My Grandmother's Fur Coat

After I moved to Chicago, my mother gave me her mother's fur coat, because, she explained, Chicago is cold in the winter and I could make good use of it.

The coat is actually a jacket. It is black fur, very soft. The fur is not one of the common furs that coats are made of, and even though my mother told me what it is, I don't remember. Maybe beaver? It has an unusual feature that my mother told me my grandmother had asked the furrier for - there are snap along the underside of the sleeves so you can unsnap and have the sleeves loose, more like a cape.

My grandmother was a very clever woman who had a difficult life. Widowed in her 20s with a two-year-old daughter, she went to tailoring school to become a skilled seamstress, but ended up working as a saleslady in a very small town in western Minnesota. She and my mother moved from apartment to apartment. In each apartment, they painted, wallpapered and generally made so many improvements that the landlord raised the rent and they had to move. I do not know how she came to have a custom-made fur coat.

I wore the coat a few times during Chicago winters, but as a jacket, it only kept part of me warm. Even more though, I did not feel comfortable wearing fur, even though this particular fur had been dead a long time. I will not berate anyone for choosing to wear fur, but much of the fur industry is not humane and I don't want to seem to support it. So the coat has been living in my closet for a long, long time.

What to do with it? I want to donate it to a group that will use it for animal welfare. A number of wildlife rehabilitation groups accept old furs to use in nurturing and comforting injured and orphaned animals. So I searched online for some place near me that takes old furs and found it's not that easy to give away a fur to an animal organization. I finally found a resale store, Buffalo Exchange, that has a yearly fur drive for Coats for Cubs. It's only from January to April, so the coat will have to hang out at my house for awhile longer. I like to think of my soft black fur comforting a young animal or maybe a family of youngsters.

It's a bit of my family history and a connection to my Grandmother, but I would rather see it being put to good use than just hanging in my closet. I have the stories, I can let the coat go.

This past Saturday I had an unusual and wonderful experience. I was invited to attend a Mozart party!

My main leisure-time activity is playing the (French) horn. I play in several community groups -- a band, orchestras, and a horn choir. I love to play and I love the social part of playing music. In addition, I have been a little obsessed with Wolfgang Amadeus and his family. (See multiple posts on my music blog, for example: Mozart & Salieri) So when the invitation to the Mozart party came, I jumped at the chance to play Mozart all day!

We arrived at 1:30 and the wind players made our way to the basement. There were eight of us, two horns, two oboes, two clarinets, and two bassoons. The string players were upstairs in other rooms playing quartets and other types of chamber music. Downstairs, we played octets for several hours. No one had practiced the music ahead of time; we were all sightreading. In between playing we chatted and got to know each other (ad rested!).

This party has been going on annually for 40 years or so. It started as a birthday celebration of Mozart, whose birthday is January 27, 1756. However, January in Chicago is not always travel-friendly, so the party eventually moved to June. Some participants have been coming since the first one, others have joined later, and some, like me, are one-time subs. Everyone is there because they love playing music, and love Mozart's music. Because everyone is sightreading, there is no expectation that our readings will be perfect.

After an afternoon a playing, everyone took a break for dinner and enjoyed more chatting. After dinner furniture was moved and the living set up for a small orchestra concert. This was again sightreading -- no rehearsal. We played the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro (one of Mozart's most famous operas), one of his violin concertos, and the Haffner Symphony. Again, relaxed and low-key, though everyone stayed together (without getting lost) and made music. A great day!

Since I am Mozart-obsessed, I tried to find more information about the octets we played. Mozart's music is cataloged by Kochel number, or K. number, so I looked up a few of the octets we played. Mozart wrote the Serenade in E-flat major, K. 375 in Vienna in October of 1781 for St. Theresa's Day. Mozart says in a letter to his father that he wrote it to impress a gentleman who had connections at the emperor's court, so he "wrote it rather carefully." It was played in three different locations on St. Theresa's day. No information on whether his plan to impress worked.

Another Serenade for wind instruments, this one in C minor, K. 388, was written in 1782 or 1783. The information I found says that Mozart was extremely busy during this time, both with many composing projects and with personal issues with the Weber family. He married Constanze Weber on August 4, 1782, though there were complications and intrigues leading up to the wedding. My source says this serenade "shows no sign of hurried creation; it is tightly structured, and superbly wrought." Mozart later arranged it for string quintet.

We also played an octet arrangement  of the "Gran Partita," or Serenade in B-flat major, K. 361. This is one of my absolute favorite pieces. Mozart wrote it for 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 basset horns (a member of the clarinet family, no longer used today), 4 horns, 2 bassoons, and double bass. Mozart didn't date the piece, but it was probably written somewhere in 1783 or 1784. As with all his works, he wrote it for a particular group of musicians and was received very positively by the first audiences and musicians. This is one of the pieces featured in the movie Amadeus. You can hear a snippet from the Gran Partita here. 

This may be my only time at this Mozart party, but I am thinking maybe I could make my own chamber music party, on a much smaller scale than this one. A few musicians, music, and a space and time!