Music: The Voices of Silence

(2 of 2)

Outright acceptance of the possibility that she is really in touch with Liszt and friends is, naturally, rare. But at press conferences and confrontations, Rosemary regularly disarms reporters and cynics with her modesty ("I only take what comes") and her homely use of detail. "We would call Debussy a hippie today," she adds. "He tells me he does much more painting than music." Liszt, she says, often accompanies her on shopping trips and once checked up on the price of bananas; Chopin has become a TV addict, though he disapproves of much that appears on the BBC. "When Schubert first appeared to me he was wearing his spectacles but I think it was only to make sure I recognized him. Now he doesn't wear them at all. Beethoven," she adds, shattering nearly everyone's preconception, "hasn't got that crabby look." Even celebrated musical doubters show a grudging respect for Rosemary. "If she is a fake," says British Composer Richard Rodney Bennett, "she is a brilliant one and must have had years of training. Some of the music is awful, but some is marvelous. I couldn't have faked the Beethoven."

Raising Spirits. The music itself is less interesting than the manner in which it is supposedly given. Mediums have come and gone throughout history. Today both science and the general public are more concerned with psychic phenomena than at any other time within this century. For those who long to believe in it, what could be at stake in Rosemary's rise is proof of life after death.

For those who do not believe, the whole thing is clearly a case of chicanery for profit and fame. The Philips contract has brought Rosemary $2,000 to $3,000 but can be expected to earn more. If Rosemary is in touch with Liszt, the best way to prove it is not to produce the lukewarm but pleasant Grubelei she claims to have received from him, but to discover something from the past, perhaps Liszt's now vanished manual of piano technique, which he wrote for the Geneva Conservatoire. The spirits that mediums raise always inconveniently refuse to answer the very questions that would prove their existence. So far, Rosemary's musical familiars have been no exception. When TIME posed a choice of 20 musical mysteries for solution, Rosemary replied, "I cannot push a button and call on the composers just like that."

The most outspoken faith in Mrs. Brown has been voiced by Sir Donald Tovey, one of England's most respected musicologists. Asked by Philips to write a liner note for Mrs. Brown's record, Sir Donald bluntly declared that the composers are real: "It is the implications relevant to this phenomenon that we hope will stimulate sensible and sensitive interest and stir many who are intelligent and impartial to consider and explore the unknown of man's mind and psyche." Sir Donald dictated his liner notes to Rosemary Brown on January 1, 1970; he died in 1940.