Part 1

_Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart_

By HERBERT F. PEYSER

NEW YORK _Grosset & Dunlap_ PUBLISHERS

_Copyright 1951 by The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York_

Mozart’s earthly career was so poignantly short yet so filled with incalculable achievement that the author of this booklet finds himself confronted with an impossible task. He has, consequently, preferred to outline as best he could in the space at his disposal a few successive details of a life that was amazingly crowded with incident, early triumphs, and subsequent crushing tragedies, rather than to consider (let alone evaluate) the staggering creative abundances the master bequeathed mankind.

It is scarcely necessary to disclaim for this thumbnail sketch any new slant or original illumination. If it moves any reader to renew his acquaintance with the standard biographies of the composer or, better still, to deepen his artistic enrichment by a study of modern interpretations of contemporary Mozart scholars like Alfred Einstein, and Bernhard Paumgartner, its object will be more than achieved.

Printed in the United States of America

_Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart_

If the Mozartean family tree was nothing like the prodigious trunk of the Bachs it was still not without striking features. There were Mozarts in South Germany as far back as the end of the sixteenth century; and as remotely as the thirteenth the name stood on a document in Cologne. To be sure, various spellings of Mozart existed in those distant times. It appeared as “Mosshard,” “Motzhart,” “Mozert,” and in still other variants. Bernhard Paumgartner, Director of the Salzburg Mozarteum, thinks it derived from the old German root _mod_, or _muot_, from which came the word _Mut_ (courage). Be this as it may, German “Mozarts” were anything but exceptional a couple of hundred years before Leopold Mozart or his son, Wolfgang, came into the picture. In Augsburg there was an Anton Mozart who painted landscapes “in the manner of Breughel.” Another Mozart from the same town, one Johann Michael, was a sculptor, who in 1687 moved to Vienna and became an Austrian citizen.

But of all these “Mossherts,” “Motards,” and the rest, only one, the mason apprentice David Motzert, born in the village of Pfersee, close to Augsburg, really belongs to our story. The _Augsburger Bürgerbuch_ of 1643 mentions him and sets his fortune at 100 florins. By his marriage with the _Jungfer_ Maria Negeler he was to become the great-great-grandfather of the creator of _Don Giovanni_. In the fullness of time David’s grandson, Johann Georg, abandoned the occupation of his forebears for that of a bookbinder. His second wife blessed him with two daughters and six sons. One of these sons, Franz Aloys, gained a kind of immortality as the father of Maria Anna Thekla, Wolfgang’s cousin, the “Bäsle,” to whom he wrote that series of notoriously smutty letters with which this lively young lady’s name is eternally linked.

Johann Georg’s first-born, Johann Georg Leopold, became for posterity simply Leopold Mozart, composer of arid music, author of a celebrated violin method, and father of Wolfgang and of Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia, whom the world remembers almost solely as “Nannerl.” It is a Nannerl, incidentally, that we have to look for a sort of continuation of the Mozart line down almost to our own time. On January 9, 1919, there died in the Feldhof Insane Asylum, near Graz, the seventy-seven-year-old Bertha Forschter, a great-granddaughter of Nannerl, who had lived on in Salzburg til 1829, highly revered because of her exalted kinship.

Early Life in Salzburg

What brought Leopold Mozart to Salzburg in the first place? A choirsinger in the Augsburg Church of St. Ulrich and a graduate of the Augsburger Jesuit Lyceum, he seemed to be shaping for a priestly career. He did not, at all events, follow the bookbinder’s trade like his brothers. Alfred Einstein finds it difficult to grasp why he should have preferred Salzburg to Munich or Ingolstadt for an orthodox theological education. Possibly a suggestion of the canons of St. Ulrich had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, he enrolled at the University in the town on the Salzach, July 22, 1738. There he studied philosophy, logic, and music, understood Latin, composed Passion cantatas and instrumental works, acquired some proficiency on the violin, and obtained a smattering of legal knowledge. Five years later he became fourth violinist in the court orchestra of the archbishop, but he maintained his close family connections with Augsburg and later encouraged his son not to relax these ties.

It is not quite certain exactly when he met Anna Maria Pertl, whose father was superintendent of a clerical institution at St. Gilgen on the nearby Wolfgang See. In the fall of 1772 he wrote her from Milan: “It was 25 years ago, I think, that we had the sensible idea of getting married, one which we had cherished for many years. All good things take time!” Anna Maria was her husband’s junior by a year. Jahn questions if she rose in any way above the average woman of her type. A good provincial, she had not the suspicious, mistrustful qualities of Leopold. She lacked intellectual depth, but she was a good wife and affectionate mother, a genuinely lovable creature, a receptacle of all the community gossip and local tittle-tattle. “She judged with an eye just as friendly as her husband’s was critical and sarcastic.” And from his mother Wolfgang inherited his gayety and some of his more incorrigible _Hanswurst_ characteristics.

Though the Mozart couple had seven children, only two of these survived infancy—Nannerl, the fourth, and her great brother, who came last. Wolfgang was born on January 27, 1756, at eight o’clock in the evening in the house belonging to Lorenz Hagenauer, on the narrow Getreide Gasse, Salzburg. The very next morning the newcomer (whose birth came near costing the mother’s life) was carried to church and baptized with the name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus, the last in honor of his godfather, Johann Theophilus Pergmayr. Subsequently the Greek Theophilus was changed to its more euphonious Latin equivalent Amadeus. Wolfgang, like the other Mozart children, was at first nourished with water instead of milk, according to a preposterous superstition of the time. We have to thank the good health of the infant that he did not succumb, as did most of the other Mozart offspring, and even withstood later illnesses.

A sensitive and affectionate lad, Wolfgang was extraordinarily devoted to his parents, especially to his father, despite Leopold’s humorless and obstinate nature. “Next to God comes papa!” was a childhood expression of the boy. To be sure, the inflexible martinet commanded a certain respect by reason of his very genuine love for his family and his determination to rear his children according to what he considered their best interests. But he seemed unable to rise above his middle-class prejudices and, when all is said, his attitude toward his son was like that of a conventional Victorian father, who guided the footsteps of his son according to his lights, yet refused to permit him any freedom whatever for explorations of his own. All the same, Leopold could be self-sacrificing in the interest of his children and therein lay one of the saving features of an unlovable character.

It was one of his merits to have perceived at once the musical predispositions of his children, to have cultivated them, even to have grasped early the most advantageous ways of exploiting them. Nannerl was by no means slow in showing uncommon aptitude for music, and Leopold lost no time in embarking upon her training. Wolfgang in his cradle listened to his sister’s lessons in the adjoining room and we can only surmise what mystical instincts vibrated in the childish consciousness. He was hardly more than three when these impelled him to the keyboard, there to search for consonant intervals and to shout with delight when he discovered and sounded thirds. He had an abnormally refined and sensitive hearing, was distressed by impurities of pitch, and perturbed by any violence of sound (who does not remember the story of the child Mozart fainting on hearing the tone of a trumpet?). We are told that he was very soon able to play light piano pieces without any signs of effort and to memorize and perform them without notes, “cleanly and in perfect time,” in less than half an hour. Nor was the violin unfamiliar to him and, though he is not supposed to have started his studies on that instrument till his sixth year, Nissen tells that a certain Herr von Murr heard Wolfgang play the violin at four!

Leopold Mozart’s chief trouble lay not in making his son practice but in getting him away from the piano. Music occupied his waking hours almost exclusively, and for the customary games and amusements of childhood the boy showed little interest; or, if it was a question of fun, it had to be in some way associated with music. Before putting him to bed in the evening his father would stand him on a chair to give him a good-night kiss, whereupon the child would declaim Italian nonsense syllables, like “oragnia figatafa” and such, to some scrap of folk tune, as if imitating an opera singer. Then he would return his father’s caresses, kissing him on the tip of his nose and promising when he grew up “to enclose him in a capsule and carry him about at all times!” In after years Leopold reminisced in a letter to his son: “When you sat at the piano or otherwise occupied yourself with music nobody was allowed to joke with you in any way. Indeed, the expression on your face would become so serious that many, struck by what they considered your prematurely ripened talent, feared that your life might be short”—fears that were to be only too well founded. And, when barely six, he stubbornly refused to play before any audience that did not include at least one musically cultured listener.

Abraham Mendelssohn used to say that, whereas he had once been famous as the son of his father, he was now celebrated as the father of his son. Leopold Mozart was most indisputably the father of his son. His juiceless compositions, his violin method, and the rest of his dreary talents and moral virtues have a kind of museum value only as they contributed to Wolfgang’s artistic upbringing and guidance. Alfred Einstein observes that “the first signs of musical talent in Wolfgang completely changed the direction of Leopold’s life and thought.” Unquestionably it was better so, and in the long run he was far more richly rewarded for cultivating the fruitful soil committed to his tillage.

Systematic piano instruction was the first thing on which he seems to have concentrated. Composition was a by-product. Wolfgang improvised unceasingly, which meant that numberless minuets and simple pieces of various types took shape under his fingers, the father writing down industriously what his son’s fancy dictated. Nannerl extemporized no less actively. Leopold spurred his children by acquainting them with short works by himself and recognized musicians to divert them after dry technical exercises. Each had a little study book of pieces. The one that Wolfgang received from his father on October 31, 1762, has come down to us complete and contains 135 examples for study. Among them Wolfgang tried his hand at brief works of his own. In the father’s writing we can read the following: “Di Wolfgango Mozart, May 11, 1762 und July 16, 1762.” Some of the masters given the boy to study were Wagenseil, Telemann, Hasse, and Philipp Emanuel Bach. Wolfgang’s compositions include an innocent minuet and trio with very simple basses and a little Allegro in three-part song form. In these and other childish efforts the improving hand of Leopold can be repeatedly detected. It was to be so for some time to come and when the father did not have a correcting finger in the pie we become aware of it. It is evident in a sketch book Wolfgang was given in London a year or two later when Leopold fell ill and, in order not to be disturbed by the sounds of practicing, asked the boy to write something and refrain from noise. The book is filled with a great variety of minuets, contradances, rondos, gigues, sicilianos, preludes, and even an unfinished sketch for a fugue. Here one sees indisputable genius in conflict with technical lapses and other evidences of inexperience that somewhat modify the notion that Wolfgang had acquired all his skill by instinct rather than by carefully disciplined study.

First Visit to Vienna

The five-year-older Nannerl being a remarkable clavier performer and Wolfgang absorbing his father’s instructions with the utmost facility, Leopold was not long in deciding that he might profitably bring his pair of prodigies before the public and make them known in aristocratic circles, where he had a good chance of capitalizing on their talents. Besides, there were new artistic currents astir in the world to which the boy, in particular, might be exposed to his advantage. “If ever I knew how priceless time is for youth I know it now and you know that my children are used to work,” he wrote to H. Hagenauer, insisting he had no idea of permitting the youngsters to fall into habits of idleness. He seems to have given little thought to the strain of travel, especially since the children were healthy and Wolfgang, though small, appears to have been of wiry physique. So in January 1762, he took them on a three-weeks’ excursion to Munich, where they appeared before the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria with success.

The following September, however, the family began their travels in earnest. With a small clavier strapped to their vehicle the little band of wanderers set out along the Danube by way of Linz and several smaller localities to Vienna. By October 6 they had reached the capital and they drank in its wonders with the astonished eyes of small-town folk. A week later they stood in the presence of the music-loving empress, Maria Theresia, and her family and court at the Palace of Schönbrunn. The children played and were admired and duly rewarded. There have come down to us a quantity of pretty anecdotes about the pair—how Wolfgang climbed up in the lap of the Empress and was kissed by her; how he insisted on having the composer Georg Christian Wagenseil in the room when he was to play (“because he understands such things”); how, when he slipped on the polished floor and was helped to his feet by the princess, Marie Antoinette, he thanked her and then added “I shall marry you for this when I grow up!” Unquestionably the motherly tenderness of Maria Theresia went out to the child from Salzburg. Yet it is a question whether she actually saw in Wolfgang and his sister more than a pair of precocious little people in spite of Leopold’s extravagant claims. Certainly she was less agreeable several years later when she wrote her son, the archduke Ferdinand, governor-general of Lombardy, who contemplated taking Wolfgang into his service: “I do not know why you need saddle yourself with a composer or useless people.... It discredits your service when such individuals run about the world like beggars.”

At all events Leopold was voluble in the letters he wrote to his Salzburg landlord, Hagenauer, about the wonders of the Vienna visit and the impression exercised everywhere by Wolfgang’s talents and his lively intelligence and unaffected manner. Leopold built towering air castles. Two weeks later Wolfgang came down with what was said to be scarlet fever but which was actually (according to Bernhard Paumgartner) diagnosed by a German doctor, Felix Huch, as “erythema nodosum,” which could have had serious consequences and may have planted the seeds of Mozart’s last illness. Before returning to Salzburg, Leopold accepted the invitation of a Hungarian magnate to make a flying trip to neighboring Pressburg after Wolfgang had recovered. Finally, on January 5, 1763, the Mozarts came home to Salzburg. It is uncertain how much musical stimulation Wolfgang obtained from this first Viennese visit. The one important event in Vienna at this period—the première of Gluck’s _Orfeo_—went unmentioned by either Wolfgang or his father.

However, the success of the trip whetted Leopold’s appetite for more of the same thing. After a brief period for recuperation, plans were laid for a much more elaborate odyssey to include nothing less than Paris and London. On June 9, 1763, consequently, the family carriage set out for the Bavarian frontier—“the same road by which Leopold Mozart, then a hopeful student, had wandered into Salzburg.” This trip was to keep the Mozarts away from home for three years.

Success in Paris and London

The “celebrity tour” began, strictly speaking, in Munich where the pair of prodigies performed with sensational success before the Bavarian Elector Maximilian III, who wished to hear the young people “soon and often.” But Leopold was out for bigger game and wanted, incidentally, to exhibit his wonder children to his relatives in Augsburg before proceeding to world conquests. Besides old acquaintances the “Herr Kapellmeister” had the good luck to present his “gifts of God” to the noted Italian violinist, Pietro Nardini, then concertmaster of the court orchestra of Stuttgart, and to the Italian composer, worthy Niccolo Jommelli, who was struck by Wolfgang’s abilities but against whom the mistrustful Leopold harbored various unjust suspicions. In Schwetzingen the Mozarts had the first opportunity to hear the then unrivaled Mannheim orchestra, which was to play a significant part in Wolfgang’s development. He and his sister were put through all their paces as the weeks went by; besides playing and improvising they were made to perform all manner of showy stunts. Wolfgang had to name tones and chords sounded on keyboards covered with a cloth, as well as guess the exact pitch of bells, glasses, and clocks.

The travelers went on to Bonn, Cologne, and Aachen, where lived the Princess Amalia, sister of Frederick the Great, whose pressing invitations to Berlin left Leopold cold as soon as he realized she had no money; he reflected that the kisses without number which she gave the children would have pleased him better if they had had cash value! Finally, after further progress through the Low Countries the little band reached Paris, where the father discovered that most of his letters of recommendation and introduction amounted to little. Only when they were taken in charge by the Bavarian-born Baron Melchior Grimm, a literary figure of some distinction, did results begin to shape themselves. A first-rate publicity man, Grimm launched a campaign for the youngsters in his _Correspondance littéraire_, with the result that doors promptly opened and invitations began to pour in. On New Year’s Eve, 1764, the Mozarts were asked to a _grand couvert_ at the court in Versailles. Wolfgang stood next to the Queen who fed him dainties and translated for the King—Louis XV—what the boy said to her in German.

The great Madame Pompadour was on hand and the elder Mozart noted that she must once have been a great beauty for all her present stoutness. Later, when Wolfgang offered to give her a kiss, she drew back; whereupon the boy indignantly asked, “Who does she think she is, anyhow? Our Empress herself did not refuse to kiss me!” Leopold was careful to note the countless features of the Parisian scene. For one thing, the abundance of make-up on the faces of the Frenchwomen was something to revolt “an honest German.” He saw eye to eye with Baron Grimm in his preference for Italian over French music, declaring that the latter was “not worth a farthing.” Wolfgang was eventually to share his distaste for French customs, French art, even the French language. Leopold brought his son to the attention of several prominent German musicians who happened to be in Paris, such as Johann Schobert, Gottfried Eckhart, and Leontzi Honnauer, all of whom registered appropriate astonishment and presented the children with some of their own compositions, suitably inscribed. Four sonatas for clavier with _ad libitum_ violin parts by Wolfgang were printed, and on the title page it was duly noted that their author was “only seven years old.” For all their charm and freshness these works clearly betray the improving touch of Leopold.

On April 23, 1764, after an easy Channel crossing, the Mozarts arrived in London, where the children were announced as “Miss Mozart of Eleven and Master Mozart of Seven years of age, Prodigies of Nature.” The Hon. Daines Barrington subjected the boy to “scientific tests,” which demonstrated that his talents were, indeed, “out of the ordinary.” The musical George III and Queen Charlotte received them at St. James’s Palace on April 27. A few weeks later there was another concert before the royal couple, when the King asked Wolfgang to play at sight pieces by Wagenseil, Johann Christian Bach, Handel, and Carl Friedrich Abel. The monarch praised the lad’s performances on the organ even more than on the clavier, and had him accompany the Queen in a song and improvise a melody on a figured bass of Handel’s. Leopold wrote home that what his son knew now completely overshadowed his earlier abilities. At a charity concert in Ranelagh Gardens they made over a hundred guineas. Yet these successes did not last: several concerts had to be postponed because of Leopold’s sudden indisposition; a mental illness of George III increased alarmingly; the political situation was unfavorable; and the public began to lose interest in the wonder children.

But apart from the sympathy Wolfgang was always to feel with the English people, one experience of his London sojourn really outweighed all others. This was the friendship he and Johann Christian Bach, the son of Johann Sebastian, formed for each other and the influence the older musician exercised on the creative genius beginning to blossom in the child. As Hermann Abert has written, “Christian Bach signified for Mozart a blithe, elegant counterpart to Schobert by virtue of the modernized Italianism that came to pervade his style.” The “gallant” manner, the fresh, playful rhythms of his finales, and the relaxation modifying the dry composition technique of Leopold’s are elements for which Mozart is deeply indebted to the “London Bach.” Wolfgang’s early symphonies and piano music make it plain how much he looked upon Johann Christian as his model and how fully this master was the chief inspiration of that “singing allegro” that became a hallmark of the mature Mozart.

Not only for his boyhood symphonies and sonatas but for his piano concertos was Wolfgang obliged to his great London friend. His earliest clavier concertos are largely copies or rearrangements of the concertos and sonatas of Johann Christian, as of Schobert, Honnauer, and similar masters. From these seeds came those glorious fruits of concerto literature that stand among his grandest and most original achievements.