article 164: Sheherazade in Amsterdam, Greenville, Vourey and Paris I spent New Year’s Eve 2025 at a hotel in Amsterdam while Naoko was in Hiroshima with her aging parents. Fireworks are a traditional Dutch feature of the transition from old to new, but this was the last year they were legal. The reaction to an impending ban can be imagined. Tumult began at nightfall, went on for eight hours, and resulted in a 19th-century church being burned to the ground. I couldn’t really mourn its demise; the only time I had ever been inside it was as a member of a discussion panel organized by the Glenn Gould Society on the occasion of a round number of years after his death, or birth. I was on record as disliking his interpretations and was invited in order to inject some liveliness into the discussion. It was indeed lively without me taking any initiative. Sticks and stones were not thrown, but there were some hurtful words. Earlier on 31 January I passed the Concertgebouw, riding tram 12 to a friend I hadn’t seen for half a century. For the nth time I cursed everyone responsible for disfiguring a great monument with a wretched glass and marble wing which we were told would be “transparent”. There was a banner on the front façade advertising a New Year’s concert. It was broadcast this evening, four days delayed, on a Franco-German TV channel which calls itself ARTE, and occasionally furnishes something artistic. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra — the “Royal” warrant was granted after my time — was in the middle of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Sheherazade” when I tuned in. I hadn’t heard this Orientalist “symphonic suite”, loosely based on the Arabian Nights, for ages. As a boy I played my father’s LP of the work over and over on afternoons alone. I still knew what was coming from bar to bar. The large hall of the Concert Building (that’s all the name means) is always counted as one of the two or three finest in the world. Its sobriety contrasts well with its rival, the Goldener Saal of the Musikverein in Vienna, whose New Year’s concert of Johann Strauss & Co. is broadcast live all over the world, perpetuating the sham of jolly, benign, picturesque old Austria. I sat at harpsichord, piano and organ on the stage where Mengelberg held sway for 50 years countless times between 1975 and 1990, and even descended the long stairs from the Green Room as soloist more than once. So I tend to get nostalgic when I see it on TV. The turnover in the orchestra has been complete; I didn’t recognize a single face. Some things have changed. For one, the violins are nearly all female except the front desks, and mostly Asian. For another, the flutes and the piccolo were bare wood. And the conductor was a smiling Scandinavian boy of doubtful baton technique, a type who almost seems de rigueur at present. Changes in me too — I couldn’t hear the high notes in the violin cadenzas, a pity especially about the long ones at the end. The English horn solos took me back to my brief career as an oboist. The cor was the variant instrument I really enjoyed. Its length and lower air resistance fitted my gangly build when I was 15. The second trumpet must have been retiring after 1 January — he got a big bunch of flowers while the other orchestra soloists were taking their well-earned individual bows. What a showpiece “Sheherazade” is! It is certainly more respectable than Ravel’s “Bolero”, which he called “merely orchestral tissue without music”. It is less repetitive, though repetitive it be. But the virtuoso orchestration alone makes it worth hearing, and some of the tunes are captivating. I confess to being as much a sucker for big effects and sentimentality as the next guy, and Nikolai delivers. It’s such a sprawling thing that it’s rarely programmed. And I don’t really need to hear it again in this lifetime. The experience of seeing it done on such familiar territory while simultaneously remembering old Dad’s disc was almost more than I could cope with. The sad part is — the earlier performance was superior. I can’t remember what ensemble it was, but they didn’t rush the last movement, the cadenzas didn’t suffer from overemphasis and weird rubatos, and the conductor, whoever he was, held things together, unlike young Mr. Visual Media. The dacha where Rimsky-Korsakov composed both “Scheherazade” and that other sparkling gem, the “Russian Easter Overture”, in a single summer was destroyed by the Germans during the siege of Leningrad, as Peter the Great’s foundation was called in 1942. It’s now St. Petersburg again — an echo of a happier time when Germany and Russia were allies. *** In 1856 a person named in the acte de marriage as Princesse Dil Tezarajiate (1840-64) married Charles, Count Meffray, Marquis of Césarges, in the Meffray chateau at Vourey, not far from Grenoble. The count-marquis was a cavalry officer in the service of the Ottoman sultan. His bride of 16 must have been an import from that realm. She died at 23 without having had children. “Princesse” was possibly a courtesy title, because no family of the name Tezarajiate is known. It is also possible that the whole did not contain a surname at all, because Ottoman women usually did not use patronyms. “Dil” is a word of Persian origin meaning “heart” or “soul”, which is used in female Turkish and Arabic names. The final element “-jiate” corresponds to a French marriage clerk’s possible rendering of “-zade” = “descendant of ” …as in Scheherazade. Is “Tezara-” close enough to “Shehera-” to claim the whole name? AI models say no. Well, what do they know? And I have reason to want it to be so, because Meffray de Césarge’s second wife was my great-great-aunt Virginia Mudge. Her first husband was a Wilmerding, a family that furnished Bürgermeisters of Braunschweig, where a street is named after them. Emigrants became wealthy merchants in post-Revolutionary America. A promising young scion married Jeannie, as she was called, at her banker father’s estate on what Dickens called the “looking-glass prairie” east of St. Louis., Missouri. The sprawling wooden mansion near my hometown, past which Lincoln rode on the judicial circuit when it was newly-built, still stands. The future President handled a case for Jeannie’s father before the Illinois Supreme Court. One of her sisters married William Wilson, who was likely the illegitimate son of a Philadelphia Jew. Their youngest daughter was my great-grandmother, born 1871, the most ancient person I ever knew. My first piano lessons were paid for with the few dollars in oil rights produced by 40 acres of her inheritance from the Mudge estate. The Illinois oil boom of 1905 was modest but is still pumping. The newly-wed Wilmerdings were sent on business to Paris, where Miss Mudge, as she was, encountered the dashing widower Marquis de Césarges and promptly divorced Mr. Wilmerding. Perhaps they met at the court of Napoleon III and Eugénie? In any case, according to a post-Franco-Prussian-war pamphlet Jeannie’s new husband wrote (he thought a couple of squadrons of Tunisian cavalry could have saved Paris), the pair — shocking mésalliance! — lived through Bismarck’s siege of the capital and the Commune. My great-great-uncle-in-law died not long after, again “without issue”, and the titles passed to a cadet branch. The Chateau de Césarges, where Jean Jacques Rousseau was once given shelter, is now a B&B. My aunt died in Paris in 1911 after a modest career writing columns for the New York Herald. I’ve searched for her grave without success. Recently a watercolor of flowers by Jeanne de Meffray sold at auction for £26. I would have bid a great deal more than that if I had known. 5 January 2026 - back -