Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
These are Mozart’s complete letters, with selected replies from his father and sister, and occasionally his friends, or his wife… They give a wonderful picture of real, everyday life in the 18th century. His letters are extremely playful and comic, and they also show the amazing development of somebody from a performing monkey to one of the greatest musicians who has ever lived.
The Letters of Mozart and His Family?
These are Mozart’s complete letters, with selected replies from his father and sister, and occasionally his friends, or his wife. Mozart was an infant prodigy, of course, who spent most of his early life on the road with his ambitious father Leopold, performing, so the earliest letters are mostly to his mother or sister. The first part of the book is letters from his father which are all entirely practical: about contracts and fees, and the success, how little Wolfi has done so well, and they went to see the Duke of this and that, and how Marie Antoinette gave him a snuffbox or whatever.
You see the first letter from Mozart at the age of 14, and it’s quite extraordinary really. It’s partly in Latin – he just loved language, and was very good at languages, and he wrote multilingual letters all his life. And some of the letters are in code: the Mozart family all wrote in code when they had something insulting to say about their employers, because all post was opened. Mozart wrote very long letters and, within the family, they’re increasingly playful and scatological – an awful lot about eating shit and sending people farts, and all that sort of thing.
A very scatological family?
I think people in the 18th century were just much more down to earth. The letters are incredibly entertaining, and give a wonderful picture of real, everyday life in the 18th century. His letters are extremely playful and comic, and they also show the amazing development of somebody from a performing monkey to one of the greatest musicians who’s ever lived, how he was able to overcome what was almost child abuse – because he really was exploited by his father for commercial ends. I mean he went along with it, but he wasn’t to know any better at the age of six. And he did somehow transcend this and become a great musician, rather like Beethoven transcended deafness and used it to become greater. But I think there are very few like him, because it’s by definition such a shallow thing to be an infant prodigy.
How does he deal with all the pressures from his father?
Well, by being a good little boy. Once he married there were big problems because his father was a control freak – he wrote the book on the art of violin playing, which is still used. But what is fascinating is, rather as Bach was not a success in external terms, Mozart went from Salzburg to settle in Vienna (against the wishes of his father), and in worldly career terms he failed, because he didn’t get the jobs that, for example, Salieri and other people got. I suspect that was because he was very impatient with people. One of the things that comes out of the letters is his amazing ability to tease and mock and take the piss out of people. Which does not endear you to bureaucrats. The other thing about Mozart is he was wonderfully open about sex. In a late letter to his wife he writes, ‘Arrange your dear sweet nest very daintily, for my little fellow deserves it. He has really behaved himself very well and is only longing to possess your sweetest and…’ that’s been cut out, probably by his widow. He goes on: ‘Just picture to yourself that rascal. As I write, he crawls on to the table and looks at me questioningly. I, however, box his ears properly.’ So they were very close, he and his wife, and it’s very touching, I find.
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Giles Swayne is a British composer, best known for his monumental choral pieces and his interest in African musical culture. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Harrison Birtwistle and at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen. In 1980 his choral work Cry, for 28 amplified voices, was premiered by the BBC Singers under John Poole. Hailed as a landmark, it has since been performed twice at the Proms and many times worldwide. In 1981, Swayne visited Senegal to record the music of the Jola people of Casamance. These recordings are now in the British Library. From 1990 to 1996 he lived in the Akuapem Hills in eastern Ghana. He now lives in London and is Composer-in-residence at Clare College, Cambridge. He is currently working on an open-ended series of bagatelles for piano, and a choral setting of a poem. ‘The thing about music, like the arts, is that there’s an extraordinary dichotomy between the art and the career,’ he says. ‘You can have people who are really extremely mediocre with huge careers, and you can have people who are wonderfully good, who explore their art in great depth, and actually don’t have wonderful careers. Bach was one of those.’
