Mozart Wrote a Song About Butts

While we often picture Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a powdered-wigged prodigy, his private life reveals a much more mischievous and earthy personality. This is perfectly captured in a six-part musical canon he wrote for friends to sing together. Titled 'Leck mich im Arsch', a coarse German phrase, the piece is a masterclass in complex vocal harmony. The humor lies in this very contrast (Review): a sophisticated musical form delivering a playground-level insult, meant purely for the amusement of his inner circle during social gatherings.

This type of scatological humor, while jarring to modern ears, was not entirely out of place in 18th-century German-speaking culture. The specific phrase had even been popularized in a famous play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, giving it a rebellious, folk-hero connotation. Mozart's fondness for such language is well-documented in his personal letters, especially those to his cousin, which are filled with elaborate puns and crass jokes. These compositions weren't meant for the concert hall but for private parties, functioning as clever inside jokes set to music.

The piece's scandalous nature led his 19th-century publishers to sanitize it for public consumption. Long after his death, the original lyrics were replaced with the more palatable 'Lass uns froh sein!' ('Let us be glad!'). This historical censorship reveals how later generations struggled to reconcile the image of the sublime genius with the reality of a man who clearly enjoyed a good, vulgar laugh.