Once again the Mozart Society of California demonstrated its resiliency and resourcefulness as it quickly snared perpetual Carmel Bach Festival favorite Bruce Lamott to step in at the last moment to replace lecturer David Gordon, victim of a minor domestic accident.
Luckily for us, Lamott had a lecture up his sleeve that he had recently delivered in northern California, thus he was primed and ready for us. The event, entitled “Mozart’s Last Year: The real Story of Amadeus,†was held at the Carmel Presbyterian Church on Friday, January 18. It was a multimedia affair richly augmented with slides and musical excerpts, but the real show was to hear the well informed and witty Bruce Lamott put a fresh spin on a familiar story.
Lamott launched his presentation by pointing out how much we owe to Peter Shaffer’s play (and later, Academy-Award-winning film) Amadeus for raising public awareness of Mozart’s genius. For all its success, however, the play was a pretentious melodrama riddled with historical inaccuracies, and many of these inaccuracies drew fire from Lamott.
But, the main thrust of his lecture was that in the ten years since the film Amadeus captured America’s imagination new information continues to come to light about Mozart, and thus we not only need to correct some of the historical distortions of the film, but we also need to adopt a new perspective about the last year of Mozart’s life.
Lamott pointed out that it is difficult for us to remember much that happened in 2001 prior to September 11, since the catastrophic events following that day have tended to eclipse and trivialize many things that happened before that date. Similarly, when we consider Mozart’s last year, we have to put aside momentarily our knowledge of the last act, so to speak, of Mozart’s death, and consider what a productive year it had been. When we examine the Köchel listings from 600 on, we see a glorious outpouring of two operas (Die Zauberflöte and La Clemenza di Tito), the Quintet for Strings, the Motet Ave Verum, the Clarinet Concerto and the Requiem.
Thus, Mozart’s last year was full of promise, and there was no premonition of his early death. But, the fact is that he suddenly became ill and died two weeks later. The cause of his death remains mysterious to this day, and it is unlikely that the mystery will ever be solved.
Unlike Beethoven’s death, where a lock of hair snipped from his head on his deathbed was examined by forensic scientists a few years ago and revealed toxic levels of lead (probably from lead glazed cooking utensils), no hair or tissue samples exist from Mozart, thus we have no expectation of ever conclusively determining the cause of his death.
Lamott did not discuss the latest theory as to the cause of this death, which was reported only last year by a research physician who suggested that we cannot exclude the possibility that Mozart died of trichinosis, a disorder resulting from infestation of the small roundworm Trichinella spiralis, commonly acquired in humans by the eating of undercooked pork containing encapsulated larvae of the parasite. There is an extant letter written to Constanze a month before his death in which Mozart thanked Constanze for the lovely pork cutlets she prepared for him.
Only a small percentage of infected persons, however, have sufficient parasites to produce recognizable clinical symptoms, which include diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and fever in the early stage, followed later by pain, stiffness, and swelling of various muscular structures, and often edema (swelling) of the face. Many of these clinical symptoms were observed in Mozart’s last illness, and thus trichinosis deserves to be considered as a possible cause to his death.
Lamott’s lecture relied heavily on information from H.C. Robbins Landon’s “Mozart’s Last Year – 1791†(Schirmer Books 1988) and “Mozart the Golden Years†(Schirmer Books 1989), but then all of us are indebted to Landon, who, incidentally, was one of the first researchers to finally lay to rest the long-held opinion that Mozart’s wife Constanze was a superficial, self-centered wife who was a negative influence during the course of their marriage.
As always, Lamott was a gracious host and on this occasion communicated well with his audience, receiving warm generous applause and a few stimulating questions from the audience.
