Patrick Bade
Mozart and the Enlightenment, Part 1

Patrick Bade - Mozart and the Enlightenment, Part 1

- Right, well, we’re past at six o'clock so I think I’ll get started. So two portraits of Mozart on the screen. He was born on the 27th of January, 1756. So there’s a certain bitter of irony, I think, in the fact that the composer who has given more joy and happiness to humanity than any other in the classical tradition should share his birthday… Or his birthday, the 27th of January of course, is also the day that we remember the greatest crime in the history of humanity. Now, Mozart, he had a short life. He lived for 35 years, 10 months, and one week. And in that short life he created a body of great music that is, perhaps, only surpassed in quantity, if not quality, by the work of Bach and Handel. Those two composers, of course, lived almost twice as long. Bach dying at the age of 65, and Handel dying at the age of 69. For me, one of the things that makes Mozart so fascinating is that he lived in times of profound change, and that is reflected in his music. And that’s what I’m going to be talking about tonight and on on Wednesday. So its 1756, we’re still in what we call the Ancien Regime, a period of rigid hierarchies, rigid moral attitude, dominated by the Catholic Church in Catholic Europe and monarchies and the aristocracy. And it looked like those rigid hierarchies would last forever. But in the second half of the 18th century, or mid to to late 18th century, we have a whole series of revolutions. We have, first of all, the Enlightenment. I know David’s talked to you about that yesterday. So where for the first time we have a system of moral values which is independent of religion.

And we have an attempt to get people to cast aside superstition and to look at the world in a clearer and a more objective way. Of course, the Enlightenment is hugely important in the history of Jews. Because they had been tucked away in their ghettos for 1000 years and more. And now they were allowed out or really as a result of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and eventually by political developments after the French Revolution and Napoleon. And that gave them the opportunity for the Great Assimilation that took place in the 19th century with very extraordinary consequences. So the Enlightenment also gives birth to, you could say, a whole series of revolutions. The American Revolution. The American Constitution is really a famous document of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution. The most influential of all. Or, actually, maybe most influential of all, you could say, eventually was the Industrial Revolution. Which also comes out of the Enlightenment. So here we’ve got images of the storming of Bastille in 1789. That happens, of course, in Mozart’s lifetime. He dies at the height of the French Revolution in 1791. And on the right we have one of the very first machines. A Spinning Jenny, one of the first machines of the Industrial Revolution. So Mozart, one of the things that fascinates me, he’s a kind of Janus figure. And he’s coming out of the elegant

• perfume-powdered world of the Azure regime. But his attitudes and his work reflect the winds of change. I’m going to start off with two musical examples which seem to be almost schizophrenic. Where you start off actually in the new world, and then it’s almost like a switch is flicked and suddenly we’re back into the old world. So here are the opening bars of the “Dissonant Quartet” that was written in 1785. And we have two portraits with a generation between them. Maurice Quentin de la Tour on the left hand side, he’s very much a figure of the regime. Elegant powdered wig, what Kenneth Clark calls the smile of reason. I like to call it the smirk of reason. And you can see he’s elegantly dressed with a velvet jacket and lots of frilly lace and so on. So an agreeable kind of courtier. The artist has courtier. And on the right hand side.. So that dates from around 1760. And on the right-hand side, again, mid 1780s. So exactly contemporary with the music I’m playing in. This is a self-portrait of Fuseli. Henry Fuseli or Heinrich Fussli, a Swiss artist based in Britain and a pioneer of romanticism. And you see the artist looking in the mirror with anxious intensity. So the opening bars of the “Dissonant Quartet”, if you didn’t know that they were by Mozart, if you didn’t know that they were written in the 1780s, you could even think that they were by a 20th century composer. Bartok or even just Shostakovich. There is a searing melancholy and introspective qualities. Painful, dissonant harmonies for following on one another. And then, as I said, it’s just like a light switch being flicked. And it’s like he shakes off that mood. And we’re back into the age of the Ancien Regime, back into the age of hiding and powdered wigs and agreeable smiles. And the opening bars of “Don Giovanni” we have a similar kind of contrast.

The first bars have a portentous, dark, terrifying monumentality which is really something entirely new in Western Ireland. Possibly only certain moments in the bar, hassians or cantartists could come near it for the sheer monumental power of music. And it’s extremely dark. On the left hand side, I have print by Piranesi, one of Piranesi’s prisons. Which are very often seen as the direct antecedent of romanticism. And this also makes me think of, both the image and music I’m going to play you. of the famous essay by Edmund Burke, published in 1756, the year of Mozart’s Birth. Edmund Burke is a philosopher. A philosophical inquiry into the origins of ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. Sublime is beauty, which contains an element of terror and awe. And that certainly describes the opening bars of this piece. But then once again, after the first few bars, it’s like a switch being flicked and we’re back into the polite, charming, frivolous world of the Rococo that we see on the right hand side in a painting by Lancret. So here is the boy Mozart with his sister Nannerl and his father Leopold, who was a kind of jobbing musician in the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg. But they were allowed to travel Europe and all of Europe fell in love with the child Mozart, who is passed off as being even younger than he really was. I mean, he was performing in public from the age of five. But he was very small and as you can see, his little feet are nowhere near the ground while playing the spinet or the harpsichord. And so they travelled the courts and the capitals of Europe. I suppose Mozart is the most famous wunderkind in the history of Western culture. And there’s a famous story that he performed for Maria Thereza when he was six years old. And she was, of course, a warm motherly person, as we’ve heard already.

And she allowed him to clamber up onto her lap, and everybody thought he was cute and adorable. Now, he certainly is an incredible wunderkind. He was writing very sophisticated pieces of music before he was 10 years old. His opera “Mitridate re di Ponto” was written in Italy, he was 14. So that has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. And I think the next youngest work in terms of age, Verdi’s “Nabucco”, of course, he was 29 when he wrote that. Wagner, Puccini, the other great composers were all into their thirties before they wrote a work which has entered the cannon. And “Mitridate” is certainly an astonishing work for a 14 year old. Absolutely astonishing. When I saw it though, I thought, “Oh, this could be.” I wouldn’t necessarily realise that this was a work by a youthful genius. It sounded to me, I may be struck by lightning for saying this, like the work of a competent 45 year old rather than a 14 year old of genius. I don’t hear Mozart in… Well, at least I don’t hear what I value in Mozart, in those very early works. I think it’s only probably after he hit puberty in his late teens that suddenly you hear this poignant melancholy. This undertone of touching sadness that is so characteristic of the best music of Mozart. One of the earliest pieces in which I hear this is an aria from a little opera called “Il Re Pastori Llama Ocero Castante”. He was 18, I think 18 or 19, when he composed this. And it was composed for a celebration in the palace of the Archbishop of Salzburg. So it was actually first performed in the room that you see on the left hand side. And I’ve chosen a historical recording that I’m very fond of with Elizabeth Schumann. This is a recording made in 1926. So it’s almost 100 years old, this recording, and it’s very characteristic of its period. And the most striking feature, I suppose, is the use of portamento. Portamento is when you don’t go cleanly from one note to another. You slide from one note to another and it’s an expressive device. And it seems to me, people may disagree with me.

You’re free to disagree, of course, that this music is asking for this kind of style. ‘Cause it’s music of great tenderness and great warmth. So that style, of course, rather went out of fashion in the second half of the 20th century. So just at the point where Mozart, in my view, becomes Mozart and starts writing great masterpieces. By this time, of course, he’s in his late adolescence, early adulthood. And he’d lost his novelty value. He’d lost the cuteness of a little tiny child with legs dangling off the chair. So when he was 22, he just returned to Paris. He’d had a tremendous success in Paris as a small child and he wanted to repeat it. But it turned actually into a very bitter experience. As I said, the French nobility had completely lost all interest in him. His letters, many of which survived, very fascinating letters, they’re full of anger and resentment at the rudeness of the French aristocracy. And their lack of interest in his new work. And his unhappiness and bitterness in Paris was compounded by the sudden death of his mother in that city. This is the house where Mozart’s mother died in Rue Du Sentier. I walk down it very often. If I walk to my favourite restaurant I walk past this house and I always stop for a moment and pause to think about Mozart and his beloved mother. And a detail of the story which particularly touches me and tells me a lot about Mozart is that he wrote two letters back to his father in Salzburg about his mother. In the first one he warns his father that his wife is very ill. In fact, she was dead. She died before he wrote the first letter. But he was thinking of his father’s reaction then. He didn’t want the shock to be so brutal.

So, in fact he split the news between two letters. And so I want to… I say just about this time that Mozart’s genius reaches full bloom. I’m going to play you an excerpt from a work that was written immediately after his mother’s death. Which, of course, we be will be familiar to many of you 'cause it’s the standard of the concert repertoire. This is the “Concerto Concertante” for violin and viola. And I’d chosen a moment very close to the beginning in the first movement at the moment of the entry of the two soloists. So we build up to it with a whole series of trills on strings and building up excitedly to a climax. And then the soloist, the violin and viola in unison, as it were, they enter sliding off this climax. With a beautiful slightly sighing, descending melody. So Mozart’s letters are full of angry dissatisfaction at this time. He was angry at the callousness and indifference of the Parisian aristocracy, But above all, he was angry with his life in Salzburg. He hated Salzburg, loathed it. So, again, it’s such an irony that Salzburg and, of course the whole of Salzburg, sells itself on being the city of Mozart. He couldn’t wait to shake the dust of Salzburg off his shoes. And he was looking around. Initially, of course, what he wanted was some kind of court appointment. And it looked as though his wishes had come true in 1789 when the Elector of Bavaria, Karl Theodor, invited him to Munich to write an opera for the court opera there. This is Karl Theodor on the left hand side. He had originally ruled in the Rhineland and he had an orchestra that was considered to be the finest orchestra in Europe at the time. And he brought it with him to Munich. So Mozart was in it in ecstasy. He loved Munich. You’ve got this exquisite opera house, The Cuvilles Theatre. In in my opinion it’s the loveliest opera house interior that exists anywhere in the world. It’s a ravishing building. In all my years in Munich, unfortunately… Of course I’ve been to the theatre countless times, but I’ve never actually seen a performance. They’re only done, I think, quite rarely during Munich Festival.

But I would really love to see a Mozart opera performed in this theatre where it “Idomeneo” had its premier in 1789. So Mozart revelled in the relative freedom of being in Munich and the respect he received as a composer. And above all, he revelled in the virtuosity of the orchestra and the singers. And I’m going to play you an aria from “Idomeneo” that was written for the specific talents of a singer called Anton Raff, who you see on the right hand side. Mozart liked him a lot and he talks about him in his letters And he says, well, he’s a little bit past his best as a singer, but what he can still do really well are what Mozart called “chopped noodles”. And chopped noodles are very elaborate runs, coloratura on ornaments. So he wrote arias for Anton Raff that had proved for most of the 20th century absolutely impossible for most tenors to sing. They just can’t do it. There was one very famous recording at the beginning of the century, which I often use by Herman Jadlowker, who I’ve talked about before in “Lectures for Lockdown”. And that was very fascinating. Because there were descendants and relatives of him in South Africa who contacted me afterwards. And I recommend you to go on YouTube and listen to Jadlowker’s version of the aria “Fuor Del Mar” which is absolutely spectacular and amazing. And I’ve used it many times in lectures. And I always say, well, there’s never been a singer since who could come anywhere near it for virtuosity. But now there is. This is a brand new recording. I know that you’ll gasp with amazement here. Is Patrick playing you a recording that’s hot off the press? This is by the American tenor, Michael Spyres. And it is completely staggering. I could hardly believe my ears when I first heard this.

And it gives Jadlowker a very good run for his money. A staggering singing, absolutely staggering. Of course Jadlowker could bring his tentorial skills to all of that. But as far as I know, I don’t think that Michael Spyres actually has a Jewish or Tentorial background. So “Idomeneo” was a great success that Karl Theodor famously said. But then when Mozart said to him, “Well, you want to employ me?” Karl Theodor said, “Well, actually no, I’ve got enough musicians, I don’t need another.” What an idiot. I mean, I think his reputation yet reputation of Munich, I mean, it is an important musical city. But it would be a totally different reputation it would have if Mozart had been employed there on a permanent basis. So he had to go back with his tail between his legs to the hated Salzburg. And now Salzburg was an independent princeton. It wasn’t part of Austria. It’s a pure accident of history after the Napoleonic Wars that Salzburg landed up in Austria, not in Germany. So the Austrians actually really have no right to claim Mozart. Mozart’s family came from Augsburg, he thought of himself as a German and he happened to be born in Salzburg. And Salzburg was not part of Austria at the time. It was ruled by the Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, who you see on the left hand side. Who, in some ways, was an enlightened ruler. He was one of those rulers at the time who was in many ways influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. He ended torture. He certainly brought in some useful and positive reforms. But his reputation is entirely really based on his relationship with Mozart. And that’s a negative one. He thought that Mozart was too uppity.

Mozart’s letters are just crackling with resentment. The fact that he was just treated as a minor servant. There’s a letter where he angrily describes how he’s forced to sit. There’s a kind of hierarchy of servants and he’s forced to sit between the lackies and the cooks. And that’s how the archbishop regarded him. So the tensions really, really build up. And he, the bishop, regards Mozart as insubordinate. And eventually in 1781 he’s dismissed. And a courtier of the archbishop, a man called Count Arco kicked Mozart in the ass, as he says in his letter, down the stairs. And to me it’s rather wonderful in a way that Count Arco, that is a name that has only gone into history because the tip of his shoe touched the sacred bottom of Mozart. And it’s a bit the same with Colloredo. Though his name oddly… This is a bit of a red herring here but I can’t resist sharing it with you. The name of Colloredo has turned up in a lot of articles in the French press and I think in the American press too this week because of two descendants. And they are the Bogdanoff twins. So you see top right and bottom right who are big TV personalities in France who are anti-vaxxers and who died within days of one another of Covid. So that stirred up an awful lot of controversy. So, in fact, it was just this afternoon, I was reading an obituary in a French paper and their grandmother was a Colloredo. I dunno if she’s a direct descendant 'cause the archbishop was not supposed to add direct descendants. Might have been an from a brother or that she’s descended. And in the 1920s she was married to a prince and she had a very important position in Central Europe.

But she had an affair with the Black American singer Roland Hayes. Who was maybe the first really important Black male soloists in the classical tradition. And they had a daughter. And that daughter was the mother of the Bogdanoff twins. So I thought I’d share that little piece of obscure and useless information. So Mozart throws off the shackles of Salzburg and he heads for the big city, which is Vienna. And it was an exciting time to arrive in Vienna because the year before Maria Thereza had died at the end of a reign of 40 years. And she was succeeded by her oldest son, Joseph II. Who was very influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and introduced a whole raft of reforms to modernise the Habsburg Empire. And, in fact sadly, most of them he met with huge conservative opposition. And most of his reforms had to be rolled back. Including, of course, he lifted all the restrictions on Jews throughout the Habsburg Empire. But this was a step too far for many of his citizens. And that had to be reversed. So one of his short-lived reforms was he wanted to make sure that everybody in the Habsburg Empire could understand one another. And it was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empire. He wanted to impose the German language, I suppose rather in the way that the British imposed English in India so that all the different parts could talk with one another.

And part of that reform was to ban the use of Italian in the court opera house. The little to which you see here. And for a couple of years the operas were performed in German, what they call singspiel. A singspiel is, I suppose, a singing play. And Mozart, 'cause he arrives in Vienna full of optimism, full of energy, and everything seems to be going his way and wonderfully, he gets a commission for an opera to be sung in German at the Court Opera House. And that is “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail”. And this is an opera which, for me, is full of the ethos of the Enlightenment. Oh, here is a painting by Klimt, actually, of the interior of the Burgtheater, which was sadly demolished at the end of the 19th century. Terrible thing to do. So, “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail”, the abduction from Seraglio, it’s the most joyful, and happy, and optimistic of all of Mozart’s operas. And one reason for that was that he was engaged to be married to Constanze Weber, who you see on the right hand side and probably on the left. This is a photograph that was discovered just a couple of years ago. And it’s thought, I think, it is the same woman. It looks to me like the same nose and the same chin. And I find amazing and touching and extraordinary to think that we might have a photograph of Mozart’s widow. 'Cause we should have had a photograph of Mozart. He could have lived that long quite easily. So Mozart was full of love, full of anticipation and joy at the thought of his forthcoming marriage. And that is expressed very directly in this aria, Belmonte’s aria. Because there is no coincidence that the heroine of the opera is also called Constanze.

So here is a Belmonte stroke Mozart longing for his beloved. So, “Die Entfuhrung” is set in a harem in Turkey. And I think that I talked last time about Leotta going off to Turkey. And the fact that, of course, the Ottoman Turks certainly by the 1780s, they’re no kind of threat anymore to Western Europe. And with the the Enlightenment brought about attempts to understand other cultures, other religions. That you could look at Muslims, and you could look at Jews with interest and curiosity and sympathy and see them as decent human beings with their own moral values. A book that played a role in all of this were the publication of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. And she was the wife of British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. You see her on the left dressed up in Ottoman gear. And she was full of praise for the Turks and said these Muslims. She found that the Sultan was actually more humane in his treatment of his subjects than the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold was. This is at the beginning of the 18th century. And, so again, images of Liotard, who I talked about last time. He went to Turkey and made wonderful images and sort of went native dressed as a Turk. And another very important document for this enlightened understanding of other cultures, other religions, was Voltaire’s essay “Sur les Moeurs” which you can see here. Which again was trying to look at other cultures in a more enlightened and tolerant way.

And there’s a general fascination, I would say, throughout the German speaking countries for the Turks. And you see that in these little porcelain figures that were used to decorate dining tables. And what am I going to play you next? Oh yes, now, the story of the “Entfuhrung aus dem Sarail”, it’s a young girl, Spanish girl. She’s been captured by pirates and sold to a Pasha. He’s actually not Turkish, he’s Arab. And he comes from North Africa and his original lands have been stolen from him by a Spanish nobleman. And it’s that nobleman’s son, Belmonte, who is betrothed to Constanze and he comes to try and rescue her. Now, what I find really interesting is that the original libreto that was given to Mozart, it turns out there’s a coincidence at the end, of trick of Fortune. And the Pasha discovers that Belmonte is actually his long lost son. So he forgives him and allows him to go off with Constanze. But Mozart thought, “No, no, no, this is too cliche. it’s not very interesting.” He changed the plot so that at the end the Pasha decides to forgive Belmonte and give Constanze her freedom to show that he is morally superior to the Christians and that he can forgive the crime that has been committed against him. Now, Mozart has quite a lot of fun in this opera with stereotyping, national stereotyping. There is Osmin, he’s the keeper of the harem. And he is a kind of caricature Turk as a sort rather brutal character. And Constanze’s servant Blonde. She is an English woman very proud of being English.

And at one point she’s feisty character. So it’s rather nice that English women were known to be feisty like this already in the 18th century. And Osmim says, “You are my slave and you have to do what I say.” And she says. “I’m an English woman and born to freedom.” Apparently this line caused great hilarity when the opera was performed in French during the Second World War under the German occupation. That all the French people were sort of giggling behind their hands when this line came up. I’m not going to play that to you. I’ll play you a little bit of the duet that follows that dialogue with Blonde and Osmin. And you can see he’s saying. “Oh, English, aren’t you English men, aren’t you idiots? You allow your women to have their way.” I’m going to talk more next time about Mozart’s attitude to women, which seems to me often very remarkable and even proto-feminist. But here is the end of the opera where, as I said, the Pasha Osim shows his moral superiority over the Christians by his generosity in releasing Belmonte and Constanze. And the all point, the moral of the opera, there’s nothing as ugly as revenge. You have to be generous, you have to be humane. Now, the 18th century, of course, Europe was still Christian. And unless you were Jewish and you were sort of in your ghetto quite separate. Everybody else, whether they’re Protestant or Catholic, they were still Christian. But I would say it’s a century where the Catholic Church, in particular, but also in England, you see something similar that the religion loses something of its potency, something of its authority. And in the art and the literature of the 18th century, there is a lot of disrespect for the clergy.

You can see it in these three images. Lancret on the left hand side, we’ve got this… Part of the trouble was, of course, that what the problem with younger sons in the gentry, in nobility, what to the oldest son inherited. And then younger sons might go into the Army or the Navy. But then if you had spare sons what to do with them? You shove them into the church. Either the Church of England or the Catholic Church Or they became monks or whatever. And often they didn’t really have any kind of religious vocation. So they gambled and drank and fornicated as you can see in these images. Now I’d like to ask the question was Mozart Catholic? Yes, of course, he was nominally Catholic. Was he deeply religious? I’m convinced that he was not deeply religious. Up until 1781 he wrote 16 settings of the mass, but that’s 'cause he was required to by the archbishop of Salzburg. There’s a letter he wrote to his father where he’s really quite dismissive. He says, “Oh God, masses, I could write half a dozen in a day if you wanted me to.” And that you sort of feel, yes, he’s writing this religious music on automatic. And I think it’s significant that after he leaves the service of the archbishop for the rest of his life, we’ve got another 10 years, he only wrote two major pieces of religious music.

Of course, one of those is the “Requiem” which is one of the greatest pieces of religious music ever written. But my feeling is that it’s more of a personal statement than a religious statement. The other piece of music, that important mass that he wrote, is also written for very specific personal reasons. This is the “C Minor Mass”. And this was written for performance, again, in Salzburg on the only occasion after his leaving in 1781 when he went back to the city of Salzburg with his new wife Constanze. And he wrote this mass to be performed in the Peters Kirche, which you see on the right hand side. And his wife was soloist. So it was his way, really, of introducing his wife, I think, with great pride to Salzburg. And I want to finish this evening with a solo that he wrote for her. And the words are “ed incarnatus est”. So the words are really the central doctrine of Christianity. That Jesus was the son of God who was made flesh “incarnatus est” to save humanity. Now, this is an exquisitely beautiful piece of music. I think I feel a real disconnect, actually, between the text what’s being told us in this Latin text and the music itself. To me, this music is more of a declaration of love for Constanze. It’s a lovely warm, feminine, loving, humane quality to this music, which doesn’t seem to me to have much to do with religious doctrine. Lets us stop here and see what questions and comments we have.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: What else is January the 27th remembered for?

A: Well it’s, of course, it’s a Holocaust Memorial Day, Mozart’s birthday also happens to be my very beloved sister’s birthday. January the 27th.

Q: Which quartet?

A: The “Dissonant Quartet”. It’s on your list. As always, there is a list with all the details of the recordings. And again, yes, the first piece was the “Dissonant Quartet”.

Q: Is that a backgammon board the light?

A: Yeah, I think it probably is. It’s obviously some kind of card game. The painting by Lancret. It’s in the National Gallery, by the way. And it’s called Lu… No, I think it’s called “Le Midi”.

Q: Who is the women?

A: I’m not sure what you’re asking me there.

This is Joni Catsal saying, “I had the great privilege of playing the University Orchestra in performances of "Don Giovanni” in the 1960s. They’re amongst your fondest memories.“ Well, I can’t even imagine how wonderful it would be to participate in a good performance of that opera. Which, in my opinion, is maybe the greatest opera ever.

Q: Why did he hate Salzburg?

A: Because it was provincial. He says it was not a place where he could really express himself or develop his talents. Above all I think he just hated the archbishop and the way he was treated by the archbishop. Which was, to our minds, absolutely shocking.

The Cuville Theatre, what? Oh, lucky you to go to an opera there. As I said, I haven’t managed that so far.

Q: Did Mozart use castrato singers?

A: Yes, he would certainly have used them in Italy in the earlier part of his career. I think they were really out of fashion by the time he was writing his great operas in the 1780s.

Q: Could you please give me the name of the artist of the painting you showed of Mozart by his piano?

A: I think the one at the beginning on the right hand side I think it’s by his brother-in-law. Joseph Lange, I think his name was. Yes, I’m afraid the Bogdanoff twins, they abused plastic surgery. Very sad. Yes, Joseph II allowed Jews to settle in towns. He, as I said, he his mother’s restrictions. But I think they were also, once again, some were reimposed because there was a kind conservative backlash. But you need to check with Judy about that.

Q: How was close was the tale of Mozart in the movie?

A: That’s a very interesting question. And not very close, I would say. I think it’s a wonderful movie. And I love the play and the movie. But in a way I think the central tenant of both the play and the movie is total nonsense. 'Cause they make a lot of the fact that Mozart had a very poor sense of humour and he had what the English would call a potty mouth. And he talked dirty and he wrote dirty. But that doesn’t make him an idiot. Mozart was no idiot. And in the play and the movie there’s this sort of idea that he’s just a conduit for divine inspiration who goes through this rather stupid and idiotic man. I think that’s actually completely wrong, completely untrue. Doesn’t mean that it’s not a good play or a good movie, but it’s certainly not the reality of Mozart.

I’ve been to concert in the Gold Room. The Gold Room? Are you talking about the Golden La Salle in Vienna? No, it wasn’t there in Mozart’s lifetime, it’s 19th century. Who wrote Mozart’s Libretti? Well, and that will be next time. I’m going to be concentrating on the great operas that he wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte. That’s a central part of the next talk.

I’ve never actually read the whole book by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. But, of course, it’s quoted all over the place. It was very, very influential. Particularly in its descriptions of the orderlies lulling around inside the harem, had a great impact on 19th century painting. Well, Lorenzo da Ponte wrote three… Mozart wrote 22 operas all together. And da Ponte wrote the Libretti for three of them. Yeah, it’s a damn cheek, actually, that the Austrians have claimed Mozart. And obviously Mozartkugel, "Mozart’s balls” literally translated, is disgusting little sweet chocolate things. What an insult, huh? The Burgtheater was torn down around 1890. And, of course, it was a rather shocking event. It was a big event in Vienna and there was great sadness. And the final performance was apparently the audience went crazy and they’re all taking little bits home as souvenirs.

Q: Did Mozart take note of the French Revolution and did it have any impact on his compositions?

A: Yes and no. I will talk about that next time. I think like everybody, I think he was quite shocked by the French Revolution. Didn’t have any time for Voltaire, by the way. When Voltaire died he gloated over the fact and said he’s died like a dog. But on the other hand, I will talk about this next time, Napoleon said the French Revolution would never have happened without the play “The Marriage of Figaro.” So, and that was a very, very bold choice for Mozart and da Ponte. And it always astonishes me that they were actually allowed to set that play as an opera.

No, Mozart did not write his own Liberettis. He was a Freemason. And I will talk about that next time in the context of the “Magic Flute”.

Yes, I think Mozart was more profoundly influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and Freemasonry than he was by the Catholic Church. But of course, as I said, he was still nominally a Catholic.

Q: How common was it for women to be soloists?

A: Oh, well, very common at the time in the 18th century. Well, Herbert, yes. Well, I hope I haven’t plagued you with the C Minor Mass for weeks. Although there are worse things to be played with.

Yes, extraordinarily beautiful. Well certainly the “C Minor Mass” and the “Requiem” are very great music. But I don’t think that’s where his primary inspiration lay.

Q: Did Constanze marry again?

A: Yes she did, and she lived a very long time. She lived well into the 19th century. You can find out who’s singing by looking on the list.

And that’s it I think, is it? No, let me see if I can… Yes, Herbert is talking about… Da Ponte is a fascinating character. Really he deserves a lecture in himself. Very interesting life landing up in New York, of course.

Q: Who was Mozart’s favourite, Librettist?

A: Well, who knows? But probably da Ponte, I suppose. Certainly the Librettist who inspired his greatest masterpieces. Da Ponte being a converted Jew, as we will hear next time.

Yes, 27th of January is Holocaust Memorial Day because it was the day of liberation of Auschwitz.

Right. I think I probably better come… On my great-grandfather’s side… I think that one’s better.

Oh, here’s Judith. “Mozart Woche in Salzburg is a wonderful festival and not very busy.” I have to say I don’t like the Salzburg festival. It’s too blingy, too glitzy for my taste. But oh, another very beautiful piece. Yes, of course, it’s not a mass, the “Arve Verum Corpus.” That’s a very lovely piece. But do you really think that it’s religious in the way that say it’s just a very lovely, comforting piece, “Arve Verum Corpus.” But I don’t sense the profound religiosity that you have with, say, Bach and Handel.

Q: Which operas do you think are best sung in German?

A: What I’ll talk about that next time. Well, obviously the German operas, 'Entfuhrungand" and “Zauberflote”, you want to hear them in German. But most of his operas were written in Italian. And I like them, I’ll talk about this next time, being sung by Italian singers. Gives them something extra. You can find a list, but when you are sent the list every week with the invitation. You have to scroll down the list. We will come back.

And I think I need to come to an end here. Oh, of course. Well, yes, of course, I did a lecture on Vato last year and talked quite a lot Shop Sign by Vato. And it is a truly marvellous picture and a very interesting social document as well as being a great masterpiece.

Good, well, I think that’s it. So I’ll continue with Mozart on Wednesday and we’ll be looking at the da Ponte operas. We’ll be looking at the Freemason, his relationship with the Freemason and at the “Magic Flute”.

• [Moderator] Thank you, Patrick, for another wonderful lecture. We will see everyone back at 2:00 for our second webinar of this afternoon. Everyone, have a good night. And thank you, Patrick, again.

• [Patrick] Bye-bye.