Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon

Preface

Preface since this volume is entitled Musical Mysteries, i should begin, as oldfashioned music used to do, by clearly announcing the principal themes. In my discussion (in Part one) of the encounters of musicians with homicide, real or suspected, I will be emphasizing three recurring motifs. The first will be envy and competition between musicians. The second theme will be in the form of a question: Can genius and criminality coexist in the same soul? And finally a third theme will keep cropping up like a rondo subject: the jarring contrast between the sublime activity of the creative artist and the violent melodrama of everyday life from which none of us—musicians included—is safe. Let us begin with theme one, envious and competitive musicians. Who was the first of them to suffer the pangs of rivalry gone mad? If we were to urge the claim of Antonio salieri to this sinister distinction, we would be many millennia too late. Perhaps the earliest example of a composerperformer who turned to murder to eliminate a competitor was the very inventor of the musical arts, the god Apollo. This well-known story has a Mozartian ring for it features the first magic flute, a double flute that Athena made from a stag’s bones and played at a banquet of the gods. She was nettled to see that Hera and Aphrodite were laughing at her behind their hands while all the other gods seemed quite transported by the music. After the concert “she went away by herself into a Phrygian wood, took up the flute again beside a stream, and watched her image in the water, as she played.” Immediately she understood why the two goddesses had laughed at her. Her efforts on the instrument had turned her face an unflattering blue ix x · Preface and caused her cheeks to swell. In disgust “she threw down her flute, and laid a curse on anyone who picked it up.” The unfortunate victim of Athena’s spell was the satyr Marsyas. No sooner did he put the flute to his lips than it played by itself, reproducing Athena’s divine music. The satyr, though, claimed the music as his own and wandered through Phrygia enthralling the peasants with his performance . They told him that even Apollo couldn’t do better on his lyre, and Marsyas was foolish enough to accept their critical appraisal. His vainglory provoked the anger of Apollo, who invited him to a music contest, “the winner of which should inflict whatever punishment he pleased on the loser.” Marsyas consented, and Apollo impaneled the Muses as a jury—as clear a fix as there ever was at least before the judging scandals in modern Olympics . The Muses claimed to be charmed by both instruments until Apollo came up with a trick. He challenged Marsyas to do with the flute what the god could do with the lyre. Turn it upside down, he ordered, and both play and sing at the same time. Marsyas failed to meet this tall order, but Apollo, with ease, “reversed his lyre and sang . . . delightful hymns in honour of the Olympian gods.” The Muses awarded victory to Apollo. Thereupon the god took cruel revenge on the musical upstart Marsyas. He flayed him alive and nailed his skin to a pine tree. if the divine creator of music could be moved to murder by envy of a mortal competitor, how was more restrained behavior to be expected from Salieri and his ilk? My article, “Salieri and the ‘Murder’ of Mozart,” published seven years before Peter shaffer’s Amadeus, explores not only the envy motif but also the psychological compatibility of genius and crime. A classic (but optimistic) pronouncement on the latter subject is attributable to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself, not, however, as he appears in Shaffer ’s drama but in the pages of Alexander Pushkin’s chamber play Mozart and Salieri. A seventeenth-century analogue to the whispering campaign against Salieri was the assertion that opera composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, after driving his rival robert Cambert out of the French theaters, murdered him in england. The claims that homicide caused the deaths of mozart and Cambert are ungrounded, but the mysterious murder of eighteenth-century composer and violinist Jean-marie Leclair is well documented by surviving records of the police investigation. The solution to the case that I propose on the basis of my examination of the detective work suggests that the killing of Leclair [3.141.27.244...