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Lonnie

W.H. Auden

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I suppose we tend to place most great writers, poets, composers and others who have handed down to us works of great beauty on a kind of pedestal. We think of them more for their traditional works than themselves as people and conveniently forget about any less savoury works they may have penned. 

Anyone who has seen the play or the movie "Amadeus" by Peter Schaffer will know that our ideal of Mozart as a precious, intelligent and delicate composer of some of the most divine and gorgeous music ever written is quite wrong. He was a man with youthful desires and frequently mixed with common folk. Amongst the works he has left for posterity is a series of six pornographic canons (a canon being a work where a short melody will eventually be repeated by a series of other voices). The best known is this one which best translates as "Lick my Ass".

A similar one starts "Lick My Ass Nicely, Lick it Nice and Clean". 

In another, the last four lines in the expurgated edition are 

"Very gently, sleep resting well,
Good night!
Have sweet dreams,
Until the morning breaks!"

The text that Mozart wrote is actually

"Good night, good night,
Shit in your bed and make it burst;
Good night, sleep tight,
And stick your ass to your mouth."

More scatalogical and certainly not outright pornographic as is Auden's poem, but then the times were very different.

When then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher saw "Amadeus" at the National Theatre, she was not happy at its depiction of Mozart. She said to the director. Peter Hall,

"In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul-mouthed. I said that Mozart's letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour ... "I don't think you heard what I said", replied the Prime Minister. "He couldn't have been like that". That was the end of any discussion.

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Posted
On 10/12/2021 at 3:40 PM, Lonnie said:

By soundless bounds it extended and distended, by quick
Great leaps it rose, it flushed, it rushed to its full size.
Nearly nine inches long and three inches thick,
A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise.

 

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