The story they give you about Mozart, as a child, feels simple. A kid was really good at music, so he played for a lot of royalty. Pretty straightforward, when you’re a child. Five-year-olds composing music with great success? That makes sense to children. They see stuff like that in cartoons all the time.
By the time you’re an adult, Mozart’s been normalized to you. You’re used to all of this. You don’t give Mozart a second thought. For a while there, he’d come up in autism conversations, but TikTok has convinced all kinds of people without autism that they are people with autism, and that’s way weirder than a little Austrian boy who’s good at the violin. That’s what we talk about now when we talk about autism, at least in my circles. Not a little Austrian boy. I assume all little Austrian boys are good at the violin, and I assume many of them have autism. How many? I have no idea. It depends how many are watching TikTok.
We should give Mozart that second thought, though. Because Mozart’s life was nuts. Specifically, his parents might have been nuts. The kid was touring Europe at the age of five or six. I don’t blame them, but man. Those are some involved parents right there.
Which brings us to Instagram.
If Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart existed today, a music teacher recognizing his son as a musical prodigy would get that child on the internet. Gotta get the word out, you know? Had his life transpired today, Leopold Mozart would most likely have been an Instagram dad. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s probably true. What kind of Instagram dad would he be? I’m not sure there’s a second type. I think they’re all the same. Simultaneously overly fixated on their own image and a little off-base when it comes to what a good image would be. Wolfgang Mozart would have grown up under some weird pressure.
Where this gets better is that Mozart would have eventually grown into an adult, and we don’t have any evidence that his father, Leopold, was a man of malice. We can assume Wolfgang would have gotten his own Instagram password when he turned 13 or 16 or 18. We can assume we would have started getting insights into Mozart’s thoughts. Would that be cool for fans of his music? Well, maybe. Would that be a sensation because of the brand of Mozart’s humor? Yes. That is the part where this gets better.
You see, Mozart loved to joke about feces. Shit. Poop. The brown stuff. There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to Mozart’s “scatological humor.” The guy was a menace. When he was 21, he sent this poem (translated by Alan Dundes) to his 19-year-old cousin, Maria:
Well, I wish you good night, but first,
Shit in your bed and make it burst.
Sleep soundly, my love
Into your mouth your arse you’ll shove.
Maybe people knew about this 40 years ago, when Amadeus was on Broadway and on the silver screen, but they didn’t teach us this in music class in the early 2000s, and since then, Mozart hasn’t come up at all. Mozart would have been wild on Instagram.
