Genius! We imagine the high ceilings of a drawing room in Versailles. Elegant nobles in many-layered dresses or white tights, lounging in every posture. One of the huge mirrors framed in gold—perhaps we are in the Hall of Mirrors itself!—shows the reflection of a young Mozart’s fingers upon the piano. Everyone is mesmerized. Not pictured: the chamber pot.
“The Presentation of the Young Mozart to Mme De Pompadour at Versailles in 1763.” Painting by Vicente De Paredes (color litho).
“Before I start writing to you, I have to go to the john,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart writes to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla (or, Bäsle) Mozart on December 3, 1777, “…Well, now, that’s over with! Ah!—now my heart feels so much lighter again!—it’s like a big stone is off my chest!”
And thus is established the governing metaphor of Mozart’s epistolary oeuvre to his dear cousin. Writing nonsense, according to the erstwhile composer, is like building a log cabin. When this is inevitably discovered by his admirers, it doesn’t always go over well. In fact, it’s led to some strange conclusions.
Mozart wrote the Bäsle letters between the Octobers of 1777 and 1781. In total, as scholar Robert Spaethling teaches us, there were twelve of these letters, of which nine are extant. Eight are drenched in scatalogical play. The exception is, in all likelihood, a sincere attempt to convince Bäsle that they need to stop engaging in the kind of sexual deviance described in the previous letters and instead concentrate on friendship. No doubt, the rest of the Mozart family supported this approach.
The simple wordplay of Mozart’s Bäsle letters reminds one of the well-known dada poem “Anna Blume” by Kurt Schwitters, and they are, artistically speaking, neither superior nor inferior to that piece of writing. Schwitters’s own translation of the playful poem begins:
Oh thou, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I love thine! Thou thee thee thine, I thine, thou mine, we? That (by the way) is beside the point!
Schwitters considered the work an anti-love poem, a parody of a love poem, and, one might as well say it, an example of a bad poem. Likewise, Mozart knew these letters were hardly works of art.
Mozart’s most famous letter to Bäsle—probably his most famous letter period—is overflowing with aural play of a haphazard, juvenile sort. Consider this:
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.
Ouch. The principle poetic technique of this letter is to add a nonsensical rhyming adjective to a word that would otherwise not need it. That’s it. More than a few musicologists have wrongly claimed that the letter demonstrates advanced poetics.
What’s more, the final third of this particular letter tells the gripping saga of a mysterious smell in Mozart’s chamber, the solving of which comes when he sticks his finger up his butt and confirms that it is, as the reader might expect, leftover fecal detritus. Genius indeed.
The fact also remains that Mozart tells Bäsle—in the letters themselves—that his musings are nothing but a steaming grumper.
…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! [charming!]—muck, suck!—love this stuff!—muck chuck and suck!—chuck muck and suck muck!
And this translation could have been much worse.
Because of this, I’m afraid I cannot agree with accomplished conductor Jane Glover, who writes in her book Mozart’s Women, “That the excitable and sexually aroused Wolfgang developed this practice to such startling proportions should, in truth, be no surprise, for it was no more than what he did when improvising with infinite brilliance and originality at the keyboard.”
Nope, not the same thing. Mozart’s occasional practice of composing intentionally bad poetry should not be equated with his lifelong commitment to composing consistently brilliant music. Not the same.
“My mind is made up: if I have to go, I go; but it all depends,” Mozart writes, “if I have the runs, I must run; and if I can’t hold it any longer, I’ll shit in my pants.” But he doesn’t. He writes a letter to Bäsle instead. Apparently, he holds the two activities in similar regard.
This was Mozart’s relationship with Bäsle in a nutshell. As he wrote to his father, “Indeed, we two get on extremely well, for, like myself, she is a bit of a scamp. We both laugh at everyone and have great fun.” Such is the level of seriousness in which Mozart held his correspondence with her.
The genteel reader may well be alarmed at the many, many instances of scatalogical humor in the letters. After all, How could he? But Mozart had no intention of immortalizing these playful verses to his cousin. In fact, publishing music wasn’t even common during Mozart’s life. It didn’t occur to him that anyone would be interested. It’s our culture’s obsession with “genius” that makes the letters seem significant to us in the first place.
“Afternoon Tea at the Temple.” Painting by Michel-Barthélémy Olivier (oil on canvas).
One peer-reviewed article from 1992 opens, “The surprising scatology found in Mozart’s letters has not been satisfactorily explained.” A fellow traveler, this one. Scholar Benjamin Simkin even charted the instances of the terms “shit, arse, muck, puddle (or piss), fart, arse holes, and ‘fondling and kissing, sexual fetish’.” At the risk of spoiling the reader’s own research, Simkin concludes that Mozart had Tourette’s syndrome.
The subject has come up countless times since, with scholarship on both sides. It certainly feeds a dual interest in our society—the “freak” as well as the “genius”—and their inevitable correlation. But it is repeatedly ignored by scholars that Mozart’s behavior was intentionally ridiculous, part of a playful act.
Some scholars have suggested that his scatological play reveals a deep sadness. Playful linguistic experimentation, especially in children, can be a response to sadness or trauma. I concede this point as a possibility, even an interesting one. Yet, following Paul Johnson, I believe the mythology of Mozart’s poverty and unhappiness belie what appears to have been a cheerful and fulfilling life.
Mozart occasionally uses the letters to practice his rusty French, despite not knowing whether Bäsle is able to read it. “I hope you have already begun to learn some? Well, now I don’t have enough space left to write anything sensible, besides to be always sensible gives you a Headache.” He doesn’t care about making sense.
One might expect a handful of these letters to at least make some reference to concert music. Well, one does:
Dearest, best most beautiful most enchanting, little bass or little Violoncello, so enraged by a worthless fellow Salsbourg, 10th of May 1709er blow into my rear.
Here, the maestro has manipulated the year (1709ni) to rhyme with (blass mir hint’ aini). He also wants to employ bässchen (“little bass”) as a nickname for Bäsle. These little linguistic tweaks allow him to suggest that Bäsle might play his anus as one would a trombone. Pretty heady stuff. In defense of Herr Mozart, a similar joke can be found in Dante, though one can hardly imagine him altering the year to pull it off.
We are collectively fascinated with Mozart’s Bäsle letters because they don’t mesh with our devotion of the concept of genius. With Mozart, it is all staged for us. Look at the painting of Michel-Barthélémy Olivier (above). The child prodigy sits upright at the piano in the drawing room. One can almost picture a halo above his head. This is the church of the genius.