After a
Noel Mewton-Wood performance of
Hindemith's (.pdf) Ludus Tonalis, Dame
Myra Hess exclaimed: ‘The boy is truly remarkable, and
what shall he be like at 40-odd?’.
Glowing testimonials to his ‘genius’ (Sir Malcolm Sargent) from Beecham, Schnabel, Bliss, Hindemith and Britten were countered by indifference from the major record labels and concert managements. In 1953,
at the age of 31, the pianist, a shy young man susceptible to depression, committed suicide. Now, the
Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive of Middlesex University offers
a scan of the The London Evening News page with the report of Mewton-Wood's death. And here is
a mp3 page with some of his out-of-print work.
posted by matteo
on Mar 24, 2006 -
11 comments
"In those days, there wasn't a lot of talk about gay priests. People didn't want to believe it." On Dec. 4, 1982, a deeply suntanned man, about 40 years old, walked into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho, and readied himself for confession. As he waited, the man swallowed a cyanide capsule. A few minutes later, he was dead. He had no identification, and a note in his pocket said only that the $1,900 he carried should be used for his burial, with any remainder donated to the church. The note was signed with what turned out to be a false name. To this day, no one has been able to identify the man, nor to determine why he had come to the church to absolve himself of his sins. On the answers to that mystery may hang the fate of
a small, quiet, meticulous man who now lives in South Austin, and who
spent 20 years in a Texas prison for a murder he says he did not commit, but which investigators believe may be connected to the dead man at the Boise Sacred Heart Catholic Church. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Jun 22, 2005 -
25 comments
The Suicide’s Soliloquy August 25, 1838, the Sangamo Journal, a Whig newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, carried an unsigned poem, thirty-six lines long. It stands out for two reasons: first, its subject is suicide; second, its author was most likely a twenty-nine-year-old politician and lawyer named
Abraham Lincoln.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin relates how
historians regard a broken off engagement to Mary Todd as the trigger to
his famous depression, but it was his perceived failure as politician, she maintains, that fed Lincoln's
"black dog". (For his depression,
Lincoln probably took "blue mass", a drug prescribed to treat "hypochondriasis," a vague term that included
melancholia). Lincoln's medical history file is
here
posted by matteo
on Jun 7, 2004 -
12 comments
