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

hated Salzburg . . . the last surviving impression of the place of his childhood’
(Wolfgang left for Vienna, never to return, the day after the mass’s one performance). 82
Gerhardt argues that this complex of emotions was reawakened when he came
to work on the Requiem:
In the requirement of a fugue for a mass [by which he means the Lacrymosa’s ‘Amen’ fugue] the
recollection of his own authoritarian father combined with his self-chosen musical substitute-fathers,
Bach and Handel. In this extreme confrontation between two parental authorities it must have
become clear to the thirty-five year old composer that his childhood was gone beyond the possibility
of return. Now that he was independent of these authorities, however, the former Wunderkind seems
to have found it difficult—if indeed it were possible at all—to define himself; and not only in an
artistic sense. 83
This intense probing of Mozart’s Oedipal impulses would seem to be more
appropriate for a character living in the Vienna of 1891 than that of 1791. After all,
most of the best-known composers of the eighteenth century—Bach, Handel, Gluck,
Haydn—had famously robust (and opaque) psyches. But then, as now, people were
complex beings, and we should not dismiss psychological investigations as being
anachronistic by definition. We should also remember the eccentrics, misfits, and
depressives of eighteenth-century music: Francesco Geminiani, W. F. Bach, Samuel
Wesley, J. G. Müthel, and perhaps Mozart’s Salzburg contemporary Michael Haydn.
Is it part of Mozart’s strange appeal that he is on the boundary between the two, fitting
clearly into neither category? If his music at times appears to give strange glimpses of
his interior life, he was as we have seen a product of his time, a creative personality
turned resolutely outward. According to one’s taste, this may be a perfectly adequate
explanation for the incompleteness of so many of his fugal sketches—he could, after
82 Ibid., 12. Gerhardt does not mention that the Mozarts’ first child died in Vienna while Mozart and
Constanze were on this journey: yet another unhappy association.
83 Ibid., 12.
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