The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  S (quoting):

  ‘Mozart’s scatological disorder.’ Umm … ‘The surprising scatology found in Mozart’s letters has not yet been satisfactorily explained. When the first English edition of the Mozart letters was published in 1938 all of the previously suppressed, unexpurgated letters were made available. In her introduction Emily Anderson stated: “It was not only when writing to his ‘Bäsle’ (little cousin) that Mozart indulged in this particular kind of coarseness, but … certainly his mother and very probably the whole family and indeed many of their Salzburg friends were given to these indelicate jests.” The possibility of Tourette’s syndrome, a syndrome of vocal and motor tics, was raised at the 1983 world congress of psychiatry in Vienna by Fog and Regeur, on the basis of Mozart’s scatology and his portrayal in Peter Shaffer’s stage play and motion picture, Amadeus. Peter Davies attributed Mozart’s scatology to a hypomanic manifestation of his cyclothymic personality disorder. Steptoe echoed Anderson and regarded the scatology as a coarse, immature characteristic which Mozart retained in his adult life. With this background, this paper tabulates Mozart’s scatology and suggests that its origin lay in Mozart’s plausible affliction with Tourette’s syndrome.’

  WAM: You see? On the basis of some letters and a film script Messrs Fog and Regeur – good names, incidentally – drag my name before the world congress of psychiatry, vengeful little bastards the Viennese, didn’t I always say? Whereupon everyone else chimes in and agrees I had a personality disorder, whatever that may be, as well as being coarse and immature. They, naturally, being models of refined maturity. Beware the jealousy of the radically untalented! In the nicest possible way and with nothing but the deepest respect and dispassionate scientific enquiry in mind – other than making a lot of money at the box-office – they’ll bring you down to their own level, never fear. They just keep chipping away, a paper here, a theory there, a bestselling biography or two and voilà! Just like everyone else, just another mortal, what did we tell you? Wonderful talent, of course, genius even; but oho! imagine being married to him! Impossible character, a pain to live with, vain little man etcetera etcetera. All goes to show that brilliance has its down side, nicht wahr? Yes! So we can go home thinking either that he wasn’t really much different from us after all, genius-schmenius, or congratulating ourselves on not having been him, can’t have been any fun, you don’t imagine they’re ever happy, do you, these incredibly gifted people? Stands to reason, Liebchen: if they’re out of the ordinary they’re not normal by definition. And if they’re not normal they’re abnormal … And wheel on the medical diagnoses.

  S: Have another beer.

  WAM: I’m sorry, I’ve never quite got used to it, people’s ignorance. So unimaginative, too, as well as being impertinent. These are my private letters they’re quoting from: letters to my family, to my wife whom I often didn’t see for months on end because I was always travelling. Do none of them have pet names for their own wives and lovers, private references which nobody else might understand? Obviously not. Now we get some drivelling Californian complaining about my ‘nonsense words’ and compiling po-faced tables listing the percentage of my letters which mention Shit, Arse, Muck, Piddle or Piss, Fart, Arseholes, Fondling and Kissing/Sexual Fetish and Palilalia, Echolalia or Word Games. You’re looking puzzled, as well you might.

  S: Palilalia’s a new one on me.

  WAM: I had to look it up. It means being repetitive. One of the symptoms of Tourette’s, as we doctors refer to it familiarly. Apart from the vocal and motor tics, this marvellous syndrome includes hyperactivity, sudden impulses, odd behaviour, echolalia, love of nonsense words and driven inner rhythms. I quote. Remember the old expression ‘to jump for joy’? Well, forget it. Nowadays it’s a symptom. Have you never felt such energy you wanted to skip and run and turn somersaults? So did I. I used to leapfrog over chairs. More fool me. It wasn’t the innocent pleasure I thought it was, it was Tourette’s … Oh, we can dismiss all this as a lot of serio-comico-pseudo-medico-

  S: Mozartkugel,

  WAM: Mozartkugel, exactly, but the real giveaway’s the maiden-aunt tone. Where’s that bit? Yes, listen to this: ‘Mozart confessed to his father that on several occasions he entertained his host, the director of the world famed Mannheim Orchestra, along with his family and important orchestra members, by reciting after-dinner scatological rhymes by the hour …’ Oh, the small-town creep! ‘World famed’ indeed. It was old Christian Cannabich’s bunch. Certainly a good orchestra, but I was a better composer. ‘Important orchestra members’ – my God, had I but known all those instrumentalist chums of mine like Ramm were important I’d never have done it, your Honour, and certainly not when a family was eavesdropping. They must have crept in at the back, unnoticed … ‘World-famed’ and ‘important’: it’s all there in those two slimy little adjectives. They’re supposed to make you overlook the phrase ‘on several occasions’ because obviously this wasn’t one embarrassing episode when a lot of blameless worthies had to endure the ramblings of a drunkard. They took part. You bet they did! Cannabich’s own daughter Lisel egged us on. She had this really great dirty mind. We had rhyming competitions. We did it not once but again and again. Guess why. I mean, were we all being immature and childish? All those world famed and important people? Or maybe smutty talk was a peculiar disease shared by late eighteenth-century Austrian musicians? Is this a previously undiscovered syndrome like Tourette’s, waiting for some airhead psychiatrist to discover? Another of those pseudo-historical cul de Sacks?

  S: I hope you’re spelling that the way I think you are.

  WAM: Look, when I say these idiots are ignorant I really mean it. They’ve no idea what things were like then, over two hundred years ago and counting. Austria wasn’t even a tiny bit like late twentieth-century California, and certainly not for a jobbing musician stuck way down the social heap. Life was completely stratified. Social levels were elaborately drawn, constantly reinforced by custom and protocol and verbal formulae. Who might address whom, and in what terms. I was a nobody, especially when I left Salzburg for Vienna. I never again held a proper long-term appointment or had a reliable patron. We all spent half our time grovelling. Imagine those petitions and letters we sent to our employers, to prospective patrons; to minor royalty asking for a job, for our long-overdue salary, for ordinary fair treatment. No unions. I was kicked by an Archbishop and called ‘a vile wretch’. ‘Most noble, high, and devoutly esteemed Sir,’ I wrote – and that was just to the syphilitic arsehole who did the Archbishop’s accounts. Dedications to Royalty, on the other hand, went on for pages. ‘Your Most Ineffable Gloriousness …’ grovel grovel grovel ‘… I have the temerity to write on the reassurance of Your having been most graciously pleased to look with some small favour upon my last humble offering …’ gibber gibber gibber ‘… and were it in Your famously munificent heart to accept this present unworthy …’ crap crap crap and now the punch-line: Might you see fit, you tone-deaf, inbred, noseless royal wastrel, to give me another commission fast – preferably with some hard cash up-front – since my wife’s ill, our baby was stillborn, we owe four months’ rent and haven’t had a square meal in a week? Not that I expect much, since the entire Holy Roman Empire knows you’re so tight you shit needles.

  S: And so on.

  WAM: And so forth. But even people who think they understand all that still get it wrong. They see my rebelliousness as political. They think I was a closet radical with an instinctive sympathy for republicanism and the imminent Revolution in France. I wasn’t anything of the kind. We liked Beaumarchais’ Figaro because it was ironic, pretend-anarchic, affecting to turn things on their head. It was anti-hypocritical. It was alleged to be anti-monarchist, but that certainly wasn’t why we liked it. I and most of my friends were Masons, for heaven’s sake. I was very conservative, like all my family. I can still detect streaks of it in me even today. I feared God and had nothing against Royalty per se. What we all despised were the hypocrites who sometimes wore archbishop’s ve
stments and royal robes; we didn’t all despise the office.

  So, faced with the hermetic and flouncy social hierarchy of court life – such as nobody in Europe today can even vaguely imagine, still less in the States – we gave vent to our feelings by going to the opposite extreme in private. While off-duty we naturally sang canons in dialect to words like ‘Lick my arse really good and clean.’ Now I think about it a good few were concerned with power and inferiority. ‘Stick your snout right up my hole.’ I wrote dozens but most are lost. ‘Let one rip but keep your breeches dry’ was another, I remember. And of course we mocked formal occasions by giving after-dinner speeches about excrement. It wasn’t childish, it was damn well life-saving, believe me. We composers and orchestral players were treated like street riff-raff most of the time by morons in powdered wigs who wouldn’t have known a fugue from a hole in the ground. How else do you let out all that rage? Why are you looking at me like that?

  S: You’re sweating. You’re a Nigerian and this evening breeze off the sea strikes me as pleasantly cool. Is this pure passion?

  WAM: Would that it were. It’s pure malaria, actually, and unfortunately not a benign variety. I know – physician heal thyself, ho-ho. It’s a strain that P. falciparum has developed up near Maidugun which chloroquine won’t touch. We think we’re so clever in our apparent victory in the war against protozoa and microbes that we’ve overlooked one small thing. Time. We think a century’s a long time, but evolution doesn’t. They’re striking back. This beer you kindly keep buying for me’s replenishing my liquid levels most agreeably but on past experience its effects may be dire. My departure could be abrupt. I don’t know whether it helps to keep talking about it.

  S: Shit?

  WAM: Shit, exactly. One of those four-letter words the blessed Emily Anderson nerved herself to write without the fig-leaf of a single asterisk. Thirty years later they were still referring to her ‘courageous’ translation of my letters. Interfering old cow – how dared she sniff around my private correspondence?

  S: She thought you were dead.

  WAM: So I was for a while, but I still think it’s no excuse. Imagine how you’d feel if a bunch of so-called scholars were one day to paw through your intimate letters and presume to make judgments of your character on their misreadings? Even close friends can misinterpret certain references between lovers – imagine what total strangers might make of them. Foreign strangers at that, and living in an age which bears no resemblance to our own. All the cultural assumptions slightly off-centre, the tone always slightly skewed. That was sort of it, I suppose, but at the same time it wasn’t it by miles. And on the basis of her translation of my letters done in the Thirties they make films and write biographies and diagnose my syndromes. Wouldn’t you feel a little nettled?

  S: I don’t know what I’d feel. It’s all too hypothetical. Mercifully it won’t happen to me.

  WAM: Never try to second-guess posterity, is my advice. It has interests you’d never dream of. How could I have imagined they’d one day be dissecting me for pathology and holding their noses at the character they’d invented for me? Even though it’s now over half a century since she translated me, impertinent baggage that she was, they’re still taking their cues from the divine Emily. They all dutifully show a regretful and ladylike disdain for what she called my ‘scatology’ on the grounds that it was ‘childish’. Not childlike but childish. In other words sadly and inexplicably at variance with the extreme ‘maturity’ which enabled me to write the music they claim to admire. You can place this on record: that any accusation of childishness is always a sign of unease. As I said just now, they don’t understand the social pressures we were under. But there’s another reason why they’re plain dead wrong, and that’s because they’re being completely anachronistic. They don’t want to know about shit, and it’s very much to the point.

  S: It is?

  WAM: Absolutely. From my perspective I can now see how intimately smells are bound up with history. As my former self I was born in 1756 and I can assure you that nobody in Austria during my lifetime ever thought children any more childish for being interested in shit. Smell had yet to become pathologised or politicised, whichever you prefer. Germs weren’t known about. Pasteur’s discoveries lay a hundred years in the future. Only towards the end of that short life of mine – which actually wasn’t so short for those days – did anyone begin making connections between disease and the fabulous variety of stenches which surrounded us. Miasmas, we used to call them. Eventually that led to public drainage systems and laws stopping you throwing your shit out of the window into the street, but that was after my time.

  From what I gather it wasn’t until after the French Revolution that the middle classes began putting some real social distance between themselves and the masses. I suppose they must have thought they were naturally ‘mature’ because of their education and because they could afford to stop living like pigs. Suddenly they developed these acutely sensitive noses for smells they never used to mind and which the masses still didn’t seem to notice. It must have been like that, don’t you think? Calling them ‘the great unwashed’ and shunning the parts of town with smelly industries like soap-boiling, tanning and slaughter yards, which I remember did hum a bit. Because the masses stank – and sometimes to make a point acted proud of it – your new bourgeois considered them more like animals. Closer to nature, you know, always shitting and fucking. And since children were anyway thought of as more animal than adults were I bet their scatological behaviour became a sign of their immaturity. So by extension the common herd was naturally more primitive, more childish.

  S: Q.E.D.

  WAM: Well, maybe it’s a bit pat, but the doctor in the current me seems quite interested in connections between class and smell. Don’t forget I work in Nigeria. These are live issues, let me tell you. But they weren’t when I was a boy in Austria. If we were foul-mouthed, me and my highly talented, God-fearing and upwardly mobile family, it certainly wasn’t because we were immature sons of the soil.

  S: So if you say the 1990s smell of sun-tan lotion, what did the 1770s smell of?

  WAM: Shit, mostly. Especially Paris. When was I there? 1778, I think. I knew what I was talking about, too, because by then I’d been half over Europe. Holland, England, France, Italy, Germany; but I can tell you Paris was the smelliest city known to man. People really ought to study shit, get their noses into it, work their fingers into it, especially if they’re going to sound off about scatology and immaturity. But they won’t do the work, you see. They’re too busy with their nice clean paper analyses and watermark studies. They’d prefer to rely on some silly old biddy writing half a century ago and a playwright. A playwright, I ask you! Where’s the research? The real library work? There was a most interesting book published about fifteen years ago, Histoire de la merde. I found it in Lagos. I’ll bet not one of them dipped into that. If they had, they’d have learned how furiously certain artists of the day rejected the prissy new taboos. There’s a letter from Flaubert to a friend of his full of heartfelt advice about how to deal with this sudden outbreak of gentility. Look it out, I should. Read it into the record.

  [It seems likely that WAM was referring to the following passage, dated March 15th, 1842: ‘Let diarrhoea drip into your boots, piss out of the window, yell “Shit!”, crap in public, fart like a trooper…!’]

  S: Why don’t we dislike the smell of our own farts? I’ve often wondered.

  WAM: Why should we? It’s only recently we’ve learned to treat our own bodies with distaste. I believe someone’s done some research to establish exactly when you begin to feel disgust for your own shit, when it no longer feels like a part of you. I mean both when after infancy as well as when after crapping. We had to learn our disgust; it’s not natural. It’s odd when you stop to think about it. People pay endless attention to eating habits, to food and cuisine down the ages, digging up all sorts of amazing historical detail; yet they pay no attention to shitting. Where’s the logic in
it? What goes in one end is accorded immense social importance but when it comes out the other end it disappears into a black hole. Those post-sanitation sensibilities, I’m afraid. It’s behind all their treatment of me at present. The modern middle classes will happily gorge themselves on my balls but they live in mortal terror of my anus.

  S: Didn’t I read something once about shit throwing festivals?

  WAM: Ah, those used to be held on Shrove Tuesday where we were, and people said they went on all over Europe, especially in France and Bohemia. I remember one in Salzburg when I was a kid. We came home plastered in turd and aching with laughter. Next day Lent began. We associated shit with health and vigour and fertility, just as they still do in parts of Nigeria. Happy memories, you know. Perhaps you can’t imagine? Smells and textures and remembered laughter. They go on haunting one for a long, long while, all the more so in such sanitised times as we live in. More than a century went by before we were handed all that analytical stuff about coprophilia and masochism. Shit had changed its meaning by then. You know, I hadn’t thought about these things for ages, not until that damnfool article brought it all up again. But last night I vividly remembered what it was like, sitting there writing music for hours, usually cold, the table all gritty with sand and quill slivers like nail clippings. I’d open my legs and crack a long bubbly one and let the smell come drifting up over the edge of the table and inhale it like incense. It was a serious smell. It was my smell, it came from within, exactly as the music did. They both came from me and no-one else. They were inseparable, part of my power. They used to make me yearn to squeeze out my strongest essence. I can remember them both, the farts and the longing. Farts are the music of creativeness, the divine wind. I even wrote them into my music. The opening of my C major symphony? The one they call the Jupiter? That was a cracker. Barp! Brrrarp! BrrrARP! It was at suppertime and we all laughed, but none louder than I because I heard an orchestra and knew I’d started something. That’s how artists work, you know, but for God’s sake don’t tell anyone. You’ll never be believed. They never will get that right. They think it’s all to do with a plodding sacrament. They never allow for the pleasure, the wit of inspiration; the way it makes you laugh as it comes bubbling up, the way ideas whizz, form patterns, slide apart again, all mixed up with tiny details, precise phrases, actual scraps.