Forget 'Amadeus': Mozart revealed
'MOZART! WHAT a radiance streams from the name! Bright and pure as the light of the sun, Mozart's music greets us. We pronounce his name and behold! The youthful artist is before us -- the merry, lighthearted smile upon his features, which belongs only to true and naive genius."These are the opening words of "Mozart: the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words," published in 1905 by Friedrich Kerst.
And it gets worse. Kerst continues: "Mozart was a Child of the Sun. Filled with a humor truly divine, he strolled unconstrainedly through a multitude of cares. Music was his talisman, his magic flute with which he could exorcise all the petty terrors that beset him."
What appalling balderdash -- sentimental and plain wrong. It's embarrassing merely to copy that out. But given that the Child of the Sun turns 250 today, be prepared for similar twaddle this year.
More nonsense has been written about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart than almost any historical figure except Jesus Christ. Plenty made its way into film too, in the outrageously inaccurate "Amadeus" (1984), which fixed Mozart in the popular imagination as an uncouth idiot savant, at once genius and scatological boor -- and at the same time unleashed a tidal wave of interest in his music.
Myths abounded about Mozart from the very start. Within a month of his death in December 1791 (at age 35), a Berlin paper published a rumor that he had been poisoned. Another suggestion was that he died from poverty because the jealous court composer Antonio Salieri deprived him of work. Some suggest he died for lack of tact -- certainly, he had little gift for saying the right thing to influential people. And it's true that he made many enemies.
But when he died, it was from rheumatic fever or heart failure, not poison or poverty. He was far from a pauper. Certainly, he had debts, but his fortunes had turned up again after several bad years owing to war with the Ottomans, recession and the death of the music-loving Hapsburg emperor, Joseph II.
The fictitious Mozart was introduced to the world by the first biography, Friedrich Schlichtegroll's "Nekrolog" of 1793. This collection of anecdotes, bequeathed to posterity the myth of Mozart the eternal child who married unsuitably and against his father's will, who was unable to manage money and lived in chaos.
