When I was in my late twenties I discovered the joy of drinking alone. Well, perhaps ‘joy’ is putting it too strongly. I’d been thrown out of the flat I shared with one of my closest friends from university after a series of drunken rows about his social-climbing girlfriend. I was living in a converted gardener’s cottage in west London. It was painted pink, for some reason (‘a pink cottage — just right for you,’ harrumphed my ex-flatmate), and furnished so miserably that it didn’t seem worth the effort to throw out the empty wine bottles or bother with ashtrays.
Now I could binge-drink and, just as important, binge-listen. The late Beethoven quartets, in virtuosic but slightly unhinged performances by the Lindsays, suited my mood. But when I was really pissed, and had finished drunk-dialling my delighted friends, I invariably turned to the same disc, on unofficial permanent loan from Kensington and Chelsea Library. (Can you imagine borrowing a CD from the library today? I shouldn’t think it stocks them any more. No point in returning it, then.)
It was a Mass by Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745), a Czech composer at the court of Dresden, whose ruler, August, Elector of Saxony, had converted to Catholicism in order to become King of Poland. This was a very odd arrangement, requiring a Catholic royal chapel in the middle of a staunchly Lutheran city. August, feeling insecure, married his son to the Archduchess Maria Josepha of Austria. She wanted to hear the frills and furbelows of southern European Catholicism in the chapel — and Zelenka, who’d studied with the Jesuits in Prague, was happy to supply them.
In fact, Maria Josepha got more than she bargained for. Zelenka, an unmarried man and passionate Catholic, wrote music that was spiky with ornaments and amazingly hard-driven.
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