J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

circumstances. In them we have the satisfaction of a clear villain (Salieri), whose
position in the Viennese musical establishment gives us a warm glow of moral
superiority, enabling us: ‘to heap blame on Mozart’s contemporaries while, at the same
time, reinforcing our own conviction that we, we enlightened people of today, whose
love for him and his music knows no bounds, we assuredly would not have failed
him.’ 74 It is yet another chapter in the endless tale of Italian intrigue and duplicity that
forms such an important Leitmotif in German operatic history. 75 For all its dramatic
effectiveness, from Rimsky Korsakov to Peter Shaffer, this story has never achieved
the slightest scholarly credence. But Gerhardt has an alternative theory for Mozart’s
death, seeking its origin in psychological rather than physical causes: ‘Not poison’ he
says, ‘but counterpoint’. 76 Counterpoint?
Gerhardt is interested in the relationship between the mind and the body,
observing that ‘often illness follows mental excitement [“seelische Erregung”],’ 77 then
advancing Eric Berne’s striking assertion that ‘many die because they [unknowingly]
wish to.’ 78 There is, it would appear, no wide consensus about the connection between
mental crisis and physical health: but it is perhaps reasonably safe to assert that the
human will is a complex and contradictory thing. Whether or not one accepts
Gerhardt’s framework as a whole, he does pose one important question that seems not
to have been asked before: ‘Why did the commissioning of a Requiem from the thirty
five year old composer unleash such existential anxiety, and precipitate him into a life-
74 V. Braunbehrens, ‘Väterlicher Freund, “gehorsamster Sohn”. Leopold und Wolfgang A. Mozart’,
Väter und Söhne: Zwölf biographische Porträts (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1996), p.7; pre-publication text at
http://www.aproposmozart.com/Braunbehrens%20-%20Fatherly%20Friend.pdf (accessed 7
December 2006).
75 This Leitmotif recurs in the biographies of Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert,
Weber, Mendelssohn, and Wagner (and no doubt others); it is partly a consequence of the fact that,
then as now, show-business was largely dominated by ambitious, rather unscrupulous ‘fixers’, partly
a consequence of the slow and painful growth in international stature of German music during this
time.
76 ‘Nicht Gift, sondern Kontrapunkt: Mozarts Requiem und sein Ende’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
150/9 (Sept 1989), 6-12.
77 F. Langegger, Mozart, Vater und Sohn, Eine psychologische Untersuchung (Zürich/Frieburg im
Breisgau: Atlantis 1978), p.33.
78 In What do you say after you say hello? (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
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