Scholar defends Mozart's archbishop

I am being challenged on my post about Archbishop Colloredo, above, whom I called Mozart's mean archbishop. And I am going to look into it because the comment writer is Michael Lorenz whose Web site I love.

If he tells me to do more research I will do more research! I admire Michael Lorenz and am always honored to hear from him.

Was Archbishop Colloredo a villain, a major pain or at least a bad boss?

Or is he among the saints?

I will say one thing, if I was wrong about this, a million other people have been wrong too.

"Please do not repeat old nonsense," Michael Lorenz writes. If old nonsense this be, I am only the thousandth person to repeat it. Still it is easy to see how that can happen because after all, the version of events we are always fed began with Mozart himself.

It will be fun to see if we can defend old Colloredo.

Meanwhile, I have been sitting here on this rainy and brooding All Souls Day ...




... cataloging Leonard's records, a major pursuit in my life these days. Today I am going through his recordings of the music of Miklos Rozsa. I have all these letters written by Rozsa and Pennario and I am checking different things in these letters, pinpointing exact recording dates, things like that.

I sometimes look up peripheral people to see if they are still around, because then maybe I can get them on the phone or something, if they might be useful. I noticed that the liner notes to three of these records are by a writer named Christopher Palmer. He seems to have been an authority on Rozsa's music. So I Google Christopher Palmer. He is dead. He died a long time ago. Which is too bad because he was passionate about film music and under-appreciated composers.

Christopher Palmer's obituary in the Independent is beautifully written. and details his many accomplishments. In the middle of it, though, is this sentence I love:

"The errors he did not notice and allowed into print reached legendary status."

The writer said proof-reading was not the Palmer method. Which makes sense to me because on one of the Rozsa albums this one mistake jumped out at me and I had been wondering what the story was about it. Now I know!

Anyway, inspiration from all sides to check my work more carefully even on a Web log written in haste.