Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A Side of Mozart You Might Not Have Known About


People like to complain about how low-brow culture has become. The radio is cluttered with profanity-laden hip-hop tracks, misogynistic rock songs, and club hits dripping with enough sexual innuendo that they'd glow under a black light. But all of this longing for the "good old days" is usually based more on selective memory than it is reality. Case in point, Mozart's song "Leck mich im Arsch".

If you can't guess the translation based on the title, it's basically "Lick me in the Arse". Most scholars believe that this was a party piece that he wrote for his friends' amusement. A sanitized version with drastically altered lyrics called "Let Us Be Glad" was published after Mozart's death. It wasn't until 1991 that the original manuscript was unearthed and we all learned what a dirty bugger Mozart was.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the post, Tom. I am from Austria and I guess that this songs gets even stranger if you understand the lyrics. Basically they just repeat the following passages over and over again:

Lick me in the arse
Let us be happy
Grumbling and growling are in vain
This is the true cross of life
Therefore let us be happy

I guess my mom also doesn't know this song considering that she always talks about how peaceful and relaxing Mozart's music is. Hilarious xD

Vitriolix said...

Leck mich im Arsch is one of my favorite insults in German, I never knew Mozart wrote piece. My Austrian father is going to crack up when I play it for him.