I read a few of Mozart’s letters to his Dad. I had no idea he was so religious. He’s in Paris for this concert. He’s not sure how it’s going to go. “I was really very afraid,” he says. “I would have liked to rehearse it again.” But there wasn’t time, so he goes to bed pissed off about it and fantasizing that if it starts to go badly he’ll dive into the orchestra, rip the fiddle from the hands of the first violin and conduct it himself.
It goes great. The audience laps it up, “especially the final allegro”. So what does he do afterwards? He heads down to the Palais Royal and buys himself a big ice-cream and says the rosary. He doesn’t even wait till he gets home to say the rosary. He lashes it out there and then, having his ice-cream.
When he hears of Voltaire’s death he says to his Dad – “You probably know that that godless arch-rogue Voltaire has died like a dog, like a beast – that’s his reward!”
I don’t know about you, I found it pretty funny.
But come here to me – one other thing – he’s talking about this great piano he’s been playing and he says there’s no “reverberation” off it. Does that mean he played his pieces choppily, without a sustain pedal? Could that be true? Did Mozart play his own adagios in a way that we would find – jerky?
