Salzburg finds new Mozart letter

Salzburg finds new Mozart letter

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norman lebrecht

April 17, 2020

Not much else is happening in the town, so the Mozarteum flushed out an unknown letter from Mozart to his wife, Constanze, dated April 1789.

In it, Mozart tells his ‘dearest, most treasured little wife!’ that a new opera commission from Prague is ‘almost in the bag’ and that the King of Prussia wants to see him in Berlin.

Neither of these expectations were realised.

It’s not a very revealing letter.

 

Comments

  • Mike_T says:

    Probably due to its minuscule size…

    More revealing is the absence of earlier news which has been ‘disappeared’

    Though aircraft are grounded, perhaps injunctions are still flying? 😉

  • Bostin'Symph says:

    It’s still a wonderful discovery. And poignant that WAM’s expectations weren’t met.

  • HugoPreuss says:

    Too bad. Imagine another Prague opera, preferably with Da Ponte writing the libretto…

  • Roy G. Biv says:

    That’s not how history really works anyways, Its not one grand revelation but rather a series of small evidence compiled over time that gives a picture of the man, the times, and the music. You sir are a terrible commentator and an even worse historian. A new letter is an incredible find, even if you’re too blind to see it!

  • Nijinsky says:

    I don’t know what one can say about this.

    And I wonder if I say anything at all whether it’s anything but thought of as crazy. Or even some sign of dangerously damaging to accepted norms.

    Somehow, I don’t think that harboring yet another relic of what’s now gone and exploitable is going to help any artist that truly has something to say beyond the fashions of this time. The only reason there is at all any fuss about “Mozart.” Other than to avoid such “institutions,” be they animate or not, I question whether it does anything for a true artist. Hopefully that it is possible to simply be yourself against all odds still somehow comes through, like the miracles happening every moment allowing human experience to give time meaning, although mostly no one cares to notice for fear of being seen as crazy.

    A man that during his last years, because he had become a mason and wasn’t Catholic anymore, wasn’t allowed to have societal gatherings, concerts, the real reason why he had stopped writing concertos and giving his own concerts of them. Consequently anything that might point out such oppression has been hidden. And you’ll read about it much less even than how much the unhealthy food industry is responsible for more deaths than any virus that’s ever been around (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and then aiding viruses and other agents by compromising the immune system), and that doesn’t include starvation when there’s food readily available but the economic system won’t get the money their games might out of it, and is often destroyed.

    A letter to his wife, the woman that destroyed many of his letters, and why would she?
    The woman who dropped his death mask.
    The woman who, because her husband on his deathbed said that he had been poisoned by aquato fana, started a gossip about that, giving little “concerts” and created such a cloud of tabloid style talk about it that Salieri, having lost his mind actually thought he had poisoned Mozart during his last years in an asylum.
    And this during that time was because there was such talk about her having poisoned her husband.
    Oh, and she was “Catholic,” although that hardly could be Christian, I think.

    In fact this idolatry of Mozart is a bit too much like the “Christian” church’s adoration of their “savior” who they make out to be homophobic, against any kind of premarital love, against birth control, and interested in waging a war against the infidel or Satan himself, some metaphysical entity excusing all of their hostility against who knows what (being human?)….

    And maybe being human, simply that, is also food, something no one could ever destroy, because it’s spiritual and remains exactly that.

  • John Borstlap says:

    One of the more interesting letters by Mozart is the one posthumously written and published, where he complains about the biographies written about him.

  • fflambeau says:

    Mozart was right to leave Salzburg: that was his judgment of them.

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