All language subtitles for BBC.The.Joy.of.Mozart.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.eng

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

# 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

# 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.