Difficile lectu (Mozart)

Difficile lectu, K. 559, is a canon composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The music, in F major, is set for three singers. The words are probably by Mozart himself.

The work was entered by the composer into his personal catalog on 2 September 1788 as part of a set of ten canons; it was probably written some time during the years 1786–87.

Although some of the canons in the 1788 set have serious (that is, religious) lyrics, K. 559 was evidently meant entirely for fun. The work features two bilingual puns and some scatological humor. The lyrics are—ostensibly—in Latin, though as they are given in sequence they do not make sense in this language:

The humor of the work consists of hearing these words instead as vulgar phrases of German and Italian.

The German pun is based on the strong Bavarian accent of the tenor-baritone Johann Nepomuk Peyerl (1761–1800), who can be presumed to have been the lead singer in the first performance (see below). As Jean-Victor Hocquard points out, the pseudo-Latin lyrics lectu mihi mars, as Peyerl would have sung them, resemble Bavarian German leck du mi im Arsch, which in a literal English rendering is "lick thou me in the arse". More idiomatically, the phrase could be translated "kiss my arse" (American English "kiss my ass").

The second pun in the canon is based on the single Latin word jonicu. Winternitz (1958) explains that when this word is sung repeatedly and rapidly, as in the canon, its syllables are liable to be heard rearranged as a taboo word of dialectal Italian, cujoni, which means "balls, testicles", akin to Spanish cojones.

The line thus translates as "It is difficult to lick my arse and balls". Michael Quinn writes, "Mozart clearly relished the incongruity resulting from ribald verse set as a canon, traditionally regarded as the most learned of all compositional techniques."

A tale concerning how the canon was composed and first sung was offered by Gottfried Weber, a musicologist and editor of the early 19th century. In an 1824 issue of Caecilia, the journal he edited, Weber published a facsimile of the original manuscript of the canon (see figure above). In his commentary, Weber included the following.

Weber does not say where his story came from.

For more on Mozart's habit of favoring his friends with vulgar mockery, see Joseph Leutgeb.

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