Picture it: Mozart at a masquerade ball gussied up as an ancient Middle Eastern prophet and spouting a made-up philosophy of riddles and off-color aphorisms.
Too silly even for Mozart? Nope.
Musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch notes in his documentary biography of Mozart that on February 19, 1786, Mozart attended a Carnival masked ball at Vienna's Hofburg Palace. Mozart dressed up as the ancient philosopher Zoroaster and passed out copies of a printed broadsheet entitled "Selections from Zoroaster's Fragments" and containing riddles and pseudo-philosophical aphorisms of his own creation.
A couple of those riddles, as leaked to a Salzburg newspaper, read, "I may be possessed without being seen" and "I may be given without being possessed." The "fragments" include gems like, "I prefer an open vice to an equivocal virtue; it shows me at least where I am."
Mozart probably heard a fair bit about Zoroaster in the months leading up to the masked ball. Some of what were thought to be the prophet's teachings were mixed among the tenets of Freemasonry, which Mozart experienced in visits to several Viennese Masonic lodges in 1784 and 1785.
Mozart's whimsical Zoroastrian riddles weren't the only creative evidence of his Masonic involvement. He composed several musical works for performance in Masonic ceremonies, and his Singspiel The Magic Flute was famously inspired by Masonic ideals and rituals.
Though somewhat fluffy when compared with the purposed seriousness of The Magic Flute, Mozart's Zoroastrian riddles were inspiration for some later composers. Those riddles make up part of the text of British composer Michael Nyman's television opera Letters, Riddles and Writs, and American composer Richard Danielpour's Concerto for Orchestra, bears the nickname "Zoroastrian Riddles."
