As one of the finest opera composers the world has ever known, Wolfgang Mozart also turned his lyric gift to the art of song. One particular song shows especially well Mozart's dramatic flair, while also in a twist of fate unwittingly foreshadowing an episode in a twentieth-century royal soap opera. You could almost call it an opera in miniature. Mozart's song "Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte" ("As Luise burned the letters of her unfaithful lover") has all the ingredients of riveting music drama. First, there's a heroine unhappily in love with a philandering man. Then there's the over-the-top language, as Luise sings invective to the letters: - "die, you children of melancholy." And there's also Luise's extreme, if ironically futile, course of action: she burns the letters to retaliate against her unfaithful lover and to purge her soul of her love for him. Dramatic though that conflagration may be, it is still no match for Luise's despair on realizing as the song ends that, though she destroyed her lover's letters, her love for him nevertheless remains. Mozart decks Gabriele von Baumberg's poetry in emotionally rich music brilliantly paced for dramatic effect.
Here's the song, performed by mezzo-soprano Anne Sophie von Otter with Melvyn Tan, pianoforte: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx_zhz4CS2Q By an odd coincidence, Mozart's heartbroken heroine has a connection with a much later luckless lover whose letters also went to the pyre. After Mozart's death, the autograph of "Als Luise" passed through the hands of various owners, including those of the wife of Charles Spencer, Britain's Sixth Earl Spencer and a great-grandfather of Lady Diana Spencer, who would become the Princess of Wales. Princess Diana's own marital misery is well documented. But according to William Shawcross' 2009 book, The Queen Mother: The Official Biography, some of the unhappy details of Diana's desolation likely went up in smoke when in 1993, after Diana's separation from Prince Charles, her aunt-in-law, Princess Margaret, burned some of Diana's letters to Margaret's mother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. One speculation is that Margaret burned the letters to protect members of the royal family about whom Diana may have written unflatteringly. Another holds that Margaret could also have been protecting Diana herself, with whom she was reportedly on decent terms at the time. But not for long. Two years later, in a now-iconic BBC television interview, Diana famously decried her husband's infidelity, ruffling the royal feathers, and snuffing out the flames of Princess Margaret's friendship forever. Read more:
- Destroyed: The Letters That Fuelled a Royal Feud (Telegraph)
- How Diana's Letters to Queen Mother Were Burned by Princess Margaret (Mail Online)
