Mozart’s Final Days

When I was twenty-one and a senior studying music composition, friends started nicknaming me “The Youngest Spy in the World.” I let them. In fact, I wore the label like a second jacket—much cooler than the self-appointed one I’d given myself: Aspiring Composer, which even then felt like a line you pencil in until you’ve earned the ink.

They teased, sure, and perhaps a touch of envy lingered over a part-time job I’d recently left—which I’ll narrate with the appropriate theatrics later. (Trust me, I’ve tried telling it plainly, but it refuses to cooperate.) Yet behind the eye-rolls and staged intrigue, there was something else—a reluctant fascination with the idea that one of us might already be living a life with hidden layers, a quiet subplot woven beneath the ordinary script of crowded lectures, pricey textbooks, and overcooked meals in the student cafeteria. (That Thursday’s entrée was so aggressively prepared that I wasn’t sure if I’d eaten fillet de sole or the sole of a Birkenstock.)

The truth is, there was no reliable way to know if I truly deserved the title The Youngest Spy in the World. Google didn’t exist. This was late ’80s Hartford, Connecticut—before the internet. Before hostesses asked, “Smoking or non?” and before toothbrushes began resembling sneakers.

As I sat in our university’s computer lab, polishing my résumé, I debated whether I should even mention the spy gig. On the plus side, it hinted at a stint with a well-known outfit tucked within the rarefied sphere of classical music—the very world I was fighting to break into after graduation. On the minus side, the job hadn’t endured. But then, none of mine ever did. My résumé up to that point read less like a career trajectory and more like a string of polite evictions. And worse—much worse—loomed the internship interview at the local classical radio station, where I was hoping, praying, almost trembling with need, to land the position and, God willing, to keep it. If anyone asked about that mysterious “spy gig,” I would be bound, by conscience and a stubborn lack of convincing lies, to admit that it had involved, among other things, lap dances. From exotic dancers.

As I typed and retyped the job onto my résumé, my finger kept erasing it—like the fingers themselves were ashamed for me—a tiny, judgmental assistant refusing to allow the job to become a lasting part of my professional story. It seemed to anticipate the interview-day reaction from people at the radio station: brief, awkward smiles followed by the carefully worded “Well, that’s… certainly unique experience”—delivered with the same tone you’d use to compliment a child’s finger-painting—before sliding the résumé into a folder labeled “Absolutely Not.”

The internship interview, set up for me as a huge favor by the dean of my music school, took place at Allegro FM, the home of the storied Bertram Bobker, who had been the station’s voice for more than four decades. Now in his eighties, the man behind that voice was still razor-sharp and lucid.

Madly devoted to Bertram, I was the kind of admirer who could’ve worn his face on a T-shirt and tattooed his lines on my forearms. Like EF Hutton, when Bertram spoke, people listened. He spoke with a refined Boston accent where the W and H in words like when or why were each almost pronounced separately—rich as butter (he would have said butter, not budder, as many do).

He could make a discussion about strophic interludes—found in medieval motets—sound fascinating. Besides, he was a master of humor. I remember listening to him on the radio during a long drive from my parents’ house in New Jersey back to Hartford. He elaborated on the difference between “classical music” and the Classical era, joking that beyond the Rococo influence and the piano’s invention and the smallpox vaccine, you must mention the Industrial, French, and American Revolutions to discuss the era at least once. “Okay, I’ve mentioned them,” he quipped.

I laughed so hard I had to pull over, gasping, because my abdomen hurt. Landing this internship and the chance to work in the same room, or even breathe the same recycled studio air as Bertram, would feel like the moment a teenage Bill Clinton met JFK in the Rose Garden, or the time I spotted Mary Tyler Moore in a Paramus department store and momentarily forgot what a noun is.

Setting Bertram aside, obtaining this job would finally insert me into the world I’d longed to inhabit. Not as a composer, not yet—that dream still lived on the margins of my notebook pages and the quiet corners of my ambition. But this would bring me into the orbit. A kind of professional osmosis. I wouldn’t possess the life I’d pictured, not yet, but I’d be adjacent, able to hear its hum from the next room, waiting perhaps for someone like me to knock it down and step in.

All the prior part-time gigs I’d listed on my résumé—though within the music world—felt so distant from that near room that they might as well have been buried in a windowless basement miles away, staffed by failed balloon-twisters and one guy who thought “Rhapsody in Blue” was a deodorant.

Take one freshman-year job at a music shop, for example, where the manager told me my task was to play piano during lunch to keep customers engaged. I asked to switch to guitar, the instrument I could handle best. He regarded me as if I’d written a scandalous typo in a love letter: small but ruinous, and beyond repair. I obliged. Fine, piano it would be.

For a couple of weeks, I managed passable takes of tunes like “The Entertainer” and “Heart and Soul.” Then one day, the boss told me there’d been complaints about my repertoire and demanded I play Beethoven’s “Für Elise” from the moment I started until I left, each version in a different key, as if this would fool customers into thinking they heard something new. “Modulation equals innovation,” he said with a smile that signaled surrender to the elevator music of life. I got through the piece in its original key—A minor—but botched it badly in G-sharp minor and was fired before the final chords.

My sophomore year looked brighter when I answered a classified ad to produce arrangements for a bandleader named Johnny Novak. He offered a hundred dollars per arrangement. With rent, textbooks, groceries, and other modest adult expenses piling up like creditors outside the door, I said yes without asking what kind of band Johnny led. Desperation tends to skip the fine print. It turned out to be a polka outfit led by Johnny with what might have been the world’s largest accordion—something I would’ve found charming if I hadn’t been the one charged with arranging “Pinkalinko Polka” for an instrument I could barely lift, let alone compose for. And that was before factoring in the horns, drums, bass, and the creeping realization that I had no clue what I was doing. Johnny fired me after three arrangements and never paid for the third, which he deemed unplayable. True, I couldn’t play it. But I did think he should have had the chops to execute it.

The entire experience left me so depleted that, for months afterward, I browsed the classifieds with the enthusiasm of someone reading their own obituary. I sent out job inquiries like messages in a bottle—half hopeful, half mourning their disappearance. My pride, once crisp and upright, sagged like an old coat on a peg. And still, somewhere inside that collapsing tent of ambition, I kept pushing forward because, sentimental as I was, my Sears Discover card’s collections agency had shown no mercy for my slowly unraveling artistic venture.

Then I spotted a listing from ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, on my music school’s bulletin board. It wasn’t specific in its duties. Something along the lines of, “Are you a music aficionado who can beat anyone in a drop-the-needle test?” I don’t recall the exact wording, only that it required applicants to be twenty-one and paid twenty-five dollars an hour. Given how long it took me to cook up one miserable polka arrangement for Johnny (carry the one), that sum felt almost unbelievable. So when ASCAP called from their New York offices to invite me for an interview, I boarded a train from Hartford quicker than you could say “Pinkalinko Polka.”

Among other things, ASCAP collects royalties for songwriters or composers whenever their music is played in public: stores, eateries, bars, shopping centers—anywhere you can think of. ASCAP has a squad of employees whose exclusive job is to track playlists and determine which clients are getting played the most. Using a complex algorithm that’s beyond my comprehension, the money they gather each quarter is distributed to members all over the world, including classical composers, whose earnings are supported by pop icons like Michael Jackson and Madonna.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this before the interview. But the night before, fueled by vending-machine coffee and a rising panic, I spent hours in the school library devouring every article I could locate about performance rights, scribbling talking points, and hoping I wouldn’t be asked to define a “blanket license” out loud.

I sat across from Susan, an ASCAP human resources representative, in an office so blandly nondescript that it almost felt chosen on purpose. While she finished a call, I let my gaze drift to the windows behind her. Lincoln Center stood just beyond—the white stone and glass gleaming as if it were a sacred space. I silently wished for my own music to fill those grand rooms someday. The longing wasn’t mere fantasy; it was a hunger, a quiet ache in my chest. I could almost hear the moment before the downbeat, the audience holding its collective breath, the swell of strings. It gnawed at me, how close I was, and how unknown to everyone in the room, I might be the person who would actually stand there someday, even if no one had yet recognized it.

My gaze lingered on the storefront posters in glass cases along the street, each promising an upcoming delight. Among them, Mozart’s Symphony No. 31—one of his most celebrated works.

Ah, Mozart.

While Susan was still finishing her call, I remembered the first moment I truly heard Mozart’s music—the distinction between merely hearing and listening, the kind that rearranges your brain and makes the world seem to open up to you in a new way.

It was freshman year, and Jennifer, my first serious girlfriend, who I’d met in a class called Music Theory and Analysis I: Diatonic Harmony, proposed a weekend trip to Boston. The class title sounded like a historical uprising, but in practice it mostly meant Jennifer answering questions with the fearless boldness of a cliff diver named Helmut.

She became someone I’d eventually exchange both mixtapes and intimate moments with—though not in that order—and perhaps not with equal deftness. She possessed a quiet intelligence, a fondness for road snacks, and a cool, almost fearless composure that made me straighten my shoulders whenever she was near.

The drive there was uneventful in the way long trips can be: too hopeful, the radio constantly flipping between heartbreak ballads and churchy rock, as though trying to console and convert us at once.

In Harvard Square we found ourselves amid bookstores and old gum, and a nearby theater showing Milos Forman’s Amadeus. We bought tickets, settled into our seats, and watched a sequence in which Salieri reads Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 for Winds in Bb Major, describing the music as if whispering secrets to God. I held my breath for two uninterrupted minutes. That music, and F. Murray Abraham’s extraordinary portrayal of it, did more than impress me; it dismantled me. Each counterpoint and every wrenching harmonic twist felt like a direct message from some higher plane. It wasn’t merely beautiful; it was devastating in its clarity and purpose.

By the end, tears streamed down my face as Mozart’s figure seemed to be laid to rest, nameless and rain-soaked, into the common grave of oblivion—a life too luminous to end so quietly.

Jennifer helped me back to the T, but my body moved while my mind still swam in those chords, still reeling from the raw awe. Something inside me had been exposed—a delicate nerve or a longing I hadn’t known existed. When we returned to the Back Bay and our youth hostel, I marched straight into Tower Records and bought every Mozart album I could afford, not hesitating for a moment. I needed to chase that sound, to live inside it as long as I could.

Back in Hartford, after that Boston excursion, I hid in the university library, devouring Mozart’s scores and the biographies that surrounded them, trying to ingest his genius by proximity alone.

And then I remembered, with a sting, how much the man had accomplished by my age. As I interviewed for the ASCAP position, Mozart, at the same age, had already produced thirty symphonies, innumerable sonatas, concertos, and nearly a dozen operas. Operas! Full-length works! My ear was still untrained for opera, which to me sounded like a sprawling misunderstanding—an extension of Three’s Company plots, only with heartbreak and vengeance and a soprano who could shatter glass. Yet who else my age could have written that many? If only Google existed back then, I’d look it up. But, of course, this was a time before the internet, when Pluto was still a planet and customer service calls hadn’t yet become a universal nuisance.

And there I was, the same age, with little to show for it beyond a handful of student works performed by sleep-deprived colleagues on campus or an evening of original songs I performed at my grandmother’s Florida nursing home—advertised on the building’s elevator as “An Unforgettable Night of Song.” A phrase that, in hindsight, was a bit of gentle misdirection, given that most residents forgot the event entirely.

My eyes drifted back to the Lincoln Center ad for Mozart’s Symphony No. 31. He had drafted it during a supposed triumphant job-hunting trip to Paris, which, of course, never happened. Not only was there no triumph or employment, but his mother, who had accompanied him from Salzburg, fell ill on the long journey by horse-drawn coach and died soon after reaching Paris.

I adjusted in my chair and offered Susan a hopeful, almost artificial, smile as she raised a single finger to indicate “one more minute,” followed by a smile that suggested she was about to apologize for something. In a moment of quiet desperation dressed as pragmatism, I did the one practical thing: I asked for mercy from fate—specifically, a gentler path in New York than the one Mozart himself endured in Paris.

At last she hung up, and she explained ASCAP’s long history. She described how licenses work: when clothing stores or restaurants aren’t paying the annual music-fee, a hired witness sits with a notebook to record every song that plays in an evening. That playlist serves as proof to compel payment. In many cases, after years of unpaid funds, ASCAP sues the business to recover the sums owed. The playlists and evidence I would collect could become decisive in such legal actions. Interestingly, the places most likely to dodge payments during that era were strip clubs.

“So let me get this straight,” I remarked once my eyebrows had settled. “You’re going to pay me twenty-five bucks an hour to watch women stripping?” I tried to sound professional, but it came out as if I’d read a lottery ticket twice.

Susan’s smile was tight. “There are drawbacks to the job as well.”

“Really?”

“The bars are full of rowdy truckers when they’re drunk. There’s a lot of cigarette smoke, which can be an issue for some. And the music is incredibly loud. It’s the kind of noise that could make your ears ring at night. It’s not for everyone.”

I hadn’t weighed those cons before, blinded as I was by my newfound twenty-one-year-old optimism.

“Also,” she added with an even tighter smile, “to avoid drawing attention to yourself, you’ll need to tip the dancers. Not everyone is comfortable with that. Some performers might even sit on your lap briefly as you wait for tips. It’s about how comfortable you are with this kind of atmosphere.”

I nodded, as if signing a legally binding contract. In the furthest recesses of my brain—just beyond the safe vault for my social security number and a full index of every Beatles track, including those written during acid trips or in India—I began conjuring a mental reel of what a night might entail: women, sequins, shimmies, dollar bills. The entire scene exuded the danger and glamour of a shark cage dive: beautiful creatures circling, glittering water, and me, barely legal, barely breathing, clutching a crumpled bill as if it were a weapon or a prayer.

Susan studied my face, as if gauging whether I’d flinch, and then, with the calm of someone who’d already fielded ten terrified college applicants that month, she continued. “Sometimes you’ll also have to buy drinks. Some places impose a two-drink minimum. If those drinks count toward the job, we’d prefer they be Cokes or ginger ales so you can stay focused. You can also buy and claim food, which often counts toward the minimum. The tips, the drinks, travel to and from—the expenses are reimbursable as long as you keep the receipts. There better be receipts.”

She flashed a look that suggested receipts weren’t needed for singles and offered a Tic Tac as if it were a sedative. I declined. My breath was fine. It was my bank account that reeked. My roommates had already lent money to cover last month’s rent, their generosity offered with the kind of casualness that only magnified my guilt. They shrugged as if it were nothing—“Just pay us back when you can”—but the word when hung over me like a looming deadline. I hated how grateful I felt, how poor I remained, and how the two realities seemed to multiply quietly.

Whether Susan was gently deterring me or simply preparing me for the indignities ahead was hard to say. She smiled. But some smiles hide lies. Others smile because they know you’ll say yes. When she finally asked if I needed a moment to think, to weigh my options (as if I had any), I told her no. Absolutely not. It wasn’t the money alone that drew me in; it was the lure of a challenge I’d never faced, and the wild unknown of what lay ahead. It felt like stepping into something I’d chosen on purpose. It was happening. To me.