Mozart the Insult Comic Composer
Mozart could be scatological. Now this was portrayed well in the movie Amadeus, but it is something that truly must be seen and heard to be believed. The following is an excerpt from Mozart’s words to his musical canon O du eselhafter Martin, which translates as “O You Asinine Martin”:
I’ll shit on your mouth,
that’ll wake you up I hope.
O my dear Martin, I beg you truly,
O quickly quickly lick my ass!
O my dear friend, I’ll seal up your asshole.
I swear I did not just make up those words. I took them directly out of the program notes for a recent Mozart concert I attended. It was a great crowd pleaser, and just helped out all of those people writing dissertations on the connections between Mozart and hip hop.
O du eselhafter Martin (mp3) - Mozart Buy
So you think Mozart’s music sounds boringly plain and interchangeable?
Well, it was something Mozart was aware of as well. The potential for banality was much explored, and he even wrote a piece called A Musical Joke that is intentionally so. And he devised a game to compose pieces using musical spare parts…kind of like musical Mad Libs or those books where you can flip each word around to come up with funny plots for movies. He wrote dozens and dozens of short fragments that each had a different assigned number, and you could simply request a combination of numbers and voila…a brand new piece of music. Check out the link below and start generating your own new Mozart compositions (in MIDI and sheet music) today!
November 30th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Howard, you keep an amazing blog. I love reading your posts and listening to your selections. Thank you for all your effort.