[QUOTE]Originally posted by robert newman:
I do not think that the young Beethoven's visit to Vienna (at which time he may have met Mozart) proves any motive by Max Franz. They barely met one another (if at all) and Beethoven may not even have known about the politics with which Haydn/Mozart/Luchesi and Max Franz were involved.
Beethoven needed no instructions. He thought he was perhaps only 7 years old at the time. If he came back with no "story" at all, that might have been all that was needed.
I tend to agree with you that by December 1791 Mozart's enemies considered him a lapsed heretic. I also agree that a court-imposed sentence would have provided the reason for him being able to predict with some precision the time when his life was in danger.
But was the sentence really death, or did Mozart invent that to make himself a martyr & so perhaps manipulate the authorities into a reprieve? If they wanted to make Mozart an example of the restored order, slow death by poison isn't the way to go about it. The Golden Fleece is an interesting angle. I know nothing about them (other than a possible alchemical connection), the histories on the net are sanitized. One could make the Vienna chapter out to be an unscrupulous secret magical order who laid one whammy of a curse on Mozart, but this is not the sort of thing secret groups, even nasty ones, want to do. To get them laying a curse on Mozart (which would explain a lot of what Mozart himself was saying about his ultimate demise), I have to put him in the group, I have to have him betray the group in some way they would regard as dangerous, and I have to find a reasonably effective means of making the curse. (How reckless was W.A. Mozart?)
I honestly believe that the Memorial Service of 10th December 1791 at St Michael's Vienna was the place where a Requiem of Mozart's own composition was sung, this completed by the composer. But news of this small gathering caused great embarrasment and the 'Requiem' project was begun - so that K626 (finally manufactured and published virtually 10 years after Mozart's death) is today portrayed as being 'Mozart's Requiem'. (There are even two newspaper reports that the Requiem was being prepared for performance in early 1792).
The mass is a white magic ceremony of great power. (For lots of details, find the obscure book, The Science of the Sacraments, by C.W. Leadbeater, 1920.) Priests & bishops are themselves white magicians. A requiem mass manipulates both the corpse & the newly dead spirit, for mutual benefit & blessing. Ordinarily, both are present in the church building at the time of the mass itself. This is of great assistance to the newly deceased. (I can't call the deceased a "soul", as the reduction of the deceased to a soul is what the requiem itself is all about.) Would a requiem mass be effective if the corpse itself was not physically present? It seems to me it would be, if a lock of hair (for example) was present on the altar. Without any physical remains, it would not be as effective. This has to do with placing the service in some context, eg, circumstances which would enable the clergy to consent to it.
While there were a lot of rules unique to ecclesiastic music, I've always thought K626 to be the work of a man who was inexperienced with large forces & therefore, hesitant in his expression.
As the morning after Mozart's death seems to have been busy, here are some useful details:
Sunrise in Vienna on 6 December, 1791 (corrected to Local Mean Time) was 7:42
Sunset was 4:01. This gives 8 hours, 19 minutes of daylight. (I am uncertain if it should be the 5th or 6th.)
We may presume half an hour of twilight on either side. The moon was waxing, gibbous. At sunset, the sun/moon angle was approximately 137 degrees: the moon was in the middle of the eastern sky. So there was some moonlight. It was full approximately 3 1/2 days later. Venus was a morning star.
I would presume that Vienna was stirring by 8:30 or 9. Family & friends must be notified. Presuming that Closset has not already written & signed a death certificate, that will need to be done. It must be presented to the authorities. An immediate decision must be made concerning funeral & burial. If, as you suggest, Mozart's head was severed before burial, and if, as has been suggested, he was buried in St. Marx's the very same day, then here is what that looks like to the gravediggers: They will want to finish for the day around 3:30 at the latest. This would barely give them time to go home & eat their dinners before darkness falls. This is not a highly paid job, their lavish use of candles in the evening is not likely. Presuming that bodies are collected in one place & loaded onto a horse-drawn cart & trundled off to St. Marx's somewhere else, that cart wants to leave by 1 at the latest. I imagine the grave digger's schedule was: Dig a big pit in the morning, have a nice lunch, wait for the cart full of dead bodies to arrive, sling them into the pit, fill. I imagine they spent their spare time, as gravediggers traditionally have, debating the finer points of Greek philosophy.
You say the head was severed soon after Mozart's death. This had to be before he was buried. The authorities would not likely stand for grave tampering. (Even with a full moon, it would take the better part of a full night to dig down, find the body, chop away, put everything back in some sort of order & escape. Darkness slows things.) Only in gristly Hollywood movies is the head simply chopped off. A body is put on a slab, it is inclined in one direction or the other, a vein is opened, and the blood allowed to drain. This takes time. Then the head can be severed. This presumes an undertaker, and money to pay him.
A note on clocks. At this time, only the wealthy have clocks. For the rest of us, there was the communal clock, stuck on the side of some large building, that rang out the hours. As it happens, Local Mean Time (LMT) was a 19th century invention. Prior to that, the time reference was the sundial. I do not know how that related to LMT.
So if Mozart was buried as claimed, in a pauper's grave, his corpse was misrepresented. If the skull was taken when the bones were disinterred some years later, I am not happy with the story that a wire, put around his neck at burial, was later used to identify the body. The wire may well have been the remains of a cheap necklace. It may have been worn for medicinal purposes, as copper still is today. It could have been any head, from any body. For that matter, the man who claimed to have put it around Mozart's neck, might have put it around the neck of any body of similar size & age, on that day, or on any day, days or weeks later. This is especially true if a major scandal was brewing in subsequent weeks. The wire is, sorry to say, another red herring.
What a mess this has become!
[This message has been edited by Droell (edited 08-29-2005).]
I do not think that the young Beethoven's visit to Vienna (at which time he may have met Mozart) proves any motive by Max Franz. They barely met one another (if at all) and Beethoven may not even have known about the politics with which Haydn/Mozart/Luchesi and Max Franz were involved.
Beethoven needed no instructions. He thought he was perhaps only 7 years old at the time. If he came back with no "story" at all, that might have been all that was needed.
I tend to agree with you that by December 1791 Mozart's enemies considered him a lapsed heretic. I also agree that a court-imposed sentence would have provided the reason for him being able to predict with some precision the time when his life was in danger.
But was the sentence really death, or did Mozart invent that to make himself a martyr & so perhaps manipulate the authorities into a reprieve? If they wanted to make Mozart an example of the restored order, slow death by poison isn't the way to go about it. The Golden Fleece is an interesting angle. I know nothing about them (other than a possible alchemical connection), the histories on the net are sanitized. One could make the Vienna chapter out to be an unscrupulous secret magical order who laid one whammy of a curse on Mozart, but this is not the sort of thing secret groups, even nasty ones, want to do. To get them laying a curse on Mozart (which would explain a lot of what Mozart himself was saying about his ultimate demise), I have to put him in the group, I have to have him betray the group in some way they would regard as dangerous, and I have to find a reasonably effective means of making the curse. (How reckless was W.A. Mozart?)
I honestly believe that the Memorial Service of 10th December 1791 at St Michael's Vienna was the place where a Requiem of Mozart's own composition was sung, this completed by the composer. But news of this small gathering caused great embarrasment and the 'Requiem' project was begun - so that K626 (finally manufactured and published virtually 10 years after Mozart's death) is today portrayed as being 'Mozart's Requiem'. (There are even two newspaper reports that the Requiem was being prepared for performance in early 1792).
The mass is a white magic ceremony of great power. (For lots of details, find the obscure book, The Science of the Sacraments, by C.W. Leadbeater, 1920.) Priests & bishops are themselves white magicians. A requiem mass manipulates both the corpse & the newly dead spirit, for mutual benefit & blessing. Ordinarily, both are present in the church building at the time of the mass itself. This is of great assistance to the newly deceased. (I can't call the deceased a "soul", as the reduction of the deceased to a soul is what the requiem itself is all about.) Would a requiem mass be effective if the corpse itself was not physically present? It seems to me it would be, if a lock of hair (for example) was present on the altar. Without any physical remains, it would not be as effective. This has to do with placing the service in some context, eg, circumstances which would enable the clergy to consent to it.
While there were a lot of rules unique to ecclesiastic music, I've always thought K626 to be the work of a man who was inexperienced with large forces & therefore, hesitant in his expression.
As the morning after Mozart's death seems to have been busy, here are some useful details:
Sunrise in Vienna on 6 December, 1791 (corrected to Local Mean Time) was 7:42
Sunset was 4:01. This gives 8 hours, 19 minutes of daylight. (I am uncertain if it should be the 5th or 6th.)
We may presume half an hour of twilight on either side. The moon was waxing, gibbous. At sunset, the sun/moon angle was approximately 137 degrees: the moon was in the middle of the eastern sky. So there was some moonlight. It was full approximately 3 1/2 days later. Venus was a morning star.
I would presume that Vienna was stirring by 8:30 or 9. Family & friends must be notified. Presuming that Closset has not already written & signed a death certificate, that will need to be done. It must be presented to the authorities. An immediate decision must be made concerning funeral & burial. If, as you suggest, Mozart's head was severed before burial, and if, as has been suggested, he was buried in St. Marx's the very same day, then here is what that looks like to the gravediggers: They will want to finish for the day around 3:30 at the latest. This would barely give them time to go home & eat their dinners before darkness falls. This is not a highly paid job, their lavish use of candles in the evening is not likely. Presuming that bodies are collected in one place & loaded onto a horse-drawn cart & trundled off to St. Marx's somewhere else, that cart wants to leave by 1 at the latest. I imagine the grave digger's schedule was: Dig a big pit in the morning, have a nice lunch, wait for the cart full of dead bodies to arrive, sling them into the pit, fill. I imagine they spent their spare time, as gravediggers traditionally have, debating the finer points of Greek philosophy.
You say the head was severed soon after Mozart's death. This had to be before he was buried. The authorities would not likely stand for grave tampering. (Even with a full moon, it would take the better part of a full night to dig down, find the body, chop away, put everything back in some sort of order & escape. Darkness slows things.) Only in gristly Hollywood movies is the head simply chopped off. A body is put on a slab, it is inclined in one direction or the other, a vein is opened, and the blood allowed to drain. This takes time. Then the head can be severed. This presumes an undertaker, and money to pay him.
A note on clocks. At this time, only the wealthy have clocks. For the rest of us, there was the communal clock, stuck on the side of some large building, that rang out the hours. As it happens, Local Mean Time (LMT) was a 19th century invention. Prior to that, the time reference was the sundial. I do not know how that related to LMT.
So if Mozart was buried as claimed, in a pauper's grave, his corpse was misrepresented. If the skull was taken when the bones were disinterred some years later, I am not happy with the story that a wire, put around his neck at burial, was later used to identify the body. The wire may well have been the remains of a cheap necklace. It may have been worn for medicinal purposes, as copper still is today. It could have been any head, from any body. For that matter, the man who claimed to have put it around Mozart's neck, might have put it around the neck of any body of similar size & age, on that day, or on any day, days or weeks later. This is especially true if a major scandal was brewing in subsequent weeks. The wire is, sorry to say, another red herring.
What a mess this has become!
[This message has been edited by Droell (edited 08-29-2005).]
Comment