Mozart and scatology

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart and scatology is a subject that stops most people short. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the composer of extraordinary elegance, wrote letters containing verses about defecation, invented nicknames for aristocrats like "the Duchess Smackarse" and "the Countess Pleasurepisser", and composed canons whose lyrics had to be scrubbed clean before publishers would touch them after his death. What does it mean when one of history's most celebrated composers had, as one contemporary put it, an "extraordinarily infantile sense of humour"? The answers involve his family, his era, and the politics of vulgarity in 18th-century Europe. They also involve a Prime Minister who refused to believe it, a psychiatrist who was invited to weigh in and declined, and a debate that has run from Sigmund Freud to the Tourette Syndrome Association.

• 2. The Bäsle Letters

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  On the 5th of November 1777, Mozart wrote from Mannheim to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart. The letter is in rhymed verse in German. The translation by American academic Robert Spaethling renders the playful spirit faithfully, complete with word-pairs that rhyme nonsensically in English: "Dearest cozz buzz" and "writing biting" and "good fettle kettle". Then the letter turns sharper: "Oui, by the love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin". Maria Anna Thekla was not just a cousin. Musicologist Maynard Solomon describes her as a probable love interest, and the letters to her are known as the "Bäsle letters", after the German word Bäsle, a diminutive meaning "little cousin". Mozart had spent a pleasant two weeks with her in her native Augsburg before writing these letters, and in them the scatology is woven together with wordplay and sexual references. Historian Lucy Coatman argues that the two cousins almost certainly shared a sense of humour, something she believes has been "discounted throughout much of the historiography on this set of correspondence". While scholars have no record of Maria Anna Thekla's replies, Coatman notes that his continued writing to her suggests she was not offended. In 1798, Mozart's widow Constanze sent the Bäsle letters to the publishers Breitkopf and Hartel, who were gathering material for a potential biography. In her accompanying letter, Constanze described them as "full of wit" but admitted they were "in dubious taste" and could not be published in their entirety.

• 3. A Family Affair

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  Endocrinologist Benjamin Simkin compiled a careful count: 39 of Mozart's letters include scatological passages. Almost all of them were directed at his own family, specifically his father Leopold, his mother Anna Maria, his sister Nannerl, and his cousin Maria Anna Thekla. Simkin's research revealed that the scatology was not a one-way street. Leopold, Anna Maria, and Nannerl all included similar humour in their own letters. Anna Maria, for instance, wrote to her husband on the 26th of September 1777 in rhyme: "Addio, ben mio. Keep well, my love. Into your mouth your arse you'll shove. I wish you good night, my dear, but first, Shit in your bed and make it burst." Even the more reserved Leopold used a scatological phrase in at least one letter. Simkin's final count of scatological letters runs to twenty directed to Leopold, six to his wife Constanze, six to Maria Anna Thekla, four to his sister Nannerl, and one each to his mother, to his Salzburg friend Abbe Joseph Bullinger, and to his friend the choirmaster Anton Stoll, for whom Mozart had written the Ave verum corpus. The breadth of that list matters: it is not the behaviour of a man with a secret vice, but of someone operating within a shared family register.

• 4. Canons and Censorship

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  Mozart's scatological music almost certainly originated as entertainment for a small, intimate circle. Musicologist David J. Buch describes these pieces as "recreational and shared among a closed group of inebriated friends". All of them take the form of canons, or rounds, in which each voice enters with the same words and music after a delay. Buch notes something puzzling: Mozart made fair copies of these pieces, entered them into his personal works catalogue, and allowed them to be copied, even though he tended to leave ephemeral works out of the catalogue. Why he gave these small, crude pieces the same attention as his more serious work, Buch concludes, "remains a mystery". When the canons were published after Mozart's death, their lyrics were bowdlerized. "Leck mich im Arsch" ("Lick me in the arse"), K. 231, became "Lass froh uns sein" ("Let us be joyful"). Another canon, K. 233, whose title translates as "Lick my arse right well and clean", was published as "Nothing refreshes me more than wine". K. 231 was written for six voices at some point in the 1780s. K. 559, titled "Difficile lectu mihi Mars", was composed around 1786-1787. The canon "O du eselhafter Peierl" also dates from around 1786-1787 and exists in a slightly revised version, "O du eselhafter Martin", catalogued separately as K. 560b.

• 5. The 18th-Century Context

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  Musicologist David Schroeder wrote in 1999 that the passage of time has created "an almost unbridgeable gulf" between the present and Mozart's era, causing his scatological letters to be misread more drastically than any of his other writings. In Mozart's own time, scatological humour was far more public and mainstream. The German-language popular theatre of the 18th century drew on the Italian commedia dell'arte and built its comedic centre around the stock character of Hanswurst, a coarse figure who would entertain audiences by pretending to eat enormous objects and then defecating them. Schroeder reads a political underlay in this vulgarity. The audiences for these performances lived under hereditary aristocracy that locked them out of political life. Crude humour was a counterpoint to the refined culture imposed from above. Mozart's own letters show the political edge of scatological language at work: he described the aristocrats at a concert in Augsburg in 1777 as "the Duchess Smackarse, the Countess Pleasurepisser, the Princess Stinkmess, and the two Princes Potbelly von Pigdick". Professor of German Robert Spaethling identifies many of the phrases Mozart used as not his own invention at all, but as preformulated folk speech. The phrase "Gute Nacht, scheis ins Bett dass' Kracht" is, Spaethling says, a children's rhyme still current in south German language areas. When Mozart sang scatological words to Aloysia Weber after she romantically rejected him, he was singing an existing folk tune.

• 6. German Culture and German Scholars

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  Folklorist and cultural anthropologist Alan Dundes argued that a particular tolerance for scatological subject matter is a specific feature of German national culture: "In German folklore, one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality." Dundes was careful to note that he was not claiming uniqueness, only degree: "I am not claiming that other peoples of the world do not express a healthy concern for this area, but rather that the Germans appear to be preoccupied with such themes." The canon "Leck mich im Arsch" takes its title from a standard German vulgarism euphemistically known as the "Swabian salute", or schwabischer Grus. Contemporary German would more likely say "Leck mich am Arsch"; the closest English equivalent is "Kiss my arse". The sources that document Mozart's scatology also note similar material from Martin Luther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich Heine. Mozart's colleague in Salzburg, Michael Haydn, also wrote a scatological canon. One letter Mozart wrote to his father describes a real-time encounter with a priest named Father Emilian in Augsburg: he sang a canon with the priest, but slipped in his own words, "Pater Emilian, oh you prick, lick me in the arse," singing quietly enough to be heard only by his cousin. "Then we laughed together for another half hour," Mozart reported.

• 7. Diagnoses and Their Critics

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  Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer who amassed a large collection of musical manuscripts, was one of the first to try to explain Mozart's scatological material through a medical lens. His collection included the Basle letters, then still unpublished, as well as the autographs of two scatological canons: "Difficile lectu" and "O du eselhafter Peierl". Zweig sent copies of the letters to Sigmund Freud with a suggestion that they "throw a psychologically very remarkable light on his erotic nature", displaying what Zweig called elements of "infantilism and coprophilia". He proposed it as "a very interesting study for one of your pupils." Freud apparently declined. Decades later, in the 1990s, some authors interpreted the letters as evidence of Tourette syndrome. Benjamin Simkin compared the frequency of Mozart's scatological writing against similar material from other family members and found Mozart's to be far more frequent. He combined this with biographical accounts suggesting Mozart had physical tics. The claim was picked up by newspapers worldwide and circulated extensively online. German psychiatrist Thomas Kammer, writing in 2007, reported that the Tourette hypothesis had been "promptly and harshly" criticized on both medical and scholarly grounds. Kammer concluded that "Tourette's syndrome is an inventive but implausible diagnosis". Neurologist Oliver Sacks published an editorial disputing the claim. The Tourette Syndrome Association noted the speculative nature of the argument, and no Tourette's expert or organization has endorsed the diagnosis. Historian Lucy Coatman, following ethicist Osamu Muramoto, argues that retrospective diagnosis fails "not only on an epistemic level but also on the ontological and ethical ones", and that scholars who apply modern psychiatric categories to 18th-century Salzburg have misread both the historical context and Mozart's personality.

• 8. The Prime Minister's Response

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  When Margaret Thatcher attended Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, director Peter Hall told her about Mozart's scatological side. Hall recalls her reaction directly: "She was not pleased... and gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words." Thatcher argued it was inconceivable that a composer of such "exquisite and elegant music" could be so foul-mouthed. Hall responded that Mozart's own letters proved otherwise, describing his humour as "extraordinarily infantile". He offered to send a copy of the letters to Downing Street, did so the following day, and received a polite acknowledgment from a private secretary. The letters changed nothing: "The Prime Minister said I was wrong," Hall recalled, "so wrong I was." The anecdote captures something Schroeder had already identified: the tendency to suppress or explain away the scatological letters precisely because they embarrass modern sensibilities. As Schroeder noted, readers have tried to "trivialize them, or explain them out of the epistolary canon with pathological excuses". The suppression was already underway within decades of Mozart's death, when Constanze's own ambivalence about the Basle letters reflected what scholar K.A. Aterman calls the shift in taste associated with the rising middle class of the early 19th century.