In a headline, the website chess.com wondered if the Prague Chess Festival, of which the second edition was held this year in February, might be called the Czech Wijk. This was probably tongue in cheek. The organizers in Prague have still some way to go to reach the stature of the Tata tournament in the Dutch village Wijk aan Zee, but they made no secret of the fact that they were inspired by that tournament.
The main group in Prague was called the Masters, the second group the Challengers, just as in Wijk, and there were numerous side tournaments and other festivities, such as a program of chess films and a meeting commemorating the former Czech president Václav Havel.
From pictures on several websites, I gathered that were quite a lot of Dutch ambassadors present. I saw Genna Sosonko, the journalist Max Pam and the chess benefactor Bessel Kok, who has been living in Prague since the 1990s. At the opening ceremony of a tournament in Prague in 1990, Bessel had played a game against Havel (with expert advisors on both sides) which was won by the president.
I also saw Jeroen van den Berg, director of Wijk aan Zee’s Tata tournament, making the first move of a round in Prague, and in the Challengers group the Dutchman Jorden van Foreest was doing well. It seems that a nice city connection is in the making.
Finally the Masters group was won by the young Iranian star Alireza Firouzja (16) and of course this invoked comparisons with heroics of young chess players of the past, even with Garry Kasparov, who as a sixteen-year old won a tournament with a 2½ point lead over former world champion Petrosian. That comparison with the great Garry was somewhat exaggerated.
The Challengers group was won by Jorden van Foreest. From Prague he travelled on to the German city Mülheim, where in the weekend he won two games in the Bundesliga for his club Solingen. As a result, on the live ratings list he became #58 in the world rankings. He is moving in the right direction at full speed.
In Prague, they played in the Hotel Don Giovanni, named after Mozart’s opera. Guests are welcomed in the lobby with Mozart’s piano music, after which they can have a drink in the hotel bar Amadeus.
The eminent English chess historian Edward Winter is a hermit who follows the world on his computer screen and surely he wasn’t there, but the Prague Mozart atmosphere may have spurred him to a substantial update he gave to an older article about “the Mozart of chess.” Nowadays Magnus Carlsen is that Mozart, since Lubosh Kavalek called him so in 2004, when Carlsen was thirteen-years old.
Eight years later, Kavalek was a bit sorry. He wrote: “In January 2004, I called Magnus Carlsen the Mozart of chess for the first time. It was a spontaneous, last-minute decision to meet a deadline for my column in the Washington Post. The name was picked up immediately and spread around quickly. It was used, misused, overused.”
Edward Winter shows that before Carlsen, there were at least ten others who were called the Mozart of chess, from Morphy to Kasparov. How rich is our chess world! Music lovers have a Mozart, but we have at least eleven.
If the meticulous fact checker Winter wouldn’t be a chess historian but a classics scholar, with his network of informants he would surely have solved the ancient riddle that asks which song the sirens sang and which name Achilles wore when he hid between the daughters of Lycomedes. As a chess historian, he found not only all these Mozarts of chess, but also the first game ever that was compared (by the American Reuben Fine) to a Mozart symphony. As a Dutchman, I rejoice, as it is a game by Max Euwe.
Fine wrote, first in the American magazine Chess Review and later in his book Chess Marches On!: “The following game, played in a recent Dutch tournament, is as graceful and pleasing as a Mozart symphony. Euwe has produced a masterpiece of force and elegance.” At the time, Fine was married to a Dutch woman, which may have boosted his interest in things Dutch.
Euwe’s opponent in that game from 1941, H.J. van Steenis, was a Dutch engineer who after the war became a founder and first president of the Pacifist Socialist Party and also a president of the Dutch Chess Federation.
But what about this proliferation of chess Mozarts, why always Mozart? Vladimir Kramnik once remarked that Carlsen was no Mozart, but that Kasparov might well be the Rammstein of chess.
Click here to view Euwe-Van Steenis, Amsterdam 1941, in the game viewer.