April 11, 1770—Arriving in Rome after five days of rainy, windy weather, 14-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his father went to the Sistine Chapel, where the teenage wunderkind gave further evidence of the musical brilliance that had already set Europe abuzz over the last several years.
Leopold Mozart and his son came to the musical capital of Europe and the center of Roman Catholicism on Ash Wednesday. That day, they attended the Sistine Chapel Choir, where they heard Miserere, a complex piece by the 17th-century composer Gregorio Allegri.
Allegri’s composition was so prized, Leopold in a letter, that “the singers in the chapel are forbidden on pain of excommunication to take away a single voice-part, copy it or give it to anyone.” But not to fear, Leopold continued: “We have it already. Wolfgang has written it down.” His son had come home from the performance, written this composition from memory, gone back a couple of days later to make some minor changes, and voila!—he’d broken the code that had eluded others for years.
Is that what happened? I remember having read that some time ago, a writer went into the Vatican Library and, while poring through material, sat bolt-upright when he discovered a document that showed that a saint had fathered a child out of wedlock. His shock was so obvious that the next day, the document in question could no longer be found. So when I read about the Mozart incident, the part about the Vatican’s overprotectiveness rang true to me at first.
But let’s stop for a second. In all the copiously documented life of Mozart, the document he is supposed to transcribed from memory has never appeared. Moreover, a number of copies of the Allegri piece were already in circulation, according to Stanley Sadie’s Mozart: The Early Years, 1756-1781. If this Sistine Chapel secret was so jealously prized, then surely the operation was being run by Monsignor Maxwell Smart, if you ask me.
But young Mozart’s gifts were so extraordinary that music historians by and large, with allowance for Leopold Mozart’s exaggerations, do credit the incident as fact.
It strikes me as an amazing feat of memory. The other memory exploit that immediately came to mind when I read about this was John Dean’s during the Watergate hearings. Nixon attorney James St. Clair had just asked a question so convoluted that, when someone on the Senate panel asked that it be repeated, St. Clair himself couldn’t remember what he had said. Dean then stepped in and did so, and Nixon’s attorney readily admitted that this was in fact what he had said, in total. That performance did much to convince those in the room that, as far as Dean’s own testimony was concerned, whatever problems arose from it would have to relate to veracity instead of memory.
Mozart’s recall, however, is another matter entirely, because it involves someone so young and in a piece that, toward the end, is complex enough to challenge anyone of any age to reproduce it. It was another testament to an intelligence that burst out in virtually every aspect of his life.
For evidence of this, turn to Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, an epistolary collection edited by Robert Spaethling. I can’t recall another other series of letters by a famous person that gave me such a vivid impression of what he was like since those reproduced by Nigel Hamilton in his biography, JFK: Reckless Youth, in which the future president emerges as curious about the world, hilarious, fatalistic about the mass of medical conditions that threatened to kill him at every turn, and, as one might expect from a teenage boy, just wild about the opposite sex.
Spaethling’s collection is a good antidote to those whose impression of Mozart has been malformed by the historically egregious Amadeus’s portrait of the composer as almost totally an obscene child. It’s not that Mozart didn’t include scatology in his correspondence, but you can see here that there was so much more to what he wrote.
Each letter is filled with dashes, as if rushed off between engagements, and a gem. It’s not unusual for the boy to include passages from not one or even two, but even as many as three different languages. They’re invariably warm and often playful (in one to his sister, every other line is upside down!).
The trip to Italy is also significant for what it reveals about Mozart’s relationship with his father. Right after the Sistine Chapel performance, Mozart get a chance to meet the pope, who, good Catholic that he was, he believed to be God’s representative on earth.
Seen in this light, the composer’s own youthful motto is revealing: “After God, Papa.” The question of Leopold’s relationship with his son has preoccupied Mozart biographers for the past two centuries.
To be sure, Leopold was himself quite a talent, having refused to go into the ministry because of his own dreams of becoming a great musician and displaying great skill on the violin. Something in the family DNA certainly manifested itself in music, for the only other child of his that survived to adulthood, daughter Nannerl, was also a prodigy, and a grandson was, too.
So Leopold was not one of those stage parents like Judy Garland’s bumptious mother, a crass person of little talent piggybacking on her wondrous child’s back for money. At the same time, the performance schedule he created for his son could be punishing. I also found interesting the following announcement he created for his son, not yet age 10, when the two toured England:
“The boy will also play a concerto on the violin, accompany symphonies on the clavier, completely cover the manual or keyboard of the clavier, and play on the cloth as well as they he had the keyboard under his eyes…”
It goes on and on like this, but you get the point. It’s hard not to observe the note of the born promoter in him—kind of an early version of Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, who plugs one of his more unusual clients (she plays the glass harmonica) thus: “She’s the Jascha Heifetz of her instrument!”
Leopold Mozart and his son came to the musical capital of Europe and the center of Roman Catholicism on Ash Wednesday. That day, they attended the Sistine Chapel Choir, where they heard Miserere, a complex piece by the 17th-century composer Gregorio Allegri.
Allegri’s composition was so prized, Leopold in a letter, that “the singers in the chapel are forbidden on pain of excommunication to take away a single voice-part, copy it or give it to anyone.” But not to fear, Leopold continued: “We have it already. Wolfgang has written it down.” His son had come home from the performance, written this composition from memory, gone back a couple of days later to make some minor changes, and voila!—he’d broken the code that had eluded others for years.
Is that what happened? I remember having read that some time ago, a writer went into the Vatican Library and, while poring through material, sat bolt-upright when he discovered a document that showed that a saint had fathered a child out of wedlock. His shock was so obvious that the next day, the document in question could no longer be found. So when I read about the Mozart incident, the part about the Vatican’s overprotectiveness rang true to me at first.
But let’s stop for a second. In all the copiously documented life of Mozart, the document he is supposed to transcribed from memory has never appeared. Moreover, a number of copies of the Allegri piece were already in circulation, according to Stanley Sadie’s Mozart: The Early Years, 1756-1781. If this Sistine Chapel secret was so jealously prized, then surely the operation was being run by Monsignor Maxwell Smart, if you ask me.
But young Mozart’s gifts were so extraordinary that music historians by and large, with allowance for Leopold Mozart’s exaggerations, do credit the incident as fact.
It strikes me as an amazing feat of memory. The other memory exploit that immediately came to mind when I read about this was John Dean’s during the Watergate hearings. Nixon attorney James St. Clair had just asked a question so convoluted that, when someone on the Senate panel asked that it be repeated, St. Clair himself couldn’t remember what he had said. Dean then stepped in and did so, and Nixon’s attorney readily admitted that this was in fact what he had said, in total. That performance did much to convince those in the room that, as far as Dean’s own testimony was concerned, whatever problems arose from it would have to relate to veracity instead of memory.
Mozart’s recall, however, is another matter entirely, because it involves someone so young and in a piece that, toward the end, is complex enough to challenge anyone of any age to reproduce it. It was another testament to an intelligence that burst out in virtually every aspect of his life.
For evidence of this, turn to Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, an epistolary collection edited by Robert Spaethling. I can’t recall another other series of letters by a famous person that gave me such a vivid impression of what he was like since those reproduced by Nigel Hamilton in his biography, JFK: Reckless Youth, in which the future president emerges as curious about the world, hilarious, fatalistic about the mass of medical conditions that threatened to kill him at every turn, and, as one might expect from a teenage boy, just wild about the opposite sex.
Spaethling’s collection is a good antidote to those whose impression of Mozart has been malformed by the historically egregious Amadeus’s portrait of the composer as almost totally an obscene child. It’s not that Mozart didn’t include scatology in his correspondence, but you can see here that there was so much more to what he wrote.
Each letter is filled with dashes, as if rushed off between engagements, and a gem. It’s not unusual for the boy to include passages from not one or even two, but even as many as three different languages. They’re invariably warm and often playful (in one to his sister, every other line is upside down!).
The trip to Italy is also significant for what it reveals about Mozart’s relationship with his father. Right after the Sistine Chapel performance, Mozart get a chance to meet the pope, who, good Catholic that he was, he believed to be God’s representative on earth.
Seen in this light, the composer’s own youthful motto is revealing: “After God, Papa.” The question of Leopold’s relationship with his son has preoccupied Mozart biographers for the past two centuries.
To be sure, Leopold was himself quite a talent, having refused to go into the ministry because of his own dreams of becoming a great musician and displaying great skill on the violin. Something in the family DNA certainly manifested itself in music, for the only other child of his that survived to adulthood, daughter Nannerl, was also a prodigy, and a grandson was, too.
So Leopold was not one of those stage parents like Judy Garland’s bumptious mother, a crass person of little talent piggybacking on her wondrous child’s back for money. At the same time, the performance schedule he created for his son could be punishing. I also found interesting the following announcement he created for his son, not yet age 10, when the two toured England:
“The boy will also play a concerto on the violin, accompany symphonies on the clavier, completely cover the manual or keyboard of the clavier, and play on the cloth as well as they he had the keyboard under his eyes…”
It goes on and on like this, but you get the point. It’s hard not to observe the note of the born promoter in him—kind of an early version of Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, who plugs one of his more unusual clients (she plays the glass harmonica) thus: “She’s the Jascha Heifetz of her instrument!”
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