E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning:
I don’t know how I failed to learn this for 60 years or so but Purcell’s cataloguer is a Z person, Franklin Zimmerman. You probably have known forever, but thought I’d mention it just in case. How can someone who died so young have 860 Z numbers? And probably most are glorious.
Ah, something I have known but forgotten. Nice to be reminded; St. Cecilia has just come by in my nightly playing through my classical music recordings. If he’d just done St. Cecilia, Dido and Aeneas, and The Fairy Queen, Purcell would be famous, but then he did all those songs. 860 Z numbers in only 36 years.
Otherwise, it seems, Z numbers in math (ℤ, the set of integers) and chemistry (the Z number of an element, its atomic number) — and the z-score (or standard score) in statistics (the number of standard deviations by which a raw score deviates from the mean value) — all go back to German Zahl ‘number’. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
So I might take to saying I have your Z, for figurative I have your number, meaning ‘I understand your motives and can therefore defeat you’, or something like that.
taken young: Schubert 31, Mozart 35, Purcell 36, Bizet 37, Mendelssohn 38, Chopin 39
But then there’s the other end of the scale, the > 70 group, in descending order:
death in the fullness of time: Stravinsky 88, Verdi 87, Telemann 86, Haydn 77, Rossini 76, Handel 74
Down to the next lower decade, 60-70, in descending order:
death in maturity: Wagner 69, Shostakovich 68, Bach and Berlioz 65, Vivaldi and Brahms 63, Dvořák 62, Prokofiev 61
The remaining group (40-60) is of composers dying in middle age, so understood as taken before their time (I’ll list them in ascending order), but not as young people:
Schumann 46 [7 years after Chopin] Tchaikovsky 53, Beethoven 56 [5 years before Prokofiev]
The distribution is clearly bimodal: 6 deaths < 40 years old, 3 deaths from 40-60 years old, 9 deaths > 60 years old. It’s the early deaths that stand out as notable (granted, in a field — musical composition — where great talent is often evidenced at an early age).
The composers were picked because of what I perceived to be their significance, but not in any systematic way; these are matters of judgment, with a certain amount of light-hearted randomness in the matter, so please don’t write to complain that I have listed composer A (Dvořák, say) while disregarding composer B (Rachmaninoff, say). In addition, Schubert, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Chopin are all special favorites of mine (not chosen because of their early deaths), as are Haydn, Bach, Beethoven, and Handel. (Thanks to Robert Coren and John Gintell, who broadened my coverage, especially to take in opera composers.)
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