Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as revealed in his own words | Page 4

Henry Edward Krehbiel. Each page was cut out of
the original book with an X-acto knife and fed into an Automatic
Document Feeder Scanner to make this e-text, so the original book was
disbinded in order to save it.
Some adaptations from the original text were made while formatting it
for an e-text. Italics in the original book were ignored in making this
e-text, unless they referred to proper nouns, in which case they are put
in quotes in the e-text. Italics are problematic because they are not
easily rendered in ASCII text.
This electronic text was prepared by John Mamoun with help from
numerous other proofreaders, including those associated with Charles
Franks' Distributed Proofreaders website. Thanks to C. Franks, S.
Harris, A. Montague, S. Morrison, J. Roberts, R. Rowe, R. Tremblay, R.

Zimmerman and several others for proof-reading.
Corrections for version 11 of this text made by Andrew Sly.

MOZART: THE MAN AND THE ARTIST, AS REVEALED IN HIS
OWN WORDS
BY
FRIEDRICH KERST
TRANSLATED BY HENRY EDWARD KREHBIEL

MOZART: THE MAN AND THE ARTIST, AS REVEALED IN HIS
OWN WORDS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INFORMATION ABOUT THIS E-TEXT EDITION BRIEF
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH MOZART: THE MAN AND THE
ARTIST, AS REVEALED IN HIS OWN WORDS
EDITOR'S NOTE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MOZART CHIPS
FROM THE WORKSHOP CONCERNING THE OPERA MUSICAL
PEDAGOGICS TOUCHING MUSICAL PERFORMANCES
EXPRESSIONS CRITICAL OPINIONS CONCERNING OTHERS
WOLFGANG, THE GERMAN SELF-RESPECT AND HONOR AT
HOME AND ABROAD LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP WORLDLY
WISDOM IN SUFFERING MORALS RELIGION

BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

The German composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was
not only a musical genius, but was also one of the pre-eminent geniuses
of the Western world. He defined in his music a system of musical
thought and an entire state of mind that were unlike any previously
experienced. A true child prodigy, he began composing at age 5 and
rapidly developed his unmistakable style; by 18 he was composing
works capable of altering the mind-states of entire civilizations. Indeed,
he and his predecessor Bach accomplished the Olympian feat of adding
to the human concepts of civility and civilization. So these two were
not just musical geniuses, but geniuses of the humanities.
Mozart's music IS civilization. It encompasses all that is humane about
an idealized civilization. And it probably was Mozart's main purpose to
create and propagate a concept of a great civilization through his music.
He wanted to show his fellow Europeans, with their garbage-polluted
citystreets, their violent mono-maniacal leaders and their stifling,
non-humane bureaucracies, new ideas on how to run their civilizations
properly. He wanted them to hear and feel a sense of civilized
movement, of the musical expressions of man moving as he would if
upholding the highest values of idealized societies. One need only
listen to the revolutionary opening bars of his famous Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik to see this.
He was an extremely sophisticated and complex man. His letters reveal
him as remarkably creative, fascinated by the arts, principled, religious
and devoted to his father. He had an energetic personality that was
almost completely devoid of any cynicism, pessimism or
discouragement from creating music. While rumors suggest that he was
a lascivious individual, there is no evidence of this at all in his letters.
Quite the contrary, the evidence seems overwhelmingly to suggest the
opposite, and that Mozart may not have had any relations with women
except with his own wife.
He was not as shrewd as he was civilized, however. He was peculiarly
lax about profiting from his history-changing music. His promoters
constantly short-changed him.
He died nearly penniless and in debt, and at his death at age 35 an

apathetic public took little notice of this man who had done so much in
service to civilization. He was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave
with few mourners. After his death, the bones of this great paragon of
self-sacrifice for the sake of improving civilization were dug up and
disposed of. His grave was then re-used, and to this day no one knows
where his bones lie. Perhaps they are in a catacomb somewhere, in a
huge bone-pile containing thousands of anonymous cadavers.
But the sounds he heard in his head live on, stimulating millions in
elevators, doctors' offices, train terminals, concert halls and myriad
other places to be more civilized, assuming that they pay attention to
the music.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The purpose and scope of this little book will be obvious to the reader
from even a cursory glance at its contents. It is, in a way, an
autobiography of Mozart written without conscious purpose, and for
that reason peculiarly winning, illuminating and convincing. The
outward things in Mozart's life are all but ignored in it, but there is a
frank and full disclosure of the great musician's artistic, intellectual and
moral character,