Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words

F >> Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel >> Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words

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(Vienna, June 13, 1761--another attempt at justification against
slander.)

252. "Moreover take the assurance that I certainly am religious,
and if I should ever have the misfortune (which God will
forefend) to go astray, I shall acquit you, best of fathers, from
all blame. I alone would be the scoundrel; to you I owe all my
spiritual and temporal welfare and salvation."

(Vienna, June 13, 1781.)

253. "For a considerable time before we were married we went
together to Holy Mass, to confession and to communion; and I
found that I never prayed so fervently, confessed and
communicated so devoutly, as when I was at her side;--and her
experience was the same. In a word we were made for each other,
and God, who ordains all things and consequently has ordained
this, will not desert us. We both thank you obediently for your
paternal blessing."

(Vienna, August 17, 1782.)

254. "I have made it a habit in all things to imagine the worst.
Inasmuch as, strictly speaking, death is the real aim of our
life, I have for the past few years made myself acquainted with
this true, best friend of mankind, so that the vision not only
has no terror for me but much that is quieting and comforting.
And I thank my God that He gave me the happiness and the
opportunity (you understand me) to learn to know Him as the key
to true blessedness."

(Vienna, April 4, 1787, to his father, who died on the 28th of
the following month. One of the few pasages in Mozart's letters
in which there are suggestions of the teachings of Freemasonry.
In 1785 he had persuaded his father to join the order, with the
result that new warmth was restored to the relationship which had
cooled somewhat after Mozart's marriage.)

255. "To me that again is art twaddle! There may be something
true in it for you enlightened Protestants, as you call
yourselves, when you have your religion in your heads; I can not
tell. But you do not feel what Agnus Dei, "qui tollis peccata
mundi" and such things mean. But when one, like I, has been
initiated from earliest childhood in the mystical sanctuary of
our religion; when there one does not know whither to go with all
the vague but urgent feelings, but waits with a heart full of
devotion for the divine service without really knowing what to
expect, yet rises lightened and uplifted without knowing what one
has received; when one deemed those fortunate who knelt under the
touching strains of the Agnus Dei and received the sacrament, and
at the moment of reception the music spoke in gentle joy from the
hearts of the kneeling ones, "Benedictus qui venit", etc.;--then
it is a different matter. True, it is lost in the hurly-burly of
life; but,--at least it is so in my case,--when you take up the
words which you have heard a thousand times, for the purpose of
setting them to music, everything comes back and you feel your
soul moved again."

(Spoken in Leipsic, in 1789, when somebody expressed pity for
those capable musicians who were obliged to "employ their powers
on ecclesiastical subjects, which were mostly not only unfruitful
but intellectually killing." Rochlitz reports the utterance but
does not vouch for its literalness.)

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