melted, making its tone one-eighth lower than that of other violins. So Schachtner gave up and started playing the trumpet instead.
Once, Schachtner played his trumpet in front of Mozart. The boy was so shocked that he dropped dead on the spot. But he came back to life straight afterwards.
One day, when Mozart’s father and Schachtner got together to play a trio, the four-year-old Mozart asked if he could join in. His father refused, saying he hadn’t learnt to play the violin yet. Mozart had a tantrum, so his father reluctantly let him have his way. The child proceeded to play the second violin with his right hand and the first with his left. What’s more, he played all six of Wenzel’s compositions
Mozart still didn’t know how to use a pen when he was five. The score of a concerto composed by Mozart as a five-year-old is so splattered with ink, and this ink is so smeared over the page by the child’s fingers, that it is unreadable. When he saw this, Mozart’s father wept in despair. That’s why, if this concerto were ever performed, it would truly be a miracle.
When he was six, Mozart was taken on a concert tour of Vienna by his father. There, he was invited to play for the Empress Maria Theresa and the Emperor Francis I at the Palace of Schonbrunn. During the performance, Mozart is said to have covered the keyboard with a cloth and played with one finger. It would seem that, by this time, Mozart only had one finger left.
There were a number of princes and princesses of Mozart’s age in the Palace at this time. When Mozart slipped and fell on the polished parquet floor of the Palace, one of the girls helped him up. In his joy, Mozart promised, “I will surely make you my wife!”
The girl’s name was Marie Antoinette. She took the promise seriously, and waited for him. But Mozart never came to claim his bride. She lost patience and went off to marry Louis XVI of France instead.
Even then, she still held a secret passion for Mozart. When he died in 1791, her grief made her provoke the people into starting the French Revolution. Stepping up to the guillotine herself, she ordered the executioner to behead her, thereby committing assisted suicide.
When he was eight, Mozart travelled to London. There, tutored by Johann Christian Bach among others, he composed a number of pieces including the ‘Londoner Skizzenbuch’, ‘K19a’, and ‘Kochel-Einstein 15a-ss’.
Mozart received his first ever commission at the age of ten. He composed a piece called ‘Licenza’ for two patrons, Recitativo and Aria. But it’s not very good.
In the following year, Mozart performed the ‘Obligation of the First Commandment’ for Apollo and Hyacinthus. Nobody seems to know exactly what this was.
In the autumn of Mozart’s eleventh year, Maria Josepha, ninth daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, was to marry King Ferdinand IV of Naples. When Mozart heard of this, he was furious (he’d mistaken her for Marie Antoinette). Though suffering from smallpox, he went back to Vienna to stop the wedding. Maria Josepha caught smallpox from Mozart and died.
Mozart seems to have had an amorous nature. As young as twelve, he fell in love with a vain, foolish girl called Buffa, with whom he is said to have been consumed from spring to summer. Of course, he had various obstacles to overcome here.
When he was fourteen, Mozart went to Rome. There, he was profoundly moved on hearing a piece called ‘Miserere’ in a well-known chapel. That same evening, he wrote a composition of his own. But it was exactly the same as the ‘Miserere’ he’d heard in the afternoon, and was therefore never recognized as his own work.
In Rome, Pope Clement XIV made Mozart a “Knight of the Golden Spur”. But Mozart was physically weak. There is no mention of him performing as a knight after this, so we may infer that he refused the honour.
At the age of seventeen, Mozart again went to Vienna. There lived Joseph Haydn, who became engulfed in one of the whirlwinds that plagued the city. Mozart was also affected by it, and suffered serious injury. This whirlwind is known in German as “Sturm und Drang”.
Mozart is thought to have had some kind of extrasensory perception. When he was twenty-one, he had a premonition that the soprano Josepha Duschek was about to pay a visit from Prague, exclaiming “Ah! Io previdi” (Hey! I saw it coming!).
At twenty-two, Mozart fell in love with all four daughters of a man named Fridolin Weber. Although little is known of Mozart’s relationships with these four, common sense would suggest that it was merely an orgy, at most (sexual morals were not so strict in those days). Mozart’s favourite was the second daughter, Aloysia, but in the end he married the third, Constanze. This would suggest very strongly that it had indeed been an orgy.
In the same year, Mozart composed the symphony known as ‘K297’, as well as ‘Andante’ and a prelude called ‘Missing’.
When he was twenty-six, Mozart tried to marry Constanze. But she was whisked away to the palace of Friedrich Eugen, Duke of Wurttemberg. Overcoming a variety of hurdles, Mozart abducted Constanze, escaping with her from “the seraglio” and eventually marrying her.
But Constanze was a bad wife. She is said to have treated Mozart no better than a “goose of Cairo”. It is not clear to what this refers, but Mozart apparently saw himself as a “deluded bridegroom”.
Disillusioned, Mozart joined the secret society of the Freemasons at the age of twenty-eight, and took part in a conspiracy theory. He cantata’d his joy at this, while fighting off the CIA and the KGB. At one time he was a fugitive, pursued on a journey to Lied. But in November the organization was wiped out by the CIA. Mozart expressed his grief by composing the ‘Masonic Funeral Music’.
Mozart fell ever deeper into poverty from this time on. He studied to be a magician, and tried to make ends meet by taking side jobs, like “theatre manager”. But when his manservant Figaro upped and married in Prague without his permission, Mozart’s financial fortunes reached an even lower ebb. He became dependent on a person called Chloe, went around seducing women and acting like a right Don Juan, wrote musical jokes for the NHS, walked the streets naked shouting “Eine kleine Nachmusik!” and summoned the God of Death by playing his magic flute.
Mozart lived to the age of thirty-five. We know this, because he died when he was thirty-five. After his death, he wrote a “Requiem” for the repose of his soul.
The Last Smoker
I’m sitting on top of the parliament building, resisting tear-gas attacks from air force helicopters that circle above me like flies. I will soon enjoy my very last cigarette, my last show of resistance. My comrade, the painter Kusakabe, fell to his death just moments ago, leaving me alone as the last smoker remaining on earth. At this very moment, images of me – highlighted against the night sky by searchlights down below – are probably being relayed live across the country from TV cameras inside the helicopters.
I’ve got three packs left, and I refuse to die before I’ve finished them. So I’ve been chain-smoking two or three at a time. My head feels numb, my eyes are starting to spin. It’s only a matter of time before I, too, fall lifeless to the ground below.
It was only about fifteen or sixteen years ago that the anti-smoking movement started. And it was only six or seven years ago, at most, that the pressure on smokers really started to intensify. I never dreamt that, in such a short time, I would become the very last smoker left on earth. But maybe the signs were all there from the beginning. Being a fairly well known novelist, I used to spend most of my time at home writing. As a result, I had few opportunities to see or feel for myself the changes that society was going through. I hardly ever read the newspapers, as I abhor the journalistic style – it reminds me of dead fish. I lived in a provincial town, and my editors would come out to see me whenever the need arose. I tended to shun literary circles, and so never ventured into the capital.
Of course, I knew about the anti-smoking lobby. Intellectuals would often write articles stating their support or opposition in magazines and elsewhere. I also knew that the tone of the debate, on both sides, had gradually grown more hysterical, and that, from a certain point in time, the movement had suddenly started to swell while opposing arguments rapidly disappeared.
But as long as I stayed at home, I could live in splendid isolation from it all. I’d been a heavy smoker since my teens, and had continued to smoke without pause. Even so, no one ever admonished me or gave me any complaint. My wife and son tacitly put up with it. They probably realized that, for me to continue producing literary
