Excerpts from the book “Fairytale Art for Mozart”

Apparently, Mozart’s pet songbird could whistle a few bars of his piano concert in G major (K. 453). Did Mozart live in a magic world we love to hear stories about, even if we find them unbelievable? The prelude to his marriage, too, resembles a love story with obstacles the couple had to overcome to be united. Father Leopold was exasperated when Mozart decided to leave Salzburg and embark on the insecure life of a freelancer. Also, he did not approve of his son’s wife Constanze. Maybe this was why Wolfgang hardly mentioned his father’s passing in 1787, while dedicating a long obituary to his “star songbird”, which died around the same time. If we try to judge Mozart’s life in the simplistic terms of fairy tales, based on our conventional ideas of “good” and “bad”, we inevitably encounter contradictions.