Wolferl Amadé

There’s nothing as good as prejudice for winding people up, especially if you believe it yourself. Take Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for instance, or Wolferl Amadé, as he was known to his best mates. “Little Wolf” – that’s a joke, for  
a start, prepubescent panda or Peppa Pig, more like it, if you ask me: these mincing minuets, crowd-pleasing scherzos, sycophantic sonatas, pussyfooting passacaglias, appalling arpeggios, crap-head cantatas, colourless coloraturas, fatuous fortissimos, capricious carpaccios (wrong semantic domain, and in any case, we’ve got the point – Ed.).

All of this breathtakingly banal muzak still trending after all these years, but even your most “sublime masterpiece” wouldn’t take my mind off my smartphone for even a trillionth of a nanosecond. Anyone who joins the Freemasons without having been press-ganged is decidedly dodgy. Then there’s that neoromantic story about being the vessel that God filled with divine music, music as divine
as the most exquisite wine, aka vino plonko. Who made that one up? None other than our main man, our own canny geezer. To be honest, a few selfish genes and a hell of a lot of practice - that’s what did it.

And then those operas, what was that all about? Headhunting that Da Ponte guy as librettist – NICE ONE! He “had a profound grasp of human psychology”, according to the aficionados. Cosi, Figaro, and Giovani contain the wisdom of Buddha, Confucius, and Kant, all rolled into one. Exhibit one, m’Lud: Cosi Fan Tutte – for those of you not on best-buddy terms with the lingua Italiana, “that’s what all women do”, in this case grab the first opportunity to be unfaithful to their lovers. But what about the men who seduced them just happening to be their lovers in disguise? That’s OK, apparently, just the usual loveable rogues.

“But the sweetness contains sadness”, your fans and groupies opine. But let’s
face it, inside the sadness there is yet more sweetness, which is so well off the calorie scale it’s entered a non-calorific universe, and inside that sweetness
there’s a musical monster, a tune-making  geek, a foul-mouthed nerd. Am
I the only person in the world who doesn’t love Wolferl, the world’s cutest cub?

Your life wasn’t a ball of chocolate with marzipan inside wrapped in silver paper with your portrait by some Salzburg piss-artist on it, I’ll grant you that, Wolferl, what with being schlepped round the courts and concert halls of Europe by a particularly pushy parent, when you’d rather be skateboarding, spraying graffiti, or contacting your Facebook friends like any half-normal kid. Later the endless commissions from archbishops, princes and assorted nobs and snobs of what passed for high culture and civilization at the time, always demanding, setting crazy deadlines, using any pretext to talk down your fees, and generally driving you into the loving arms of an early death –
how bad is that?

But mark one thing, my friend: ALL OF THIS IS NO EXCUSE