Among the books that have come into our hands lately, there is one written by Giacomo Cardinali for Sellerio, entitled ‘Il Giovane Mozart in Vaticano: L’affaire del Miserere di Allegri’. The publisher presents the book as a scrupulous historical work and some newspapers even extol its depth. But what depth?!
It is yet another novel passed off as historical research, which confines the Salzburger to a few pages that are a succession of anecdotes far removed from reality constructed after Mozart’s death. It reads like one of those novellas they used to write in the 19th century, for the amusement and pastime of young ladies from good families.
What are Cardinali’s sources? From the endless bibliography on Mozart, he has chosen three anecdotal texts by Niemetschek, Schliechtegroll and Nannerl and the letters from the trip to Italy edited by Cliff Eisen, which are a translation of the translation full of speculation.
Cardinali’s book, in the part about Mozart, is a marvel of mismatched fantasies. It extols the feat of the Miserere, which, however, never took place, because the Mozarts arrived late and only distributed the letters of introduction after the piece had been performed, and so the Sistina had nothing to do with it. The Miserere was already on sale in Rome and there would then have been no reason to transcribe it, the excommunication affair being fake news invented there and then.
According to the author, ‘the story narrated here has been derived from direct and minute scrutiny of original documents, almost exclusively manuscript and unpublished, preserved in two Vatican institutions’, but there is no trace of Mozart in these documents. And in the pages where his name appears, Cardinali creates facts, characters and encounters out of thin air. The story comes across as cloying, rhetorical, as if he knew what was going on in the head of the ‘brilliant little genius from Salzburg’.
One imagines, for example, a ‘dreamy’ Mozart writing home: ‘I too am still alive, and always in a good mood, as usual, and I travel happily: now I have even been to the Mediterranean Sea’. That scene opened up before his eyes, writes Cardinali, ‘a multitude of iridescent scales’ and ‘blurred every boundary between heaven and earth, as if new and capricious horizons were opening up before him. He felt that his eyes were not enough for such a dazzling spectacle and that such light as that day had never been seen in fourteen years of life, and in none of the long journeys he had been on until then. Overwhelmed by the frizzy, shining mirror of the sea of Naples, his ears full of incomprehensible, but very musical and impassioned voices, his personal victory over Allegri vanished in an instant, without him even noticing”.
It is a pity that in Mozart’s letter all these phrases from Cardinali are not there. The boy simply says that he is alive, always cheerful, that he travels happily and that he has been ‘on the Mediterranean Sea’, with an ‘r’ for Rome.
Giacomo Cardinali not only censors the words that he does not like and that would ruin his idyllic picture, but also invents at the end the meeting with the Pope who wants to reward Mozart for being ‘the author of that theft with genius’.
The critical reconstruction of the facts, respectful of the sources of the time, is in “Mozart in Italia”, the last book we published.
