How Mozart caused Buffalo's Blizzard of '77

Son of a Clementi-playing sea cook, I fell off the Music Critic Blog wagon and I missed Mozart's birthday.

Well, that is OK because he did not celebrate it either.

He celebrated his Name Day which as we have already determined is Oct. 31, the feast of St. Wolfgang.

That is when people should celebrate! That is when the classical station should play Mozart all day long and when people should hold concerts and lectures.

The heck with Hallowe'en!

You know what, I would settle for any day as long as I could sit down and actually listen to something. I mean the way I used to when I was a kid. This is the problem with making music your business. You never get to listen to it just for the heck of it. Maybe you never will get to ever again.

When I was a kid I would put on my big '70s headphones and just be lost to the world. I knew all the Mozart piano concertos inside out and even though I played the piano I did not stop there. Playing the piano myself was never the point. I knew the string quartets inside out too, and the viola quintets, and the symphonies of course, and the serenades, and the violin and horn concertos, and the clarinet music, and a lot of the operas.

My sister was laughing to me the other day, "Mary, remember when you caused the Blizzard of '77?"

And I said: "Haha, yes, I remember that!"

That is the Blizzard of '77 pictured above, in a great shot from this site I found. You could touch the traffic signals! All thanks to me. What happened was, I prayed for a snow day, a day off from school, on January 27 because it was Mozart's birthday and I knew the classical station, WNED, would be playing Mozart all day. I used to pray for Mozart's birthday off every year but that year, 1977, I prayed particularly hard. And we got the day off.

Not only that but we got the next two weeks off! During which time I not only touched traffic lights, I listened to A LOT of Mozart.

You always wondered what caused the Blizzard of '77.

Now you know!

Mozart and name days

Another thing I am learning from Paul Johnson's book on Mozart...

(The last one being the mean archbishop ...)

... Mozart would celebrate the name days of his female relatives by writing them pieces of sacred music -- an Ave Maria, a Magnificat, something like that.

Imagine being one of Mozart's relatives! It is your name day and you get an Ave Maria written by Mozart. Probably at the time they saw it as nothing special.

"What did you get for your name day, Sophie?"

"Oh, my husband gave me this great necklace, and this is exciting, my sister gave me a gift certificate to that new restaurant."

"But you must have gotten something else."

"Oh, right, a new Parisian hat! From my other sister."

"What else?"

"Let me think."

(Long pause.)

"You know what, my brother-in-law gave me a cute Salve Regina he wrote."

I want to start celebrating people's name days, you know?

Back when I was a kid and read about Mozart I kept reading about name days and I did not know what they were. Your name day is the feast day for the saint you were named after. That was what you celebrated back then, not your birthday.

My husband Howard's name day would be Oct. 19. Darn, I just missed it! I am going with St. Philip Howard, one of the martyrs of Elizabethan England.

Mozart's name day was Halloween. Oct. 31 is the feast of St. Wolfgang. St. Wolfgang was "one of the three brilliant stars of the 10th century." The Catholic Church, gotta love it!

It also worked so that you were christened the name of the saint whose feast day you were born on. Mozart was born on Jan. 27, the feast day of St. John Chrysostom. Hence his name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb (or Amadeus, or Theophilus, depending on what you read, I have never been able to get this straight).

What great traditions, all lost now. They have thrown out all these babies with the bathwater.

Haha ... Looking at the St. Wolfgang link I see someone had commented: "Dear St. Wolfgang, thank you for being the namesake of Mozart."

Amen!