"My Friend Mozart"

In this deeply personal and eloquent essay, Emre Aracı reflects on "Dostum Mozart" (My Friend Mozart), the final work of the Turkish journalist Nadir Nadi—a lifelong tribute to the composer whose music transformed his soul at sixteen. Moving from Istanbul’s Galatasaray Lycée to 1930s Vienna, from Strauss’s reimagining of "Idomeneo" to forgotten Mozartian traces in Canterbury, Aracı interlaces memory, history, and music. A meditation on youthful discovery, serendipitous encounters, and the enduring presence of Mozart across time and place, the essay becomes a testament to friendship—both human and artistic—that transcends generations.

"Mozart’s music had possessed me entirely. I felt I must know the man—truly and intimately—learn the details of his life, study his works, and be able to play the music he had written for the violin. I regretted the years I had squandered in idleness. I was only sixteen”. These lines were written by Nadir Nadi in Dostum Mozart (My Friend Mozart), a book he published in 1985 at the age of seventy-seven. Born in 1908 and passing away in 1991, Nadir Nadi was one of the most prominent figures in Turkish journalism and cultural life, long-time editor of Cumhuriyet, and a man whose love for Mozart remained a defining and enduring passion. Dostum Mozart would be the last book of his life—a final offering, perhaps, to the one companion who had quietly accompanied him in spirit throughout the entirety of his days. And in that book, he succeeded in passing on his sentiments to future generations. He died six years later.

 "Dostum Mozart would be the last book of Nadir Nadi's life"

When Dostum Mozart appeared, I was in my final year at Nişantaşı Anadolu Lisesi—formerly known as the Old English High School for Boys, a distinguished institution in Istanbul with deep-rooted ties to the city’s educational and cultural life. My chemistry teacher, Semra Yılmaz—who knew I had chosen an utterly unexpected career path and dreamt of becoming an orchestral conductor in the field of classical music—gave me a copy of this singular book as a gift, inscribed with the words: “May your successes endure, and your aims be true”. I have never been without that book. Wherever life has taken me, My Friend Mozart has found its place on the shelf of my library.

Nearly forty years have passed. The pages have yellowed and faded; they have begun to fall apart. In the intervening time, amid the changing tides of the world, certain old friends, like those disintegrating leaves, have suddenly vanished from my life, never to be seen again. Though at times I have felt overcome by sorrow, Mozart’s companionship—like the ennobling power of his music—has never ceased to dwell within me, just as Nadir Nadi once felt and so movingly expressed. Indeed, as readers of mine will know, it has been a profound consolation to discover Mozart in unexpected places and distant lands—to find and follow his traces, and to tread in his footsteps.

The old Imperial Museum within the grounds of Topkapı Palace

Nadir Nadi’s book opens in the final days of autumn in 1920s Istanbul, during his years as a boarder at Galatasaray Lycée. We find ourselves in the historic Narmanlı Han on İstiklâl Caddesi, the old Grand Rue de Pera, in the flat of his violin teacher, Karl Berger. Many years later, on a warm summer evening during the 31st Istanbul Festival, I had the privilege of performing, together with friend Cihat Aşkın, the lyrical Élégie for violin and piano composed in 1921 by Caliph Abdülmecid Efendi—dedicated to none other than Karl Berger—before the monumental entrance of the Archaeological Museum, the old Imperial Museum within the grounds of Topkapı Palace. 

With a description that might have been lifted straight from the pages of a Proust novel, Nadi draws us into his remembered world:

“The waiting room was almost entirely bare of furniture—there was no carpet on the floor, and a single, bare electric bulb hung from the ceiling. Against the wall stood a long sofa, and there were two wicker chairs. That was all. From the window one could see Istanbul, including Süleymaniye and a stretch of the Golden Horn. Towards sunset, a beautiful picture would unfold—one which, I suspect, was the apartment’s true, priceless possession”.

In truth, the young Nadi had no great love of music. He could barely tolerate the violin. It was only under pressure from his father, the journalist Yunus Nadi, that he attended lessons at all. His greatest desire was to be rid of them as soon as possible, so he might lose himself in the crowds of İstiklâl Caddesi. That is, until one dusky evening, when he sat before Berger and began to play—without piano accompaniment—the Andantino sostenuto e cantabile movement from Mozart’s Sonata in B-flat major, K. 378: “I placed the score on the stand and began to play. The pianist in my mind was unfolding the first theme, and I was accompanying him with my violin. From the very first bars, a sudden brightness filled my soul. It was something wonderful, unlike anything I had ever encountered before. I was tasting, sip by sip, the full beauty of the sonata. It felt as though I had found, for the first time, a divine language. I was now repeating—word for word, with the same faith and the same fervour—what an artist who had lived 150 years earlier had once said to the world. It was as though I had become one with Mozart. My breathing quickened, and my cheeks turned a flushed, rosy pink”.

Narmanlı Han on İstiklâl Caddesi, the old Grand Rue de Pera

In those yellowed, timeworn pages—loosened from their binding and scattered like autumn leaves—there remained, preserved between the lines of Nadir Nadi’s prose, a vivid tableau of 1920s Istanbul, still infused with that characteristically gentle and sweet air, which once permeated the city. The scene unfolded behind the freshly restored, unnaturally bright façade of the Narmanlı Han—now spiritless, having long surrendered its soul in the course of renovation—its resplendent portico, evocative of a Greek temple, recalling the architectural genius of the Fossati brothers who built it in 1831, and in whose shadow Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar himself had once sat.

To reopen those pages today, to behold that tableau as though projected upon a wall by a flickering old lantern, what the Italians called the Lanterna Magica—and what I, too, prefer to name with that enchanting phrase—is to experience a quiet joy. 

It is not the conventional Mozart biography that gives Nadi’s book its unique colour and savour, but rather such anecdotes as these. And to perceive, even after the passage of so many years, that these scattered sentences resonate with fragments of one’s own life is to glimpse another dimension of existence entirely.

Mozart's statue in Burggarten in Vienna (photo © Emre ARACI)

Indeed, we next encounter Nadir Nadi—his love for Mozart having only deepened in the intervening years—amid his student days in Vienna of the 1930s: “I enrolled at the Faculty of Political Science. My readers will doubtless have quickly grasped the reason I chose Vienna for my higher education. Ostensibly, I wished to acquire another foreign language. But the true motive, unquestionably, was to draw nearer to Mozart—to speak his tongue, to dwell in the city he had once inhabited, to come closer to his music, to strive to know him more intimately. How far I succeeded, I cannot say with any certainty. But I can affirm that during my time in that city, I was deeply happy: for while approaching Mozart, I also encountered, in Vienna, the most felicitous coincidences that would shape the course of my life”.

Mozart's Idomeneo was premiered at the court theatre in Munich on 29 January 1781

In 1931, the Vienna State Opera marked the 150th anniversary of the première of Idomeneo, which had been premiered at the court theatre, Residenztheater, in Munich on 29 January 1781. By then, the opera was widely considered rather old-fashioned and had long since disappeared from the repertory. In an effort to revive it, the opera house commissioned Richard Strauss to prepare a new version. Strauss proceeded to replace nearly a third of Mozart’s original score with music of his own, even incorporating motifs from his own opera Die ägyptische Helena, and reorchestrating substantial portions of the original score.

Yet this bold reimagining would come to appal Alfred Einstein—the celebrated Mozart biographer and editor of the revised Köchel catalogue—who was aghast at such liberties. Strauss himself seemed uneasy with what he had done, famously remarking: 

“If I reach Heaven, I shall have to account personally to the divine Mozart for this act of irreverence”.

"Strauss himself conducted the première at the Vienna State Opera"

Strauss himself conducted the première at the Vienna State Opera on the evening of 16 April 1931. Among the audience that night was no other than Nadir Nadi, who had also attended the final rehearsal and went on to immortalise the experience in his book: 

“I was a journalist, and had a press card that granted me access to rehearsals. The final run-through was scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning, two days before the première. I went with great excitement. Aside from a handful of interested parties, the vast auditorium was empty. This was to be expected, as it was not a Generalprobe. It felt as though Mozart had composed the opera just for me. I listened from beginning to end with immense delight, savouring every moment. Richard Strauss—balding, with a slight paunch and a complexion tinged with reddish pink, resembling a retired member of the Court of Audit—conducted with baton in hand. Throughout the rehearsal he remained calm, making no sweeping gestures, as if the orchestra were playing without a conductor at all. He stopped them only once to offer a correction. That was all. Naturally, I was there again on the night of the première. The house was full. This three-act opera seria, commissioned by the King of Bavaria and inspired by Greek mythology, was met with thunderous applause. Perhaps it had not been staged for a century and a half. It was as though the Mozart repertory had gained a new work”.

Nadir Nadi had been right; and, indeed, there had been no need for Richard Strauss—whom he had likened to a retired member of the Court of Audit—to seek Mozart’s forgiveness in Heaven. For Strauss’s version of Idomeneo would, in time, play a pivotal role in the opera’s return to the stage in its authentic form some twenty years later. 

As I read Nadi’s reflections—how his journey towards Mozart brought him, too, to those fortuitous moments that would quietly shape the course of his life—I could not help but be deeply moved. As a writer who also seeks to discern such coincidences and weave from them a life of meaning, his words struck a familiar and resonant chord. 

Karl Theodor's statue on Heidelberg's historic bridge named after him (photo © Emre ARACI)

After all, it was none other than Elector Karl Theodor who had commissioned Idomeneo—the very same Karl Theodor whose name still resounds on the great stone bridge I had crossed only months before in Heidelberg. In the gardens of his palace at Schwetzingen, filled with temples and follies, I, too, had traced the footsteps of Mozart, just as I had once found myself inside the old Munich court theatre—where Idomeneo was first performed in 1781 and which is now known as the Cuvilliés Theatre—while following in the footsteps of King Ludwig II of Bavaria many years ago.

Turning the pages of Nadir Nadi’s book, the Lanterna Magica within my soul brought each of these fragments vividly to life. His words unspooled like a reel of film. To befriend composers and their works was no different, I thought, from forming lasting friendships with writers and their books.

That old Munich court theatre—built between 1751 and 1755 by the architect François Cuvilliés—had been utterly destroyed during the Second World War. And yet, anticipating the threat of war, its boxes and interior decorations had been carefully dismantled and preserved in storage. The reconstructed theatre rose again from the ruins, a worthy resurrection of its former splendour. If only the same care had been taken to preserve the exquisite theatre once housed within the Dolmabahçe Palace.

"I too had once found myself at the old Munich court theatre" (photo © Emre ARACI)

One afternoon, lost in thought, I found myself in Canterbury—one of England’s most sacred and historic cities, and a place, like so much of Europe, scarred by aerial bombardment during the same war. Just half an hour’s drive from my home, I wandered through its historic cathedral, then made my way towards the nearby village of Bishopsbourne. I passed through emerald fields where lambs grazed peacefully, and followed winding paths lined with wildflowers in full bloom, until I came upon a stately red-brick house, nestled in the natural beauty of the Kentish countryside—an estate that might have leapt from the pages of a Jane Austen novel.

I stood for a long while before that house, captivated by its quiet charm. Its name was Bourne Park. But when I later read of its history, I was astonished. 

Bourne Park near Canterbury in Kent (photo © Emre ARACI)

In July 1765, the Mozart family—father, mother, young Nannerl, and the prodigious nine-year-old Wolfgang—had spent an entire week there as guests. It was during their journey back to the Continent via Dover, after fifteen months in London, that they had paused in Canterbury. And thus, quite unexpectedly, a fleeting moment from the vagabond life of Mozart had found its way into the annals of this unassuming manor in Kent.

More than two and a half centuries later, gazing upon that unchanged landscape, it was impossible not to be moved by such a historical connection. Heidelberg, Schwetzingen, and now Canterbury—was I unknowingly following in Mozart’s footsteps? Or was he, with the warmth of his friendship and the radiance of his music, quietly following me?

When Semra Hoca once gave a copy of Nadir Nadi’s Dostum Mozart to a young sixth-former at the very beginning of his life’s path, perhaps she offered him the finest of all gifts. For if our achievements are to endure, and our purposes to be made real, then true and loyal friendship—like that which Mozart so unfailingly inspires—must surely come first.

Emre Aracı's article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Dostum Mozart’ in the June 2024 issue (No. 212) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

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