Robert Spaething's Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life is a vivid if inevitably one-sided biography/autobiography, written on his travels across Europe from an early age until his untimely death and helpfully annotated over 200 years later.Mozart is as incorrigible, lively and spirited as the play makes him out to be. From early on, the letters to his family are energetic and liberally laced with jokes about bottoms and related lavatorial fixations that even his mother joins in with. Imagine that. I'm not convinced that establishes him as a sufferer of Tourette's Syndrome but what it might suggest is a child-like disposition that might have contributed to is chronic struggle to find the best paid employment.
It isn't long before a contemporary is cited as having diagnosed that if Mozart had only half the musical talent but had been twice as good at business he would have done much better for himself.
Various nobility don't seem to have a vacancy whenever approached by the universally accepted most prodigious musical talent of his day (or virtually any other day). He is aware of rivals plotting against him, presumably defending their own positions, and that eventually includes Salieri in Vienna who is nonetheless noticed at a recital being overwhelmingly impressed by Mozart's latest compositions but the genius is reduced to offering his services as deputy to him for no pay whatsoever in the hope of inheriting the job eventually, which he isn't going to live long enough to do.
One advantage of the reading the book is following up compositions written for occasions or people, none of which turn out to be grater discoveries than the arias for Aloysia Weber, his major infatuation before he has to abandon that idea and marries her sister, Constanze. What a sublime album they make,
A turning point in the book comes after the tours with Leopold, then the tour with his mother due to Leopold being required in Salzburg by his employer on which Maria Anna dies and Mozart writes a letter ahead of the news, preparing Leoplod for the worst. He never intends to go back to Salzburg with its backward provinicialism and terrible musicians sand he doesn't like Paris much, or the French. While he never suffers a fool gladly, he is generous in his appreciation of friends and musicians he approves of and he finds great favour with the public, if not the employers, in Vienna. The Salzburg Tourist Board makes less of Mozart's feelings about his home town than the place makes of chocolates and liqueurs with his picture on the labels. But one notices that the infantile jokes diminish to nothing and are replaced by earnest entreatries for loans from Masonic friends in his last years in Vienna. He doesn't want to undersell himself and would rather take fewer good pupils than have less able ones in greater numbers but he pawns the furniture and sells compositions than he didn't want to and is borrowing to pay off the most pressing debts.
One is tempted to think it is something to do with his need of a manager, which might have been Leopold except Mozart was very much his own man, didn't do what he was told and in some way his behaviour marks a seminal point in the transition from creative artists being servants to being reverenced. Mozart was well aware of his own gift but his independent spirit cost him in a world that wasn't quite ready for the artist to decide for himself where he would work. Prince and George Michael found things more in their favour much later.
But however good a film and play Peter Schaffer made out of Amadeus, there is a darker story than the sinister machinations of Salieri imagined there. The Requiem was commissioned by Count Walsegg and Mozart died of 'complications arising from a chronic kidney ailment, acute rheumatic fever, and a streptococal infection'. But on the day of his funeral, one of his Masonic friends 'attempted to kill his wife', who may have been one of his pupils and committed suicide afterwards. So perhaps Schaffer let us off lightly with his portrait of a jealous, brooding Salieri undoing the outrageous boy wonder.
But the exuberance of Mozart represented there is all in the letters, too, and painfully underscored, as the music so often is (in direct comparison with Haydn's) with a sense of loss even before his own distressed last days. One can hardly blame Salzburg or Austria as a whole for trading on his name but he was always far more than the chocolate box figure as advertised on music boxes that play the Piano Sonata k.545 for you.
Saints, it turns out, were only ever those given honours for services to the Catholic church, however dubious some of their stories might now appear in our more sceptical times. If we need saints, we need to start a new list. One can find onself ending up where one began with the first record one ever bought. I think I'd start with Mozart.
