing four out of six duos for violin and viola, commissioned by the Archbishop. Mozart’s old enemy, who’d kicked him out of the town. What fun, to get the better of him. He wrote two duos for Michael’s set, and the Archbishop never spotted the difference, though he might have wondered why the viola part was suddenly so difficult. He’d have thought there was too much Mozart.
He’s decanting wine for her birthday dinner when the bell rings. “Let Cecilia in?” she says.
He opens the door. She’s outside, straight from a rehearsal, violin case on her back. He kisses her cheek. She’s family now. Words of welcome; she laughs, claps her hands together and, shedding her coat, asks whether he’s played his viola recently. He excuses himself: “No time, what with work and the children...”
“So what did you give my sister for her birthday?”
“A Mozart CD. But she thinks there’s too much Mozart.”
“Nonsense. There’s never enough. Which is it?”
He shows her.
She smiles. “It’s still my favourite. Put it on?”
“Cecilia,” her sister says, “do take those silly heels off. I don’t want my floor wrecked.”
Violin and viola fill the air. Did Mozart sometimes imagine another voice, as he occasionally hears Cecilia’s, echoing back from the trees? It’s not for him to say. One thing he knows. Some day he’ll die, and when he has to choose his haunting ground, it will be that woodland, last seen when he was twenty-three, walking beside her.