Mozart's Difficult Life

"If their lives were exotic and strange, they would likely have gladly exchanged them for something a little more plain, maybe something a little more sane."--Neil Peart, Mission, 1988

I'm currently about 7/8ths of the way through a biography on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that was written by Marcia Davenport in the 1930's. It was originally my mother's book, bound as it was by a protective coat as only a library book could be. (She was a librarian the last twenty-plus years of her life; just as library books were bound, so to were a number of books in our house.) I remember her commenting to me that the Mozart depicted in the movie "Amadeus" was somewhat insulting to her, but on reading this particular biography, found it to be rather accurate. (For those that never saw the movie or the Broadway play, Mozart is depicted as a boorish, irresponsible, foppish dandy who just happened to possess perhaps the most singular musical talent in human history.) I guess Hollywood gets it right sometimes, or as a former business associate of mine once said: "Even the blind chicken finds the corn sometimes...."

Mozart was a sensation as a younger child, brought around to all the major royal and aristocratic courts throughout Europe by his "stage" father, Leopold. Leopold was an accomplished musician/composer in his own right, who's patron, Archbishop Sigismund, let him draw a salary even as he toured throughout Europe (and absent Sigismund's court) with his prodigy. Leopold was manipulative and political, though not in a terrible way, when it came to the talents of his song Wolfgang, as well as his daughter Nannerl, who was quite a minor prodigy in her own right. The family had to eat, and his kids were his meal ticket to a better life. Leopold dominated Wolfgang's life up 'til Wolfgang reached the age of 22, when Mozart broke away and married his wife Costanze, who Leopold disapproved of. In the end, the smooth political operations of Leopold did not transfer to his son Wolfgang, and so started an awful cycle of disappointments. Debts were incurred due to Mozart's poor money management (he could never say no to a friend's entreaty for a loan...ever) and high-life partying. He frequently offered unsolicited and boorish criticism to other musicians and composers. He succeeded in pissing off virtually the entire Viennese musical establishment, particularly the Italian composers who surrounded Emperor Joseph, who favored them. As a result, he had to scrape for every gig that came his way, writing music for dinner parties, weddings, funerals, and other non-state events. The Emperor Joseph once commented to Mozart that one of his pieces contained "too many notes". One of the few times he got a commission from the Emperor, to put "Le Figaro" on a Viennese stage, one of the court composers in the "inner circle" of Emperor Joseph either bribed or bullied (or both) the singers and musicians to deliberately play off key. Mozart freaked, complained to Joseph, and actually persuaded Joseph to order the musicians to play competently or they'd be out of a job in Vienna. His wife Costanze gave birth to four children that all died within six months to a year after birth. If the emotional traumas were not enough, the debts incurred for their medical care and subsequent burials put Mozart even more into the hole. The cycle of partying, grieving, scrambling for money, and performing would be carried on until his untimely death at age 35. Disregarded in Vienna during his lifetime by his ruler and his people (but certainly not in Europe as a whole) and composing for apathetic audiences, Mozart is now considered perhaps the greatest composer of them all; certainly he fully deserves to be considered one of the three greatest, along with Beethoven and JS Bach. Yet life never cut him any slack.

I struck up a conversation with a waitress at Fanelli's Cafe in Soho about six months ago. We started talking about music and she mentioned that Eminem was "a genius". I had to shake my head. Anyone think Eminem's music will be played two hundred fourteen years after his death in virtually every corner of the world?