By Maxim Kelly
Mozart loved numbers. Indeed as a child in the mid 1700s, the classical composer doodled sums and cryptic codes everywhere, and for his entire life the Austrian used a secret cipher in letters to his family.
It was not until the 1930s that a brilliant Galwegian, Emily Anderson, cracked Mozart’s codes and published his diaries and letters in full to global acclaim. This would be achievement enough for most people, but Anderson also had a secret, shadow life as top code breaker for British military intelligence during the first and second world wars. In her retirement in the 1960s, she translated Beethoven’s infamously confusing letters too - presumably just for the craic, and probably because no one else could.
Next Friday, October 13, at 7.30pm, Music for Galway celebrates this remarkable University of Galway graduate in the college’s quadrangle where the young Emily lived as a child of college president Alexander Anderson, and his suffragette wife, Emily Gertrude Alexander, formerly of the city’s Binns banking family.
Irish pianist Finghin Collins will perform Mozart’s C minor Sonata KV 457, a dramatic and energising piece for solo piano, before introducing The Castalian Quartet. Comprised of two Welshmen, a Finn and Irish violist Ruth Gibson, this Oxford University ensemble will make its Irish debut with Mozart’s romanticist string quartet KV 421. Fittingly, the performance space in the university’s ‘Quad’ has been renamed the Emily Anderson Concert Hall.
University of Galway academic Jackie Uí Chionna published a gripping book in April this year chronicling the fascinating life of the Galway-born spy. In Queen of Codes (Headline, €18.99 ), Uí Chionna makes the case that Anderson’s success in British Military Intelligence’s Bletchley Park and Cairo operations during WWII makes her one of the top three codebreakers in the world. A British army general even named one of his brigades after her in recognition of her contribution to his defeat of a much larger Italian force. The book also reveals that Anderson had several relationships with other women, and during a period when homosexuality was not generally accepted, this puts an extra layer of secrecy on her life.
“I don’t really know why Emily Anderson isn’t better known in Galway,” says Music For Galway’s musical director, Anna Lardi, who points out her work was the basis of the Oscar-winning 1984 biography of Mozart, Amadeus, which is frequently referred to by movie critics as one of the best films ever made. “In classical music circles in the English-speaking world she is still considered the authority on Mozart and Beethoven’s letters. I suppose in 1960s Galway there was a lot going on with other forms of music, and a classical music expert – especially a woman - just wasn’t on [Galway’s] radar.”
With a venue, an annual concert, and now a biography in her honour, maybe Anderson will now join the pantheon of eclectic cultural forces our small city seems to produce. As a gay, presbyterian woman from a unionist background, she might not quite fit the mould of the modern Galway luvvie, but us culture vultures are a disparate bunch.
Standard tickets for the Emily Anderson Concert, Friday October 13, at University of Galway's Emily Anderson Concert Hall, cost €20 from www.MusicForGalway.ie
