The interminable childhood of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

What can the life of a genius be like? What moves in the heart of a human being who is already considered a prodigy at the age of five? How does your existence unfold when your art must necessarily coexist with everyday life and necessity? If we think about it carefully, it is absolutely not easy to answer questions like these when talking about great artists, as well as protagonists of history. One always imagines them intent on finishing a masterpiece, with brush in hand giving the final masterful touch to their art or intent on dictating a speech that will change the course of events. Conversely, Edgarda Ferri , writing her personal, or rather, very personal biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, seeks answers to questions such as the initial ones.

“ The Child of Salzburg ” (Solferino, 2023, pp. 240, also e-book) reveals itself not as a traditional biography, but as an exploration with unexpected outcomes. There is Mozart's music, constantly evoked, an element that already punctuates little Wolfi's most tender childhood. There are the many courts of Europe and the cities that the great composer passed through in a career that lasted thirty years despite his death arriving at the age of 35 years and a few months. There are the greatness and infinite mediocrities of an era, the eighteenth century, in which a musician, however immense, was at the service of the powerful man of the moment and was considered an integral part of servitude, no more and no less than a lackey or a waiter.

However, finally because it has never been told in such a participatory way, there is Mozart's intimacy, his desires, his dreams, his family ties. There is the enormous internal boulder of the exclusive relationship with his father Leopold, the man who appropriates his son's greatness, absolutely convinced that this greatness must be subservient to the needs of the lineage. Not out of selfishness or perhaps not only, but out of a sort of toxic love that puts blood, belonging, dynasty above all else, even though the Mozarts were far from any quarter of nobility.

Edgarda Ferri explores Mozart's dense correspondence, capturing the humanity behind the descriptions, the emotions hidden behind the events, the irony, the drama, the essence of life itself. He sees Wolfang as that little human being who deep down always remains Wolfi, the child who aims to please his father, to remain faithful even when loyalty involves betraying himself and his desire for independence and adulthood. Infant, adolescent, boy and man, the great musician thus remains trapped in a childhood that never ends.

There is no point in hiding it: the most beautiful and fascinating part of Edgarda Ferri's book concerns the complicated and controversial relationship between Mozart and his father, a parent who in Wolfgang's opinion was second only to God as he often repeated. It is together with his father, transformed into a severe impresario, that he begins to travel to the courts of Europe - from Vienna to Paris, from Rome to London - to perform and to make use of his gift. It is with his father that he has to fight all his life to erase Wolfi and definitively become Wolfgang Amadeus, but we realize that without his father he would never have been what we define with reverential respect as "Mozart".

Of course, the myth cost the child from Salzburg his games, his light-heartedness, his friendships, his love and even his health. But could it be otherwise? Between the lines of the book, the strong impression emerges that Wolfgang followed his destiny to the end, even if at a certain point he broke, almost with a clean cut, the umbilical cord that kept him tied to his parent. He was naturally considered ungrateful and he wasn't. He wanted independence, but he remained a musician employed by someone. He hoped for freedom and happiness, but even those did not arrive, perhaps because in life every human being has the right to the completeness of the only divine gift and Mozart had already had music.