[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

There’s a photograph of Leonora Speyer where she looks to be in her early twenties. She was born to some wealth. I can’t tell if her her family was idly comfortable or extravagantly rich. Her father, who died six months before her birth, was Count Ferdinand von Stosch originally of Monze, later of Washington, DC. There’s not much on her in the typical poet biography places and scant to zip on her father. He fought for the Union side in the Civil War, settled in Washington, and died at around forty years old; no information about rank or deeds or cause of death. He immigrated in the 1840s or 50s, so he was a kid when he came. That’s about it. Otherwise he’s an addendum to the bio of the daughter he never met.

An AI search–so take it or leave it–reports the photo is from some time in the 1890s, which I’d already assumed. Leonora showed an early proclivity for music and led a public life. She gave her first public performance in Washington at age ten: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. One source tells me she and her mother sailed for the continent in 1899, when Leonora was sixteen, to continue her musical studies in Brussels. Another tells me she debuted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age seventeen. It’s possible they went back for a visit, but I can’t find record of it. As best I can tell, she and her mother stayed abroad, first in Brussels and then in Paris with another violin teacher, until 1891 or 92.

Maybe they went back and forth, maybe she was seventeen when they left, maybe she was sixteen in Boston. No matter the details of her precociousness, Leonora was talented. She was a force on the piano as well as the violin, but there came a time to specialize. Whether she had a preference or felt she had a greater talent for violin is unclear to me, but she chose pure string violin over string/percussion piano in the end. Encyclopedia.com tells me she’d played the violin since her “chin was firm enough to hold it.” Having seen the photograph of her in her early twenties, my first though: “That must have been very, very, very, very early.” It’s not a flattering picture.