The price of obsession can be high.

Mozart’s spirit sends telepathic messages!

In case you missed this headline, I saw it first in the eighties, in one of those papers where Ross Perot could also be seen, apparently shaking hands with a friendly (and visibly concerned) alien visitor.

If you are a Mozart fan, however, you understand something of the truth behind this headline. There are legions of us since "Amadeus." We saw the play, then the movie, and then we began to collect his music. CD and videotape had just come in, and so we had to buy those and the new, and, at the time, expensive, equipment. My poor vinyl collection took a back seat to digital perfection. I searched in the pages of The New Yorker for small businesses that would carry “arcane” video, like opera. I volunteered constantly at my public radio station—they were kind enough to feed my Mozart frenzy on a daily basis.

I was not alone, however, in this mad Mozart revival. Every opera singer with a recording contract put out a Mozart album, whether Mozart wrote anything for his/her type of voice or not. Famous baritones were exhausted by too many performances of Don Giovanni. It became like singing the Toreador Song in ten thousand back-to-back Carmens, only, somehow, despite the role having two more decent songs than Escamillo, far worse, perhaps because of the stage time.

Neighbors in posh NYC apartments sued neighbors after hours and hours and days and weeks and months of The Requiem played continuously and at full volume. Like so many star phenoms, Mozart had surged over the top in our poor brains. He was sending urgent telepathic messages to hundreds of thousands of us.

Love me!
Love me!
Listen to me!
Do what those 18th Century fools did not!

Unfortunately for yours truly, I was one of those crazed fans. I devoted almost twenty years to the study of Mozart and to writing a long, passionate novel about his wife. I constantly revised that novel and marketed it for nearly fifteen years, all the time listening to nothing but his operas, his symphonies, his chamber music, his string quartets, quintets, marches, dances, Masonic hymns and his hausmusik. I read nothing but works devoted to him. Publishers were helpful, putting out book after book on this New Grove groove. I tracked older biographies through interlibrary loan—which still had funding in those halcyon days—and spent weeks in the state library stacks with rare items that could not be borrowed.

I put pictures of Mozart all over the house. The Dora Stock sketch encouraged me while I wrote and rewrote—and rewrote again. A bust of Mozart still stares down at me from atop a cabinet of video devoted to nothing but his operas. There are, of course, several versions of each of his “top of the charts” DaPonte collaborations. There are documentaries taped from the small screen, and Maurice Sendak’s eerie version of the Nutcracker, where a bust of Mozart attacks poor Clara. I purchased, at great price, a used copy of Emily Anderson’s "The Mozart Family Letters," only to see it reissued, at about a third of what I’d paid, less than a year later. This was not the only out-of-print book I tracked down and bought in this time of mad desire.

The single party I gave every year, for fifteen years, mind you—and a terrible time of year it is—was to honor his birthday. My other writer and poet friends, all of us struggling with manuscripts, with attempting to find agents and publishers, with jobs and with family who did not really understand our thoroughly useless, constantly humiliating, and self-destructive passion for writing, attended faithfully. Some of them drove through snowstorms traveling from other states. There was wine, and 18th Century food of all kinds, steak and kidney pies, syllabub, and peanut soups (this is America, after all) prepared, over the course of days and special trips to the butcher, the grocer, and the import shop, by the hands of Juliet, The Obsessed. I bought Mozart Kugln, straight from Deutschland, as party favors.

I should have known that like all Stars and most Lively Spirits, Mozart was not only fickle but dangerous. My twenty years of dedication were nothing to him. He had been playing the field all the time.

All my love, my fidelity, my years of full time work, of neglecting my own well-being in order to pay homage to him, has left me with a handful of dust and ashes. Broke, but, I must admit, with a hell of an 80’s Mozart music collection and a ton of biographies and musical theorists. I don't regret owning so much Samuel Ramey, Ilena Cotrubas, von Stade or Kiri Te Kewana!

Of course, as in everything else, this is my own damn fault. I’d done my homework. I knew all about him, after all. I’d channeled, (forgive me for even saying that word!) not only his wife, but also a secret mistress whose life he utterly destroyed. They knew all about his games, about what it was like to be seduced and abandoned by a matchless musical genius, a man at once uniquely sensitive—and uniquely callous. In the long reach of 200+ years of this possessing spirit, my little book, my twenty years, was about as important to him as one of Stanzi’s maids.

I should have known better! After all, Mozart has always favored the musicians--his opera singers and talented lady pianists--over any other kind of fan.