We’ve had only one Mozart Listener crossword, Joint Submission in 2023, but Mozart is a team isn’t it (Dysart and Ozzie according to the Listener website) so this is another ‘Joint Submission’as well …It was somewhat daunting to see a carte blanche then read a preamble that suggested that half of each symmetrical pair of clues might have an entry different word-length from that indicated, since we were required to enter not the answer but a “Consonantal Equivalent” (CE) – same consonants but vowels ad lib (including Y as it turned out). So 1a ‘Single then married to Scots sage (7)’ which we solved as SOLOMON (SOLO + M for married and ON = Scots ‘married to’) turned out to have SALMON as its entry – but it could at first blush have been SOLEMN, ISLEMAN, ISLEMEN and perhaps some others as well. (Without wordfinder programs like QAT we’d have been all at sea, but even they struggle to offer syntax which would infallibly select just what we needed which was &S&L&M&N& where & = a e i o u y or any combination of these or nothing).
Help: how are to we get anything into the grid with any certainty?
Salvation came in the form of realising that this half of the symmetrical pair must have the same word-length as its twin, helpfully printed next to it in the clue list, in which it was not the entry that was to be replaced by a CE but a word or phrase in the definition. That was still tricky because until there were some crossing letters there was a strong element of guesswork and/or more playing with letter strings, but at least the enumeration was correct and the same for both halves of the pair. So 1a was going to be either SALMON or SOLEMN and as there was a 1d that meant that S at least could be put firmly in the top left corner.
The symmetry combined with a careful look at the clue numbering also meant that quite a bit of a likely grid pattern could be at least pencilled in with a bumper set of 1-11 in the top row. The puzzle was beginning to look solvable. SIMOOM fell into place at 1d, from the anagram SUMMAE (‘Treatises‘ in translation amuse Mozart (6)’, while Solomon’s twin in the bottom right corner was a PARSON from ‘Viceroy’s rule between Charles I and II for example (6)’ amusingly constructed from R(ule) in PA + SON and defined by VICAR from Viceroy. (After we had spent some time investigating a poor CLERIC.)
And there were another 21 pairs like that – what a feat of setting and what a challenge for the solver! But it did get easier as it went on with our eye in and crossing letters to help, and eventually a full grid was in place. We did note one ambiguity though. 22d ‘Melting unit for electrical safety primarily (4)’ was a gimme for FUSE (first letters), but a CE was needed for the 3-letter entry and we could see no way of working out for sure whether EFS or IFS was correct. The electronic Chambers lists EFS as the plural of EF for the name of the letter and IFS as an abbreviation as well the plural of IF (as in ‘ifs and buts’). We presume that either will be marked as correct.
Thankfully the endgame was crystal clear and a lovely PDM for us as both halves of Dash studied Jespersen on the GREAT VOWEL SHIFT back in the day and one even taught it to first-years at Oxford. It does of course have nothing to do with CEs, but was the systematic ‘raising’ (of the tongue height) of the pronunciation of long vowels in English in the period roughly between Chaucer and Shakespeare so that ‘time’ which was originally pronounced like modern ‘team’ became pronounced like modern ‘thyme’. (If you hear say an Irish person pronounce ‘meat’ rather like ‘mate’ you’re hearing a time-travelling survival of the old pronounciation.
That’s a rather dry topic and the puzzle was pretty dry too in the sense that we struggled at first to confirm Mozart’s membership of the Listener Oenophile Club, with a TEA URN much in evidence, but 19d came long just in time offering us a tot of rum or whisky, and 23a generously even invited us to dine out with the partnership, so ours will be a nice claret, thanks.