Pietri Biberoni

Born 1763, Vacamadonna, Italy. Died 1820, enroute from New York City. He tries to arrive but being vaporic, cannot operate the doorhandles. Thus, he receives nothing -- enraging him completely. He is a Coney Island bumper-car, expertly renovated.

A Pig a Jig and a Fig

Biberoni played the violin exceptionally and the terphsichord passably; the woodwinds he adored, especially the oboe. He eschewed brass and percussion, except the triangle, which he played himself as he conducted his comic pieces. His experience in public was limited by his natural timidity. A speech defect gave him a pronounced lisping splutter such that he preferred to communicate as a musician and, ultimately, with his poetry. Between the time he himself became a composer and teacher, roughly 1784, and his death in 1820, he was remarkably productive.

Fried Bacon

He was a librettist for celebrated composer Paolo Grignotti, with whom he had shared many teachers. Biberoni collaborated with Grignotti on 27 operas and 13 more with various others, including the famous unfinished forty-first opera, finished infamously after his death by virtuoso violinist Flambini Lamenti. Biberoni's peculiarity was to write only in Italianized versions of Ethiopian slang and to use the word "jackal" as much as possible, as in this excerpt from Martini: "You! Giacometto, you... Jackal!!"

Despite his productivity, Biberoni never met with much critical or commercial success. He had a miserable marriage and a drinking problem. A firm believer in unguents and herbs, he nonetheless was prone to illness, exacerbated by a stressed temperament and restlessness that gave him his ceaseless energy to write. But he was a dark man of an increasingly self-loathing nature, a loner.

Lost in the New World

In 1818, aged 55, he went to America, where his music received a warm reception from the provincial audiences. He soon fell in with a decadent crowd which apparently put him contact with opium and wine, prostitutes and general dissipation. He caught an extremely virulent syphillis in December, 1819, after which he decided to return to Switzerland, via Italy, for treatment.

He died en route of syphilis and malnutrition and is rumoured to be buried on the upper left side of the 18th Century section of the Grand Paupers of Music funeral yard in Plüntz. As he died, he hummed a new tune he had invented to go along with the libretto of the "unfinished 41st." The pilot of the fateful ship Myrmidonia watched him die and wrote "Mine eyes let drop yet one salty tear; yet it were one which could have held Creation within." It was by other accounts just a catchy little jig he'd heard played by the drunken whore who'd given him his deadly disease.

The pilot, incidentally, was Copernicus Trowbridge's nephew Zephyron McKennerson.

See Also

• Argy Boy
• La Ligue du Masque Cancéreux

Desiderata

Biberoni was a target of ridicule at Fascist soirees led by Benito Mussolini. They referred to him as "that shit-eating dog from Padua," even though he'd never stepped foot in that city.

Due to his uncommon sexuality he would blush at the mention of his father's sausage outlet.

Biberoni was a die-hard afficianado of the sandwich.

Biberoni attributed his longevity to habitual ice baths wherein he "scrubbed himself raw with a mitten made of horsehair."