Opera 101 Part II

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART II

Wolfgang Amaeus Mozart

The Magic Flute

Jacque Offenach

The Tales of Hoffmann

Giacomo Puccini

La Bohème

Tosca

Madama Butterfly

Turandot

Johann Strauss

Die Fledermaus.

Born: The youngest of Leopold and Anna Maria [nee Pertl] Mozarts’ seven children was born on January 27, 1756, and christened Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, without an Amadeus in sight. At least until July 8, 1770 when the 14-year-old was made a Knight of the Order of the Golden Spur by Pope Clement XIV for having, from earliest youth distinguished himself in the sweetest fashion in playing the cembalo. But, as the Greek and Roman Churches were still feuding over that single word in the liturgy that separated them in the first place — filioque — [meaning, ‘the Son’], the new knight’s paperwork was sanitized of all Hellenisms meaning that the perfectly good Theophilus, Greek for, ‘friend of God,’ was Latinized to the equally euphonious Amadè.

The Roman and Greek churches are still divided over this one word in their liturgy, and it can be said to have caused of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and thus setting up the surrender of that entire region to the Muslims, a situation that continues to this day.

http://www.gotquestions.org/filioque-clause-controversy.html

Wolfie told his sister of this in a letter he jokingly signed, Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozartus and the rest is history. Or, as his biographer, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, put it, Amadeus is the product of the biographers desire to smooth out rough edges. His existing letters are usually signed, Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, or just, Amadè Mozart.

Of the seven Mozart children, only he and his 4¹/² year older sister, Maria Anna [Nannerl] Walburga [b. July 30, 1751] survived to adulthood. According to Wolfgang, she was a brilliant pianist and composer in her own right. And while no work survives under her name, some suspect that a few works attributed to the young Wolfgang are really hers.

Died: Mozart died at 12:55 AM on December 5, 1791, in Vienna, Austria, of what his physician, Dr. Thomas Franz Closset, called heated military fever, that age’s gobbledygook for, Who knows? He was 35 years, 10 months and eight days old and in hock to the tune of 3000 gulden which Emperor Leopold II paid before the month was out. [Joseph II had died the previous year.]

So what killed Mozart? Writers have had a field day trying to cull a diagnosis from the seemingly endless list of symptoms his many letters describe during the last year and a half of his life. Then there’s Mozart’s own suspicions about having being slipped aqua tofana — a slow-motion arsenic concoction made famous a few centuries earlier by the Borgias and still available for the occasional murder in Mozart’s time. Then there’s this nut.

Just before dying, Antonio Salieri confessed to killing Mozart; and this totally spurious tale of a mildly mad man in his dotage — he was 75 — was elevated to ‘fact’ by the Russian poet Pushkin. Rimsky-Korsakov turned Pushkin’s poem into an opera which, together with other myths were cobbled into the play and movie, Amadeus which ignored a few facts: Like, it failed to mention that Mozart had been made Emperor Joseph II’s royal and Imperial Court Composer on November 15, 1787 more than four years before his death. He died broke because he couldn’t live within his means.

Mozart’s actual cause of death: Cholera is mentioned a lot, as are the ever popular, uremia, rheumatic fever, goiter tuberculosis, dropsy, Bright’s disease, mercury poisoning, military fever, typhoid fever, syphilis, brain inflammation and acute nephritis. But what if Mozart died of an ‘unlisted’ disease? Something as common then as it is today: Medical Malpractice? In this genre, there are at least two theories:

• Carl Bär states that in his last 12 days, Mozart was bled of 2 or 3 LITERS of blood! If true, he was simply bled to death or died of an acute electrolyte imbalance;

George Washington too died of deliberately being bled to death, but in his case, it was his hypochondriacally pushing for treatment that practically forced his doctors to do it. Washington was our second sickliest president behind JFK who constantly lied about his health while being our only president to — and not too long before becoming president either — receive the last rights of his church no less than three times in one six-month period.

• Then there’s Ohio State University Hospital neurologist and frustrated musician, Miles Drake who believes a badly treated skull fracture and subdural hematoma led to a fatal stroke. This has been embellished by Josie Glausiusz in the Discover Magazine article, The Banal Death of a Genius, [page 25 of the March, 1994], but I should mention that this magazine has a penchant for running new reasons for Mozart’s death ever few years.

Burial Mythology: That Mozart received the ‘cheapest funeral available,’ is right, but more because of Emperor Joseph II’s weird edicts than poverty.

• August 23, 1784: His majesty banned burials in church crypts. An act setting Vienna a-howl as patriotic vandals took this as a license to disinter bodies — some of which had lain undisturbed for centuries — and dumping the remains into communal pits. When the flap over that died down, Joseph II came up with another gem:

• December 20, 1789: His majesty banned the use of coffins. Bodies were to be buried in sacks and covered with quicklime. He also banned formal funeral ceremonies, and barred priests from accompanying bodies to their graves!

Public outrage forced the repeal of this nonsense which was certainly convenient for Joseph II himself who died two months later [February 20, 1790] and was given a very nice pre-edict send-off. But the spirit of his laws lingered on amongst the enlightened — read cheap — for years. Thus, when Mozart’s funeral arrangements were pawned off on his patron, the notorious skinflint, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, you have the myth ready to bloom in all its glory. The facts, however, are a bit more mundane.

van Swieten’s father was the first physician to suggest that mercury compounds be used in the treatment of syphilis. As these compounds cause almost identical symptoms to syphilis itself, his father can be said to have driven more European nobility crazy than any army of whores in history.

Mozart’s Burial: Mozart was interred in his own little Mozart sack in his own little Mozart plot in Vienna’s, St. Marx cemetery, just as any normally sized person might have been. So why all the fuss about a pauper’s grave? Because — just as they are in some parts of Europe today — grave plots were rented, and somewhere along the line, van Swieten ‘forgot’ to pay the rent. The seven-year grace period ran out; and when ‘paying’ customers needed the space [1801] nasty shove-wielding sheriffs’ deputies downgraded Mozart’s accommodations to the paupers’ pit everyone knows about today.

While doing this, they kept a skull that stayed in circulation for a century or so before ending up at its present home, the Mozart Museum [Die Mozarteum] in Salzburg where, in 1991, anthropologists from France’s University of Provence looked it over and said something like, Hey! If it ain’t Mozart’s, whose is it? This has been more comforting to some than others.

Mozart had been dead more than 16 years before his widow first tried visiting his grave, but by then even the oldest gravediggers had forgotten where it was.

Nickname: Wolfie, to his wife and friends, his father, wrote of him as Wolfgangerl.

Physical Characteristics: ‘Tiny’ and ‘Twitchy’ are the words most often used in describing him. Not over 5’ 4 tall, wrote an Englishman of the mature Mozart, but his penchant for putting on weight found the reed-like adolescent blossoming into a stout adult with a paunch, double chin and overall puffy appearance. And if his oversized head wasn’t being mentioned, a part of it might be, as in the article written during his lifetime calling him, the great-nosed Mozart."

A youthful case of smallpox pitted his skin which jaundiced to an ‘unhealthy’ color with age. And while experts swear his bulging eyes were either blue or brown — depending on the expert — most agree he was nearsighted and squinted when looking into the distance. His curly, brown hair was worn long to cover a ‘strange malformation of his ears’; and he spoke with a ‘soft tenor’ voice. The ‘twitchy’ part is interesting too.

Letters from his family and friends include phrases like, ‘he never stood still but was always moving his hands or feet,’ and, ‘he was always playing with something.’ His sister-in-law, Sophie, noted that he, ‘grimaced constantly.’

He never knows how to properly conduct himself, wrote biographer, Adolph Heinrich von Schlichtegroll. And, as if to exemplify this, his piano pupil, Karoline Pichler, added, As he often did in his foolish moods, he began leaping over table and chairs, meowing like a cat and turning somersaults. Couple this with his penchant for scatology and you get the feeling he might have suffered from Tourette’s syndrome.

Swearing fluently in German, Latin and Italian as a child, he added French and English later to become one of music’s more formidable scatologists.

Personality: Educated entirely at home with only his elder sister for a playmate, Mozart’s personality was both molded and destroyed by his father.

Starting on a European tour to play for emperors, kings and the pope when only six, the overly serious child grew up to find the mighty ones he had entertained dead, and himself thrust into a hostile world where he had to compete with the very men his youthful exploits had humiliated. They never forgot or forgave, and Mozart, remained a child all his life, as his sister put it. And, as an adult acting like a child, human ties, as we know them, were alien to him.

To sister-in-law, Sophie, he was always in good spirits, but very reflective even at the best of times. He looked at everyone with a piercing glance giving balanced answers to everything … yet seemed to be lost in thought about something else entirely.

From his pupil, Karoline Pichler, [he] never demonstrated any unusual intellectual power at all, and scarcely any learning or higher culture.

In his last days