It\u2019s 1771, you\u2019re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. \u2018I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,\u2019 wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (\u2018Nannerl\u2019), excitedly. \u2018They hang them just as they do in Lyons.\u2019 He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766, and, as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (10) and daughter (15) along to a hanging \u2018for a jolly treat one free afternoon\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mozart\u2019s letters deliver many such jolts \u2014 reminders that, however directly we might feel that Mozart\u2019s music speaks to us, he\u2019s not a man of our time. But for every shock of difference, there\u2019s a start of recognition. Composers\u2019 letters can make frustrating reading. Beethoven\u2019s are brusque, practical affairs. Brahms hides behind a humor as impenetrable as his beard. But with Mozart, you get the whole personality \u2014 candid, perceptive and irresistibly alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reading Mozart\u2019s correspondence is like being tugged by an enthusiastic, garrulous friend right into the green room of 18th-century European culture. The cast list extends from Empress Maria Theresa to the family dog Bimperl: Mozart is just as fascinated by both. One minute, he\u2019s dressed as Harlequin and dancing all night at the 1783 Vienna carnival. Next, he\u2019s talking shop with Dad (Leopold was a respected composer in his own right), or bitching about a mediocre singer or arrogant patron. Now he\u2019s arriving in Linz without a symphony in his luggage, and writing a new one overnight before getting back to the equally compelling business of lavatory humor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s probably the most notorious aspect of Mozart\u2019s letters: the filth. Quite how gamey they get varies with the translation. The classic English version \u2014 some 616 letters covering the period 1762 to 1791 \u2014 comes in three fat volumes, translated by Emily Anderson in 1938 in the best possible taste. More recent paperback selections by Robert Spaethling and Stewart Spencer are less reserved: \u2018I\u2019ll shit on your nose so it runs down your chin,\u2019 writes the 21-year-old Wolfgang to his cousin Maria in Augsburg, and if you\u2019ve seen Amadeus<\/em>, you\u2019ll know that there\u2019s plenty more where that came from. (Mrs Thatcher famously disapproved of the scatology.) One advantage of Anderson\u2019s edition (and Spencer\u2019s 2006 translation) is that it includes letters from the rest of the Mozart family, and it\u2019s clear that they were all at it \u2014 mother, father, daughter and son, all cheerfully potty-mouthing away. \u2018Stick your tongue up your crack,\u2019 Nannerl urges her brother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, in the background, we glimpse a concerto or an aria on the workbench. But surprisingly rarely. The exception comes in Munich in late 1780, when Wolfgang\u2019s letters to Leopold suddenly become a daily production diary for Idomeneo<\/em>. He coaches the singers: the castrato \u2018has to learn his part like a child\u2019. There\u2019s a new scene change, \u2018so I composed a short march for strings and oboes\u2019. Leopold sends a parcel from Salzburg with trumpet mutes and a fresh pair of stockings, but \u2018the ballet-master is an insufferable wind-bag and bore\u2019, and makes Wolfgang miss the mail coach. We\u2019re witnessing a man of the theater in his element: it\u2019s more like a Broadway memoir by Sondheim or Lerner than Lives of the Great Composers<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And occasionally, magically, it all joins up. Here he is in Milan a few days before his 17th birthday, writing gibberish to Nannerl: \u2018I for the primo a homo motet to make had tomorrow that performed will be. Well be to you I ask. Farewell. Addio.\u2019 The \u2018primo a homo\u2019 was the castrato Rauzzini, and the \u2018motet\u2019 was Exsultate, jubilate<\/em> K.165 \u2014 which Mozart had completed days earlier. Its exuberant finale throws the single word \u2018Alleluia\u2019 every which way against the rhythm, just as the boy chops and changes the syntax of that playful letter home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At moments like this, Mozart\u2019s life, personality and art are all of a piece. Almost our final glimpse of him is in October 1791, writing to his wife Constanze with no idea that he\u2019d be dead before Christmas. \u2018I played two games of billiards\u2026then I had Joseph fetch me some black coffee, with which I smoked a glorious pipe of tobacco,\u2019 he writes. \u2018Then I orchestrated almost the entire Rondo of the Stadler<\/em> concerto\u2019 \u2014 in other words, the Clarinet Concerto: the sensuous, bittersweet masterpiece that we\u2019re far too ready to call the swansong of a man who was actually enjoying life intensely. The marvel of Mozart\u2019s letters is that you don\u2019t need to know the music to experience that joy, though it\u2019s even more wonderful when you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n