I do most of the cooking. My wife does all of the driving. We both have successful professional careers. Our economy is never a source of argument. I have a number of female colleagues who, in point of ability in my book, take second place to no one. I deplore such things as salary differences based on sex, and I detest self-proclaimed "masculine" males. I, should consider myself a liberated man, were it not for the malaise the female thinking-and-speaking process sometimes induces in me, making me feel an alien on my own planet. Take last night, for instance. (Please!) Apropos of nothing, my spouse said, "I love those nursery rhymes you were playing." I stopped to mull that one over: I hadn't been playing anything--! had been scrubbing some carrots. "You mean, earlier?" I asked. "Yes, that's it," she replied. Quickly stepping into my academic robes, I said coldly, "I was playing the Beethoven variations on the duet from 'Don Giovanni,' which I assumed you had heard enough times to recognize." "Oh, I know the Mozart thing," she said impatiently; "What I liked were the nursery rhymes that came afterwards."

The Mozart theme, "La ci darem la mano" (Give me your hand), is, of course the Act I duet in which Don Giovanni lures Zerlina on. A lovely tune it has, too--but moreover it is a masterpiece of dramatic suggestion, in which the two vocal lines, at first separate, gradually draw together and overlap as the "unwilling" contadina succumbs. The "nursery rhymes" are nine variations on the tune. Why my wife interprets them as she does eludes me. Our child was not one to receive nursery rhymes or lullabies. Possibly the reference is to the fact that they were played in a Tafelmusik way, and one wonders why they have attracted so few recordings (Schwann lists only a Voxbox; there was a Westminster mono, a 78-rpm version on Musicraft, plus transcriptions for string quartet and for clarinet and piano.)

The C major trio, for the same forces, is a longer and more ambitious work (in four movements), dating from the same period roughly (it's generally thought to have been written in Bonn in 1794). Not as "catchy" perhaps as the nursery-rhyme work, it is unfailingly pleasant unpretentious music, obviously intended to be enjoyed. It is fashionable to say that it is Haydnesque rather than Beethovenian. The recording I listened to yesterday demonstrates a richness of texture that I don't associate with Haydn, but that is perhaps because it was apparently recorded in a large cast-iron bathtub.

The Mozart adagio is, I believe, a genuine novelty on records. I've not heard it, my books don't mention it, and the University Library is closed for renovation, so I don't know whether it was assigned to the Kochel appendix because it is incomplete (admittedly a missing section has been "recomposed" here) or because it is dubious. But eighteenth century pieces for English horn aren't all that common.

For those who've forgotten, the English horn, or cor anglais, is an alto oboe with a bulbous bell that makes it look vaguely like a giant scallion. An old dictionary describes it as "the most mournful and inconsolable of instruments.'' Some say that anglais means not ""English" but "angled" since it was once curved or crooked, but that does not account for the contemporaneous corno inglese, 'much less englisches Waldhorn (English hunting horn). Sibyl Marcuse speculates that it began as a miniature imitation double-reed cor de chasse--though why "English" we aren't told.