There are many reasons to like the Amazon TV show Mozart in the Jungle, which is a fictional show but is based on a 2005 memoir written by a former oboist in the New York Philharmonic. There is much that the show gets right about the world of professional classical music (what it gets wrong are usually small details that needn’t bother the average viewer), and the positive effect of bringing classical music to a wider audience shouldn’t be underestimated. For example, just from Season 3 alone we witness Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time performed at Riker’s Island and we see the character Lizzie dressing and acting like Vítězslava Kaprálová, a tragically underrated composer of the early twentieth century. Certainly some viewers will seek out her music after watching these episodes.

Lizzie even sings in adorably English-accented Czech. What bothers me, though, is a horribly translated phrase that Lizzie says. As Kaprálová, Lizzie says, “We have a saying here in Prague: ‘Stokrát nic umořilo osla.’ A hundred times and nothing killed the donkey.” Continue reading →