“Sure.”
“You’ll have to wear a haz-mat suit.”
“Really? Who was this guy?”
“He was a morbidly obese shut-in and lived in squalor.”
The sketchy story that unfolded – nobody wanted to talk details – is this: The man was the son of opera aficionados, was one himself, but had few if any relatives, and tended to spend his days, if out at all, at the public library indulging in various arcane interests. Or maybe he was one of those library denizens who are there because few other places that would have him.
And then he was murdered. Nobody knows why or by whom.
He was a defenseless for sure. Maybe the murderer did it because he/she simply could. Arriving at the compact three-story townhouse – your basic old Philadelphia “trinity” – I was told the place had been cleaned up enough that only a face mask and rubber gloves were necessary. Looking through the records, I thought his tastes were pretty mainstream. About the only thing I would’ve wanted to hear was a 78 set of Gyorgy Sandor playing the Liszt Sonata in b, but I don’t have a proper player. Few do.
Concert programs were everywhere and fascinating, some dating back to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s summers at the now semi-operational Robin Hood Dell. In a Beethoven 9th from 1961, the soprano soloist was a young Teresa Stratas. It’s hard to imagine that the hyper-dramatic future star of Mahagonny, Pelleas et Melisande and the Franco Zeffirelli film version of La Traviata ever did any oratorio work. Maybe the gig was good, quick money. Maybe Beethoven rarely has it so good.
A program from the 1929 Philadelphia Orchestra season at the Academy of Music had an advertisement for chamber music concerts featuring familiar names such as Pro Arte String Quartet and less familiar ones such as Swastika Quartet. Arturo Toscanini had an entire Philadelphia series with the New York Philharmonic. The orchestra program itself, led by Leopold Stokowski, daringly ended with the challenging, now-neglected Prokofiev Symphony No. 2. A 1931 program had Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 on the first half, Vaughan Williams Norfolk Rhapsody on the second. The back page carried a homey letter from then-president Herbert Hoover encouraging home ownership. In 1931. Such a different time. And as I write this, I’m coughing from the dust….
The great mystery was the 3-by-5 cards that were scattered throughout the house like confetti. One featured the cast list for a 1928 cast for Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin State Opera. Another documented a 1898 Faust at Covent Garden. What was this? What did it mean? One closet opened up onto shelf after shelf of baseball cards. Were the opera-cast cards some strange extension of that?
I started to wonder what mysteries my apartment might hold if people who didn’t know me very well had to clean it out after my death. I remember one of my cat sitters looking around at my collection of discs and books and saying, “I just love being surrounded by so much data!”
But in a town like Philadelphia – where a sizable portion of the population is self-appointed Judge Judys (I hear from them often) – I can just imagine the withering questions that would be asked about my thoughtfully and passionately collected belongings.
Q: Was he just a little bit obsessed with Der Rosenkavalier? He has every
recording ever made of the piece. He probably swanned around the house
lipsynching to the Marschallin.
A: I love Der Rosenkavalier but once had a magazine assignment to write a complete survey of the opera’s recordings. The level of performances is so consistently high that I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of any of them. Also, they were the backdrop for the inexplicable disintegration of a four-year relationship. And in defiance of gay stereotypes, I never longed to be anything like the regal Marschallin The clothes are too much work. I like to maneuver.
Q: Why three recordings of Lili Kraus playing Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat? Same performance, same label, one is a CD, one is an LP….
A: You never know when you’ll need it and I don’t want to spend forever looking for it. What can be a morose Schubert sonata has great hope in her hands. She was captured during World War II by the Japanese (she was on tour of the down-under hemisphere) and forced into several years of hard labor. And yet she came out of it and went onto a mid-level, multi-decade career. Such perspective is important.
Q: What’s Petula Clark doing in here?
A: Remember that Glenn Gould adored Petula Clark. If she’s good enough for
him…well, you know the rest.
Q: Who is Jo Stafford? How could anybody so obscure make so many recordings?
A: My first musical memory is Jo Stafford singing “I Got a Sweetie” and it’s even better with each return visit. The saxophone solo still rocks. The voice was soothing but not bland, because everything she did had a subtle undercurrent of jazz. The voice tells you that the world is somehow in balance. Her signature song, “I’ll be Seeing You” wasn’t a hit so much as it was a public service during WW II and earned her the name GI Jo.
Q: Ah! The Johnny Mathis Christmas Album. See? He really was a fraud.
A: Not if you think of him as Nat King Cole’s kid brother. I can’t wait to they stumble upon the Mae West Christmas album. Or the Zsa Zsa Gabor exercise video. I love unintentional and accidental humor. It’s like a mistake in nature. The bigger the better….
Q: What are all these home-made discs marked M5, YNS, MTT, BR3….looks like fractured British postal codes.
A: Mahler 5th, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Michael Tilson Thomas, Brahms Symphony No. 3….
Q: All of these rectangular sheets of paper have the same numbers – 250 and 350 – next to names like “Milhaud” in fancy writing. Looks a bit pretentious….
A: They’re assignment slips from Gramophone magazine. The numbers refer to my limit (which I always exceed). The handwriting is that of my editor Andrew Mellor, who is the polar opposite of pretentious.
Q: Look! On the inside sleeve of this Judy Collins album there’s a message scrawled. It says, “Bob, meet me down at the lounge.” Look at that awful handwriting. He really must’ve been partying that night….
A: In fact I had been tear gassed. The Vietnam War was still going on and some anti-protester vigilantes threw tear gas canisters into the stairwell of the high-rise dorm where I then lived – in the middle of the night. I woke out of a sound sleep with my face feeling ignited. The awful thing about tear gas is that your natural impulse is to rub it off your face. In fact, it’s acid, and just hurts more. The only thing you can do is find your way to some fresh air and splash water on where the gas got you. And in this dorm, each floor had a lounge with a separate ventilation system. The Bob in question was my roommate.
So….there’s always more to any given story. The truth is rarely what you first think it is. Judgments are the product of an under-utilized brain.
End of sermon.
That is one of the funniest “sermons” (your choice of words, not mine) I’ve ever read and I’m still laughing. More than funny, this is an often-touching, bizarre and eye-opening account about the strange ways of record collectors, a breed to which I have belonged since inheriting my grandfather’s collection of 78’s early in my teens while growing up in Havana. Thank the Lord I have not sunk into the level of squalor of your Philly weirdo – my wife would not allow it, but I’ve known others who might be classified as borderline phono-psychos. Thanks for the posting. I’m sharing! Oh, and by the way, HAPPY HOLIDAYS and a GOOD 2015!
Did you suggest to the cops that maybe this person had been murdered for a valuable baseball card rather than for a valuable 78 rpm?