COMMENTARY: Time to Sing Happy 250th Birthday for `Wolfie’

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) One of my most vivid childhood memories is my father’s huge collection of 78 rpm phonograph recordings. Classical music filled our home, and back then, I loved the big Russian orchestral pieces _ Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” But in recent years _ […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) One of my most vivid childhood memories is my father’s huge collection of 78 rpm phonograph recordings. Classical music filled our home, and back then, I loved the big Russian orchestral pieces _ Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.”

But in recent years _ as a sign of either advancing age or growing maturity _ my musical tastes have shifted to intimate chamber music, passionate 18th century operas, and intricate violin and piano concertos. That means _ no surprise here _ falling in love with the music of the composer who was born in Austria 250 years ago this month, on Jan. 27, 1756.


Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived a brief, turbulent life that lasted only 35 years. Poor “Wolfie.” He had an overbearing father who hated his son’s choice of a wife. A peripatetic Wolfgang, a true child prodigy, traveled throughout Europe constantly performing music while fending off poverty, the early death of his mother and a series of growing physical infirmities. At age 28 he antagonized leaders of the Catholic Church by becoming a member of a Masonic lodge.

But in only 31/2 decades Mozart composed 626 pieces of incredible music including 27 piano concertos and three of the world’s greatest operas: “The Marriage of Figaro” with its then subversive theme of a servant outwitting a nobleman, “Don Giovanni” with its remarkable portrait of a sexual seducer and murderer, and “Cosi Fan Tutte,” based on a true story of two Viennese “gentlemen” who test a woman’s loyalty.

I am especially proud that Mozart’s brilliant librettist in those operas was a Jew: Lorenzo da Ponte, a picturesque character who in later years taught Italian literature at Columbia University in New York City. Da Ponte fully deserves a motion picture about his extraordinary life to complement “Amadeus,” the 1984 film about Mozart.

When Mozart died in 1791, he was rushing to complete his “Requiem,” but he never finished it. After a minimalist funeral in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Mozart was buried in an unmarked grave in the Austrian capital, a site that still remains unknown. The cause of his death has been the source of speculation _ was it poisoning by a jealous rival composer, kidney failure or scarlet fever? In 2000, a medical panel determined Mozart died of rheumatic fever.

Many of his contemporaries were either unable or unwilling to grasp the sheer complexity of Mozart’s music. And the fact that he wrote so much so quickly and so well made him the target of envy and consternation. The Hapsburg emperor Joseph II complained: “Too many notes, my dear Mozart.” Wolfgang’s response to his sovereign was pure chutzpah: “Your Majesty, there are just enough notes, just enough.”

Even though Mozart wrote a great deal of church music, surprisingly, no composition of his was performed at the Vatican until 1985 when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, another ardent Mozart devotee, arranged for a performance of the composer’s Coronation Mass. Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has declared: “His (Mozart’s) music is by no means just entertainment. It contains the whole tragedy of human emotion.”

But old animosities die hard.

Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, the archbishop emeritus of Bologna, whom some observers thought might succeed Pope John Paul II, once called for Mozart’s music to be banned in Catholic churches because the composer was a Mason. Indeed, Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” does contain Masonic ideas.


Some years ago I participated in a Catholic-Jewish conference at the Vatican. A priest at the meeting was also a Mozart admirer, and during one conversation about our favorite composer, he asked me, “Rabbi, which music would you like to hear when you arrive in heaven?”

Without hesitation, I selected only three compositions: a cantorial rendition of the Kol Nidre prayer that ushers in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; followed by Leonard Bernstein’s own personal favorite, his “Chichester Psalms”; and finally, “anything” by the man another pretty good musician, Joseph Haydn, called “the greatest composer I have ever heard.”

Happy birthday, Wolfie!

MO/PH END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Rabbi Rudin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.

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