"Now I Sit Like a Rabbit in the Pepper": Proverbial Language in the Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Proverbial language plays a major stylistic and expressive role in the letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (175691). Invaluable for understanding his genius, these letters contain revelations about his complex personal, artistic, and social existence. The stylistic and biographical discussion of this traditional folk rhetoric is grouped under eight subheadings: Incantations and curses as proverbial formulas, animal phrases as social commentary, somatic expressions as emotional indicators, humorous use of anal folk speech, scatological humor in the Bäsle-letters, proverbial love letters to his wife, Konstanze, proverbial phrases as emotive venting, and Mozart's fate as expressed in proverbial speech.