time to see his companion deliberately trying to put out the flame with his paw. The author set his book aside and played with the cat, then shared the story with his family the next day.
HAMLET
THE CAT WHO HELD COURT OVER
A LITERARY ROUND TABLE
For decades, Manhattan’s elegant Algonquin Hotel has been a gathering place for the city’s theater crowd and literati. But during its heyday, its greatest celebrity arguably wasn’t Dorothy Parker or Robert Benchley but a scraggly former stray cat named Hamlet.
According to legend, the feline, originally called Rusty, was an unemployed theater cat taken in by the hotel’s owner, Frank Case. It must have been quite a step up. The old tomcat was renamed Hamlet and given the run of the hotel. He even got his own cat door to ease his travels and is said to have enjoyed lapping milk from a champagne glass. When he passed away after only three years on the job, the New York Times noted his departure in its gossip column.
Though the original Hamlet is a distant memory, the tradition of keeping a cat at the Algonquin lives on. Today the position is held by a former animal shelter inmate named Matilda. Like her predecessors, she has the run of the place (save for the kitchen and hotel dining room) and receives fan mail from around the world.
PULCINELLA
THE CAT WHO WROTE A FUGUE
Today the name Domenico Scarlatti doesn’t exactly fall trippingly off the tongues of music aficionados. In the early eighteenth century, however, the Italian-born composer was famous throughout Europe. A master of the keyboard, he commanded respect both from his contemporaries and successors. He was considered George Frederic Handel’s equal on the harpsichord. Artists ranging from Chopin to Brahms to Vladimir Horowitz have idolized his work for centuries, but he was also extremely popular with lay audiences.
He was as prolific as he was skilled. During his lifetime (1685–1757) he created several operas and produced some five hundred sonatas, all while holding various high-profile musical posts in Italy, England, Portugal, and Spain, where he lived for more than two decades. Scarlatti became famous not just for his intricate, innovative keyboard pieces, but also for his somewhat unorthodox style, which sampled everything from religious themes to Spanish, Moorish, and Jewish folk music. But one of his most famous pieces was inspired not by some rustic melody or the work of another composer. It was a collaboration with his cat. Officially called the Fugue in G minor, Kk. 30, this one-movementharpsichord sonata is unofficially known as the Cat’s Fugue.
According to legend, the maestro owned a cat named Pulcinella, who enjoyed walking up and down the keyboard of his harpsichord. Usually this produced only random, meaningless noise. But during one of these “improvisation sessions,” the feline plinked out an unusual, though quite catchy, series of notes. Scarlatti grabbed a pad and wrote down the short phrase. Inspired, he composed an entire fugue around it.
The piece became an instant success, and it remains so today. During the 1840s, the great pianist Franz Liszt added the work to hisrepertoire—it became a regular part of his performances. By that time a major oversight on Scarlatti’s part had been rectified. At the time he wrote it, the idea of somehow noting the origin of the piece in the title simply didn’t occur to him. But by the early nineteenth century the brilliant bit of feline-inspired music had become universally known as the Cat’s Fugue.
CALVIN
THE CAT WHO INSPIRED
TWO AUTHORS
It is the rarest of literary cats who serves as the muse of not one but two writers. Such was the case for a fluffy Maltese named Calvin. He entered the world of letters in the mid-nineteenth century, when he wandered “out of the great unknown” into the household of Harriet Beecher Stowe. “It was as if he had inquired at the door if this was the residence of the author of Uncle Tom’s
HAMLET
THE CAT WHO HELD COURT OVER
A LITERARY ROUND TABLE
For decades, Manhattan’s elegant Algonquin Hotel has been a gathering place for the city’s theater crowd and literati. But during its heyday, its greatest celebrity arguably wasn’t Dorothy Parker or Robert Benchley but a scraggly former stray cat named Hamlet.
According to legend, the feline, originally called Rusty, was an unemployed theater cat taken in by the hotel’s owner, Frank Case. It must have been quite a step up. The old tomcat was renamed Hamlet and given the run of the hotel. He even got his own cat door to ease his travels and is said to have enjoyed lapping milk from a champagne glass. When he passed away after only three years on the job, the New York Times noted his departure in its gossip column.
Though the original Hamlet is a distant memory, the tradition of keeping a cat at the Algonquin lives on. Today the position is held by a former animal shelter inmate named Matilda. Like her predecessors, she has the run of the place (save for the kitchen and hotel dining room) and receives fan mail from around the world.
PULCINELLA
THE CAT WHO WROTE A FUGUE
Today the name Domenico Scarlatti doesn’t exactly fall trippingly off the tongues of music aficionados. In the early eighteenth century, however, the Italian-born composer was famous throughout Europe. A master of the keyboard, he commanded respect both from his contemporaries and successors. He was considered George Frederic Handel’s equal on the harpsichord. Artists ranging from Chopin to Brahms to Vladimir Horowitz have idolized his work for centuries, but he was also extremely popular with lay audiences.
He was as prolific as he was skilled. During his lifetime (1685–1757) he created several operas and produced some five hundred sonatas, all while holding various high-profile musical posts in Italy, England, Portugal, and Spain, where he lived for more than two decades. Scarlatti became famous not just for his intricate, innovative keyboard pieces, but also for his somewhat unorthodox style, which sampled everything from religious themes to Spanish, Moorish, and Jewish folk music. But one of his most famous pieces was inspired not by some rustic melody or the work of another composer. It was a collaboration with his cat. Officially called the Fugue in G minor, Kk. 30, this one-movementharpsichord sonata is unofficially known as the Cat’s Fugue.
According to legend, the maestro owned a cat named Pulcinella, who enjoyed walking up and down the keyboard of his harpsichord. Usually this produced only random, meaningless noise. But during one of these “improvisation sessions,” the feline plinked out an unusual, though quite catchy, series of notes. Scarlatti grabbed a pad and wrote down the short phrase. Inspired, he composed an entire fugue around it.
The piece became an instant success, and it remains so today. During the 1840s, the great pianist Franz Liszt added the work to hisrepertoire—it became a regular part of his performances. By that time a major oversight on Scarlatti’s part had been rectified. At the time he wrote it, the idea of somehow noting the origin of the piece in the title simply didn’t occur to him. But by the early nineteenth century the brilliant bit of feline-inspired music had become universally known as the Cat’s Fugue.
CALVIN
THE CAT WHO INSPIRED
TWO AUTHORS
It is the rarest of literary cats who serves as the muse of not one but two writers. Such was the case for a fluffy Maltese named Calvin. He entered the world of letters in the mid-nineteenth century, when he wandered “out of the great unknown” into the household of Harriet Beecher Stowe. “It was as if he had inquired at the door if this was the residence of the author of Uncle Tom’s
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