David K. Israel, THE LOST MOZART
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:03]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show, and learned endless amounts about
[0:09]storytelling, reinvention, and life itself, because when you talk about books, you're
[0:13]really talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors, the best-selling, and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read, and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy!
[0:27]David K. Israel is the author of The Lost Mozart, a novel.
[0:30]He is an author and composer who lives in Los Angeles.
[0:33]David's essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston
[0:37]Globe, The L.A. Times, and an essay was in My Anthology on Being Jewish Now.
[0:43]His first novel, The Critically Acclaimed Behind Every Man, was published by Random House
[0:47]in 2005.
[0:49]As a composer, David's work has been commissioned by choreographers and dance companies
[0:53]around the world, including Twilithar, Papal Taylor, and The New York City Ballet.
[0:58]His songs have been sung and recorded by Patti LePone, Mandy Potinkin, Mod Maggert,
[1:03]and Andrea Marco Vichy.
[1:06]Welcome, David.
[1:07]I'm so excited to have you on Totally Butte to talk about The Lost Mozart.
[1:11]Yay.
[1:12]So excited.
[1:13]Thanks for having me.
[1:14]It's my pleasure.
[1:15]We've had the pleasure of getting to know each other in many ways through L.A. through
[1:20]the Palisades, through the on being Jewish Now, Anthology.
[1:24]And I don't even know.
[1:26]It's been great.
[1:29]So it's great to know you and having your support for all my writing endeavors.
[1:34]No.
[1:35]I love how you write your funny and smart and it's just awesome, which tracks for this
[1:40]book.
[1:41]What don't you tell us?
[1:42]And there's what The Lost Mozart is about.
[1:44]Sure.
[1:45]So the book is a coming-of-age story about a college music student, a senior in the late 1980s
[1:52]in Connecticut, and he's struggling with what he's going to do when he graduates.
[1:56]How he's going to support himself, hopefully prove his parents wrong, that music isn't
[2:00]just a hobby.
[2:02]When he happens on what he believes is a sketch by none other than Mozart for one of the
[2:06]missing Prussian quartets.
[2:08]These are some of the last works that Mozart wrote before he died.
[2:12]And so you know, with the Hutzpah of Youth, he decides he's going to finish the piece
[2:15]himself and give Mozart one last premiere of 200 years after Mozart's death.
[2:21]And it sort of coincides with the height of that real-life Amadeus craze that was taking
[2:26]out in the world when the film won eight Oscars and there are suddenly Mozart hotels
[2:30]and candies and radio stations that all matters of merch.
[2:33]I should probably preface it all by saying it's actually a comedy, although, you know,
[2:37]not without its pathos.
[2:39]Well, you'd also teach us the reader a lot about Mozart and music and...
[2:44]Yeah, it's like a mini biography, too, yeah.
[2:47]I didn't realize how Mozart had written what on different leaves or different pieces of paper,
[2:52]and that's how he could tell the different conditions that he made to explain that better than I just did.
[2:58]Yeah, well, so as I say in the book, you know, all paper was handmade back then.
[3:03]And so depending on what year it was or where the paper was sourced from, you know,
[3:08]musicologists and historians now can actually date Mozart's pieces to a specific time,
[3:14]and there's like wine stains on the paper and food stains and other stains that we don't have
[3:18]to get into depending on what was going on in Mozart's life.
[3:23]So, you know, the idea, this story that I wrote actually just happened in real life.
[3:30]I don't know if you followed the news, but...
[3:32]I like to think I do follow the news in general, but I might have missed this fun fact.
[3:37]Unbelievable, you know, when you write these things, I wrote this story in 2023,
[3:41]when you feel like it's safe that every Mozart piece has ever been found, you know, that will
[3:46]ever be found. So this is like the stuff of novels, right, that you'd happen on a lost Mozart
[3:52]unfinished piece. Two weeks ago, there was an announcement in France that a previously never known
[3:59]before Mozart piece was found in the library in Paris that just had its world premiere.
[4:06]So it's like art imitating real life or real life imitating art, I guess.
[4:11]But you're able to actually pinpoint, you know, the dates that the pieces were written,
[4:17]so that's how Noah gets this idea that this is authentic, you know.
[4:21]Well, I would say that is very helpful for your book. It's always good to peg it to something
[4:25]news. I know, no, I have a piece coming out in the Boston Globe about it.
[4:29]There you go. Well-timed, really. Well-timed.
[4:34]In fact, you were probably there being like, eh, could you give me like two more weeks?
[4:39]Just like the fact that- Yeah, right. You know, on dates, August 4th, so we want this news to be
[4:44]fresh fresh. That's really funny. Where did your, well, maybe take us back through how you
[4:49]became interested in music. Yeah. Well, you know, I don't know how one becomes interested.
[4:55]Well, or professionally, you know, how you pursued this from a professional standpoint and
[5:01]to get further than the rest of us who just listen and think it's lovely and, you know.
[5:06]Well, from that earliest age, my parents had this big box of musical instruments, mostly for kids,
[5:14]you know, like tambourines and shakers and a beat-up guitar. And I put on like their Beatles albums
[5:22]or their reggae albums and or the soundtrack to hair. And I opened up this box and just like
[5:30]play along, make a lot of noise. But I think, you know, there's been some research around composers,
[5:35]brains. And apparently, you know, when a baby or an infant is overwhelmed by the noise that's
[5:42]coming at them, they make more noise to sort of calm the chaos so that they have some control
[5:48]over the chaos. So I was doing that sort of all the time. And eventually, I guess around,
[5:55]you know, I started on trumpet as soon as you could take up an instrument. These were the days
[6:00]when public schools still had arts budgets and kids had to be an orchestra and that sort of thing.
[6:07]And then guitar and then piano and then things just snowballed and eventually I was writing music
[6:12]in high school and I was in jazz band and concert choir and jazz choir and musical theater band
[6:18]and all the bands. Just a big band geek, I guess. And then when I was in college, very much like
[6:25]Noah in the novel, I was senior and I was sort of frantically trying to find a job in the music
[6:32]industry. So I didn't have to wait tables when I moved to New York. When I got this lucky break
[6:37]and wound up working for Leonard Bernstein in his Dakota apartment on 72nd Street,
[6:44]editing West Side Story and on the town in wonderful town in Mass. And it was just like baptism by
[6:49]fire and the whole thing just sort of snowballed from that point. Wow. So what did you learn from
[6:55]him? That's an incredible experience. Yeah. I mean, you know, I learned how to orchestrate
[7:01]first and foremost. Like I had no idea. I mean, we had orchestration classes just like Noah does
[7:06]in the novel where you learn, you know, the ranges of the instruments and, you know, how far
[7:12]violin can go up the scale or how low it can go. And you sort of have a basic idea when you
[7:18]graduate how all these instruments and colors work together. But you don't have real-life experience.
[7:24]And so now I'm thrown into this world and he had just died when I enter his apartment. I mean,
[7:31]his hair was still in his razor. His daughter gave me his razor to take to London because I didn't
[7:38]have a plug-in razor that would work on British voltage. And I just assumed like they had cleaned
[7:45]it after he died, but I cracked it open and all this gray stubble came out. And I was like,
[7:51]can we clone somebody from their hair? Should I be saving this on Scotch tape? You know, I'm
[7:56]putting it in a Ziploc bag. But so now I'm working with the London Symphony Orchestra and I'm sort
[8:02]of putting on my Bernstein hat and having to orchestrate and arrange things, you know, as if I'm him.
[8:09]Or at least representing him, the ghost of him. And so you learn pretty quickly. Like, if you
[8:14]write for a French horn up in that register, you're not going to hear anything else in the orchestra,
[8:19]except the French horn. So yeah, pretty quickly. I learned how to orchestrate.
[8:24]And then what about writing when did writing come in?
[8:27]Well, I had always been writing. I wrote a musical in high school. And I wrote the libretto in
[8:32]the book and all that. And I was studying musical theater also in college. And so,
[8:37]you know, you need a story. So I would take like a Twilight Zone episode and adapt it for the stage.
[8:43]So I was writing and I was producing little plays at the local theater on campus.
[8:48]And writing essays when I first got to New York, mostly about the music and dance scene.
[8:54]And then at some point, I sort of got burnt out. I was doing an opera with Twilight
[8:59]Tharp and Hal Prince about the founding of the state of Israel of all things and the sort of
[9:05]theater rehearsal movement. And we were getting pretty close to having something I was writing
[9:10]the book. And, you know, that just went off the rails and the whole sort of thing project died.
[9:17]And I was like, I got to get out of New York. It's killing me. So I moved to Israel for a time.
[9:24]And I started working on fiction. And I wrote a novel and it sold. Yeah.
[9:29]Same muscles. Yeah, quite a different, you know, slightly different tools, but the sort of the
[9:36]same creative muscles, I think. I do feel that writing has a melody to it that you have to hear it
[9:42]as it ebbs and flows. And that's why so many authors say they read their work out loud to like
[9:46]catch the mistakes. Yeah. And the architecture is very similar. You know, like, if you're writing
[9:52]a ballet or if you're writing a song, you have a beginning, a middle and end just as you do in a
[9:57]story and it has to go someplace and evolve. You can't.
[10:00]just stay flat, unless you're writing like a beat poem or something, which I'm not.
[10:04]But to me, they're very similar. In fact, one of the sort of quiet obsessions, as I write in
[10:10]the afterword of the book, is this sort of obsession with originality, where one art ends
[10:19]and another art begins, or where inspiration becomes something new in the way that like
[10:24]Bernstein and Robinson, Sondheim took Romeo and Juliet and triggered it into West Side Story.
[10:30]You know, in the book, Noah is taking a piece that he finds and deciding to finish it.
[10:37]In the same way that Sussmaier, a young composer during Mozart's time, was called into
[10:43]Finnish Mozart's Requiem when Mozart died writing his Requiem. And if you listen to it,
[10:49]and you don't have to be like a music expert or trained in music to listen to Mozart's Requiem,
[10:55]and pretty soon after the piece begins, you're like, whoa, this is a different composer. Like,
[11:01]the whole thing has a different feel, but it's still Mozart's Requiem. His widow sort of asks
[11:07]his former student to come in and finish it. In the same way that Noah, in the book,
[11:12]the side, he's going to finish the sketch that he found. And so I was, if you remember, in the
[11:18]essay I contributed to your wonderful collection, I write in the little preface to the essay that I
[11:25]gone through a bad breakup, and I was looking to entertain myself and write a lot of comedy,
[11:30]just funny stuff to help me sort of write the ship. And so I wrote that essay that appears
[11:36]in on being Jewish now, and I was writing at the same time the sketches for the characters
[11:41]that you came the last Mozart. And while I was working on Bertram sketch, you know, who was this guy,
[11:46]and how was he going to fit into the fabric of this world, I was reading a play by Dale
[11:52]Perot called frequency modulation. I love reading plays almost more than novels. I just love the
[12:00]world of the theater. And I was blown away. I was just laughing my ass off. I was blown away,
[12:05]and it's all set in a radio classical radio station. And I asked Dale if he would maybe possibly
[12:13]consider letting me use it. It's a short play. It's like a little one act. Use part of it in this novel.
[12:20]And to my delight, he said yes, and that became basically the whole second chapter of the novel.
[12:25]So again, it's this idea of like taking something that already exists and building on it. And
[12:32]you know, even in the essay that I contributed to your collection, I'm taking the 10 commandments
[12:38]and riffing on that. So I love this idea of originality. And you know, like we were talking about
[12:43]with with West Side Story, from, you know, with its origins in Romeo and Juliet, or how you have
[12:50]like in the master in Margarita, there's the novel within the novel. And that's based on Pontius
[12:57]Pilate's life or the crucifixion of Jesus. And it's like the true story that comes from the
[13:03]Bible being interpolated as a novel within the novel. I just I've always loved that. I've always
[13:09]loved that. And it's sort of, you know, provided a great jumping up point for this novel.
[13:14]So interesting. I actually, I didn't do this intentionally, but I'm also interviewing today,
[13:19]someone who wrote all about Paul Simon and his Graceland album and how that he layered on his
[13:26]musical compositions on top of, you know, South African music and really done that before. And it's
[13:32]similar to what you're saying about your book, right? How we what we layer on and and how. And of
[13:37]course, that's fiction. I mean, some people say there's like no new ideas out there. So
[13:42]yeah, right. I think new under the sun. Nothing new under the sun. I mean, to bring it back to
[13:47]you. We're asking about my music a couple years ago. I had a ballet at the New York City ballet.
[13:52]And it was a theme and variations. And the theme 28 minute piece and the theme is 22 seconds. And
[13:59]it's this piece of music that I found in the Harvard library that George balanced
[14:03]Shane himself, who was of course a choreographer in the founder of the New York City Ballet,
[14:08]but also a composer wrote for Stravinsky's birthday and Stravinsky loved it. And he harmonized it
[14:14]and he orchestrated and he gave it back to balance sheet. And I found it and I pitched it to New York
[14:18]City Ballet and it became this big piece for the 50th anniversary. It was like on their spring
[14:23]gala. And it all came out of this piece of art, even though it's just 22 seconds long,
[14:30]that already existed. I just, yeah, I mean, there's so much, you know, there's so much
[14:37]stuff out there. If you just get your hands on it, you know, how to manipulate it or develop it and
[14:43]take it to a different place. I was developing characters though is kind of different. I would
[14:48]argue from developing the melody or the music behind a composition, right? You have developed all
[14:53]your characters so well in there, so vivid and different, it's like a whole ensemble piece.
[14:59]As you were, I know how you got Bertrand, but as a no-op, loosely based perhaps sometimes in your life,
[15:04]but when you thought about crafting the characters and taking them through all these
[15:09]situations and capers and all the rest, like how did you go about that?
[15:13]You know, I tend not to write outlines. I just write straight forward. I have a kind of vague
[15:19]idea where I wanted to end. And I knew I wanted it to be a love story. So there had to be a female
[15:25]interest. And you know, I wanted to put her in Yale, which is right down the freeway from New
[15:32]Haven, from Hartford where a lot of it takes place. And I wanted her to be in the music world.
[15:37]I wanted her to, you know, have her on string quartet. And I wanted her to be a very powerful woman
[15:44]to be sort of, you know, the foil to him who's kind of weak and, you know, Mambi Pambi at
[15:50]time, she would really like push him. And then there's this wonderful age gap story, which I
[15:57]wanted to write. I've been dying to write an age gap story. There's so few of them. You know, so
[16:01]here's this 21, 22 year old college kid who becomes friends with this octogenarian, several
[16:09]octogenarians, but Bertram especially, I had, I didn't have the delta that Noah and Bertram
[16:18]have, but I had friends, you know, having worked for Bernstein, who were three times my age.
[16:25]And they taught me so much. And I respected so many of them and learned so much from them. And I
[16:31]thought there was something there where you could really, especially in those days, I mean,
[16:36]a bit different now. The kids don't seem to give a hoot about us or think they can learn anything
[16:41]about us. And, you know, they have their, their own ways of doing things. But back in those days,
[16:46]in the 80s, you know, if you wanted to get to be the next person in the pecking order,
[16:52]you tried to emulate those that were above you, you know, that were your sort of role models.
[16:58]And, you know, Bertram is this old wise voice of classical music in the New England area,
[17:05]and Bert, and Noah already loves him before he even meets him. So when he falls under his tutel,
[17:10]it was just a wonderful opportunity to explore that kind of herald and mod-esque sort of age gap.
[17:18]And I knew I had wanted to do one and everything just clicked with this. I don't know,
[17:21]it just fell into place. And I kept writing, going forward and writing, going forward. And at
[17:26]some point, I was like, I think this is saleable. Like, there might be something here. I hadn't
[17:32]published a novel in 20 years. So, do you have the bug again now? Like, are you going to write
[17:38]another novel? Or do you think it was just this one and now you're done for a while?
[17:42]Well, no. I'm already working on this sequel to this. No. Yeah. And, you know,
[17:47]the lost Mozart has to continue. So, as I mentioned often in the book, there's this sister,
[17:53]Maria Anna Mozart. Her story has been lost the time because her brother was more famous and
[18:01]more accomplished, but the truth is, as I write in the book, when they were kids, and you won't
[18:06]see this in Amadeus or the Will Sharp Amadeus or the Broadway play Amadeus or the Pushkin poem
[18:13]Amadeus, but there was a sister. And she was the more talented of the two. And she got top billing.
[18:20]And Mozart was sort of, you know, this five-year-old accompanist for her. And I think that will be
[18:25]the next lost Mozart story to tell and really like raise the profile of Maria Anna,
[18:32]especially in these days where, you know, we want to find every great woman whose story has been
[18:36]lost the time and make sure that she gets her due respect. Well, lovely. Thank you for doing that
[18:42]for the team. That's a great story to tell. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, I can't wait to read that
[18:49]that sounds great. Through the writing and editing and now publishing of the book as someone in
[18:54]the Palisades and we were neighbors, you lost your home tragically, like so many thousands of people.
[19:00]It's just terrible. How are you dealing with that sense of dislocation and having to rebuild your
[19:07]life while you're also creating this work of fiction and putting it out there? How's that?
[19:13]You know, for the first three or four months, it was just admin. Like, you know, my son's school
[19:20]burned and suddenly you're living in Airbnb's and hotels and trying to deal with FEMA insurance
[19:26]and get clothes. And I mean, you were there holding a lot of our hands going through it. Thank you so
[19:32]much for your support. But it was tough. But you're so sort of in that day to day, you know, just trying
[19:40]to keep a float and figure out what you're going to do, where you're going to live next. How your
[19:45]son's going to get through being, you know, online during the most important semester of his getting
[19:51]ready for college applications. And then you get through it. You know, you're in month five or six and you're
[20:00]Okay, now I'm going to grieve, and it became really hard. I think I sent you some text,
[20:04]where it's like really struggling and depressed. You know, and did a lot there. A lot of
[20:10]BMDR started seeing a new psychiatrist and did a lot of work, like a lot of soul searching,
[20:18]and you wind up grieving all kinds of other things. Like my mother's death was never fully grieved
[20:24]and other trauma that started to resurface. This big trauma sort of kicked, you know, the dirt
[20:33]up. But I feel like now I'm in a really good place. I just moved to Malibu. I'm working on another
[20:41]book. I'm working on a book that I can't even talk about yet. I'm about to go on a little book
[20:47]tour for this novel. My son got into UCLA. Amazing. He's staying close by. There's a lot of also
[20:55]trauma and sort of like not trauma, but anxiety around, you know, he's my only kid, and I was going
[21:02]to suddenly be an empty nester, but now he's going to be, you know, a couple of towns over. So we
[21:08]can have lunch a couple of times a month, I'm sure. That's nice. So yeah, you know, you don't really
[21:12]appreciate what you have until you lose it sometimes. And writing has been the thing, whether it's
[21:19]music or words that really has been the buoy. In fact, selling the lost Mozart, I found out that
[21:27]it sold in February. The fire was in January. So that was the first major buoy, you know, and just
[21:33]for a couple of weeks, at least I was able to breathe and be like, oh, I did something like
[21:40]this isn't just going to be a shitty year because of the fire and losing everything I have
[21:45]around. It's going to be a positive year at the end of the day. I just have to get through it.
[21:51]Well, I'm sure that the book will be that guiding light for others. It is uplifting and funny
[21:57]and escapist and educational too for a little bit. So thank you for this fabulous read and
[22:05]for sharing your sense of humor and wit with the world and all its forms and for persevering
[22:11]through a very hard time and getting this out there. So thank you. Thanks, Libby. It's been
[22:16]a pleasure to be on the show. And thanks for all your support through this crazy 18 months.
[22:22]Of course. Of course. All right. Well, I hope to see you soon. Yep. Okay. Thank you.
[22:29]Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Libby, formerly Momstone, I have time to read books.
[22:35]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens
[22:41]and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and bye the books.