"Verdammter Schultheiss" snarl the benighted peasants in Carl Orff' s delicious folk-opera Der Mond, cursing the mayor who has sold the moon that used to light their way to the inn. They are, of course, archaic peasants, for in time a mayor became not a Schultheiss but a Schulze (or Schulz or Schultz). And Schulze became a family name that could, in the time of my youth be counted on--why, God only knows!--to evoke almost as much laughter as Brooklyn did. And maybe it did a long way back, for in Renaissance Germany the Schulzes, dis­covering in the new Humanism that praetor, "head man," was a close Latin equivalent, took to calling themselves by the highfalutin name of "Praetorius." Now there were lots of Schulzes, as you can well imagine, and a good many of them were musical, so that a man in my line of work has to be on his Praetorian guard when he encounters one of them.