Mozart's vulgar letters
Older translations of Mozart's letters made him sound decorous and eloquent, but a recent translation by Robert Spaethling preserves Mozart's childish rhyming and vulgar humor. In a love letter to his cousin Maria Anna, he wrote, "Oui, by the love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin." Writing to his mother, he penned the verse, "Yesterday, though, we heard the king of farts/ It smelled as sweet as honey tarts/ While it wasn't in the strongest of voice/ It still came on as a powerful noise." Some critics see a paradox between the sublime music and the smutty prose, but reviewer Aaron Retica argues that "the word-drunk contrarian-vulgarian-comedian who emerges from Spaethling's excruciatingly exact rendering of Mozart's linguistic games — his rhymes and his puns, his scatological and coprophilic obsessions, his doublings, inversions and mirrorings — is the essential Mozart, a spitting image of the composer. Or should I say farting image?"
