Mozart at His Impetuous Best

For Sunday, September 21, 2025
Laudate Pueri by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

By David Jolliffe

I’ll admit that when I perform or even listen to a work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, it’s a challenge to put completely out of my mind that fun-loving imp created by Tom Hulse playing the title role in Milos Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus.  Of course, a character in a film is rarely the same historical person on whom the character is based, but a great many Mozart scholars attest that the real Mozart was not that different from the character that Hulse portrayed. In fact, the piece by Mozart that the St. Paul’s Choir will sing during the 11 a.m. service on September 21 might be seen as a prime example of Mozart’s rather brazen response to the musical “powers that be” in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century.

The anthem is Mozart’s “Laudate Pueri,” the fourth movement of his Vesperae

Solennes de Confessore (Solemn Vespers for a Confessor). The lyrics come from Psalm 113, which begins “Praise ye the Lord. Praise, O ye servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord.” Mozart composed the vespers service in 1780 for the choir at Salzburg Cathedral, an institution with which he had a long history.  Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and spent much of his youth there, barring the times that his enterprising father, Leopold, squired him around Europe, showing off his son’s musical genius. In 1781, at age 15, Mozart accepted the position of concertmaster of the Salzburg Cathedral choir and enjoyed the benefaction of Sigismond von Schrattenbach, who had been prince-archbishop of Salzburg since 1753.  Mozart could not have asked for a more supportive patron.

All of that changed in late December 1781 with the sudden death of Archbishop Schrattenbach.  He was succeeded by Archbishop Hieronymous Colloredo, who had very different ideas about the nature and function of church music than his predecessor.  Colloredo thought the sole purpose of music in church was to accompany the liturgy; he showed little interest in the actual artistry of the music.  What’s more, Colloredo treated Mozart like a menial, forced him to take his meals with the servants, even forbade him from accepting public performance engagements without the archbishop’s permission.  The tension between Mozart and Colloredo had been escalating even before the latter’s ascension, and Mozart tried to resign not long after that event.  The archbishop, however, refused to accept the resignation without Leopold’s consent, so Wolfgang stayed on, but in July of 1781 the feud came to a head and Mozart was literally kicked out of the cathedral court by Count Karl Joseph Arco, the archbishop’s chamberlain.

Seen through the lens of this controversy, Mozart’s “Laudate Pueri” might be seen as an “in-your-face” move in an encounter the new archbishop.  Colloredo liked ecclesiastical music to be simple and unadorned.  The “Laudate Pueri” is anything but that:  it is a brilliantly executed fugue, a textbook example of that form.  It manifests such techniques as turning the theme upside down and stacked on top of itself, and employing running descending scales.  Its muscular vigor must definitely have rubbed the stern Colloredo in the wrong way.