Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji ~ June 30th 2022
~ Pride Post: June 30th ~
Opus Clavicembalisticum by 🏳️🌈Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji🏳️🌈
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kCXZ3vPfwIznK2ctcU2RzBtmsn_fUmAfs
--
"Sorabji spent approximately the last 35 years of his life with Reginald Norman Best (1909–1988), the son of his mother's friend. Best spent his life savings to help Sorabji buy The Eye and shared the costs of living with him. He was homosexual, and although Sorabji often described him as his godson, many suspected there was more to their relationship and those close to them believed they were partners. Sorabji once called him 'one of the two people on earth most precious to me'. In March 1987, they moved into Marley House Nursing Home, where Sorabji called him "darling" and complimented him on his looks before Best's death on 29 February 1988, an event described as a blow to the composer. Sorabji suffered a mild stroke in June and died later that year; their ashes are buried beside each other."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaikhosru_Shapurji_Sorabji
Opus is the longest piano work in existence. When Sorabji finished Opus, he wrote to a friend this:
"With a wracking head and literally my whole body shaking as with ague I write this and tell you I have just this afternoon early finished Clavicembalisticum... The closing 4 pages are so cataclysmic and catastrophic as anything I've ever done—the harmony bites like nitric acid—the counterpoint grinds like the mills of God... (underneath he quotes the last chord of the work, with 'I am the Spirit that denies!')"