Before the end of 2024, on a whim, I bought a book of Mozart’s letters. “His head was apparently too large for his body;” proffered Irish tenor Michael Kelly, a friend of the composer who sang in the premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro, “but the body itself, and the hands and the feet, were formed in exact proportion, of which he was rather vain.” A description and a metaphor, perhaps.
Mozart was a prolific, effusive, and kooky multilingual correspondent. “Kiss Mama’s hand for me 1000000000000 times,” 14-year-old Wolfgang wrote to his sister Anna Maria (better known as Nannerl) on March 3, 1770. “If I were to tell you all the things I do with your dear portrait you would often laugh, I think!” he wrote to his “dearest, best little wife” Constanze on April 13, 1789, at 7 o’clock in the morning. “For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say, ‘Good morrow, Stanzerl! Good day, little rogue! – pussy-wussy! saucy one! – good-for-nothing! – dainty morsel!’ And when I put it back I slip it in little by little saying all the time, ‘Nu–nu–nu–nu!’ with just the peculiar emphasis this very meaning-ful word demands, and then, just at the last, quickly, ‘Good night, little pet – sleep sound!’”
While these are a delight, I was most interested in his letters from 1787 – the year Mozart composed Don Giovanni, my favorite opera. As I’ve said before, you can’t beat that ending: the titular hedonist gets eternally damned by the undead man he killed at the start of Act I and a coterie of singing demons.
1787 was a tough year for Mozart. In April he appeared to have suffered from IgA vasculitis (formerly known as Henoch-Schönlein purpura), and in August he developed renal tuberculosis with renal colic. Mozart’s earlier bout was treated by Dr. Sigmund Barisani, a childhood chum who would die unexpectedly that September.
Mozart’s father Leopold was also gravely ill. On April 4, in what would be his final correspondence to his dad, Mozart wrote: “I gathered from your last letter that you were, thank God, in very good health. But now I hear you are really ill! I am sure I need not tell you how greatly I long for reassuring news from yourself. Indeed I expect it, even though I have accustomed myself to contemplate the worst on all occasions. Since death, when we come to consider it, is seen to be the true goal of our life, I have made acquaintance during these last few years with this best and truest friend of mankind, so that his image not only no longer has any terrors for me, but suggests, on the contrary, much that is reassuring and consoling!”
Leopold died on May 28. Wolfgang, despite his purported acceptance of death, was devastated.
In January of that same year, Mozart asked Lorenzo Da Ponte for a libretto. Da Ponte suggested Mozart make a new version of the libertine blasphemer who’s taken to hell by the statue one of his victims – you know, that ol’ yarn. Mozart, burdened by debt and raw from the recent loss of his infant son, Johann Thomas Leopold, was into it. He composed Don Giovanni that summer in Vienna.
The opera’s sudden mood shifts and ghostly daddy savior make a throughline from Leopold’s passing to Mozart’s creative process here very tempting. But consider that Mozart wrote Ein musikalischer Spaß (“A Musical Joke”), a possibly satirical piece that makes fun of bad composers, just two weeks after his father died. Mozart is a rubber band; the man contains multitudes. To this day, critics argue over whether Don Giovanni is a tragic or comic opera. It, like Mozart’s life, seems to be both.
Around the same time I bought this book, someone ghosted me. We’d been talking nonstop, a faucet on full blast, but I can’t specifically say what drew me to him. We shared vibes but not interests. He was brimming with trauma. A week before he disappeared, I had texted an old friend asking if/affirming that whatever was going on between us was doomed. “This has happened to me & many friends before,” another pal sympathized when I told her it was already over, “depressed ghosts.”
I was sad, then mad, but now it’s kind of funny? Life is a journey to death, according to Mozart, who died obscenely young at the age of 35, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be exuberant and fuck up and find strange humor in shitty situations. Mozart composed what many believe is the greatest opera of all time during a god-awful year for him personally. And who’s to say a zombie Italian statue won’t help avenge me down the line? Bad things will happen, ghosts will come and go. But Mozart is forever.