Project Mozart

I admit it.  It's hard to make classical music cool.  I say that as a practitioner of a hobby that was at one time relegated to little old ladies and war wives.  But opera, like poetry, tends to be an enjoyment of the old and rich who pretend to a little taste.  And I'm not cool enough to change that.

And yet if you asked me what era I should've been born in, I'd have to give serious consideration to late 1700s Vienna, in time to hear Josefa Hofer sing the Queen of the Night role in "Die Zauberflote."  Mozart's sister-in-law, for whom he might have written the part, if you're wondering.  It must've been magical.

I don't know why I have a favorite composer either.  Maybe I gravitate toward short geniuses who died young (see Keats).  In the classical music world, at least based on my callow impressions of it, Mozart inhabits a tier somewhat below that of the 3 Bs (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms).  And who am I to judge?  I have no formal music training except for the requisite Asian child piano lessons for the sake of...what, exactly?  I cut my teeth, as so many have, on the C major piano sonata and the  third movement of the A major, aka "Rondo alla Turca" (I was about twelve at the time though, disgracefully old).  Vocally, I am my family's equivalent of Constanze Weber (without the famous husband): lacking my sister's range and my mother's power, I could never presume to make much of singing except maybe out of necessity.

But there'll always be the summer I was nineteen, watching a badly dubbed "Amadeus" with a bunch of Chinese tourists in a sticky bus bouncing along the Italian countryside.  It was the music that made me forget the heat and nausea and catty conversations and almost regret arriving in Rome or Florence or Venice or wherever we were headed.  That said, I might be forgiven for picturing Tom Hulce conducting whenever I hear the operas.  Nineteen.  Humidity.  Questionable seats.  Motion sickness.  Pinto conducting an orchestra is a small price to pay for what might have felt, at the time, like an oasis.

Still, I never thought there'd come a time when I'd be able to unite my dual passions of knitting and music in one fell swoop of a lace scarf.  I didn't even start doing lace until a couple of years ago, on a whim (see Aeolian shawl knit-along), whereat I managed to fall in love with Estonian stitches.  When Knit 'n Purl posted the Papagena scarf on Facebook, I knew I had to add it to my to-do folder.  And then my Zauberball came along.  What's a girl to do?  How about buy the darn yarn and cast on already?

Shown here are the 2 borders, the first of which is grafted onto the rest of the body at the very end.  When finished, it should make a very feminine and delicate thin scarf for an opera-loving friend to drape around her neck for a night at the Lincoln Center.  Ha!  Who am I kidding?  Like I'm actually going to be willing to part with it.  One day, I will meet or give birth to someone worthy who will pry it from my cold dead fingers.  That someone will have the ability to make Mozart cool again.  And only then will I forgive her the grave-robbing.