Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In the autumn of 1777 Mozart, twenty-one, passes through Augsburg on the journey to Paris and truly gets to know, for the first time as an adult, his cousin Maria Anna Thekla, daughter of Leopold’s brother. She is nineteen; in the family they call her the Bäsle, the little cousin. An understanding springs up between the two at once, made of laughter and complicity; when he leaves, a correspondence begins that would become the most embarrassing problem in Mozart philology.
The letters to the Bäsle, the ten or so that survive, written between 1777 and 1781, are in fact stuffed with scatological wordplay: cascading rhymes, nonsense, bodily allusions of every calibre, with a verbal fantasy that turns syntax inside out like a sock. For the nineteenth century, which was building the marble Mozart, those pages were simply unpublishable: the first editions of the correspondence cut them, summarized them, chastened them with dots. One of the raciest ended up in the private collection of Stefan Zweig, who spoke of it as a document to be handled with gloves; the full text of the corpus reached print only well into the twentieth century. A solid century and more of editorial censorship, to protect a genius from his own sense of humour.
The point, however, is not gossip: it is the context, which research has patiently restored. That kind of bodily humour was common currency in eighteenth-century German popular culture, and in the Mozart family it circulated in every direction: traces turn up in the mother’s letters, and Wolfgang’s catalogue contains convivial canons on texts that a modern programme note hesitates to translate, starting with the famous K 231. It was not the secret deviation of a genius: it was the comic register of an environment, an era and a city, practised by a young man who in the same weeks was writing, with the same pen, pages of aching tenderness. The Bäsle, moreover, was no epistolary ghost: the two saw each other again, and the biographical tradition gives her a real place in the affections of those years.
The lesson concerns us, not him. Every era fabricates the Mozart it needs: the nineteenth century removed the unseemly letters to have the saint, the twentieth waved them about to have the rebel, and the cinema built a famous laugh on top. The documents, read whole, give back something simpler and rarer: a complete young man, able to keep cheerful vulgarity and the sublime in the same drawer without either soiling the other. Whoever is scandalized by the letters to the Bäsle, and whoever uses them to cut him down to size, makes the same mistake in two directions: confusing the man with the monument. The monument, as we know, now and then ended up in the lock-up too: and that is why he keeps interesting us more than the marble.