LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Strange meta last week: a very simple mechanism, but concealed beneath several layers that made tricky work of spotting that mechanism in the first place.
Solvers were tasked with finding a famous European, past or present, which certainly narrowed things down. The theme entries were:
17-a [Common marsh bird] = AMERICAN BITTERN.
22-a [Where the Australian Open final is contested] = ROD LAVER ARENA. In case you missed the best play of this year’s Aussie Open, here it is. Federer involved of course, though not the hero. OK, just kidding, this was really the best play of the tournament.
29-a [All around the globe] = NEAR AND FAR.
41-a [Disney character voiced by Wilmer Valderrama] = HANDY MANNY. Not a Nosowsky reference, though he is handy if you need an excellent freestyle puzzle.
45-a [East River area] = SPANISH HARLEM.
55-a [Another name for pearl pasta] = ISRAELI COUSCOUS.
First layer of concealment: it’s not clear whether NEAR AND FAR and HANDY MANNY are even theme entries.
Second layer: those three nationalities (AMERICAN, SPANISH, ISRAELI) have nothing to do with the meta. Note that this wasn’t an intentional red herring: AMERICAN BITTERN and ISRAELI COUSCOUS are pretty much forced, and my options for Mahler were A RAGE IN HARLEM, HARLEM SHUFFLE and SPANISH HARLEM; the last was the one that happened to fit my grid. CANADA at 14-a and MEDUSA at 61-a didn’t hurt, either.
So where was the meta hiding? You needed to anagram one word in each of the six theme answers into the surname of a famous classical composer:
BITTERN = Benjamin BRITTEN
LAVER = Maurice RAVEL
NEAR = Thomas ARNE
HANDY = Joseph HAYDN
HARLEM = Gustav MAHLER
ISRAELI = Antonio SALIERI
The first letters of those composers’ names, emboldened above, spell out Johannes BRAHMS, who was our famous mystery European. Which brings us to our third layer of concealment: the six composers I used in the grid aren’t quite A-listers. Salieri but no Mozart, Beethoven or Bach. Which didn’t really matter since everyone knows Ravel, Haydn and Salieri, and every crossword solver has filled four squares with the surname of Thomas ARNE (a composer so crossword famous that I mentioned him in this article).
All this added up to Week 5 difficulty, with just 66 right answers submitted. Tyler Hinman was an exultant member of the 66:
YES YES YES YESSSSSSSSSSS. Dude, NASTY red herring.
cjablonski writes:
No joke, this was the hardest meta I’ve ever solved. Knowledge of the composers probably goes a long, long way. I probably put in 8 hours total
And Bri Nebulae says:
It was very hard to crack that one, esp. seeing Salieri. I was convinced Couscous had to be some obscure Romanian composer like Sucousco!
This week’s winner, whose name was chosen at random from the 66 correct answers received, is Joan Aufderhar of Fair Haven, N.J. In addition to a MGWCC pen, pencil and notepad set, Joan will also receive a signed copy of my new book Mental Floss Crosswords.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a French-born Nobel Prize winner. Submit your answer in the form on the left sidebar by Tuesday at noon ET. Note: the submissions form disappears from the site promptly at noon on Tuesday.
To print the puzzle out, click on the image below and hit “print” on your browser. To solve using Across Lite either solve on the applet below or download the free software here, then join the Google Group (1,904 members now!) here.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.