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*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.07/27/01*END*

This etext was produced by John Mamoun (mamounjo@umdnj.edu), Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS E-TEXT EDITION

The following is the text of "Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words," compiled and annotated by Friedrich Kerst and translated into english, and edited, with new introduction and additional notes, by Henry Edward Krehbiel. Each page was cut out of the original book with an X-acto knife and fed into an Automatic Document Feeder Scanner to make this e-text, so the original book was disbinded in order to save it.

Some adaptations from the original text were made while formatting it for an e-text. Italics in the original book were ignored in making this e-text, unless they referred to proper nouns, in which case they are put in quotes in the e-text. Italics are problematic because they are not easily rendered in ASCII text.

This electronic text was prepared by John Mamoun with help from numerous other proofreaders, including those associated with Charles Franks' Distributed Proofreaders website. Thanks to C. Franks, S. Harris, A. Montague, S. Morrison, J. Roberts, R. Rowe, R. Tremblay, R. Zimmerman and several others for proof-reading.

Corrections for version 11 of this text made by Andrew Sly.

MOZART: THE MAN AND THE ARTIST, AS REVEALED IN HIS OWN WORDS

BY

FRIEDRICH KERST

TRANSLATED BY HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL

MOZART: THE MAN AND THE ARTIST, AS REVEALED IN HIS OWN WORDS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS E-TEXT EDITION BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH MOZART: THE MAN AND THE ARTIST, AS REVEALED IN HIS OWN WORDS

EDITOR'S NOTE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MOZART CHIPS FROM THE WORKSHOP CONCERNING THE OPERA MUSICAL PEDAGOGICS TOUCHING MUSICAL PERFORMANCES EXPRESSIONS CRITICAL OPINIONS CONCERNING OTHERS WOLFGANG, THE GERMAN SELF-RESPECT AND HONOR AT HOME AND ABROAD LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP WORLDLY WISDOM IN SUFFERING MORALS RELIGION

BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

The German composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was not only a musical genius, but was also one of the pre-eminent geniuses of the Western world. He defined in his music a system of musical thought and an entire state of mind that were unlike any previously experienced. A true child prodigy, he began composing at age 5 and rapidly developed his unmistakable style; by 18 he was composing works capable of altering the mind-states of entire civilizations. Indeed, he and his predecessor Bach accomplished the Olympian feat of adding to the human concepts of civility and civilization. So these two were not just musical geniuses, but geniuses of the humanities.

Mozart's music IS civilization. It encompasses all that is humane about an idealized civilization. And it probably was Mozart's main purpose to create and propagate a concept of a great civilization through his music. He wanted to show his fellow Europeans, with their garbage-polluted citystreets, their violent mono-maniacal leaders and their stifling, non-humane bureaucracies, new ideas on how to run their civilizations properly. He wanted them to hear and feel a sense of civilized movement, of the musical expressions of man moving as he would if upholding the highest values of idealized societies. One need only listen to the revolutionary opening bars of his famous Eine Kleine Nachtmusik to see this.

He was an extremely sophisticated and complex man. His letters reveal him as remarkably creative, fascinated by the arts, principled, religious and devoted to his father. He had an energetic personality that was almost completely devoid of any cynicism, pessimism or discouragement from creating music. While rumors suggest that he was a lascivious individual, there is no evidence of this at all in his letters. Quite the contrary, the evidence seems overwhelmingly to suggest the opposite, and that Mozart may not have had any relations with women except with his own wife.

He was not as shrewd as he was civilized, however. He was peculiarly lax about profiting from his history-changing music. His promoters constantly short-changed him.

He died nearly penniless and in debt, and at his death at age 35 an apathetic public took little notice of this man who had done so much in service to civilization. He was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave with few mourners. After his death, the bones of this great paragon of self-sacrifice for the sake of improving civilization were dug up and disposed of. His grave was then re-used, and to this day no one knows where his bones lie. Perhaps they are in a catacomb somewhere, in a huge bone-pile containing thousands of anonymous cadavers.

But the sounds he heard in his head live on, stimulating millions in elevators, doctors' offices, train terminals, concert halls and myriad other places to be more civilized, assuming that they pay attention to the music.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The purpose and scope of this little book will be obvious to the reader from even a cursory glance at its contents. It is, in a way, an autobiography of Mozart written without conscious purpose, and for that reason peculiarly winning, illuminating and convincing. The outward things in Mozart's life are all but ignored in it, but there is a frank and full disclosure of the great musician's artistic, intellectual and moral character, made in his own words.

The Editor has not only taken the trouble to revise the work of the German author and compiler, but, for reasons which seemed to him imperative, has also made a new translation of all the excerpts. Most of the translations of Mozart's letters which have found their way into the books betray want of familiarity with the idioms and colloquialisms employed by Mozart, as well as understanding of his careless, contradictory and sprawling epistolary style. Some of the intimacy of that style the new translation seeks to preserve, but the purpose has chiefly been to make the meaning plain.

H.E.K.

New York, June 7, 1905

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MOZART

Mozart! What a radiance streams from the name! Bright and pure as the light of the sun, Mozart's music greets us. We pronounce his name and behold! the youthful artist is before us,—the merry, light-hearted smile upon his features, which belongs only to true and naive genius. It is impossible to imagine an aged Mozart,—an embittered and saddened Mozart,—glowering gloomily at a wicked world which is doing its best to make his lot still more burdensome;—a Mozart whose music should reflect such painful moods.

Mozart was a Child of the Sun. Filled with a humor truly divine, he strolled unconstrainedly through a multitude of cares like Prince Tamino through his fantastic trials. Music was his talisman, his magic flute with which he could exorcise all the petty terrors that beset him. Has such a man and artist—one who was completely resolved in his works, and therefore still stands bodily before us with all his glorious qualities after the lapse of a century—has