Mozart’s God

In a glass case at Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg is a small wax doll. Its eyes look demurely downward, it wears a crown several times the size of its head, and it is clad in a richly embroidered garment that looks like nothing so much as a sumptuous eighteenth-century ball gown. This is the Loreto-Kindl, or Loreto Child: a replica of an ivory image of the infant Christ housed in Salzburg’s Loreto Church. Believed to have miraculous healing properties, the Loreto Child was (and is) an object of veneration to many Salzburg residents, including the Mozart family. When, in Paris in 1764, the eight-year-old Wolfgang fell sick, his father Leopold sent money back home for a Mass to be said at the shrine of the Child.

The little figure survives today as a museum exhibit in a very different kind of shrine: an unexpected glimpse of Mozart’s inner life, and for some visitors a slightly unsettling one. This isn’t the rational, thoroughly modern Mozart they thought they knew. It’s too early to say, of course, but it seems equally unlikely that it’s the Mozart we’ll see in the forthcoming Sky reboot of Amadeus—the 1984 film of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 stage play based on a playlet written in 1832 by Alexander Pushkin. We’re promised a Mozart who has been “playfully re-imagined”; Paul Bettany has been cast as Salieri and Will Sharpe (from The White Lotus) has been announced in the title role. It will, we’re assured, be “fresh, intimate and irreverent.”

That’s no great surprise in the year 2024, though the Mozart revealed in his music and letters is—in his own way—deeply reverent. In fairness to the creators of this new drama, it’s true that every era since 1791 has recreated Mozart in its own image. You might say that each generation gets the Mozart it deserves. In the spring of 2013, the Mozarteum in Salzburg mounted an exhibition at the city’s Mozart-Wohnhaus containing every documented portrait that is known to exist of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and quite a few with rather shakier credentials.

It was eye-opening in all sorts of ways. Who knew that the famous painting of a bewigged Mozart in a red coat dates from nearly thirty years after his death? One portrait whose provenance is unquestioned—the one painted by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange, and said by Mozart’s widow Constanze to be the best likeness—seemed almost drab by comparison: a small, half-finished image of a quizzical-looking man with bulging eyes, dun-colored hair, and a hint of an incipient double-chin.

But the most revealing part of the exhibition came in the final room, which collected posthumous images of Mozart in chronological order. A bust from the romantic 1830s had him looking poetic and pensive, cravat artfully tousled. Chillingly, the portrait used even today on the packaging of Mozartkugeln (Salzburg’s signature chocolate treat) shows Mozart firm-jawed, with icy blue eyes. Amadeus as Übermensch: It was introduced in the late 1930s, around the time of the Anschluss.

And then we got to the 1980s, and the video for Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus was playing on a permanent loop. This Mozart you’ll know. In fact, you can probably already hear Tom Hulce’s manic laugh, and picture the pink bouffant hairdo. This is still our Mozart: punk, iconoclast, and all-around bad boy, sticking it to the stiffs and gleefully subverting the establishment. He’s a recognizably modern rock star, self-assured and rebellious. And, by implication, irreligious—and possibly about to become even more so. It would be invidious to prejudge the new series. Undeniably, though, a dominant trend in recent TV and movie treatments of history is the untethering of the world they portray from any sense of a governing morality, let alone religion.

There’s been a Game-of-Thrones-ification of the world of period drama, whereby the violent values and sadistic pleasures of an imaginary world of dragons and ice kings are gleefully applied to any given era of actual human history. Prestige productions such as The Great, Versailles, and Royal Kill List flatter current sensibilities by presenting the (actually intensely Christian) Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a moral vacuum, a costumed sandbox where the half-repressed vices of our own age can run wild without consequence. Yes, I’m a little bit worried for Mozart—at least, for the Mozart who quietly revered a domestic image of the infant Christ.

It’s not that Mozart wasn’t mischievous and even defiant, or that the image of the artist as a porcelain figurine in a powdered wig wasn’t in need of challenge. Mozart’s long-running professional feud with his employer, Salzburg’s ruling Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo, is well documented, and it concluded with Mozart’s being manhandled off the premises by one of the archbishop’s staff. (“I hate the archbishop to madness,” Wolfgang wrote to his father—hardly Christian sentiments to express toward a successor of the apostles.)

The main evidence for the image of Mozart as potty mouth has long been found in his own letters, as well as works such as his canon Leck mich im Arsch K.231 (literally “Lick Me in the Ass”). In his preface to the published script of Amadeus, the director Peter Hall tells a story about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s visit to the original production at the National Theatre in London:

She was not pleased. In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul-mouthed. I said that Mozart’s letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour. . . . “I don’t think you heard what I said,” replied the Prime Minister. “He couldn’t have been like that.” I offered (and sent) a copy of Mozart’s letters to Number Ten the next day.

Savor Hall’s condescension: For Britain’s artistic bien-pensants, any mention of Thatcher ends the argument. But perhaps it’s not so simple, not quite so obviously a case of creative free spirits versus priggish conservatives. True, Mozart’s private correspondence is gloriously exuberant and candid; and yes, there are numerous instances of scatological and sexual humor. The question of whether such vulgarity was peculiar to Mozart is rarely asked. Until, that is, you read on into the correspondence of Mozart’s sister Nannerl, his father Leopold, and even his eminently respectable mother Anna Maria, and realize that they were all writing and joking in exactly the same way.

It seems that everyday humor in a small Germanic city-state in the second half of the eighteenth century was simply—well, smutty and lavatorial. The German poet Christian Schubart visited Salzburg between 1772 and 1777 and noted that “their folk songs are so comical and bawdy that one cannot listen to them without side-splitting laughter. The knockabout spirit shines through everywhere.” It wasn’t just Salzburg, either. The quodlibet with which J. S. Bach, in Leipzig, concluded his Goldberg Variations (1741) is built around two distinctly earthy folk songs, one of which has been interpreted as a joke about flatulence.

Is that sufficient to unlock an artist’s soul? In the twenty-first century it might well be; after all, when we’re not insisting that artists should echo our own tastes and prejudices, we’re angrily cutting them down to size. Mozart’s private life and language will surely prove tempting to the producers of the all-new Amadeus. Whether an artist like Mozart might embody something greater than the sum of his private gossip is not the sort of question that’s typically addressed in a high-budget, mass-market TV drama.

And yet Mozart’s religion informs his art on every level. Mozart was a lifelong Catholic, instructed in the faith by his father, who had been educated by Jesuits in Augsburg. His life spanned the American and French revolutions; the certainties of Leopold’s generation were under question and Mozart was certainly aware of those debates. But his faith was unflagging, and for every piece of evidence showing him at odds with the Church’s official hierarchy, there’s another showing a very personal but clearly profound belief in the tenets of Catholicism.

His fractious relationship with Colloredo, for example, was in part a personality clash (Colloredo could be authoritarian in his manner) but also a rejection of Colloredo’s reforms, which radically curtailed the scale and duration of liturgical music and indirectly threatened the livelihoods of Mozart’s colleagues and family. Colloredo’s reforms were well intentioned, but his Hirtenbrief (pastoral letter) of 1782 expressed his concerns in language that could hardly have endeared him to the musicians of his court: “Every good thought is driven out of the heart of the common people by the miserable fiddling; and horrible howling only invites stupidity and inattention.”

As early as 1776 Mozart had expressed his frustrations to his mentor, the Italian music theorist Padre Martini. Under Colloredo’s restrictions, he complained, “A mass with the whole Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Epistle sonata, the Offertory, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei must not last longer than three quarters of an hour.” (Note that Mozart’s “beloved and most esteemed” Martini was also a priest.)

Colloredo was not the whole Church, even in Salzburg, and the Mozarts also enjoyed a long and affectionate relationship with the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter’s, which operated outside of Colloredo’s jurisdiction. Wolfgang wrote numerous works for the Abbey—beginning with his Mass K.66 at the age of thirteen, and culminating in the stupendous unfinished Mass in C minor, K.427 of 1783, a work that, if completed, would have matched Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Bach’s B minor Mass in scale. The fact that it openly defied Colloredo’s strictures about the reduced role of sacred music pales beside the towering force and beauty with which it affirms the divine mysteries expressed in the text.

And so on. Whether he’s assuring his father that he would never settle in a Protestant country, or convincing the atheist Parisian philosophe Baron von Grimm to believe in miracles, religion is in the air Mozart breathes. He might not have signed his scores Laus Deo, as did his friend Joseph Haydn, but both Leopold and Wolfgang were convinced that his gift was God-given (“it would be impious to pretend otherwise,” commented Wolfgang).

So what of his later involvement in Freemasonry? The papal prohibition on the Craft was not promulgated in Vienna in Mozart’s lifetime, and nothing in Masonic principles stood between a Catholic of the period and his conscience. Mozart was certainly no secular liberal. He was in Paris when Voltaire died in May 1778: “That godless arch-villain Voltaire has pegged out like a dog, like a beast! That was his reward!” he wrote to Leopold. The savagery of his response can perhaps be excused by the fact that he was grieving after the sudden death of his own mother: “I felt such terrible pain, and cried and cried,” he wrote, in the darkest hour of his young life. “And yet God, in his mercy, bestowed upon me the grace I needed.”

There he is again: our all-too-human Mozart. And indeed, why pretend that he wasn’t a flawed, sinful, loveable, and life-affirming human being—albeit one whose music can seem, at times, to come from another sphere? The challenge for us, 233 years after all that was mortal of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was laid to rest in Vienna, is to reconcile those truths at a time when complexity comes a poor second, in public discourse, to polarized extremism.

Again, perhaps each era gets the Mozart it deserves. Nineteenth-century performers who wanted Don Giovanni to be a gothic melodrama about a free spirit in rebellion against God simply omitted outright the entire final scene of the opera, wherein the librettist Da Ponte (a defrocked priest—Mozart was truly catholic in his approach to talent) declares the moral of the tale and Mozart restores the universal order in a blaze of sunlit D major.

In the same period, though, it was also commonplace to dismiss Mozart’s sacred music as superficial—operatic writing applied without discrimination to religious texts. Recognizing the absurdity of that notion is as simple as listening to the Et incarnatus est of the C minor Mass and asking yourself which of Mozart’s operatic heroines could possibly have sung this music. Ilia? Countess Almaviva? Dorabella? Come on now, that’s just silly. This is “not just music at worship but music of worship, an exegesis of liturgy,” writes Hans Küng in Mozart: Traces of Transcendence, his masterly 1993 analysis of Mozart’s “Coronation Mass.”

For Küng, the sheer freedom of Mozart’s sacred music is made possible by a lifelong confidence of salvation—and with it, a worldview in which the ultimate triumph of light neither destroys nor cancels darkness, but rather makes all things whole. (Possibly that’s why Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute, in which Sarastro ultimately does not crush the Queen of the Night but helps her to her feet and escorts her into the daylight, feels so overwhelmingly moving in performance.) Mozart, observed the composer Ferruccio Busoni, “gives the answer with the question,” and Küng sees this as a specifically Catholic quality: “a belief in God, His providence and eternal life which for Mozart need not constantly be striven for in a strictly Lutheran way, in a constant struggle with your conscience.”

In that light, it’s sobering to reflect upon Mozart’s reduced standing in our current hierarchy of musical taste. His role as our preferred voice of the sublime (seemingly unchallenged as recently as his bicentenary year in 1991) has been supplanted since the new millennium by the Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach—a miracle-worker more in tune, perhaps, with an era at war with its own conscience. Another theologian, the Protestant Karl Barth, found his own formula to square that circle: “It may be that when the angels go about their task of praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart, and that then too our dear Lord listens with special pleasure.”

Fashions change, though a TV series probably won’t shift the dial very far. When we’re finally exhausted with wrestling, we could do worse than rediscover the delights, consolations, and (for sure) the challenges of—in Barth’s words—an artist whose “gravity soars, and whose lightness is infinitely grave.” When we do, we’ll find (Barth again) “heaven and earth, nature and man, comedy and tragedy, passion in all its forms and the most profound inner peace, the Virgin Mary and the demons; the church mass, the curious solemnity of the Freemasons, and the dance hall; ignorant and sophisticated people, cowards and heroes (genuine and bogus), the faithful and the faithless, aristocrats and peasants, Papageno and Sarastro.”

All this from an artist for whom “rain and sunshine fall on all”—the man with so many different faces, whose voice is always so recognizable, and so right. Mozart is still there for us. Whether we deserve him is another question.

Richard Bratby writes from Lichfield, England.

Image by Mateus2019, public domain. Image cropped.