Mozart and Kant

Today I learned from Egon Friedell’s Cultural History of the Modern Age, that Mozart finished his opera Idomeneo in the same year Immanuel Kant published Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781.

Friedell was an Austrian Jew. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, he described them as “the realm of the Antichrist. Every trace of nobility, piety, education, and reason is persecuted in the most hateful and base manner by a bunch of debased menials.”

In March 1938, two men from the SA came to arrest him in Vienna. While they were talking to his housekeeper, Friedell committed suicide. Before jumping out of the window, he warned the pedestrians: “Watch out please! Get out of the way!”