Mozart: The Man Revealed Page 14

  ‘Well now, so you are gone from Salzburg for good, are you?’

  ‘Yes, Your Highness, for good.’

  ‘But why? Did you have a quarrel with [Archbishop Colloredo]?’

  ‘Not at all, Your Highness, I only requested permission to travel, but he refused it. So I was forced to take this step; although I had wanted to leave anyway for quite some time. Salzbourg [sic] is no place for me. No, absolutely not!’

  ‘My god, what a young Man! but your father is still in Salzbourg?’

  Wolfgang then lays out his credentials, in a way he would be able to do only face to face. It is all or nothing.

  ‘Yes, Your Highness, and he too throws himself most humbly, Etc. I have been to Italy Three Times, have written 3 operas, I am a member of the accademie of Bologna, I had to take a Test at which many maestri had to work and sweat 4 to 5 hours, but I did it in one hour. That may serve as proof that I am able to serve at any court. But my one and only wish is to serve Your Highness, who himself is a great – ‘

  ‘But my dear child, there is no vacancy. I am sorry, if only there were a vacancy.’

  ‘I can assure Your Highness, I would bring great Honor to Munich.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s of no use; there just isn’t any vacancy.’

  That is the conversation, as Wolfgang described it verbatim in the letter. He leaves the most galling bit to the end. As the elector uttered those final words – there just isn’t any vacancy – he was already walking away. Wolfgang commended himself to the elector’s good graces, in effect addressing his back.

  Given that he was relaying the conversation to his father, thereby wanting it to be clear he had done his very best against an implacable elector, it is possible there is an exaggeration or two in there. Maybe the elector wasn’t quite so dismissive; maybe he didn’t walk away as he spoke those last words. But it is impossible to read the letter without gaining the impression that, to some degree or other, Wolfgang was not just rejected, but humiliated.

  One element of the conversation is worth highlighting. It is clear that Maximilian, royalty though he was, had no desire to do anything that might offend Archbishop Colloredo, which would certainly be the case if he gave employment to a musician the Archbishop had sacked (even if Wolfgang denied that was the case). By insulting Salzburg, Wolfgang had done himself no favours. Colloredo really was a powerful man, and his influence reached Munich.

  All was not entirely lost. Wolfgang wrote to his father that a scheme had been proposed, whereby ten musical connoisseurs would pay him five gulden each a month to compose and perform new music, amounting to 600 gulden a year, which could probably be augmented with other work to 800. Was that not more than the family was earning in Salzburg?

  Leopold was having none of it. Who were these philanthropists, and how could they be relied on to pay five gulden a month? What exactly would they expect in return? How long would Wolfgang have to wait in Munich to see if the scheme was practicable?

  ‘If [the arrangement] cannot be made at once,’ Leopold, ever controlling and in charge, wrote, ‘then you simply must not lounge about, use up your money and waste your time.’

  Leopold had finally come to terms with the incontrovertible fact that Wolfgang was not going to secure a position at the Munich court. He complained that Wolfgang and his mother had already stayed too long there (almost three weeks), and spent too much money for no return. He ordered them to move on to the next destination, the city of his birth, Augsburg.

  There is some delightful banter in the last letter Wolfgang wrote from Munich, just before departure. Anna Maria writes that she is busy packing and that she has to do it all by herself, since ‘Wolfgang is not able to help me in the slightest.’24

  “Leopold had finally come to terms with the fact that Wolfgang was not going to secure a position at the Munich court.”

  Wolfgang – and you can see the mischievous smile on his face as he writes this, teasing his mother at the same time, who no doubt feigned indignation – described how he and his mother were invited out to coffee, but she, instead of coffee, drank two bottles of Tyrolean wine.

  Anna Maria, probably snatching the pen out of Wolfgang’s hand, writes graphically about the arduous task of packing. ‘I am sweating so much the water is running down my face with all this packing. The devil take all this travelling. I feel like shoving my feet into my mouth, that’s how tired I am.’

  Like mother, like son. The two left Munich at noon on 11 October 1777, and arrived in Augsburg at nine o’clock on the same evening.

  The visit to Augsburg, an exception on the tour, was not to seek employment. There was no court there that could offer Wolfgang a job. It was, though, on a direct route to Mannheim, the next scheduled stop, which most certainly did have a court, and a very musical one at that.

  Augsburg was nevertheless a cultural city, home to many musicians and opera singers, and Wolfgang made contact with many of them. But he did not take to the place, or its aristocratic inhabitants.

  He was taken to a café (Cofféhaus), where as he entered he thought he would be blown backward from all ‘the stink and smoke of Tobacco’, and might as well have been in Turkey. And the aristocrats to whom he was introduced? ‘A goodly number of high Nobility, the Duchess Kickass, the Countess Pisshappy, also the Princess Smellshit.’*

  He gave two public performances, which were well received, but it is a revealing insight into his character that he describes his own playing in mundane terms: ‘I took a theme for a walk and returned it assbackwards [arschling].’

  The main purpose of the stay in Augsburg was to visit family. Leopold’s brother Franz Alois, who continued the family tradition of bookbinding, lived there with his wife and daughter.

  That daughter, Maria Anna Thekla, has a deserved place in any biography of her cousin Wolfgang. She is always accorded a mention, and I use the word ‘mention’ advisedly. That is very often all she gets, usually couched in embarrassed turns of phrase, a reluctance to delve too deeply, a sense of ‘How could a musical genius such as Mozart allow himself to behave in such base ways with this young woman?’

  Maria Anna was one year and eight months younger than Wolfgang, and they shared a single, and very powerful, characteristic. Both had strong sexual impulses, and swiftly discovered this in each other.

  Once discovered, they indulged it. We know this from a series of letters Wolfgang wrote to her after he and his mother had left Augsburg. He wrote twelve in the four-year period between October 1777 and October 1781, nine of which have survived. It is a miracle – nothing short of it – that these nine have survived. There were serious moves in the nineteenth century to have them destroyed, on the basis that they sullied the reputation of this purest of geniuses.

  They were not published in full until 1938, even then heavily expurgated. Not until the 1980s were they translated as closely into English as possible, given the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of Wolfgang’s writing.

  The letters are about as intimate and sexually charged as it is possible for letters to be. There are indirect sexual allusions, and positively direct ones. There are puns, jokes and declarations of love.

  Most striking of all – and what has stunned biographers and Mozart admirers ever since – is the abundance of toilet humour. We have already seen examples of this in Wolfgang’s earlier letters home. Now they reach whole new heights (or maybe depths). To call them disgusting, by standards of his day and ours too, would be an understatement.

  Sadly none of his cousin’s letters have survived, but it is clear from Wolfgang’s wording that she responded totally in kind. There is no other way of putting it, other than to use modern vernacular and say the two of them loved ‘talking dirty’ together.

  Can we state that it was with his cousin Wolfgang lost his virginity? We cannot, given that he did not confirm it definitively in any of the letters. In fact, as we shall see from a later letter to his father, he explicitly denies his father’s accusation that the two have had sex
ual relations. But, as I have said before, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

  I shall lay out the facts as we know them, and then draw a conclusion. If I am truly to present Mozart, the man revealed, then this relationship deserves to be explored closely and in detail. And what an extraordinary insight it gives us into this remarkable young man!

  * Adio ben mio leb gesund / Reck den arsch zum mund / ich winsch ein guete nacht / scheiss ins beth das Kracht.

  * Duchesse arschbömerl’, gräfin brunzgern’, fürstin riechzumtreck.

  Maria Anna Mozart, Wolfgang’s first cousin, is known to history as Bäsle, or the Bäsle, from the Swabian word for ‘little female cousin’, the term by which Wolfgang most often refers to her.

  She had just turned nineteen years of age when Wolfgang and his mother arrived in Augsburg. They stayed at the Zum weissen Lamm (‘The White Lamb’), which was just a few steps from the Mozarts’ house in the Jesuitengasse, behind the cathedral. The two branches of the family were soon united.

  There is a pencil drawing of Bäsle, actually a self-portrait, done at the time of her cousin’s visit. It shows a pretty, pert, even flirtatious face, with wide eyes and sensuously shaped lips. The upper lip is finely drawn in the perfect shape of a Cupid’s bow.

  Wolfgang and Bäsle, it is clear from the letters that followed, spent a lot of time in each other’s company, and Wolfgang’s letters leave us in no doubt as to the sort of activity they indulged in.

  Before we come to that, though, there were musical matters to attend to. Even with these, there was fun to be had. Wolfgang went to see the piano-maker Johann Andreas Stein,* and Bäsle and his mother went with him.

  There, to Stein’s surprise, Wolfgang performed on an organ with as much accomplishment as he had shown on the piano. Afterwards they went into a room where a certain Pater Emilian, ‘a conceited ass and simpleminded clerical wag’, as Wolfgang described him, was waiting.

  Wolfgang writes to his father that this man tried to flirt with Bäsle, ‘but she instead had her fun with him’. The man then got tipsy very quickly. He sang a canon and asked Wolfgang to sing along with him.

  Wolfgang excused himself, saying nature had not endowed him with the gift of carrying a tune(!). ‘That doesn’t matter,’ the man said, and started singing. When it was Wolfgang’s turn to enter, instead of singing the proper text, he sang, ‘P.E., oh you prick, why don’t you kiss my ass.’

  Wolfgang says he sang it quietly so only Bäsle would hear, and afterwards ‘we were laughing for half an hour’. The unfortunate man then said he would like to discuss composition with Wolfgang. ‘Well,’ wrote Wolfgang, ‘I said that would be a very short discussion. Swallow that, you imbecile!’

  Even allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration, Wolfgang obviously taunted the man to a degree, pricking his pomposity. And you can just see Wolfgang and his cousin doubled up with laughter afterwards.

  Five days after leaving Augsburg, Wolfgang wrote a short letter to Bäsle asking about some music that was due to be sent to him. But he begins with the enigmatic line: ‘That’s so strange! I’m supposed to write something sensible, but nothing sensible comes to my mind.’

  I imagine his mother was aware of the shenanigans he and his cousin had got up to in Augsburg, and told him not to write anything silly. A few lines later, even more enigmatically, he writes, ‘Don’t forget your Promise. I certainly won’t forget mine.’

  Then: ‘Very soon I’ll write you a letter all in French, which you can have yourself translated by the Postmaster.’ That letter will come shortly, and it would have made the postmaster blush.

  Five days later another letter to Bäsle, and we now have a very different Wolfgang. The letter is long, and works properly only in the original German. It is full of internal rhymes, synonyms, echo effects, and extremely down-to-earth language.*

  The first paragraph alone gives a flavour of the convoluted humour, with a translation trying as far as possible to render the sexual puns and rhymes into English:

  Dearest cozz buzz!

  I have received reprieved your highly esteemed writing biting, and I have noted doted that my uncle garfuncle, my aunt slant, and you too, are all well mell. We, too, thank god, are in good fettle kettle. Today I got the letter setter from my Papa Haha safely into my paws claws. I hope you too have gotten rotten my note quote that I wrote to you from Mannheim. So much the better, better the much so!

  The letter continues in the same vein, with more sexual puns and rhymes. Then, after a promise to send Bäsle his portrait, as she has asked, he writes this extraordinary rhyme:

  Oui, by the love of my skin,

  I shit on your nose,

  so it runs down your chin.

  Two paragraphs further down, the sort of scatological language we have encountered before from Wolfgang, but the sentence ends with very intimate words:

  I now wish you a good night, shit in your bed with all your might, sleep with peace on your mind, and try to kiss your own behind … Oh my ass burns like fire! what on earth is the meaning of this! – maybe muck wants to come out? yes, yes, muck, I know you, see you, taste you –

  The letter rambles on, largely nonsensically, with words seeming to pour from his pen meaninglessly and at random. He ends the letter with his crudest piece of humour to date:

  Wherever I go it stinks, when I look out the window, the smell goes away, when I turn my head back to the room, the smell comes back – finally My Mama says to me: I bet you let one go? – I don’t think so, Mama. yes, yes, I’m quite certain, I put it to the test, stick my finger in my ass, then put it to my nose, and … Mama was right! Now farewell, I kiss you 10,000 times, and I remain as always your

  old young Sauschwanz

  Wolfgang Amadé Rosenkranz

  Sauschwanz means ‘pig’s tail’, but schwanz is also German slang for ‘penis’, so Sauschwanz can also mean ‘pig’s dick’.

  Eight days later, Wolfgang again writes to Bäsle from Mannheim. After more nonsensical wordplay, he tells Bäsle how much he is missing her, then comes this:

  Now I have been shitting for nearly 22 years out of the same old hole and yet it’s not torn a whit! – although I used it so often to shit – and then chewed off the muck bit by bit.

  It seems as if the dirty talk is becoming dirtier and more extreme, yet one cannot fail to admire the lengths Wolfgang has gone to in order to make it rhyme. To deny there is any sexual excitement in this seems to me to be folly, even given the coarse humour we know to exist in the Mozart family, and which was prevalent too in eighteenth-century Bavaria.

  It has to be the case that both Wolfgang and Bäsle were mutually excited by such talk. Another similar sentence follows, immediately succeeded by an unexpected declaration of love:

  Now I must close because I am not dressed yet, and we’ll be eating soon so that afterward we can go and shit again. Do go on loving me, as I love you, then we’ll never stop loving each other.

  From Mannheim on 3 December there is more of the same, before a sentence in which he seems to be reassuring Bäsle he has remained faithful to her:

  My mind is made up: if I have to go, I go. But it all depends. If I have the runs, I must run; and if I can’t hold it any longer, I’ll shit in my pants … A propos, I have not taken off my pants since I left Augsburg – except at night before going to bed.

  And three months later:

  If I have already left this place, instead of a letter I’ll get muck in my face. muck! – muck! – oh muck! – o sweet word! – muck! – chuck! That’s good too! – muck, chuck! – muck! – suck – oh charmante! – muck, suck! – love this stuff! – muck, chuck and suck! – chuck muck and suck muck! – now let’s talk about something else …

  After this outpouring he moves on to more mundane matters. Wolfgang is obviously having fun, but is he having more than that? Is he referring in these letters to activities he and his cousin have indulged in, or is it fantasy? And if it is fantasy, how much is fantasy?

  Of c
ourse we cannot be 100 per cent sure either way, but to give an indication of how divided the world of musicological academia is on the subject, I shall give just a couple of examples.

  At the end of that last letter from which I quoted, Wolfgang writes:

  Whoever doesn’t believe me, can kiss my rear end, from now until eternity, or until I regain my sanity, in which case he will have to lick and lick, and I must worry myself quite sick that there won’t be sufficient muck and he won’t have enough to suck, adieu Bäsle!

  The American musicologist and Mozart biographer Maynard Solomon sees this as a reference to oral sex. He concludes, along with the German musicologist and Mozart biographer Wolfgang Hildesheimer, that Wolfgang and Bäsle had a full sexual relationship.

  “I believe that the obviously more experienced Bäsle initiated Wolfgang into the joys of sex.”

  Robert Gutman, American Mozart biographer, disputes this interpretation. His conclusion is that Wolfgang sought release in this safe form of love play, and held back from a complete sexual relationship until he married.25

  One sentence settles it for me. It comes in the letter of 13 November 1777. This is where Wolfgang switches into French. He concludes the letter with this sentence:

  Je vous baise vos mains, votre visage, vos genoux et votre ——, afin, tout ce que vous me permettes [sic] de baiser.

  This could translate as: ‘I kiss your hands, your face, your knees and your ——, in fact everything that you allow me to kiss.’ But ‘baiser’ has a double meaning; as well as meaning ‘to kiss’, it is also slang for ‘to fuck’. If we conflate Mozart’s sentence to: ‘Je vous baise votre ——’ it is more than a double entendre; it is blatant. I am certain Mozart knew exactly what he was saying when he wrote that.