THE ARTIST LIVES IN EVERYONE(Charles E.J. Moulton) In your hands, dear reader, may the be your choice of the physical or virtual version of a historical document.
That, of course, sounds like a delusion of grandure in itself.
However, it is the truth.
The author of this book, that entails accounts and articles about my heritage, is a testament to the long line of amazing personalities that aligned my past.
First of all, let me tell you how I became the passionate advocate of my family’s heritage.
During my childhood, one littered with art and music and history, our home was so filled with a plethora of artefacts and creative antiques that I wondered, even as a child, what would happen with all these things. My parents were fabulous. They gave me rules to follow, but more importantly: their lives and living gave me a compass. I see many parents today that only give their children rules and teach them only what not to do. Now, more importantly is what to do. For when a child knows only what to avoid, he will be a rebel without a cause. He will spend his life being afraid and never ever know what direction to go. My parents were great. They gave that compass. No, they gave me several compasses and told me that I could choose one of these roads. Parents: take my parent’s advice. Give your children a direction, not only what not to do. They will thank you, like I thank my parents today. If you know something, teach your kids what you know.
I was a theatre child, a historian, an intellectual, a conversationalist, an astronomer, an actor, a musician and a film fanatic by the time I was eight years old. No wonder I never felt I could fit in into groups. The kids in school wondered who this guy was who spoke of so many subjects. They could not relate to it at all.
When my father died in 2005, he left a legacy of amazing proportions behind him, having worked and communicated with the likes of Joan Crawford, Clint Eastwood and Maria Callas. My mother took care of him the last years of his life, after a 40 year marriage, his failing physical endurance limping along with his still amazing mental abilities. My mother remained physically able to manage her home for another five years in Vienna, where she, after 35 years on stage, had started working as a professor of singing at the Vienna Music Academy in 1984. The last 25 years of her professional career were spent giving lessons, touring across Europe with her concert-group Musik Melange, cultivating her friendship with Luciano Pavarotti, granting her students master-courses with Nicolai Gedda and meeting the cultural jet-set of Austria.
My father worked as a speaker for Austrian Radio (ORF), filmed commercials, taught TV-producers English, starred in international movies (Firefox, Mesmer, Dead Flowers, Business for Pleasure, Liszt’s Rhapsody, Johann Strauss), acted at the International Theatre and wrote the programmes for Vienna’s English Theatre. The latter, in combination with our cultural work in the city gave us amazing oppurtunities: at the thousands of premiere parties and press conferences, held at the the palaces of Vienna, we met people like Austrian foreign minister Alois Mock, Princess Alexandra of Kent, Golden Girls-star Rue MacLanahan, Larry Hagman, Linda Grey, Hillary Clinton, Marcel Prawy, the real Von Trappe-family (of The Sound of Music-fame), Nicolai Gedda, Kjell Lönnå, Esa-Pekka Salonnen, Per Grundén, Elisabeth Söderström, Erik Eriksson, Luciano Pavarotti, Claudio Abbado, Placido Domingo, Audrey Landers, Mary Crosby, Oliver Tobias, Roger Spottiswoode, Alan Rickman, David Carradine, Mickey Rourke, Anthony Quinn and June Andersson.
This certainly was an interesting way to live.
The backside to it all was another one: living very much in the moment, excercising my art, I, or we, didn’t think of planning for the future as to what would happen with these things. We were art, eternal souls only destined to be creative.
Then, the world caught up with us.
When my mother got older, it became obvious that her mind started drifting. Her active life as a singer of amazing range (she had sung alto, mezzo and soprano-roles in the opera field) took its toll. That became obvious in the beginning of 2010, when she collapsed in her apartment in Vienna, suffering from a severe brain trauma.
The result was hospital care. Although her spriritual strength could move mountains, it was obvious that she couldn’t come back home. Much due to the horrid overmedication of the doctors, her condition worsened throughly.
At that time, I had my most active year in the theatre I worked in: rehearsing and playing Sam in Trouble in Tahiti, Tom in Blue Monday, Walter in The Three Penny Opera, Harry in My Fair Lady, a servant in Ariadne auf Naxos and chorus parts in three other operas.
It became even more painfully obvious that something had to be done. My mother was transferred to a bigger and even more confusing hospital, where they crisscrossed medication and popped them like tic-tacs. Nine medications later, she was screaming herself sore, hallucinating and jibbering. This grand lady with a sixty year long career had to be saved.
Months of red tape followed in order to transfer her to the town, where I worked. It gave us grey hairs, cost us a fortune, but finally we were able to give her a place in a care home five minutes away from my theatre.
Since my wife had been organizing the bureaucracy of the transfer, I took it upon myself to go to Vienna and dissolve the Viennese apartment. But the job was monumental. Literally five tons of things had to be organized in two day trips at a time. I was between rehearsals, had to decide among forty years of material what to take with and what to throw away. Asian artwork, Irish paintings, one thousand books, handknitted bedcovers, original decade old music stands, invaluable photos, a hundred year old clock: all of it had to be organized and decided upon.
Naturally, I was too distraught to make the right decisions.
I found a silly moving firm in Vienna, one I shouldn’t have called. On one of my trips to Vienna, I invited them and the bought many of these priceless antiques for thirty euros. On my next trip, it got worse. I found another firm in the net, that arrived at home in Vienna and decided to take care of the moving and wasting of my forty year old past for 1500 €.
Silly me. I signed the stupid paper that he slapped in front of my face. After that, the crook told me that all of the antiques in the hundred square metre flat were his. I answered that the two invaluable books with coins were mine. Silly mistake, I know. But what is a confused singer supposed to do?
Really honestly needing someone to take care of the darned mess I was in, I dared not do anything but say yes. Who knows? He maybe had a gun or a knife. I was alone. Gee wiz, who knew what could happen to me? I was a family father. I was on my hand and knees, praying for him to leave me the coins that my father had collected for me for forty years. But he said, he would take thirty or forty coins and leave me the rest when he took care of the apartment.
He came that night, collected the silver and left.
I decided to take someone else, a friend of my mom’s.
I never saw the man again. I called him a year later, sure, but he pretended not to know anything about it.
Well, anyway. We were always great artists, owning priceless antiques, but disorganized. So, the apartment was a mess in some ways. I remember the last time I saw the flat. Empty as it was, I still had to invite the company real estate to look at it. It was awful to leave these horrible bureaucrats to vomit spit on my dear honorable parents when they saw some dust in the corners.
I took with a great deal of my mother’s critiques, many VHS concerts transferred to DVD and my father’s entire written library. His student radio programmes for the Austrian Radio remained lost.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the apartment dissolved, my mother had been in something I would called physical hiatus. It looked like she was going to leave us. While praying for a miracle on what I thought was her death bed, I heard a voice: “You can have a year, my dear. It will be a very good year, but in April of next year you will have to let her go!”
Well, my mom recovered fast after that.
She was only on one medication. She came to the old people’s home, spoke about her career, spoke about wanting to audition for my boss. I came to her every single day after our before work. She came and saw me perform in Trouble in Tahiti (where she told me how wonderfully I rushed across the stage), Die Tote Stadt and in concerts. We read stories and looked at photos and she got to see much more of her grandchild.
Her 80th birthday was a gem. Her best friend Etelka Kovacs came to Gelsenkirchen and my mother was the centre of attention. We celebrated Christmas with her and she got to laugh a great deal.
Age creeps upon us. My mother and I took a long walk around the area, her in a wheel chair and me in the back. I gave her a tour of the area that she knew. She had spoken about moving to Gelsenkirchen in Germany, she had even said now that she liked it, it was different than she had thought, but now she was here.
That next week, her condition worsened.
One morning she spoke to me that she wanted me to take her home. One afternoon, a few days later, the caretaker of the home told me that she was doing very badly. We rushed to her room and soon I saw how right his predictions were.
It was strange, though. She was looking into the right corner of the bedroom and the only way to actually look into her eyes was to walk around and actually stand in her way, so to speak. Afterwards, my wife told me that her grandmother had done the same thing.
Thoughts of rushing her to intensive care came, we phoned her doctor, but he never arrived. I sat with her for four hours, spoke to her of love, thanked her for all her affection, her bedtime stories, her fantastic directorial work, her teaching, the concerts, the fun, the bike-rides all over Sweden, the pizzas and the meatballs, even told her that she would eventually get well and see me singing and acting my heart out in the theatre. She listened to a cassette tape of her husband singing a concert in Dublin in 1965, one year before he met her. One of the last songs he sang for her on that tape was “My Lagan Love”: Where Lagan streams sings lullaby there blows a lily fair. The night is on her hair and like a lovesick lenanshee she hath my heart enthralled. Nor life I owe, nor liberty, for love is Lord of All.”
I am sure that my father was beyond that corner, in the other world, waiting for her to cross the river Styx to Heaven. Yes, her own Heaven. Musical Heaven.
But at 3:45 p.m. on April 6th, 2011, Professor Gun Margareta Kronzell, after a sixty year long career displaying her four octave range and touring the world with her dear husband, died.
I held her hand and kissed as she died.
In the follwing weeks, I was in agony. The first rehearsal I partook in was for a stage production of Britten’s War Requiem. Needless to say, the scene with the dying soldier proved to difficult to stand. I went home.
I asked for a sign. I prayed. I wanted some sign that my mother was okay. I got it. My father spoke to me, from the other side:
“Go to your collection of DVDs of The Twilight Zone. On CD 6, there is an episode that will answer all your questions.”
The tale was about a man who falls in love with his creation, a hologramme, who turns out to be a woman he knew. The woman told him that she had come to him to love him, that this was her mission in life, but that she had to go now and that she had to let him go.
Well, after that I welcomed my parents into my life as spirits. The cremation of my mother was held by an evangelic priest, who hired me three times as a concerts soloist. The subsequent burial in Sweden in July of that year led to a deep, heartfelt vacation, where my wife and daughter fell in love with my relatives and friends. That year, we bought a new house in a calm city, where I started working in two schools. I kickstarted my literary career, which has given me close to two dozen publications in two years and have even started working more as a voice-over speaker. I paint nowadays (much due to the fact that I want to replace the lost art from Vienna with my own art), my books are available in several libraries, on the net and many other places. More importantly, I am not afraid to go out and do something courageous. Even if the art I produce sometimes is wrong or incomplete, I take my creativity and shoot it out there, much due to the fact that all those lost things in Vienna actually entailed lots of songs I never wrote down or stories I never published. I have now performed my own songs in concerts, I have recorded them and posted them online, I act on my creativity instead of just waiting for fate to knock on my door.
I also know now, more than ever, that creativity is the stuff of life. Inventing new things, trying new things out, making something new and fresh, being creative persay, is the main thing. I teach my daughter this, I teach her to think for herself, I teach her to see what is unusual in the usual. Since I cannot show her the amazing things we had in Vienna, I will at least show her that there is beauty and art in all of creation and maybe I can reproduce some of the grandure of our home. Maybe it is my fate that this has happened. The burden of all those worldly goods is not upon is anymore. Now, it is all about telling the story, spreading the word of the family heritage, being creative. And if some creation gets lost, so what? There is always more creativity.
The important thing is the Paradigm Shift that I have undergone.
I was always spiritual. But now more than ever, I know that there is no hell. There is only God and that he lives inside all of us. We are souls on an everlasting journey. We come here to complete our agenda. I have learned to try to pull the truth out of everyone. When my parents criticized someone they thought were too provincial, refusing to communicate with them, I now know that there is always more there than meets the eye. Spirituality comes in many colours and many shapes and sizes. Brilliant artists live in the remotest corners of our world, great thinkers might be working as gas station attendants or in Hollywood. The only thing we know for certain is that we don’t know what the future might entail. Your higher self knows. After all, he sent you here.
So, sit back, enjoy the ride, read about brilliant careers and Barons from Ireland, women from the Spanish Armada, farmers from Sweden, Belgian aristocrats, founders of steel companies and symphony orchestras. Read about Gun Kronzell with her four octave range and her sixty year artistic experience, about whom James King said: “Jesus Christ, what a voice!”. Read about the renaissance man Herbert Eyre Moulton, MCA-singer, educated priest, learned historian, author and actor.
Log on to the websites such as these:

https://vocalimages.com/?page_id=774
https://vocalimages.com/?page_id=746
https://de-de.facebook.com/pages/Gun-Kronzell-Moulton/165526970147928?sk=taggednotes
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Herbert-Eyre-Moulton/108856562616609
https://www.ufodigest.com/article/eyre-family-0627?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ufodigest%2FrLZd+%28UFO+and+Paranormal+News%29
https://searchtopics.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/article/05vs5Gb0Rj4zd
https://www.booksie.com/memoir/article/charles_ej_moulton/charles-edmond-james-moulton
https://tidningenkulturen.se/artiklar/portr-mainmenu-51/riga-portr-mainmenu-100/14129-guns-hjaerta-tillhoerde-kalmar-om-en-beroemd-opera-kalmarit
https://www.reverbnation.com/gunkronzellmoulton
www.reverbnation.com/charlesejmoulton
https://www.epubli.de/shop/autor/Charles-EJ-Moulton/1421
https://www.buzzle.com/authors.asp?author=69032
https://www.ideagems.com/html/authors-_page_2.html^

and spread the word about a gang of crazy artists that roamed the globe, baking turkeys and singing carols, telling jokes and looking at the stars, driving people crazy and inspiring people with their song.
Read the story and then get inspired to tell your own story.
Life is worth living.
The artist lives in everyone.
He is our inner God.
Yes, God lives in you.
He loves you and wants to express himself through you through something as sweet and normal as creativity.
If the Moulton legacy tells you anything, it is the fact that creativity can make the world turn into a perfect place where opposites meet and dance the eternal dance of the eons.
Happy reading!

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