It often appeared as if Ennio Morricone’s famous harmonica tune from the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West was everywhere, all the time. Sometimes the tune would evoke a fantasy where I would suddenly appear out of nowhere, just as the “Harmonica” character, was ready to take revenge on the bastard who once upon a time had snatched my pawn illegally. When I heard Morricone’s harmonica, I reached for my revolver.
After he died on July 6, I learned that he had been in love with chess and had said that he would have loved to have led the life of a great chessplayer. I was reminded of Picasso who once said, “My mother told me, if you are a soldier you will become a general and if you are a monk you will become the Pope. Instead, I was a painter and I became Picasso.” I think it was a good thing that Picasso and Morricone became what they were.
Vladimir Kramnik, whose father is a painter and sculptor and his mother a piano teacher, once said that almost all the musicians he had come to know played chess. That has also been my experience.
I imagine a train compartment in which two people sit opposite each other. One of them is reading chess notation and occasionally smiles at a wrong move. The other is reading a musical score. An absent-minded mathematician enters. She is thinking about the Riemann hypothesis. After a while, the three of them realize that they are family, gens una as FIDE would say.
Igor Stravinsky has said about the composer Sergei Prokofiev, “I used to think that Prokofiev’s depths were engaged only when he played chess.” Prokofiev was a strong chess player. He won a simultaneous game against his later friend Capablanca and a regular game in the Café de la Régence in Paris against Tartakower, who would annotate it in the French magazine L’Echiquier.
After Prokofiev’s remigration to the Soviet-Union, Botvinnik, who was also a good friend, did not find it beneath his dignity to play a number of games against him. A lot more can be found in Edward Winter’s article Sergei Prokofiev and Chess (https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/prokofiev.html).
A small riddle remains. On many websites and in some books, one can find a game that Prokofiev supposedly played against Maurice Ravel. The venue invariably given is Mont La Joli (Mount Beautiful, but in incorrect French) 1924. Nice, those two great composers against each other, playing a lively game with several piece sacrifices by Prokofiev.
I think Mont La Joli doesn’t exist. Apart from some French camping grounds with the name Le Joli Mont or Le Mont Joli, I found the town of Mantes-la-Jolie, where Prokofiev spent some time, and which is not far from the town Montfort l’Amaury, where Ravel lived. But among all the references to that game, there was not one that gave some details that might convince me that it was not a fabrication. But perhaps a reader who is better informed about the life of Ravel than I am can help.
I’d like to finish with some words about a Dutch musician, Misha Mengelberg (Kiev 1935-Amsterdam 2017). He was a friend of mine and other chessplayers who frequented the Amsterdam artist’s club De Kring (The Circle). A jazz composer and pianist, he was also described as a musical anarchist and a great contrarian.
Just as for the American composer John Cage, a kindred soul, no sound was considered unusable for Misha, and so there is a record where on one side Misha is in concert with Eric Dolphy, one of the giants of jazz, and on the other side there is a short duet with his parrot Eeko. Misha was not a very strong chessplayer, but he loved chess and he could think on his own.
In the IBM tournament in Amsterdam in 1972, Ljubomir Ljubojevic and Walter Browne came to the pressroom for a post mortem of their game, that had ended as a draw.
Ljubojevic - Browne, IBM 1972, after White’s 39th move.
In this position Browne had played 39...f5 and after 40.Kb4 f4 41.Kc4, a draw was agreed. During their post-mortem the players came to the conclusion that it had been a correct draw and that no serious winning chances had been missed.
Then Misha modestly asked, “Gentlemen, may I ask a question? In the pawn ending, what about Kd5 instead of f5?” It took a while before he really had their attention, but then it dawned on the grandmasters that this short, slightly bent man might have a point. And indeed, after 39...Kd5, Browne would have won. The main line is 39...Kd5 40.b4 (or 40.Kb4 Kd4) 40...f5 41.b5 f4 42.b6 Kc6 (to force White’s king to a6, where it will be in check later) 43.Ka6 f3 44.b7 f2 45.b8Q f1Q+ and White will lose his queen.
This idea, first Kd5 and then later retract that move with Kc6, is far from easy to spot, but it must have helped that Misha was never intimidated by any authority.
Click here to view Prokofiev-Ravel Mont La Joli 1924