The marvel of Mozart?s letters | The Spectator
Companies, agencies, institutions, etc
chin,’
Idomeneo
Nannerl
Exsultate
Alleluia’
tobacco,’
People
Leopold Mozart
Wolfgang
Maria Anna
Lyons.’
Mozarts
Stanley Sadie
Composers’
Beethoven
Brahms
Maria Theresa
Bimperl
Linz
Emily Anderson
Robert Spaethling
Stewart Spencer
Mrs Thatcher
bore’
Sondheim
Lerner
Addio.’
Rauzzini
Constanze
Joseph
Rondo
Stadler
Groups
European
Empress
homo’
Physical locations
No matching tags
Places
Stick
Broadway
motet’
Locations
Milan
Lyons
Vienna
Augsburg
Nannerl
Munich
Salzburg
Events
the Great Composers
Summary
The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766 and as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (ten) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.Mozart’s letters deliver many such jolts — reminders that, however directly we might feel that Mozart’s music speaks to us, he’s not a man of our time. (Mrs Thatcher famously disapproved.)One advantage of Anderson’s edition (and Spencer’s 2006 translation) is that it includes letters from the rest of the Mozart family, and it’s clear that they were all at it — mother, father, daughter and son, all cheerfully potty-mouthing away. Addio.’ The ‘primo a homo’ was the castrato Rauzzini, and the ‘motet’ was Exsultate, jubilate K.165 — which he’d completed days earlier, and whose exuberant finale throws the single word ‘Alleluia’ every which way against the rhythm, just as Mozart chops and changes the syntax of that playful letter home.
As said here by Richard Bratby