This ‘Note by Tom Sharpe’ appeared in the CD liner notes of Piano Concertos Nos. 21 & 23 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by Alfred Brendel, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and Neville Marriner, 1999.
I can’t recall the last time anyone called Sharpe a sensitive person. In fact it must have been before I could announce to the world that I wasn’t and it was certainly before I had the temerity to write my farcical novels. Since my first book Riotous Assembly was published the critics and certain of the so-called literati – names supplied on request – have generally agreed that I am coarse, vulgar and not to be mentioned in polite literary society. At best I am regarded as a verbal anti-depressant or even as an emetic. It therefore came as something of a shock to be asked to write about Mozart’s 21st and 23rd Piano Concertos, played by Alfred Brendel.
The shock was intensified by the fact that in my collection of records, tapes and now CDs I have had, since I could afford them, everything Mozart ever composed; added to which, it happens also that Alfred Brendel has always been one of my heroes. Not that I am claiming for a moment that I am a concert-goer, the last one I went to was in 1950 to hear Cortot in Cambridge, or understand the first thing about music. I merely like the stuff – and the 23rd Piano Concerto has a special meaning for me…
Late one evening in the bar of a Spanish hotel where I used to stay, a woman in her cups who clearly couldn’t believe I was a writer asked if she could see my room. Well… I hesitated. I can tell you I did. But she being, as she admitted, an antique, and Sharpe being even antiquer and in no mood or physical condition to dally with anything more sexual than an overstuffed pillow, I took the risk. If the old dear wanted to see my room, what the hell. We went upstairs, I in some trepidation, and she with difficulty (whisky has that effect) and entered my abode. Swaying in the doorway she looked at the books and papers on the second bed, the typewriter and more papers, the pens, ink and paraphernalia, and said, “My God, you do write.”
She slumped into a chair and spotted my CDs. “Have you got Mozart’s 23rd Piano Concerto?” she asked with surprising percipience. I had. Would I play it? I would and did. She sat and wept. Her lover had died a few months before and the 23rd was his favourite. Through cigarette after cigarette she sat and mourned his death and told me her story. I won’t repeat it. Instead I listened to that concerto more attentively than I had ever listened to it before. The next night she sat and wept to it again until 4 a.m. She was a delightful antique and I, an insensitive one, remember her fondly and occasionally weep when I hear it now.