Mozart and the Guises of Love

Extract

If not from the beginning then from a very early time of his life, Mozart knew both that love in all its diverse manifestations is the rare wonder of our experience and that it is always under attack. At a London breakfast party in 1765, the nine-years old boy was asked by the distinguished lawyer, Daines Barrington, to extemporize a song for the castrato Manzuoli. The singer had befriended the little boy on this London visit and Mozart, with a grin, at once sat down at the harpsichord and began an air composed to the single word Affetto. ‘If this extempore composition was not amazingly capital’, Barrington reported to his fellows at the Royal Society, ‘yet it was really above mediocrity, and shewed most extraordinary readiness of invention’. He had asked for another song, one that might be ‘proper for the opera stage’. Immediately, the boy began a song of Perfido. ‘And in the middle of it, he had worked himself up to such a pitch that he beat his harpsichord like a person possessed’. That Love will ever be dogged by Treachery is the continuing theme of Mozart’s dramma in musica. The writing of operas became, as he told his father in February 1778, ‘an obsession with me’, and, taken together, these operas present as rare an assessment of the great matters of our experience as the philosophy of Aristotle, the sculpture of Michelangelo, or the novels of Henry James. ‘I cannot write a poem, for I am no poet; I cannot get the light and the dark into verse. Neither am I a painter.