Original subtitles

Mozart - otherworldly genius.

Childlike naif.

Divine gift from God.

Serene marble bust of transcendent perfection.

APPLAUSE

'Or even a bowl of perfectly smooth chocolate.

'All of it the stuff of myth and legend.'

Mozart, you see, was a human being just like you and me.

Except he could express the pain and pleasure,

the joy and darkness of being human more completely

and more humanly than any other composer.

'His music isn't merely perfect or beautiful or genius,

'it's visceral...'

MUSIC: Sinfonia Concertante In E-Flat Major, K 364

'..violent...

'..avant-garde and powerfully expressive.'

MUSIC: Violin Concerto No 5 In A major, K 219

And it was written by a composer and a person who's still modern today,

someone who made mistakes

and who tried unbelievably hard to make them right.

Welcome to The Joy Of Mozart.

Vienna put up this statue in 1896.

It's a monumental fiction about Mozart's life and music,

an excrescence of marble, bronze and golf leaf

that turns Mozart into a hyper-romantic genius,

someone literally and figuratively above the rest of humanity,

someone different from us.

It's ludicrous.

So what we have to do for Mozart's sake and our own

is take him off the plinth.

It was a strange revelation the first time I heard Mozart's music.

I spent years trying to explain why Mozart's A major symphony, K 201,

affected me so deeply when I heard it played by

the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the age of seven.

MUSIC: Symphony No 29 In A Major, K 201

I do know, though, it wasn't about beauty or perfection,

it was about exactly the opposite.

'To try to find my Mozart, the one who explains who I am,

'I'm starting at the end, here in Vienna,

'where he lived for the last ten years of his life from 1781.'

In a house on this spot on the 5th December 1791,

Mozart died

and at the same moment, something else was born - the Mozart myth.

The myth becomes powerful because people want to believe it.

I don't think you should dismiss the myths

simply because they are factually not completely true.

They tell us an enormous amount about

what we want to believe about great composers,

about inspiration,

about people who die young, about people whose work is unfinished.

And some of these myths are absolutely reflected in fact.

Mozart the child prodigy was a fact.

Born in Salzburg in 1756,

he composed over 600 pieces of catalogue music

in a life lasting a mere 35 years,

starting at the tender age of five.

The infant genius was mythologised most vividly

in Hollywood's Oscar-gobbling movie Amadeus.

This lavish biopic imagined all the tricks that Wolfgang

and his sister were made to perform by their father Leopold

as he paraded them around the courts of Europe,

travelling from country to country by carriage.

'By the age of ten,

'Mozart had already written some astonishing sonatas and symphonies.'

It's a powerful story that could've applied to

so many artists that here they are,

divinely inspired geniuses whose worth is not recognised

and they are continually exploited by people who take advantage of them.

It makes him appear at once human

because of this innocence

but divine because his music comes from another source.

Maybe it was unprecedented,

this talent to come from wherever

and for it to be so perfect and just to come out like that

and to write these works at such a young age. Mm.

'Mozart's favourite string instrument was the viola.

'It's musician Lawrence Power's, too.

'He's often played Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante,

'written in response to the composer's early experiences

'of adult life with its disappointments and tragedies.'

It's a big responsibility when you play this music,

unlike any other music, I don't know why but it's...

There's an extra level of sort of adrenaline and nerves

when dealing with that music.

His mother had just died while he was away,

he was looking for employment, he didn't find employment,

he was looking for a wife, who turned him down,

and I'm sure he would've performed this with his father.

And I think there's some sort of role there, that, you know,

that the viola has this wonderfully sort of conciliatory role, you know,

it's always sort of looking after the violin,

who's somehow more worried and questioning.

MUSIC: Sinfonia Concertante In E-Flat Major, K 364

You already start to feel that the viola's sort of answering

in a very sort of fatherly way.

And the conversation becomes sort of heartbreaking at points,

you know, it's very special.

It's this sense of dialogue in that piece, I think,

that sort of makes it his first sort of mature piece.

Why do you think that Mozart wanted to play the viola himself

as opposed to the violin or even the cello?

It's a very sort of emotional- sounding instrument, I think,

you know, it's very close to the speaking voice,

it has a certain amount of, you know,

pathos to it just naturally. Even when you tune a viola, it has that.

I mean, I was thinking on the way here,

he was 22 when he wrote Concertante, which is obviously a masterpiece,

you know, I can't sort of get my head around that. Mm.

I mean, it opens up lots of questions, not just musical.

'Another stubborn Mozart myth

'is that his music was written down perfectly first time

'as if dictated directly by God.

'I met Professor Cliff Eisen in the British Library

'to discover first-hand the scribbled, scratchy truth.'

Have a look at this then,

this is the final page of Mozart's own manuscript of the Hunt Quartet,

which is the B-flat major, Kochel rating 458.

Now, look, this is the most defiant crossing out,

this goes beyond a mistake.

He didn't want anyone to see. Even through all this cross-hatching,

you could hardly see what he's trying to rub out.

This is actually a passage that was meant to be inserted

earlier in the piece

and then decided that he didn't want that insertion after all

so it represents three, if not more, attempts to kind of go through

the piece and decide what works and what doesn't work.

He's changing his mind, you know, he's making things up.

He's not always sure. Far from being always sure, he's not.

In fact, many other pages in these six quartets dedicated to Haydn

reveal the same thing.

All of these documents that are spread around us are treated

and have been treated for close on 200 years as relics

that we don't interrogate in any way to find out more about the person

or more about the times and yet they aren't relics,

they're living documents of a variety of different processes

and a variety of different times, places, activities

that Mozart was involved with.

One of the most touching documents in all of Mozart's life

is that Thematic Catalogue where he writes out

the beginnings of his pieces from 1784 onwards,

and the touching thing about that document,

which is in the British Library and it can be seen,

is not the list of works

but the fact that when you get to the end of it,

there are pages and pages of empty, unfilled staves.

"The thematic catalogue of all of my works from February 1784 until the month..."

And he's left a space for the year.

He's written one, because he wasn't sure if this was going to be still the 17th...the 18th century

or indeed the beginning of the 19th century.

And then a full stop. Which of course he never finishes, he died in 1791.

So the first page then is the first list of pieces.

He lived to complete... He lived to fill in 29 of the 40 or so pages.

Here's the very final page.

Now, in a way the most obviously moving thing about what happens is the empty pages.

Look at the empty staves of the pieces he wouldn't write.

This doesn't conjure up for me the last moments of Mozart

and the idea that it's some kind of testamentary page.

The other thing that I'm impressed with

is what people want to make of this.

Right? It becomes one of the living, surviving artefacts

of the fact of Mozart's premature death.

I-I-It conjures up this...

this story that we want to believe, this idea of a life cut off.

But, Cliff, what's the problem with this?

Clearly, look, just turning to this page of the next canto,

this is a life unfinished, it doesn't matter how we play it.

To take the idea of what we might feel about it out of the equation,

you know, this was a life cut short, this clearly was a life cut short.

No, no, I don't mean in any way

to diminish the impact of Mozart's premature death

and all of the perfectly natural feelings

and wishes and desires and hopes and aspirations that we might have

that were unfulfilled because of it.

Rather, I think what I'm saying is that Mozart becomes reified,

Mozart becomes removed from...

This is just... This is a great heroic, mythical story in some ways.

And so we then are afraid to approach Mozart,

because of the power of this story. Because he's not like us?

He's not like us. He's not like us

and yet that seems like such an uncommonsensical thing.

And it's an idea we don't attribute to other artists.

We've discussed, you know, Shakespeare was a real person,

Leonardo was a real person, they were all real people,

but somehow Mozart...

became not an engaged, living, genuine human being any more.

BELL RINGS 'And here is the myth made real.

'These chocolate Mozart balls are the tip of the Mozart myth-berg,

'Mozart reified into little gold-wrapped confections

'and the sound of saccharine

'in this soupy recording of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

'Lovely!'

TILL CHINGS

It occurs to me what these things actually are, they're...

They're transubstantiations of the Mozartian myth,

people literally want to eat a piece him.

So the question is, of course, what they in fact taste like.

Erm...rather nice dark chocolate on the outside.

Incredibly sweet. Marzipan and praline.

Mm. Really quite sickly, in fact.

These are really the confectionery embodiment of sentimentality.

I mean, I'm going to finish it, obviously.

Mm. Not bad. HE LAUGHS

I think Mozart himself would have been a) astonished, but b) really chuffed...

SHE LAUGHS ..to know that for perpetuity

he was going to be in a chocolate ball.

That would have amused him on many levels.

Erm...or that all this...sort of tackiness, actually,

I think he would have loved it.

BIKE BELL RINGS 'But there's a bitterness in that sweetness too.

'Mozart may have been born in Salzburg,

'but the city treated him as no more than a hired hand when he was there.

'It was only on the 50th anniversary of his death in 1841,

'that they claimed him as their own.

'Salzburg erected this statue in his honour in the old market,

'which they renamed the Mozartplatz.'

That I think was the beginning of the Mozart industry.

And after that, you know, it has just steamrollered and steamrollered.

And it's almost as if they're atoning for all those years

when they behaved so badly to him.

We can't be completely sure what Mozart looked like,

but we can be sure that he didn't look like this.

This, though, is the single most reproduced image in today's world

of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This is the face of Mozart balls.

And the balls here really is to do with the relationship between image and reality.

Contemporary accounts of Mozart say that he was small,

that he was pockmarked, that he had a large nose,

that he had protruding eyes.

None of that is reflected in this Errol Flynn airbrushing that's going on here.

The one thing I think I am pretty certain of

is that if Mozart were to see this, the face of a more than five billion euro industry of the Mozart brand,

he would simply say, "Who the hell is this guy?!"

CHURCH BELL CHIMES

And look, Vienna's got in on the act just as much as Salzburg.

Nice wigs, guys.

NEEDLE SCRATCHES I can't take this any longer.

I can't stand the Mozart industry,

not just because it airbrushes his image, but because it airbrushes his music

and how we think about what it sounds like.

The industry wants you to believe that Mozart is a superficial,

sentimentalised, nostalgic courtly entertainer,

but that's the exact opposite of what he spent his whole life doing.

He was trying to express the full range of human expression, ambiguities, doubts.

He confronts us with all of that in our essential humanity

and all of this is a betrayal.

# Come and rock me, Amadeus

# Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus

# Amadeus, Amadeus...Amadeus

# Come and rock me, Amadeus... #

But popular culture doesn't just promote an easy-listening Mozart,

in the early '80s, Austrian performer Falco

turned him into a New Romantic Hells Angel.

# Come and rock me, Amadeus. #

But for Paul Morley, after a lifetime immersed in the pop industry,

there's no need to turn Mozart into anything,

just take Wolfgang on your own terms.

I realised that this music that I'd previously ignored or reviled

because it sounded quaint or peculiar,

or because I didn't understand it, was actually really radical

and, actually, mostly where the avant-garde had gone.

The avant-garde, oddly, had gone into the past,

you know, "Well, let's try Mozart, then,"

because it's this all the time, it's souvenirs,

it's the past, it's quaint. So how did you get past that?

Because Mozart has had the odd toehold here and there.

I'm thinking of Falco's Rock Me Amadeus.

I'm thinking of the fact that this bust or a version of it

is on the desk of Mr Garrison in every episode of South Park.

The chocolate box, tinkly, powdered wigs, child genius. Yeah.

And I realised of course that everybody makes up a Mozart.

I'll make up my own Mozart.

I'd strip away everything.

I'd strip away this, I'd strip away the cute pictures,

I'd strip away the academic side,

I'd even strip away the music to an extent and just begin again.

And there was a way that I could begin again I found very quickly,

which was something I found very contemporary, very modern and very abstract, which was the K-numbers.

Ah, yes, the K-numbers,

the chronological catalogue of Mozart's works

as documented by this man, Ludwig von Kochel,

70 years after the composer's death,

from K 1, a minuet for piano written when Mozart was five,

to K 626, the requiem unfinished on his death only 30 years later.

ACTOR SIGHS

The K-numbers in a way was my way of coming into it

like it was a little like Factory Records,

you know, a catalogue of amazing moments.

And I would get to, say, a piano quartet, and that would be, say, 491,

and then I would start to wonder... 493.

493, OK. And then I would start to wonder, "What's around it, then?"

And what I found startling and which really blew my mind

is that if you just go one way or the other,

which means it was written more or less at the same time,

on one side you have, say... Correct me again, Tom, because I'm not good on the titles.

..you'd get Marriage Of Figaro. 490.

OK, and on the other side... Oh, my God! ..you get a concerto. Maybe 24?

491 is the piano concerto. But isn't that amazing?

Doing the K-numbers is not unlike

watching an entire series of Breaking Bad over a weekend.

You can do the K-numbers in a week.

You know, I can do them very quickly, actually, quite a few.

And if there was a way... And I throw it back to you, Tom, again

of explaining that the K-numbers to an extent is like binge watching.

It's that exciting! You know, for me some of the K-numbers,

they are like a great series of Game Of Thrones.

'K 219 is his fifth and I think his finest violin concerto.

'But it's not the numbers that excite violinist Nicola Benedetti,

'it's the wildness of that solo part,

'the different characters he's creating in just a few seconds of music.'

To me it sounds like so much...

enjoyment in his ability to create these voices.

He's just toying with the listener, with...

He's constantly working out,

"How can I make this as varied as possible, as expressive as possible?"

And...enjoying it.

You...you can sense the almost euphoria.

And I answer...

So it's the same material, but mine is instantly feminine.

And then...

And then again low. And then...

It's really very extreme. You couldn't play this...

HE HUMS MELODY

No, well... Like...nicely?

It can't be nice? Some...some do. HE LAUGHS

I just don't ever hear Mozart like that, ever.

Erm...I just don't.

I don't hear in his voice.

I don't hear in his character.

There's too much natural wildness.

Erm...and I think...

I think Mozart with caution is just not doing him justice.

I actually nearly hyperventilate.

No, what's the thing when you stop breathing? It's the opposite of that?

Yeah, you kind of asphyxiate. Right.

I stop breathing, that's what I do... Right.

..during the development of this second movement. The slow movement?

The slow movement of the A Major Concerto, his last concerto,

to me is just one of the most...

And now...

And here's when I stop breathing.

You have long held notes in the winds.

And now syncopation.

And at the end of it all...silence.

From the whole orchestra.

And then back.

And it is just the most...

It's just so shocking and it literally takes your breath away,

it doesn't matter how many times you hear it.

One of the most unexpected and just glorious developments of a second movement...ever.

'From the sublime to the holy.

'This is Salzburg Cathedral with its five organs,

'which Mozart would have played, and where much of his early sacred music was first performed.

'It's grand, yes, but only occasionally inspired.

'The teenage Mozart had to write what Prince-Archbishop Colloredo and his court demanded.

'Not a recipe for commitment.'

So what of Mozart's relationship with Catholicism, with God?

Well, I think it's possible that Salzburg

turned Mozart away from the institutions of the church and of writing sacred music.

It was in his unfulfilling years here working for Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg

that Mozart wrote the vast majority of his church music, because he had to.

In fact, in his later life there are just two major sacred works,

both astonishing masterpieces -

but he didn't finish either of them.

There was the Mass in C minor,

composed with soprano solos for his wife Constanze to sing

when they came to Salzburg in 1783,

for the only time in their lives together,

to meet Wolfgang's father Leopold,

who had disapproved of their marriage, and his sister Nannerl.

The C minor Mass was first performed here

at St Peter's on the 26th October 1783.

SOPRANO: # Christe

# Eleison, eleison

# Christe

# Christe eleison

# Eleison

# Eleison, eleison

# Eleison... #

Magnificent though it is, what audiences then and now

hear and heard in the Mass in C minor is only an incomplete torso.

Mozart for some reason couldn't complete the Mass in C minor,

and he never returned to it either.

And then, there's the Requiem,

unfinished notoriously at Mozart's death on 5th December 1791,

parts of which were performed for the first time

here at St Michael's Church in Vienna, conducted by his friend,

the librettist of The Magic Flute, Emanuel Schikaneder, just five days after he died.

CHOIR: # ..dona eis, Domine

# Et lux perpetua

# Luceat

# Luceat eis... #

I had real problems with the religious music,

because I think Mozart himself had problems with it.

I mean, think of his religious music and think how unreligious it is.

# ..hymnus, Deus, in Sion... #

His earlier pieces are not that good.

Get to the C minor Mass...

Written for Constanze, in Salzburg. Absolutely. Unfinished...

Unfinished. I mean, it starts off like an epic -

you think, "This is going to be colossal."

And it gradually runs out of puff.

The same with the Requiem.

What is it?

# Requiem aeternam... #

Is that about a relationship with God, Catholicism...? What is that?

I think it's to do with enlightened thought, I think it's to do with Freemasonry.

I think Freemasonry is

a much more important

kind of centrifugal environment for Mozart.

I think the religion is much more superstitious,

it's more Masonic, it's more rational.

Mozart has a tremendous fear of authority, a fear of dread.

He can't really subscribe to the whole theological package.

MUSIC: Symphony No 34 in C

'Mozart the Mason was a humanist at heart,

'and his music is a consecration of humanity in all its messy, joyous ambiguity.

'I think that's closer to his true spirituality

'than his relationship with organised religion.'

BELLS PEAL

Beautiful, isn't it?

But I think there's something claustrophobic about Salzburg -

it's hemmed in on three sides by the fortress and by the mountains

that surround it, and I think Mozart felt that sense of claustrophobia too.

Ultimately this was a place he had to escape - from his employer, Archbishop Colloredo,

from his father Leopold, and his family too.

Born in Salzburg maybe, but Mozart the musician, the composer,

was formed everywhere else - in Paris, in London,

in Milan, in Mannheim, in Munich, and above all in Vienna.

Mozart had to get out.

SOUND OF COACH AND HORSES

MUSIC: Overture to Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail

'Mozart arrived in Vienna in 1781,

'determined to rewrite the musicians' rule book.

'He probably performed here, in the Sala Terrena.'

After years of needling and frustration,

Mozart made the astonishingly self-confident decision

to become a freelance composer independent of any court -

a completely new phenomenon in Vienna.

He knew he had as much honour as any nobleman,

so why shouldn't he be their equal rather than their lackey?

Now, this really is the key moment of Mozart's adult life.

His path towards personal and musical fulfilment

and emancipation from Salzburg, from his father,

towards new kinds of expression and his marriage to Constanze Weber, had begun.

'This building was a symbol of Mozart's self-confidence,

'the grandest of the 14 apartments in Vienna that he lived in.

'He was the only composer at the time

'who could afford to live WITHIN Vienna's city walls -

'in demand as teacher, performer, impresario,

'as well as husband, father, pet owner and billiard player.

'This house would have thrummed and thrilled with noise

'all day and all night.

'It's also the place where some of Mozart's most important compositions

'were heard for the very first time.'

On the second day of his father's visit here

on the 12th February 1785, there was

a performance of incredible significance

that probably happened on the floorboards I'm standing on...

the first three of six quartets

that Mozart would dedicate to Joseph Haydn.

Haydn came here to watch this performance -

Leopold Mozart played one of the violin parts and Mozart himself played the viola.

These string quartets meant so much to him as a composer,

as a human being, that he spent three years refining them.

It's hard to imagine the effect of hearing that music

for the first time, but we do have Joseph Haydn's reaction.

He said simply to Leopold,

"Your son, before God, is the greatest composer I have ever known."

Fine...

'Kristian Bezuidenhout's living room in London

'is dominated by an instrument

'that also came to define Mozart's life

'as both composer and performer - the fortepiano,

'a much more intimate and colourful instrument than the modern-day grand.

'The piano as a piece of equipment had evolved during Mozart's short life,

'and he in turn would fulfil its as yet unrealised potential.

'We just have to get this one fully operational.'

So I tend to lift the pedal just to be sure... But there it is.

This is the piece of equipment that might best serve

the unbelievably mercurial

and highly changeable surface texture of Mozart's music

better than any other piece of equipment I'd ever played.

I started learning pieces on it,

and that was a fascinating journey -

to kind of go to zero and delete the preconceptions that we have

from the world of playing the modern piano

and start working on a piece on this piece of equipment

and see what it tells us about Mozart's playing,

his conceptions of sound, his approach to the piano,

and how all of this is so deeply linked on every level.

333...

MUSIC: Piano Sonata No 13 In B-Flat Major

This is where all this stuff happens.

MUSIC: Piano Sonata No 5 In G Major

283...

A piece like 282...

MUSIC: Piano Sonata No 4 In E-flat Major

Mozart is one of these amazing people who bridges an incredible...

bridges an incredible gap, historically speaking,

and is at a sort of fascinating kind of crossroads

in terms of instrumental equipment.

This is an action

that requires a lot of Fingerspitzengefuhl -

I mean, fingertip sensitivity. Lots of finger work, hand delicacy.

There isn't much of this kind of, you know, smashing

and upper body activation that you might see on the Steinway.

Mozart grew up with an unbelievably precise keyboard technique.

When you want to write beautiful music, you write it here.

HE PLAYS A DELICATE THEME

When you're trying to express true trauma...

HE PLAYS A DRAMATIC FLOURISH

..you do it down there.

I will say that this is a slightly later instrument than the one Mozart

was writing about when he writes to his dad,

and there are a lot of modifications in an action like this -

this is a real prototypical Walter piano from the 1780s.

The action remains essentially unchanged until the beginning of the 19th century.

It's a coming together of technology,

with what he can do as a composer and who he is as a person,

all of those things come together. Yeah. It's a magic moment.

The other thing about it that's so extraordinary is Mozart's

gift at predicting these kind of blockbuster trends.

In the decade from '81 to '91,

the piano becomes THE most important solo instrument for public consumption, essentially.

I mean, it eclipses all other equipment in this period

as the number one way to make your name as a massive virtuoso, really.

From that point forward, he really writes exclusively for the piano.

He somehow gets a new piece of equipment

and understands immediately what makes it tick.

MUSIC: Piano Sonata No 11 in A major

'Mozart's own piano - the one he played in Vienna -

'is now in Salzburg in a large apartment where the Mozart family once lived.

'It's now a museum, where I can literally hear

'the ghost of the actual sounds that Mozart created -

'with the help of its head of research, Ulrich Leisinger.'

Ulrich, this is Mozart's Vienna piano -

the piano that he had with him from virtually the time

he moved to Vienna until the end of his life.

Just thinking about what he played on this instrument and the music that happened here-

it's just an astonishing thought, really.

Whatever we have from Mozart - if we have the portraits, they are not photographic,

if we have the letters, Mozart tells us some things

but he conceals others, and from time to time he's not telling the truth,

but the instrument IS telling the truth about Mozart's music -

at least about the keyboard music - and so we can really learn

a lot from carefully looking and listening to this instrument.

This is really the instrument

where all these great piano concertos were conceived,

where they got their premiere performances

and many follow-up performances during Mozart's lifetime,

and so it's really a big stroke of luck that this instrument

has survived in almost original shape.

This isn't a concerto. No, this is a sonata.

No, it should not be a problem. I am not Kristian Bezuidenhout...

MUSIC: Piano Sonata No 13 In B-Flat Major

Mozart obviously loved this instrument -

I mean, it was his constant companion for that decade in Vienna.

He would have had enough money to replace it if he'd wanted to -

I mean, why did he stick with this Anton Walter instrument, its maker,

why did he love it so much?

Apparently it was one of the best instruments that Walter ever built.

It's one of the earliest of his fortepianos,

and it has a very easy action, a very even action,

and when Leopold visited his son in 1785 he wrote to his daughter

that this very instrument was carried out of the house practically every other day,

set up in a theatre here, in a concert hall there, in a private place there

and that Mozart was practically giving a concert every other night.

MUSIC: Fantasia No 3 In D

Wunderschon.

'For Mozart, music was part of a bigger world of ideas,

'of culture, of feelings, of people,

'and that was true in his earlier life too,

'in Salzburg as well as in Vienna.'

The thing is, when Mozart was back in Salzburg,

when he came back from his travels, especially as a teenager,

he was part of a wider social and cultural scene here.

He used to socialise with the family who owned this cafe,

used to play billiards with them upstairs and dance with them.

Parties, basically.

Now, it's inconceivable to me

that Mozart, as a supremely intelligent young man,

wouldn't have been talking to his friends about his frustrations

with his employment in Salzburg,

about the poor quality of the musicians here, and maybe also

the new political ideas that were emerging all over Europe.

Mozart, in other words, was part of cafe culture.

'Nicholas Till thinks that Mozart's intellectual curiosity is

'a crucial part of how we should hear and think about his music.'

If you look at his library, er, it's not large,

he didn't own a huge number of books.

But the books he owned were really quite current, contemporary thinking.

Mozart is hanging out with the...

the Austrian Empire's Education Minister once a week.

He's going round to his house, erm, playing music.

Van Swieten was a very keen music lover,

introduced Mozart to Bach and Handel's music.

So, this...

He's right in the heart of the most progressive aspects of

Viennese life at that time.

'And at that time Europe was in a foment of pre-revolutionary fever,

'which Mozart caught in his opera The Marriage of Figaro, in 1786.'

In the kind of coffee house culture and the intellectual culture

that Mozart was part of then,

I mean, do you think he was sympathetic to the ideals of

the French Revolution?

Do you think Mozart was fundamentally

a kind of revolutionary?

Well, of course, we can't project...

The French Revolution happens right at the end of his life.

But, yes, both at a personal level,

he felt that it was wrong that certain kinds of people had

power and control over someone like him that they had, and that would

have translated into the broader political agenda of the period.

MUSIC: Se Vuol Ballare from The Marriage Of Figaro

# Il chitarrino le suonero, si

# Le suonero, si

# Le suonero. #

'Mozart singlehandedly dragged opera kicking,

'and singing, into the present day by hijacking a high art form,

'taking it away from gods and kings, and handing it over to the lives of

'ordinary people and their complicated, chaotic relationships.

'He put his own life, and the lives of people he knew,

'onstage for all to see.

'Servants became heroes

'and women were written with a unique empathy and understanding.

'That's no surprise.

'Mozart fell in love with, married or wrote music for

'three of the Weber sisters -

'Aloysia, Constanze and Josepha.'

I think we should be extremely grateful that he was surrounded

by all these fantastic women who... who could sing and could portray,

because one thing with Mozart also,

if you read his letters and everything,

he really wanted people to be sincere.

'Cosi Fan Tutte, with an original text by Lorenzo Da Ponte,

'is about a quartet of lovers.

'The boys are persuaded to test their beloveds' fidelity.

'And the result is confusion and turmoil for all four of them,

'including Fiordiligi.'

MUSIC: Per Pieta from Cosi Fan Tutte

# D'un alma amante... #

When she struggles, she realises that she has actually fallen,

but she's just desperately trying to hold on to the love for Guglielmo.

I think Per Pieta is just one of the most amazing arias to actually

show that, but she always comes back to, always,

always comes back to this, that she feels ashamed,

that she has this, you know, massive shame that she has, you know,

gone towards Ferrando rather than staying constant.

'It's about us.'

It is about normal people - they are fighting, they are, you know,

they are in love, they are arguing, it's just about normal life.

They are betraying, they are being betrayed, they are...

So it's basically like he's just making an opera about

everyday situations, which I think that's why

it's so easy to take to heart, you know, take to your heart.

# Deh vieni, non tardar

# O gioja bella

# Vieni ove amore per... #

'I remember once when I was doing Susanna in Berlin, and I just felt'

as if everything just parted away from me,

and I was just sitting there.

I could almost see myself as an out-of-body experience,

and when I looked down,

I realised that Barenboim had stopped conducting,

and he was just sitting like this,

and that's the moment when you realised that Mozart music,

when everything is right, when everyone feels the same,

it just becomes one body.

And I'm sure that the audience felt it, the orchestra felt it,

I felt it, and we all sang and did the same thing,

the whole theatre were just there in that moment.

That's one of the most, like... SHE GASPS

..experiences that I've ever had in my life.

What's different in the Mozart operatic women is, as I say,

is this tremendous sort of emotional veracity, and, er,

and a sympathy for them.

The Countess in The Marriage Of Figaro,

I mean, she... Again, it's another of these places in Mozart

that gives you so many different feelings somehow. How does he do it?

Well, the first time we meet her, as you say, er,

we meet her in soliloquy, just telling us again in a very short,

slow, 90-second aria, very difficult to sing...

..that her life is really ghastly. I mean, her husband is...

Two years, she's only been married a couple of years,

and already her husband is bonking every woman on the estate,

and is behaving appallingly to her,

and she's isolated and miserable,

and although she has a wonderful best friend

in her maidservant Susanna,

she's essentially alone,

and there is really nothing more lonely than Porgi, Amor.

MUSIC: Porgi, Amor from The Marriage Of Figaro

# Al mio duolo

# A'miei sospir! #

Women loved him and he loved women,

and we can certainly see that in his operas.

What I don't want to do, however, is overstress this at all, because he

was also a really good bloke, and he had a lot of good bloke friends too.

I mean, the whole Masonic thing, after all, was like, you know,

the ultimate men's club!

'In Salzburg, there's another piece of Vienna that Mozart's

'birthplace has uprooted...

'..a little hut that looks like

'something out of a German fairy tale.

'And funnily enough, it's where an operatic fairy tale came to life.'

This is Das Zauberflotenhauschen -

The Magic Flute Hut, where, in the summer of 1791,

Mozart wrote The Magic Flute in Vienna in the grounds

of the Freihaustheater, where the opera would have

its first performance on the 30th of September that year.

He would write on a little clavichord in there

and he'd invite the singers in to try out things,

what aria he was going to write for Josepha Weber, his sister-in-law,

who was singing the part of the Queen of the Night,

and the rest of the cast.

And really the experience of The Magic Flute for Mozart

was being part of an artistic collective.

He was simply one part of this huge, popular, populist

and Masonic theatrical mishmash, glorious theatrical hybrid that is

The Magic Flute, and this is where it happened.

And as if by magic here is the Queen of the Night's

Act II Aria, the one that goes...

HE WHISTLES

I can't even whistle that high! HE WHISTLES

MUSIC: Queen Of The Night's Aria from The Magic Flute

HE WHISTLES

# Wenn nicht durch dich

# Sarastro wird erblassen! #

See, the thing about this is, you know, he...

He was writing absolutely specifically

for his sister-in-law here.

Only Josepha, only the Weber girls could get up that high,

and, erm, well, I can't even whistle there.

'Salzburg also houses the delicate instrument on which Mozart

'composed The Magic Flute -

'his tiny treasured clavichord.'

Clavichords were meant for private use.

They do not carry, the sound doesn't carry,

and I'll show it to you because it's really remarkable.

If you open the lid we see a small paste in,

and Constanze Mozart tells us that...

This is Constanze Mozart's handwriting?

This is Constanze's handwriting,

and she tells us that her husband had composed The Magic Flute,

the Requiem and the Freemason Cantata on this very instrument

during the last months of his life.

So small was this instrument,

it'd be quite possible to carry it to the hut,

the Zauberflotenhauschen,

where he composed much of The Magic Flute in the summer of 1791?

Definitely. This may weigh some 40lbs, 50lbs,

so you can really take it with you.

It's easy to tune so it's a very practical instrument

for this purpose, and if you should carefully open the lid...

What does it sound like, Ulrich?

I know it's a quiet sound but what does it sound like?

MUSIC: Papageno's Aria from The Magic Flute

'And in this same room, there's the most moving,

'honest likeness of the composer.'

This is as close as we have to a real-life picture of Mozart.

This is really as close as we're going to get to what

he actually looked like.

It was painted from life around 1789

by Mozart's brother-in-law, Joseph Lange.

It's an encounter with a real, as opposed to airbrushed,

idea and image of Mozart.

His hair is loose, there's no wig here.

You can't see pockmarks on his skin but there's grey in the hair.

This is a really tender picture of who this musician,

who this composer was.

This picture's usually called unfinished

but in fact you can see very close up that the head

and shoulders are really a complete little portrait of Mozart.

'Violinist Paul Robertson has a relationship with Mozart's music

'that most of us will never have,

'hopefully,'

'an appreciation that can come

'only from the outer limits of life itself.'

I used to, as it were,

preach the idea that music should be

played to people in coma,

and, er, I remember a lovely lady whose husband fell into a coma

played his favourite piece,

which was the slow movement of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet.

She very kindly used our recording, as it happened. And he recovered,

he came round into consciousness during the course of that movement.

And my family, when I was in coma, erm, were playing the same piece.

It was a drug-induced coma that then became an out-of-reach coma,

so I was not actually, strictly speaking, alive.

So they played me Mozart and I was responding.

So I didn't actually have the registration of listening to Mozart.

I mean, to be honest, what I was...

well, what I was hearing was an Indian,

beautiful Indian female voice singing ragas with exquisite microtones.

Would you remember?

Oh, I remember that most distinctly, it was so beautiful.

And do you remember it as if it were a performance

or as if it was happening or...?

Oh, it was almost more real than life.

Paul, I've spent a lot of this film thinking about Mozart's humanity,

and how that's expressed in the music, how grounded it is,

and how grounded he is,

but can we talk also about a transcendence in Mozart's music,

and if so, what might it be?

Erm, he, despite all the mythology,

he strikes me as being what we might call "supra-normal".

You know, he wasn't just normal, he was what normal ought to be.

You know, anyone who could be playing billiards, drinking coffee,

writing a great symphony at the same time, caring about his family

and their aspirations, also longing for independence.

Er, this is a very high-functioning man indeed

caught in a particular web of history, as we all are.

So the transcendence is more than just musical,

I think it actually runs throughout and across his life.

There are these beautiful individuals, sometimes weird

and wacky individuals, who just have a whole range of abilities, skills,

insights, cognitive function, that are always going to be

something we just get a crick in the neck looking cos it's so elevated.

He began to prove that a composer could actually live

an independent creative life.

Now that takes a different kind of genius

because that's imaginative in terms of conceiving of a state of life

that is beyond the one that you currently know.

What would he be doing now? You know, Mozart now?

My own belief is he'd probably be writing for, erm, computer games,

because I suspect that he would be drawn to the most creative area,

probably the most lucrative area, and the place where he really needed

to exercise all his skill to the very extreme.

'After his death -

'researchers have put forward over 100 potential causes -

'Mozart's body was interred in a mass grave,

'unmarked and unremarkable.

'This wasn't the romantic fate of an artist misunderstood or

'undervalued, but common practice in Joseph II's Vienna, the result of

'liberal reforms to show that in death all men are equal.

'Vienna put up this statue to Mozart here in St Mark's Cemetery,

'where he was buried somewhere on 7th December 1791.

'But it can only ever be a best guess

'as to where his bones actually are.'

I like the fact that Mozart's grave can never become

a fetish for memorial in the way that

Oscar Wilde's, Jim Morrison's or Ludwig van Beethoven's are.

We may not know where his body finally came to rest

but we do know where his music is

thanks to its virtuosity of empathy, of compassion, of humanity.

Mozart's music rightly belongs in the bodies,

the minds and the imaginations of anyone who loves it.