Klarinet Archive - Posting 000793.txt from 1999/01

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Josef Marx (Linx and Long)
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 19:09:20 -0500

I suspect that the group that used to show up at Josef Marx's house
possibly show up at someone else's home now. And I am sad that I
am no longer there.

I probably was one of the clarinet players that you played with Ken, because
I was at Josef's almost every Saturday for several years. When I completed
my volume of wind serenades for Barenreiter, I made sure to thank Josef
Marx for his help and encouragement, even though he had been dead for
a year or two at that time.

Josef was at one and the same time a gentleman and an extremely
vulgar and obscene one. He took great pleasure in using the f-word
(at the time when it was not generally used) whenever someone would
bring in a new player who was a 20 year-old woman from the midwest.
These women were not used to that kind of language.

My wife once said, "he uses it only to get a reaction from them. Once
he sees that he doesn't get any reaction, he stops it."

Over a period of about 15 weeks, Josef did every piano concerto
(except the two and three piano concerti) of Mozart in his living
room with an upright piano. John Browning played every one. When
he did the three concerti with clarinets (the E-flat, A major, and
c minor) Allen Blustein and I played clarinets. I think that Allen
later became Swami Muhabdi Gupta or something like that. I stopped
lending him my basset horn after that because I didn't trust anyone
who became a swami. I'm bigoted that way.

Josef was responsible for removing something from the clarinet
repertoire of Mozart. Until his research, the duets for two
horns were all printed as the duets for two basset horns. Josef
took on the problem and they have never been called the duets
for basset horns since.

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================

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