Myths about Mozart
By Warren Boroson
Was Mozart poisoned by Antonio Salieri, a rival composer—a rumor repeated in the Academy Award-winning (“Best Picture”) film, “Amadeus” (1984)? No.
Was he poisoned at all? No.
Was his body thrown into a pauper’s grave? No.
Did he die a pauper? Unrecognized and unheralded? No.
There are so damn many misconceptions about Mozart! There’s even an erudite 285-page book called “The Mozart Myths,” by William Stafford, published by the Stanford University Press in 1992. In this article, I’ve cribbed a lot from this excellent book.
One reason for the myths is that people like to embroider stories, make them more colorful and interesting and dramatic. So they exaggerate…and sometimes even fib. There’s a proverb among journalists: The facts kill many a good story. To put it another way: Good stories sometimes blithely ignore the facts.
Besides the temptation to goose up the truth, there are lots of honest disagreements about Mozart. One reason: Mozart did not have a scrupulously honest lifelong friend who wrote his recollections soon after Mozart’s death, when they were fresh. Mozart’s widow, Constanze, altered the facts to make herself look better. So did almost all of Mozart’s acquaintances. This isn’t unusual. Mahler’s wife, Alma, was such a liar that the phenomenon has been given a name: the Alma problem. And she was such a nutcase that she wouldn’t let Mahler’s music be performed at his funeral.
Rumors proliferate, especially when a famous person dies young. Think of all the rumors about the death of John F. Kennedy. One of my favorites came from the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald: She thought that Texas Gov. Connolly and the President got into an argument in their limousine and shot each other. Another time, she was asked: Did she really think her son was innocent and didn’t kill President Kennedy? I never said that, she replied. I never said he was perfect.
Beethoven had an acquaintance who wrote for newspapers — and liked to make things up. He wrote that Beethoven had told him that the beginning of the Fifth Symphony — dot dot dot dash — represents fate knocking at the door. So, another acquaintance of Beethoven’s said to him, I read that you said that the beginning of the Fifth Symphony represents fate knocking at the door. And Beethoven replied, I said WHAT? I said WHAT? And laughed and laughed.
A bounteous source of misinformation about Mozart is the film Amadeus — and we’ll see excerpts from it later on.
But first, the film did get something right. Mozart was a genius. And also a silly little kid.
Even his sister, Maria Anna (who was called Nannerl), said that “except for his music, he was a child.”
Once, while Mozart was playing the harpsichord for an aristocrat, a favorite cat of his came into the room…and Mozart stopped playing and followed the cat out of the room… — ”nor could we get him back for a considerable time.”
Another woman reported that Mozart, around 30 years old, had been improvising on the harpsichord in her presence, “only to break off suddenly and begin leaping over tables and chairs and meowing like a cat, and turn somersaults like an unruly boy.”
That someone can be an artistic genius and also a child is possibly the consequence of that person’s concentrating so much on art that he or she doesn’t mature. And as you know, Mozart’s father, Leopold, dragged him all around Europe to show off his precocity…. Michael Rabin was an extreme example of an artist who never matured.
Now, the movie Amadeus centers on the rivalry between Mozart and the supposedly pathologically jealous Salieri. There’s even the implication that Salieri, wearing a mask, commissioned Mozart to write a requiem — which Salieri would have claimed to have written himself, and have played at Mozart’s funeral. (Actually, a Count Walsegg-Stuppach commissioned the requiem to commemorate his recently deceased wife.)
Movies and other media sometimes take ridiculous liberties with the truth. Remember the film biography of Beethoven — where Beethoven is secretly in love with his brother’s wife? The woman he fought with in court over her son — the woman whom he contemptuously called the Queen of the Night? Remember that Verdi wrote an opera about Joan of Arc — in which she gets married and rides off into the sunset? How about Prokofiev’s ballet about Romeo and Juliet, where they don’t die? (OK, he wisely revised it.)
I think if you’re going to write something, even fiction, about something that actually happened you should try very hard to adhere to the truth.
Here’s what one critic has written (from the High Country Press) about “Amadeus”:
“If rivalry did exist between the two composers, it was not likely as intense as the film suggests, as evidenced by the concerts the two presented together. Salieri did not play nearly so prominent a role in Mozart’s life as the film suggests. Also, Salieri is portrayed in the film as an incompetent musician. Though his abilities paled in comparison to Mozart’s and are not remembered by history, he was a good musician and a respected composer during his time. The idea that Salieri poisoned Mozart does date back to his death, but is not founded in fact. Mozart’s cause of death is more widely believed to have been a fever that was epidemic at the time.”
By the way, the notion that Salieri poisoned Mozart…well, Mozart on his death-bed said he had been poisoned. Salieri, while he himself was dying and had gone crazy, said he had poisoned Mozart. In fact, Pushkin, the Russian playwright, had written a play (1830) conveying the notion that Salieri had poisoned Mozart, out of envy.
O where is justice when the sacred gift,
Immortal genius, comes not in reward
For toil, devotion, prayer, self-sacrifice –
But shines instead inside a madcap’s skull,
An idle hooligan’s?
--Pushkin
One critic, Neil Wenborn, writes in “Mozart” (1994) that “Mozart may have believed at one point that he had been poisoned, but there is not the slightest evidence that he was, or for that matter that Salieri — despite his self-accusatory deathbed ravings more than 30 years later — was in any way connected with his death....”
Salieri actually helped Mozart’s career and was in awe of his genius.
Well, if Salieri didn’t poison Mozart, who did? The Masons? No. Did he in effect commit suicide — by taking too much mercury for his syphilis? No. (He didn’t have syphilis.) Hmm. Who else might have done it? Oh, I know! The Jews! (General Ludendorff argued in 1926 that the Jews, along with the masons, had poisoned Mozart.)
But Mozart scholar William Stafford writes: “No anti-Semitic utterance by him is known to us. He had more contact with Jews than was usual, and his Jewish former landlord stood godfather to his first child.”
Stafford, spoilsport that he is, came to “a firm conclusion: Mozart died a natural death.”
Then there’s Mozart’s undisputed vulgarity.
Even in his early 20s, he wrote things that carry, to quote one Wenborn, “an embarrassing emphasis on bodily functions.”
But he shared his vulgarity with his parents and with many of his contemporaries. Scatalogical humor was not uncommon in those days. Mozart’s 56-year-old mother wrote to Leopold, her husband, from Munich: “Keep well, my love, Into your mouth your ass you’ll shove. I wish you goodnight, my dear, but first shit in your bed and make it burst.”
Well, as the French say, autres temps, autres moeurs.
Was he a womanizer? The film Amadeus implies that Mozart seduced a popular singer, whom Salieri had his eye on. Actually, Salieri himself had seduced her. Mozart was generally chaste — unlike so many other composers. He himself wrote that “he had too much horror and disgust, too much dread and fear of diseases…to fool around with whores and too much religion and honor ‘to seduce an innocent girl.’”
In fact, Mozart was his century’s equivlent of a member of the Tea Party. When Voltaire died, Mozart wrote: “that godless archrascal Voltaire has pegged out like a dog, like a beast! That is his reward.”
Was his wife Constanza an airhead, no help to him in his career?
To quote Wenborn, she “turned out to be a giddy and flirtacious girl, a bad manager, and no help at all to Mozart. But he loved her, and the marriage seems to have been happy….”
Was he poverty-stricken just before his death? He was deeply in debt, yet he and his wife employed their own domestic staff, including two live-in maids and a servant. His financial problems, says Wenborn, stemmed from his lavish lifestyle — he owned expensive furniture and an extensive wardrobe. William Stafford’s conclusion: “…Mozart was by no means poor.”
Did he die in obscurity, cruelly forgotten by just about all? At the time of his death, writes Wenborn, “he was by any standards a famous man, whose works were performed, studied and eulogized throughout Europe.” He continues: “The pauper’s grave is a myth, as are the rain and snowstorms that are said to have accompanied his body to its last resting place. He was given a third-class funeral…and the weather was unseasonably mlld.” (A third-class funeral was common.) And because cemetery space was scarce, headstones were not permitted. Writes Stafford, Mozart’s unceremonious burial was “normal” for that time. He was not “buried like a dog.”
Was he really a combination of a genius and an idiot, given to maniacal laughter, as in the film? Stafford writes: If you read his letters, you quickly recognize his intelligence. “…Mozart was a sophisticated man—certainly not the naïve child of legend….” He also concludes: “…he was a very strange and difficult man.”
Finally…did he really die “tragically” young? Some people believe that “He lived a short life but this was simply because he lived much faster than normal mortals…. He was fully matured as an artist by the age of nine…. It is difficult to see what more he could have achieved. His musical output in his 36 years was greater than Beethoven’s, and not much less than Bach’s or Handel’s….” Goethe said that Mozart “had lived his creative life, spent his vital energy, fulfilled his mission as an artist.”
But William Stafford has a different view. At the time of his death, he argues, Mozart was not an exhausted composer; he was vigorously embarking on new ventures. “There is,” he concludes, “no consolation for his early loss.”
We can be grateful, though, that he lived as long as he did — and wrote music that will be played and admired until the end of time.
Odds and Ends
He had trouble all his life, Neil Wenborn writes, because he had “a remarkable facility for rubbing people the wrong way.” Some have speculated that he was autistic. Or that, he had Tourette’s syndrome.
Mozart’s father, who had nurtured his career, became cool toward his son later in life, leaving him “a distant and increasingly embittered observer of the career he had launched so spectacularly on the world….”
He had a deformed left outer ear, completely lacking the “outer convolution.” So did his son.
He was five feet four.
Beethoven and others were offended by “Cosi fan tutte,” which conveyed the notion that women could not be trusted to be true to just one man.
Joseph Hayden, the great composer, told Mozart’s father: “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.”
During Mozart’s lifetime, his most popular opera was “The Abduction from the Seraglio.”
The man who wrote the librettos for “Don Giovanni,” “Magic Flute,” and “Cosi” was Lorenzo da Ponte, a wildly colorful fellow. He spent time as a grocer in New Jersey, as well as a priest. He was exiled from Venice for adultery. He was the first professor of the Italian language and literature at Columbia College in NYC. I myself graduated from Columbia College, but unfortunately da Ponte taught there a couple of years before I matriculated.
In the audience during the first performance of “Don Giovanni” may have been da Ponte’s friend, Casanova — the model for Don Giovanni.
Harold Schonberg wrote about Mozart: “He was the finest pianist and organist in Europe, and the finest conductor. Had he worked on it, he could also have been the best violinist. There was nothing in music he could not do better than anybody else.
“The little man from Salzburg was a miracle. More Protean than Bach, musically more aristocratic than Beethoven, he can be put forward as the most perfect, best equipped, and most natural musician the world has ever seen.”
