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Monday, January 30, 2006

Belated Mozart’s Birthday Post

I’m an amateur singer, and an amateurish pianist. I play and sing for a couple of hours every day at the cheap Waldorf spinnet my father bought sixty years ago. I got it when he died.

I’ve been at this solitary routine for years, and have evolved some traditions. One of them is that when anyone I know and/or admire dies, I hold a private -- one person -- memorial service in their honor. This service always features the same piece of music: Mozart’s Requiem.

“The Requiem’s always in style,” has become a mantra of mine, because after all someone’s always dying, always in need of memorialization, and you can’t do better than the Requiem. The Anglican Prayer for the Dead is a drag. Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess is pretty but wordless. Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony Number Three, which enjoyed a short vogue about a decade ago, is in Polish. Purcell’s Thou Knowest, Lord is great but brief.

The Requiem’s got it all. When you’ve played and sung your way from Kyrie to Agnus Dei, you’ve gone the distance. You’ve made the gesture. You’ve done the deed.



The Requiem is written for four voice parts. I usually play the alto line and sing the soprano, though if I’m feeling ambitious I’ll sing soprano and play the bottom instrumental part. Often I jump from one voice to another. I like the ominous tenor solo, for instance, at the beginning of Tuba Mirum, so I sing that, and then, as it enters, I pick up the alto, which I then drop at the entrance of the soprano, my voice in this way taking a pleasant trip to higher and higher registers.

I’m drawn to another tuneful solo as well -- the happy, gentle alto introduction to Benedictus, which gives way nicely to a soprano solo, and then bursts into very intense four-part harmony to produce a sustained sound of great sweetness and beauty.


The two most recent honorees at my Mozart memorial service were a judge and a professor. For a few years, when my husband and I lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, Steffen Graae, a DC Superior Court judge, lived next door. Steffen’s the person who put the DC Housing Authority in receivership -- a brave thing to do -- and turned it around. He was a kind, smart, much-esteemed man who died in his sixties of heart failure.

Judge Graae’s official memorial service was big and formal, with many robed judges and political eminences. His small unofficial service, attended by my Chocolate Lab, was heavy on the Requiem’s Lachrymosa section, which is hard to sing because you have to creep slowly up to an A. As I sang this lamentation, images of Steffen on his deck in the early evening, smoking a cigar and looking at his little city garden, came back to me.



I barely knew my latest honoree, the political scientist Michael Wallerstein. He and my husband went to graduate school together at the University of Chicago, both of them interested in the field within political science known as rational choice. I was a grad student at Chicago at the same time, and my husband insists I must have met Wallerstein, but I don’t remember.

My Mozart memorial service in any case is for the known and the unknown. I never knew Washington Post writer Marjorie Williams, whose antic spirit prompted one of my best renditions of the deedledee deedledee Domine Jesu; nor did I know the essayist and AIDS activist Paul Monette, for whom the explosive and then meditative Confutatis seemed right. For whatever reason, the purely sad strains of Recordare marked the high point of Wallerstein’s ceremony the other day.

It was a weirdly windy day, a day of high gusts and the fast sky they made. The world’s vibrancy was at a peak. The wind sang.

The paradox of the Requiem -- the stupendous vitality it draws from its morbid subject -- came through strongly, as did the contrast between my continued existence in this realm and whatever quietness Wallerstein is in.