Musicologist David Schroeder wrote in 1999: The passage of time has created an almost unbridgeable gulf between ourselves and Mozart's time, forcing us to misread his scatological letters even more drastically than his other letters. Very simply, these letters embarrass us, and we have tried to suppress them, trivialize them, or explain them out of the epistolary canon with pathological excuses. When
Margaret Thatcher was apprised of Mozart's scatology while seeing
Peter Shaffer's play
Amadeus, director
Peter Hall relates: 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. It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul-mouthed. I said that Mozart's letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour ... I offered (and sent) a copy of Mozart's letters to
Number Ten the next day; I was even thanked by the appropriate Private Secretary. But it was useless: the Prime Minister said I was wrong, so wrong I was.
Letters Benjamin Simkin, an
endocrinologist, estimates that 39 of Mozart's letters include scatological passages. Almost all of these are directed to Mozart's own family, specifically his father
Leopold, his mother
Anna Maria, his sister
Nannerl, and his cousin
Maria Anna Thekla Mozart. According to Simkin, Leopold, Anna Maria and Nannerl also included scatological humour in their own letters. Thus, Anna Maria wrote to her husband (26 September 1777; original is in rhyme): Even the relatively straitlaced Leopold used a scatological expression in one letter. Several of Mozart's scatological letters were written to
Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, his cousin (and probable love interest, according to the musicologist
Maynard Solomon). These are often called the "Bäsle letters", after the German word
Bäsle, a
diminutive form meaning "little cousin". In these letters, written after Mozart had spent a pleasant two weeks with his cousin in her native
Augsburg, the scatology is combined with word play and sexual references. American academic Robert Spaethling's rendered translation of part of a letter Mozart sent from
Mannheim 5 November 1777: One of the letters Mozart wrote to his father while visiting Augsburg reports an encounter Mozart and his cousin had with a priest named Father Emilian:
Music Mozart's scatological music was most likely recreational and shared among a closed group of inebriated friends. All of it takes the form of
canons (rounds), in which each voice enters with the same words and music following a delay after the previous voice. Musicologist
David J. Buch writes:
Reactions of family and friends Historian Lucy Coatman argues that
Maria Anna Thekla and Mozart likely had a shared sense of humour, something which she believes has been "discounted throughout much of the historiography on this set of correspondence". While scholars are not aware of her replies to her cousin, it can be assumed from what is known of their relationship and his continued correspondence that she was likely not offended by Mozart's vulgar references. In 1798, Constanze sent her late husband's Bäsle letters to the publishers
Breitkopf & Härtel, who at the time were gathering material in hopes of preparing a Mozart biography. In the accompanying letter she wrote "Although in dubious taste, the letters to his cousin are full of wit and deserve mentioning, although they cannot of course be published in their entirety." K.A. Aterman suggests that this ambivalence is a result of the "change in the taste and the 'refinement' spreading to, and in, the rising middle class" in the early 19th century.
In the 18th century suggests that in the 18th century scatological humour was far more public and "mainstream". The German-language popular theatre of Mozart's time was influenced by the Italian ''
commedia dell'arte'' and emphasized the stock character of
Hanswurst, a coarse and robust character who would entertain his audience by pretending to eat large and unlikely objects (for instance, a whole calf), then defecating them. Schroeder suggests a political underlay to the scatology in popular theatre: its viewers lived under a system of hereditary aristocracy that excluded them from political participation. The vulgarity of scatological popular theatre was a counterpoint to the refined culture imposed from above. One of Mozart's own letters describes aristocrats in scatological terms; he identified the aristocrats present at a concert in Augsburg (1777) as "the Duchess Smackarse, the Countess Pleasurepisser, the Princess Stinkmess, and the two Princes Potbelly von Pigdick".
In German culture The folklorist and cultural anthropologist
Alan Dundes suggested that interest in or tolerance for scatological matters is a specific trait of German national culture, one which is retained to this day: provides ample coverage of scatological humor in Mozart, but also cites scatological texts from
Martin Luther,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Heinrich Heine, and others who helped shape German culture. asserts that "scatology was common in Mitteleuropa [central Europe]", noting for instance that Mozart's Salzburg colleague
Michael Haydn also wrote a scatological canon. Some of the phrases used by Mozart in his scatological material were not original with him but were part of the folklore and culture of his day: professor of German describes the Bäsle letters as involving "Mozart's intentional play with what is for the most part preformulated folk speech". An example given by Robert Spaethling is the folkloric origin of a phrase seen above, "Gute Nacht, scheiß ins Bett dass' Kracht", claimed by Spaethling to be a "children's rhyme that is still current in south German language areas today". Likewise, when Mozart sang to
Aloysia Weber the words "Leck mich das Mensch im Arsch, das mich nicht will" ("Whoever doesn't want me can lick my arse") on the occasion of being romantically rejected by her, he was evidently singing an existing folk tune, not a song of his own invention. ==Medical accounts==