Obscene Child
Sheila Fitzpatrick
- BuyWolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography by Piero Melograni, translated by Lydia Cochrane
Chicago, 300 pp, £19.00, December 2006, ISBN 0 226 51956 2
- BuyMozart: The First Biography by Franz Niemetschek, translated by Helen Mautner
Berghahn, 77 pp, £17.50, November 2006, ISBN 1 84545 231 3
- BuyMozart’s Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music by Jane Glover
Pan, 406 pp, £7.99, April 2006, ISBN 0 330 41858 0
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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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 16 · 16 August 2007
From Arthur Searle
Sheila Fitzpatrick mentions that Stefan Zweig was among those fascinated by the apparent contradictions in Mozart’s character (LRB, 5 July). Although Zweig wrote what might be called psychological biographies of a good number of historical figures, he never attempted one of Mozart. Instead, he concentrated on collecting documents relating to significant moments in Mozart’s life. Zweig owned four of Mozart’s letters to his cousin Anna Maria, to whom he gave the nickname ‘Baesle’, but published only one of them. It is not fair to say, as Fitzpatrick does, that his privately issued edition of the letter of 5 October 1777 is ‘expurgated’, since it includes a complete facsimile of Mozart’s tiny but very clear handwriting, as well as a transcription and Zweig’s commentary. He gave copies to a number of friends, including Richard Strauss and Freud. An elegant reproduction of the pamphlet was published last year in Vienna – a facsimile of a facsimile.
Arthur Searle
Framlingham, Suffolk
From David Whalin
Sheila Fitzpatrick says that ‘revolutionary France provided the first official recognition of authors’ rights in 1791.’ In fact the United States Constitution, Article I, §8, clause 8, commonly called the patent and copyright clause, empowered Congress to enact such recognition and the first copyright statute was enacted on 31 May 1790.
David Whalin
Annandale, Virginia
Vol. 29 No. 19 · 4 October 2007
From Gordon Peilow
David Whalin writes that the US enacted the first copyright statute on 31 May 1790 (Letters, 16 August). From early Tudor times the Stationers’ Company, in the precincts of St Paul’s, operated a system of copyright protection for authors who had a copy of their original works deposited and recorded with the Company. This was given official sanction by royal charter and then by the Licensing Act of Charles II. The first ‘real’ copyright act is that of Queen Anne in 1709. It is the origin of our present system of rights, and books published in the Americas, Ireland and Scotland all originally benefited from the rights granted under the act.
Gordon Peilow
London SW19
Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008
From Eamonn Grogan
In a letter I’ve only just come across (LRB, 16 August 2007) David Whalin claimed that the earliest official recognition of authors’ rights came with a statute enacted in the new United States in May 1790. The first historic mention of copyright, however, which set the universal precedent, can be traced much further back, to sixth-century Celtic Ireland. It is contained in a judgment of Diarmaid, High King of Ireland – the legal equivalent of today’s Supreme Court – in his finding against the Christian missionary Columba, founder of monastic rule, later canonised as Saint Columcille, who had become an incorrigible plagiarist. (The very same St Columba who settled in Iona.) Columcille had taken to visiting monasteries, borrowing books from their libraries and having his own monks copy them for him to distribute. At one stage, a certain abbot, on hearing that Columcille was on his way to visit, buried his complete library in the orchard, provoking the frustrated Columcille to put a curse on the monastery. Finally, St Finian of Clonard objected to Columcille – a former pupil – plagiarising his prized Latin Psalter, and pleaded for a definitive judgment on the problem from the High King.
Ireland was then an agricultural society and one of the native Brehon Laws of the time related to the ownership of animals found wandering. The very reasonable rule of law was that a calf, wherever it might be found, belonged to its mother, wherever that cow was kept. The High King took that well-founded legal precedent and extended it in his judgment against Columcille thus: ‘As to every Cow its Calf, so to every Book its Copy.’
Eamonn Grogan
Naas, Co. Kildare
