Wilde×Mozart

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on ROAST NIGHT, Oscar Wilde and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They take up On who in their own family deserved a roast and why.
2. 00:11
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Good evening, and welcome to what I suspect will be an evening of exquisite cruelty. Tonight we discuss our families — those people who share our blood but, mercifully, not always our sensibilities. Wolfgang, I understand you had a sister.
3. 00:24
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Nannerl! Ja, ja. My sister Maria Anna. Very good at the clavier, you know. Papa paraded us around Europe like performing monkeys — she played, I played, everyone applauded.
4. 00:36
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How charming. And yet history remembers only one Mozart child.
5. 00:39
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Well, she was excellent, truly. But when she became eighteen, Papa said 'No more tours for you, Liebling, time to get married and play for your husband.' Can you imagine? All that talent, locked in a drawing room in St. Gilgen.
6. 00:54
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I can imagine it perfectly. It's the fate of nearly every woman of talent — to be praised until the moment she might actually eclipse a man, at which point society discovers she has other duties. Your father decided this, I take it?
7. 01:06
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Leopold Mozart, ja. My father deserves his own roast, believe me. Everything I did, he wanted credit for. 'I created this miracle,' he would say. 'God speaks through my son because I taught him.'
8. 01:19
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Fathers do love to claim authorship of their children's achievements. Mine was a surgeon — Sir William Wilde, very respected, also very busy seducing his patients. He had three children before marriage and several during it, though not all with my mother.
9. 01:32
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Wait, wait — your father was sleeping with sick people?
10. 01:36
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    He was an eye and ear surgeon, Wolfgang, not a faith healer. Though I suppose he did provide a different sort of laying on of hands. The scandal was extraordinary — a patient claimed he chloroformed and assaulted her. The jury sided with my father, but really, the whole thing was marvellously grotesque.
11. 01:51
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    And your mother, she just... allowed this?
12. 01:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My mother was Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, a poetess who wrote revolutionary verse under the name 'Speranza.' She allowed very little and noticed everything, but she understood that genius — even mediocre genius like my father's — requires accommodation. She saved her true passion for holding salons and telling everyone I would be extraordinary.
13. 02:12
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    At least she believed in you! My father, every letter: 'Wolfgang, you spend too much money. Wolfgang, you don't write to me enough. Wolfgang, why did you marry that Weber girl?' Constanze! My wife! He hated her.
14. 02:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Did he have reason to?
15. 02:25
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    No! Well... she wasn't good with money. Neither was I. We were poor together, very happily poor, until I died owing everyone. But she loved me, and she didn't try to control me like Papa did.
16. 02:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How tedious controlling people are. My brother Willie was the controlled one — became a journalist, married wretchedly, drank heavily. He spent his whole life being the responsible son, and what did it earn him? Obscurity and an early grave. I, on the other hand, was wildly irresponsible and became immortal.
17. 02:57
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Your brother deserves the roast, then, for being boring?
18. 03:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No, no. Willie was pathetic, but one cannot roast the pathetic — it's too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel, and afterwards you're simply wet and surrounded by dead fish. The person in my family who deserves roasting is my wife.
19. 03:11
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Oooh! Now we get to the good part. What did she do?
20. 03:15
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Constance? She loved me, which was her first mistake. She married me, which was her second. And then, when my life came crashing down around me in spectacular fashion, she changed our sons' last name and told them I was dead.
21. 03:28
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    But... you were in prison, ja? For the... the men?
22. 03:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    For being myself, yes. Two years hard labour for the crime of loving Lord Alfred Douglas, that golden poisonous boy. Constance came to see me once in Reading Gaol to tell me about the name change. Our sons would be Hollands now, not Wildes. She thought she was protecting them.
23. 03:47
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Was she wrong?
24. 03:48
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Of course not. But she robbed me nonetheless — took my children and my name and gave me nothing but her forgiveness, which I never asked for. Do you know how insulting forgiveness is when you've done nothing you regret?
25. 04:00
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    I regret many things. Mostly financial. Also I was rude to people who could have helped me. Also I died at thirty-five owing money for my own funeral.
26. 04:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes, well, you died young enough to avoid the really spectacular failures. Tell me, who in your family truly deserves the roast? Not your father — that's too obvious. Not poor Nannerl, locked away with her clavier and her disappointing husband.
27. 04:23
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    I think... Maria Anna Thekla. My cousin. We called her the Bäsle.
28. 04:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And what did the Bäsle do to earn your wrath?
29. 04:30
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Nothing! That's the point. We wrote letters — very silly, very dirty letters. All about... how do I say in English... Scheisse. Arsch. Farting and shitting. Very funny!
30. 04:43
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Good God.
31. 04:44
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    I was young! She thought I was hilarious. We had a little romance, maybe. But then she kept all the letters. Every one! And now everyone knows that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, genius composer, wrote to his pretty cousin about licking his arsch.
32. 04:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    She kept them as insurance, surely. Proof that the great Mozart was human.
33. 05:04
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Or she kept them because she loved me and I disappointed her by marrying someone else. I was not good to women, Oscar. I loved them, but I used them too. My mother traveled with me to Paris and died there while I was chasing singers. Constanze was pregnant six times — six! Only two babies lived. And I was always working, always performing, never there.
34. 05:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes, well. Genius is expensive, and women pay the bill. My mother paid it. My wife paid it. Every woman who loved me paid it, though I tried to spend my currency elsewhere.
35. 05:35
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    With Lord Alfred?
36. 05:36
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Bosie was the most expensive love I ever had. He cost me everything — my reputation, my freedom, my family, my art. And he wasn't worth a fraction of it. That beautiful, shallow, vicious boy. His father called me a sodomite, I sued for libel like a fool, and the whole rotting edifice of my life collapsed.
37. 05:53
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    But you loved him anyway?
38. 05:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I loved what I invented him to be. The real Alfred Douglas was a narcissistic child who threw tantrums in restaurants. But I needed to love someone impossible, someone who would destroy me, because that's what artists do. We find the sharpest edge and press against it until we bleed.
39. 06:11
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    That's very dark, Oscar. I just wanted to write music and eat good food and maybe touch some pretty people. And fart. I also enjoyed farting.
40. 06:21
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes, your scatological enthusiasms are well documented, thanks to dear Bäsle. Perhaps she deserves our gratitude rather than our roast. After all, she proved that genius and vulgarity are constant companions.
41. 06:31
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    You know what? I forgive her. And I forgive Papa too, the controlling bastard. He was terrified I would fail, and so he squeezed too tight. But without him, maybe I never learn music at all.
42. 06:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How magnanimous. How sentimental. How... German.
43. 06:46
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    And you? Do you forgive your Constance? Your Bosie? Your father with his wandering... what did you call it... laying on of hands?
44. 06:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Forgiveness is for people who want to move forward, Wolfgang. I'm dead. Forward is no longer an option. But I will say this — my family, monstrous and mundane as they were, gave me the greatest gift any artist can receive.
45. 07:07
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    What gift?
46. 07:08
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Something to write about. Something to transcend. Something to prove wrong. One cannot become extraordinary by emerging from ordinary happiness. We needed our disasters.
47. 07:18
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Ja... ja, this is true. If Papa wasn't terrible, maybe I just play clavier in Salzburg and teach stupid children. Instead, I wrote Don Giovanni.
48. 07:28
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And if my father had been faithful, my mother conventional, my wife understanding, and Bosie impossible to love, I might never have written 'De Profundis' from my prison cell. I might never have understood that we are each our own tragedy.
49. 07:41
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    So... we should thank our families? For the roast material?
50. 07:45
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Absolutely not. We should roast them mercilessly, as planned, and then use the ashes as fertilizer for our art. That's what family is for, my dear Wolfgang. They give us life, they give us pain, and if we're very lucky, they give us something immortal to say about both.
51. 07:58
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Then here is to our families! The fathers who controlled us, the wives who suffered us, the sisters who were silenced, and the cousins who kept our embarrassing letters. Prost!
52. 08:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    To family — the first people to wound us and the last to understand why we needed the wound. Good night, listeners. Go home and roast your own relatives. They've certainly earned it.