Obscene Child 
Sheila Fitzpatrick
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography by Piero Melograni, translated by Lydia Cochrane Buy this book
- Mozart: The First Biography by Franz Niemetschek, translated by Helen Mautner Buy this book
- Mozart’s Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music by Jane Glover Buy this book
As Saul Bellow once wrote, we have a problem talking about Mozart. It is the fear of having to contemplate transcendence and being embarrassed by something for which we have no vocabulary. To make matters worse, Mozart composed sublime music but, in contrast to Beethoven, had the wrong personality for sublimity, being prone to clowning and lavatory humour. Think of the babyish and buffoonish Amadeus of Peter Shaffer’s play. Or the impetuous, tousle-haired and disconcertingly North American figure in the Milos Forman film, stalked through the Vienna night by Antonio Salieri to the sound of the Dies irae from the Requiem. Franz Niemetschek, Mozart’s contemporary, whose biography (not the first, pace Berghahn, but the second) was published in 1798, concedes Mozart’s propensity for jokes but presents him as a gentle soul who, as Cliff Eisen remarks in his introduction, is almost a candidate for sainthood. ‘Who can unravel all the countless felicities, the fathomless beauties of his art?’ Niemetschek asks: ‘Who can describe in words his new, original, sublime and sonorous music. Listen with an open mind, and you will feel this more keenly than can be expressed in words.’
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Sheila Fitzpatrick teaches at the University of Chicago. She is the editor (with Stuart Macintyre) of Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics.
Other articles by this contributor:
Pessimism and Boys · Sheila Fitzpatrick reads the diary of a Soviet schoolgirl
A Little Swine · Snitching
The Good Old Days · The Dacha-Owning Classes
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