Thursday, December 18, 2014

A Dark and Stormy Day

With all the activity of this December, including a hectic work week with business deadlines looming December 31st, entertaining with friends and family, Shopping, cooking, and the recent difficult diagnosis of health issues for my Kitty, I forgot to blog about one of my favorite subjects....Mozart.

Of course, as you may well know, Mozart died in December after a prolonged illness complicated by renal failure. It is on his sick bed that he wrote the Requiem mass. There is controversy about how much he wrote, and how much his colleague Sussmeyer penned, but none-the-less, the signature sound of Wolfgang is there.

He died on 5 December 1791 at the age of 35. It is said that the night he died, there cropped up a winter storm.
In a  memoir attributed to one Joseph Deiner, who was claimed to have been present, the following account appeared in the Vienna Morgen-Post of 28 January 1856.
The night of Mozart's death was dark and stormy; at the funeral, too, it began to rage and storm. Rain and snow fell at the same time, as if Nature wanted to shew her anger with the great composer's contemporaries, who had turned out extremely sparsely for his burial. Only a few friends and three women accompanied the corpse. Mozart's wife was not present. These few people with their umbrellas stood round the bier, which then taken via the Grosse Schullerstrasse to the St. Marx Cemetery. As the storm grew ever more violent, even these few friends determined to turn back at the Stuben Gate, and they betook themselves to the "Silver Snake". Deiner, the landlord, was also present for the funeral.

I would like to think that at the Silver Snake. probably a tavern, those who attended raised a glass, to the great composer. Those who did not care to pay their respects can now feel themselves ashamed (wherever they are, perhaps sitting on a little dark cloud in a corner of heaven, or toasting their buns below ) as Mozart is surely and enduringly remembered! 

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