Programs · Episode

Mozart – What the Letters Show

Aired: Monday, April 2, 2018 @ 9:00 am
Hosted by Frank Dominguez

If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play that it’s based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of diddling idiot who just happened to be really good at writing music. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.

Full Episode:

If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play that it’s based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of diddling idiot who just happened to be really good at writing music. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.  Read a collection of Mozart’s letters and you’d discover a person who is serious, articulate, witty, and perceptive.  Someone who writes beautifully and who can make jokes, sometimes very dirty jokes it’s true, in at least three different languages.

Mozart’s native language was German but he spoke Italian and French quite well and his Latin was apparently excellent. The letters also show that Mozart was a keen and skilled observer of human nature, which should come as no surprise when we think about the wonderful and complex characters in his operas. He was also an expert, and a very funny one, when it came to puncturing pretentions, even when the pretentions he was puncturing belonged to a person of exalted social status.  

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