Was Mozart really a leftie?

QUESTION It’s often said that Mozart was left-handed. What is the evidence for this? AS LEFT-hANDEDNESS was once viewed as undesirable, unlucky or even evil, it’s interesting to wonder how many famous authors and composers were natural ‘lefties’, forced to write with their right hand — common practice in educational establishments throughout the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

The musical giants Mozart, Beethoven and Bach are frequently cited as having been left-handed, but there’s scant evidence for this, certainly for Beethoven and Mozart. Also, the Bach in question isn’t Johann Sebastian but his less famous son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, for whom there is good evidence of left-handedness.

Evidence that Mozart was lefthanded relies on two factors: many of his keyboard pieces feature a left-handed dominance, and his self-professed ‘poor handwriting’ is in contrast with his impeccable musical scores.

The inconvenience in being a lefthanded music scribe is that the writing arm has to be held in such a way as to avoid smearing the wet ink and Mozart’s scores are generally clean. There may be an argument as to whether Mozart had ‘mixed dominance’, doing some things better with the left hand while being right-handed in most things, or was ambidextrous.

The evidence that Beethoven was left-handed comes from a comment by his biographer, companion and friend Anton Schindler, who recalled seeing him hold his quill in his left hand when composing. Lynnette Blackwood-Smyth,

St Davids, Pembrokeshire. QUESTION In the 1951 film, Royal Wedding, Fred Astaire dances on the walls and on the ceilings. How was this special-effect achieved? FURThER to the earlier answer, the technological wizardry used by Stanley Donen to create this famous scene — a rotating reinforced-steel cylindrical chamber — was adopted by Stanley Kubrick for his sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There’s an early scene in which a stewardess carrying a food tray steps into a sort of cylindrical vestibule and proceeds to walk up the wall, with the result that she pivots through 180 degrees and ends up completely upside-down.

Later, aboard the Jupiter mission, we see one of the astronauts jogging a couple of times around the cylindrical interior of the spaceship. In both cases, the set rotated while the actor remained more or less on the level.

S. rogers, Bristol.