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BIOGRAPHIES OF M USICIA N.S.
LIFE OF MOZART
BY
Louis NOHL
TRAN SLATED FR O M T H E G E R MAN
BY
JOHN J. LATAOR.
'J
;
:
i
tº
“Man’s title to nobility is the heart.”
CHICAGO
A. C. MCCLURG & COMPANY
I888

BIOGRAPHIES OF MUSICIANs.
I.
LIFE OF MOZART, From the German of Dr
Louis Nohl. With Portrait.
II.
LIFE OF BEETHOVEN, From the German
of Dr. Louis Nohl. With Portrait. Price $1.oo.
III.
LIFE OF HAYDN, From the German of Dr.
Louis Nohl. With Portrait.
IV.
LIFE OF WAGNER, From the German of Dr.
Louis Nohl. With Portrait. Price $1.Qo.
V.
. . LIFE OF LISZT, From the German of Dr.
; : Louis Nohl. With Portrait. Price $1.00.
Price $1.o.o.
Price $1.o.o.
A. C. McCLURG & CO., PUBLISHERs.
COPY R. IG HT
By J A N S EN, M C C L U R G & C O.,
A. D. 1880,
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TRANSLATOR'S NOTE,
MR. Louis NoHL, the author of the preſent ſittle
volume, has merited for himself in Germany a high
reputation as a writer of the biographies of musi-
cians, and some of his larger works have appeared
in English on the other side of the Atlantic. The
present is the first translation into our language of
his shorter Life of Mozart. It will, we trust, prove
acceptable to those who desire to learn the chief
events in the life of the great composer, to see how
his life influenced his compositions, and how his
great works are, in many instances at least, the ex-
pression of his own joys and sorrows, the picture
of his own soul in tones.
The translator's grateful acknowledgments are
due to Mr. A. W. Dohn, of Chicago, who was kind
enough to compare the entire translation with the
original. His thorough knowledge of music and
German, no less than his rare familiarity with the
English language, have largely contributed to the
fidelity of this translation.
J. J. L.
O O N T E N T S.
C H A P T E R I.
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY TRAVELS.
Mozart's Parentage—Early Development of his Genius—Character as a .
Child—Travels at the Age of . Six—Received by Maria. Theresa and
Marie Antoinette—Mozart and Goethe–Meeting with Madame de
Pompadour—The London Bach's Opinion of Young Mozart—Asked
to Write an Opera by Joseph II—Assailed by Envy—Padre Martini—
Notes Down the Celebrated Miserere from Ear—The Pope Confers on
him the Order of the Golden Spurs—A Member of the Philharmonic
Society of Bologna–First Love—Personal Appearance—Troubles
with the Archbishop, . . . . . . . . . 7-41
C H A P T E R II.
THE GREAT PARISIAN ARTISTIC JOURNEY.
Pisgusted with Salzburg–In Vienna Again—Salzburg Society—Character
of Musicians in the Last Century—Jerome Colloredo, Archbishop of
Salzburg—Mozart's Letter to Him—The Father's Solicitude for His
Son—Paternal Advice—New Compositions—Incidents of his Journey
—Meets with Opposition—Secret Enemies—His Ambition to Elevate
the Character of the German Opera—Disappointments—His Déscrip-
tion of German “Free City” Life—Meeting with Stein—In his Un-
cle's Family—“Baesle”—Meeting with the Cannabichs—Attachment
for Rosa Cannabich—Influence of this Attachment on his Music—
The Weber Family—The Nom so d' Onde Wiene–Circumstances of its
Composition, . tº © º & tº º © © 2 . 42—82
(5)
6 - CONTENTS.
O H.A. PTE R III.
IDOMENEO.
New Disappointments—Opposition of the Abbe Vogeler—Mozart and the
Poet Wieland—Wieland's Impressions of Mozart—German Opera and
Joseph II—The Weber Family—Aloysia Weber—Mozart's Plans—His
Father Opposes them and his Attachment for Aloysia—Mozart's Mu-
sic and Heart-trials—In Paris—Disappointments there—Contrast Be-
tween Parisian and German Life—New Intrigues Against Him—In-
vited Back to Salzburg—“Faithless” Aloysia—Meeting of Father
and Son—Reception in Salzburg—“Ring Thamos.”—Character of
Mozart's Music Composed at this time—Invitation to Compose the
Idomeneo—Its Success—Effect on the Italian Opera, . . 83–117
C EIA PTE R IV.
BLOPEMENT FROM THE SERAGLIO—FIGARO–DON GIO WANNI.
Opinions on the Idomeneo—Tired of Salzburg–Goes to Vienna—The
* - Archbishop Again—Mozart Treated by Him with Indignity—Paternal
Reproaches—Assailed by Slander—He Leaves Salzburg—Experiences
in Vienna—Austrian Society—The German Stage—The Emperor Ex-
presses a Wish that Mozart might Write a New Opera—Mozart's Love
for Constance Weber—Description of Constance—The New Opera—
Mozart's Marriage—The Emperor's Opinion of Mozart's Music—Mo-
zart's Interest in the Figaro–Its Composition—Its Success—Mozart's
Poverty—In Bohemia—His Popularity in Prague—Meaning of the
Don Giovanni-Richard Wagner on Mozart, . . . . 118–180
C H A PTE R. V.
THE MAGIC FLUTE–TITUS—THE REQUIEM.
Haydn's Opinion of Mozart—Made Court Composer by Joseph II—Don
Giovanni in Vienna—Mozart's Extreme Poverty—His Cheerfulness
under Adverse Circumstances—“The Song of the Swan”—Other Com-
positions—Mozart's Opinion of Handel—Acquaintance with Sebas-
tian Bach—Mozart's Opinion of Church Music—Mozart's Characteris-
tics—Audience with the Emperor—Petition to His Imperial Majesty
—His Religious Feelings—Joins the Free Masons—History of the
Magic Flute—The Mysterious Stranger—The Requiem—Success of
the Magic Flute—Mozart as Reflected in his Music—His Industry
—Last Illness—Strange Fancies—His Last Days—His Death, 181—236
THE LIFE OF MOZART.
gºssºmsºmº-sº
CHAIPTER I.
1756–1777. -
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY TRAVELS.
Mozart's Parentage—Early Development of his Genius—
Character as a Child—Travels at the age of Six—Received
by Maria. Theresa and Marie Antoinette—Mozart and
Goethe–Meeting with Madame de Pompadour—The Lon-
don Bach's Opinion of Young Mozart—Asked to Write an
Opera by Joseph II—Assailed by Envy—Padre Martini—
Notes Down the Celebrated Miserere from Earº-The Pope
Confers on him the Order of the Golden Sp *A Mem-
ber of the Philharmonic Society of Bologna–First Love—
Personal Appearance—Troubles with the Archbishop.
WOLFGANG AMADEUs MoZART was born in
the city of Salzburg, on the 27th of Janu-
ary, 1756. His father, Leopold, was descend-
ed from a family of the middle class of the
then free imperial city of Augsburg, and had
come to Salzburg, the domicile of a prince-
bishop and the seat of an excellent university,
to study law. But as he had to support him-
self by teaching music, even while pursuing
(7)
8 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
his legal studies, he was soon compelled to en-
ter entirely into the service of others. He be-
came valet de chambre to a canon of the
Roman church, Count Thurm ; afterwards
court-musician and then capellmeister" to the
archbishop. He had married in 1747 a young
girl, educated in a neighboring convent.
Himself and wife were considered the hand-
Somest couple in Salzburg in their day.
Of seven children born to them, they lost all
but two, Maria Anna, known by the pet-name
of Nannerl, and our Wolfgang, most frequent-
ly called Woferl. Anna was about five years
older than Wolfgang, and both gave evidence,
from the time they were little children, of an
extraordinary talent for music.
An old friend of the family tells us how,
from the moment young Mozart had begun to
give himself to music, he cared neither to see
nor hear anything else. Even his childish
games and plays did not interest him unless
accompanied by music. “Whenever,” says
our informant, “we carried our toys from one
room to another, the one of us who had noth-
ing to carry was always required to play, or
*A capellmeister is the director of a choir or band.
EIIS CHARACTER. 9
sing a march,” . . . and further: “He
[Mozart] grew so extremely attached to me
because I kept him company and entered into
his childish humors, that he frequently asked
me ten times in a day, if I loved him; and
when I sometimes said no, only in fun, the
tears instantly glistened his eyes, his little heart
was so kind and tender.”
We learn from the same source that he man-
ifested no pride or awe, yet he never wished
to play except before great connoisseurs in mu-
sic ; and to induce him to do so it was some-
times necessary to deceive him as to the musi-
cal acquirements of his hearers. He learned
every task that his father gave him, and put
his soul so entirely into whatever he was do-
ing that he forgot all else for the time being,
not excepting even his music. Even as a child,
he was full of fire and vivacity, and were it
not for the excellent training he received from
his father, who was very strict with him, and
of a serious turn of mind, he might have be-
come one of the wildest of youths, so sensitive
was he to the allurements of pleasure of every
kind, the innocence or danger of which he was
not yet able to discover.
10 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
When only five years of age he wrote some
music in his Uebungsbuch or Exercise-book,
which is yet to be seen in the Mozarteum"
in Salzburg; also some little minuets; and,
on one occasion, his father and the friend of
the family mentioned above, surprised him
engaged on the composition of a concerto So
difficult that no one in the world could have
played it. His ear was so acute, and his
memory for music so good from the time
he was a child, that once when playing
his little violin, he remembered that the
Buttergeige, the “butter-violin,” so-called
from the extreme smoothness of its tones, was
tuned one-eighth of a tone lower than his own.
On account of this great acuteness of hearing,
he could not, at that age, bear the sound of the
trumpet; and when notwithstanding his father
once put his endurance of it to the test, he was
taken with violent spasms.
His readiness and skill in music soon be-
came so great that he was able to play almost
everything at sight. His little sister also had
made very extraordinary progress in music at
a very early age, and the father in 1762, when
*Mozart Museum.
MARIA THERESA. 11
the children were respectively six and ten
years of age, began to travel with them, to
show, as he said, these “wonders of God” to
the world. ~~~~~
The first place they went to was Munich,
then as now the real capital of Southern Ger-
many, and after that to Vienna. Maria. The-
resa and her consort were very fond of music.
They received the children with genuine Ger-
man cordiality, and little Wolfgang without
any more ado, leaped into the lap of the Em-
press and kissed her; just as he had told the
unfortunate Marie Antoinette, who had helped
him from the slippery floor: “You are good
and I’ll marry you.” The youngest son of
Maria Theresa, the handsome and amiable
grand-duke,Maximilian, was of the same age
as young Mozart, and always remained his
friend, as he was, subsequently, the patron of
Deethoven. The picture of Mozart and his
little sister dressed in the clothes of the impe-
rial children hangs on the walls of the Mozart-
eum; his animated eyes and her budding
beauty have an incomparable charm.
He now, in his sixth year, learned to play
the violin, and his father neglected nothing to
12 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
give him, in every way, the best musical in-
struction. For he was himself an excellent
composer, and had written a “violin method”
which had a great reputation in its day, and
was honored with translation. Mozart's edu-
cation in music continued even during the
journey. Instruction in playing the organ
was soon added to instruction in the use of the
violin. The next scene of the marvels of the
little ones was Southern Germany. This was
in the summer of 1763. In Heidelberg, Mo-
zart's little feet flew about on the pedals/with
such rapidity that the clergyman in charge
made a record of it in writing on the organ
itself. Goethe heard him in Frankfort, and
thus obtained a standard by which to measure
all subsequent men of musical genius whom he
chanced to meet. In his declining years, Goe-
the listened to a child similarly gifted, Felix
Mendelssohn. In Paris, also, the court was
very gracious to the children; but when little
Wolfgang, with the ingenuousness of child-
hood, tried to put his arms about the neck of
the painted Madame de Pompadour as he had
about that of Maria Theresa, he was met with
a rebuff, and, wounded to the quick, he cried:
IN LONDON. 13
“Who is that person there that won’t kiss
me? The empress kissed me.” He always
thought a great deal of Maria. Theresa, and
his heart, through life, had a nook in it for her,
and was ever loyal to the imperial family, as
we shall see further on.
The princesses were all the more amiable in
consequence, and did not trouble themselves
about etiquette. Every one wondered to hear
So young a child tell every note the moment
he heard it; compose without the aid of a pi-
ano, and play accompaniments to songs by ear
only. No wonder that he was greeted every-
where with the loudest applause, and that the
receipts were so flatteringly large.
The reception extended to them in London
in 1764, was still kinder; for the royal couple
themselves were German, and Handel had al-
ready laid a lasting foundation there for good
music; while the French music of the time
seemed to our travelers to be exceedingly cold
and empty—“a continual and wearisome bawl-
ing.” Their stay in England was, on this
account, a very long one, and the father made
use of the opportunity he found there to give
an excellent Italian singer as an instructor to
14 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
Wolfgang, who soon mastered the Italian style
of melody, which was then the prevailing one.
It was in London that Mozart wrote his first
symphonies.
Their journey back in 1765, led them over
Holland, where both children were taken very
dangerously ill, and the father's strength for
the difficult task of preserving and educating
such a boy as Wolfgang, was put to the sever-
est test. Even during the Lenten season, he
was allowed, in Amsterdam, to exhibit “for
the glory of God” the wonderful gifts of his
son, and he finally returned in the fall of
1766, after an absence of more than two years,
to Salzburg, laden not so much with money as
with the fame of his little ones.
The journey taken thus early in life was of
great advantage to Mozart himself. He learn-
ed to understand men—for his father drew
his attention to everything; he even made
the boy keep a diary—he got rid of the shy-
ress natural to children, and acquired a knowl-
edge of life. He had listened to the music of
the different nations, and thus discovered the
manner in which each heart understands that
language of the human soul called melody.
INFLUENCE OF HIS TRAVELS. 15
The refined tone of the higher classes at this
time was also of great advantage to his art.
The magnificent landscape scenery of his na-
tive place had awakened his natural sense of
the beautiful; its beautiful situation, its num-
erous churches and palaces, had further devel-
oped that same aesthetic sense; and now the
varied impressions received from life and art
during these travels, so extensive for one so
young, were one of the principal causes why
Mozart's music acquired so early that some-
thing so directly attractive, so harmoniously
beautiful and so universally intelligible, which
characterizes it. But this phase of his music
was fully developed only by his repeated long
sojourns in that land of beauty itself, in which
Mozart spent his incipient youth, in Italy.
Mozart's father, indeed, did not remain long
in Salzburg. Salzburg was no place for him.
And must not the boy always have felt keen-
ly the impulse to display his artistic power be-
fore the world 2 Had not the London Bach,
a son of the great Leipzig cantor, Sebastian
Bach, whose influence on Mozart we shall hear
of further on, said of him that many a capell-
neister had died without knowing what this
16 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
boy knew even now 2 The marriage of an
archduke brought the family, in 1768, to
Vienna once more, the first place they lived
in after leaving Salzburg. Here the fath-
er saw clearly, for the first time, that Italy
and Italy alone was the proper training-
school for this young genius. The Emper-
or Joseph had, indeed, confided to him the
task of writing an Italian opera—it was
the La Fºnta Semplice, “Simulated Simplici-
ty”—and the twelve-year-old boy himself di-
rected a solemn mass at the consecration of a
church, a performance which made so deep an
impression on his mind, that twenty years af-
ter he used to tell of the sublime effect of his
church on his mind. A German operetta,
Bastien and Bastienne, was honored with
a private performance. But this first Italian
opera was the occasion of Mozart's experienc-
ing the malicious envy of his fellow-musicians,
which,it is said, contributed so much, later, to
make his life wretched and to bring it to an
early close.
His father writes:
“Thus, indeed, have people to scuffle their
way through. If a man has no talent, his
ASSAILED BY ENVY. 17
condition is unfortunate enough; if he has tal-
ent, he is persecuted by envy, and that in pro-
portion to his skill.” Young Mozart's ene-
mies and enviers had cunning enough to pre-
vent the performance of his work, and the
father was now doubly intent on exhibiting
his son's talent where, as the latter himself
admitted, he felt that he was best understood,
and where he had won the highest fame in his
youth.
Italy is the mother country of music and was,
besides, at this time, the Eldorado of composers.
The Church had nurtured music. With the
Church it came into Germany. From Ger-
many it subsequently returned enriched. It
reached its first memorable and classical ex-
pression in the Roman Palestrina. After his
day, a wordly and even theatrical character
invaded the music of the Catholic Church, of
which Palestrina is the great ideal. The cause
of this change was the introduction of the
opera, which was due to the revival of the
study of the antique, and especially of Greek
tragedy.
The pure style of vocal composition was
founded on the Protestant choral, and reached
2
18 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
its highest classical expression, in modern
times, in the German Sebastian Bach. His
contemporary and countryman, Handel, on
the other hand, remained, by way of prefer-
ence, in the region of opera; and, after he had
achieved great triumphs in it in foreign coun-
tries, he rose to the summit of his greatness,
in the spiritual drama, the oratorio. The
world at this time loved the theatrical; and its
chief seat, so far as the opera was concerned,
was the country which had given birth to mu-
sic. As, in its day, Italy had the greatest com-
posers, it had now, to say the least, the great-
est and most celebrated singers, and with a
single victory here one entered the lists with
all educated Europe. “Then up and go
there,” the father must have said to himself,
when he saw that his son's talent for compo-
sition was not recognized in Germany as much
as it deserved to be recognized even then, and
the superior excellence of his performances de-
nied there when it was admitted everywhere
else.
We need not here enter into the details of
this journey. The youthful artist continued
to work wonders similar to those which we
JOURNEY TO ITALY. 19
have already related. And on one occasion,
in Naples, the boy was even obliged to re-
move a ring from his finger, because his wiz-
ard-like art was ascribed by the people to his
wearing it. We must here confine ourselves
to tracing the course of development of this
extraordinary genius, and to showing what
were the influences that made him such.
At the end of the year 1769, that is, when
Mozart was nearly fourteen years of age,
we find him and his father journeying through
the Tyrol to the land of milder breezes and
sweet melodies. Everywhere the same un-
bounded admiration of his talent. In Vienna,
the two—who now traveled unaccompanied by
the mother and sister—were obliged to elbow
themselves through the crowd to the choir, so
great was the concourse of people. In Milan,
such was the impression made by our hero,
that Wolfgang was asked to compose an opera.
In Italy new operas were introduced twice a
year; and he was given the first opportunity
to display his talent during the season preced-
ing Christmas. The honorarium paid him
was, as usual, one hundred ducats and lodging
free. He received no more at a later period
20 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
for his Don Giovanni. But such an amount
was a large remuneration, at that time, for the
young beginner.
In the execution of his task, however, he
showed himself by no means a mere beginner.
For when, continuing their journey—to which
they could give themselves up with all the
more composure as the libretto was to be sent
after them—they came to Bologna and there
called upon the most learned musician of his
age, Padre Martini, even he could do nothing
but lose himself in wonder at the power of
achievement of our young master, who, as
Martini said, solved problems and overcame
difficulties which gave evidence both of innate
genius and of the most comprehensive knowl-
edge. Wolfgang here became acquainted with
the greatest singer of his time, the sopranist,
Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, and receiv-
ed from him as a last legacy the Italian art
of bel canto; for, said he, only he who under-
stands the art of Song in its highest sense, can,
in turn, properly write for song. And yet
this vocalist was already in the sixties.
Florence was still governed by the Haps-
burgs, and hence the best of receptions was
MOZART IN BOME. 21
given to our travelers there. Of the magni-
ficent works of art in the place, the letters
to his mother and sister do not say anything.
But we can scarcely suppose that the Venus
Anathusia and the Madonna della Sedia re-
mained unknown to him who was alone des-
tined to give life to Raphael and the antique,
even in tones. Mozart's own letters from
Rome do not leave us in the dark on this point.
He writes to his sister: “Yesterday we were
in the Capitol and saw many beautiful things,
and there are, indeed, many beautiful things
there and elsewhere in Rome”—Laocoon and
Ariadne, the Appollo Belvedere and the head
of Olympian Jove. And then the manjº
churches, and among them a St. Peter's! But
naturally enough, the music remained the most
remarkable thing of all to the two musicians;
and then there was the Sistine Chapel, in which
alone something of the art of the great Romans
still lived and ruled. Of Palestrina we hear
nothing in this connection, but Wolfgang went
so far as to make a copy of Allegri. “You
know,” the father writes, “that the Miserere
sung here is esteemed so highly that the mu-
sicians of the chapel are forbidden, under pain
22 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
of excommunication, to copy any part of it, or
to give a part of it to anybody. But we have
it. Wolfgang has written it down from ear.
However, we do not wish this secret to come
into anyone's else possession, lest we should
incur the censure of the Church directly or
indirectly.” The Mozarts, indeed, attached
some importance to their faith in the Catholic
Church. To them it was instrinsic truth.
And thus Wolfgang's youthful soul was for-
ever consecrated, for the reception of the high-
est feelings of the human breast, by the pecu-
liarly sacred songs sung during this holy week
in Rome—feelings which, even in composi-
tions not religious, he, in the course of his life,
clothed in sounds so beautiful and enraptur-
ing. In after years, he was wont to tell of the
deep impression made on him by these inci-
dents in his religious experience. “How I
felt there ! how I felt there !” he exclaimed,
over and over again, in speaking of them.
We have heard already of Naples. The
father had written from Rome that the further
they got into Italy the greater was the won-
der of the people. The intoxicating beauty
of nature mirrored in the Bay of Naples, could
FIECEIVED BY THE POPE. 23
not but make a deep impression on the artist,
who was himself destined one day to give ex-
pression in so magical a manner and in sounds
so entrancing, to the charm and intoxication
of the serenest joys of life. “Naples is beauti-
ful,” he writes curtly but characteristically to
his sister. Yet it may be that the immense
solemnity of Rome was more in harmony with
Mozart's German nature. They were there
Soon again, and this time they had an oppor-
tunity to see what can be seen only in Rome—
the Pope. Delighted with young Wolf-
gang's playing, the Holy Father—it was the
great Ganganelli, Clement XIV—granted him
a private audience, and conferred on him the
order of the Golden Spurs, that same order
which afterwards gave us a chevalier Gluck.
Mozart did not, at first, make much of this
honor, and his father wrote: “You may im-
agine how I laugh to hear him called all the
time Signor Cavaliere.” Later, however, they
knew when a proper occasion presented itself,
how to turn such a distinction to advantage.
The end now aimed at by young Mozart
and his father was fame and success. A step
towards the attainment of these was Wolf-
24 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
gang's nomination as a member of the cele-
brated Philharmonic Society of Bologna,
which invested him, in Italy, with the title
of Cavaliere Filarmonico. And when father
and son came to Milan again in 1770, he had,
so far as his rank as an artist and his position
in life were concerned, attained success. At
fourteen, he was Signor Cavaliere—Chevalier
Mozart. The journey itself had done much
to bring his artistic views to maturity. His
technical ability was very plainly now supple-
mented by the pure sense of the beautiful,
the result of the highest intellectual labor.
He had surmounted all difficulties, and espe-
cially those purely natural ones by which the
rough, lack-lustre north, with its inhospitable
climate, only too frequently keeps Germans
back in art. From this time forward the
divine rays of ideal beauty beam brightly from
Mozart's melody, and they never became ex-
tinct. In Mozart's art there was now no room
for perfection of form. His art could be
added to only by adding to the life that was
in it; and we shall soon again meet with
traces of that personal contact with life which
matures man's capabilities and develops them.
ITALIAN OPERA. 25.
Let us first look at the earliest decided successes
of the composer, successes which, for a long
time, bound him to the “land where the citron
blooms.”
The Italian opera which then ruled supreme
everywhere, was far from being such a dra-
matic performance on the stage as rivets the
attention. The taste of the Italians which
revelled in beautiful songs, soon made these
the chief feature in the entire opera. Interest-
ing or thrilling incidents from history, and still
more the great myths of antiquity and of the
middle ages, were so adapted for the occasion
that a love affair always played the principal
part in them, and the whole culminated in the
effusions of happy or heart-broken lovers.
There was here, certainly, a rich opportunity
for an art like music. As it was, almost the
entire opera was made up of arias, and the
person who wrote the prettiest arias, of course,
carried off the palm. These arias had like a
garment to be made to order, so to speak, for
the several singers, and to fit them exactly, if
they were to produce their full effect: the
finest note of the prima donna, or a tenor,
had to be at the same time the finest part of
26 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
J
the air, and vice versa. Thus prepared, the
opera was sung, and went the round of one-
half of Europe. We have seen this, in this
century, in the case of Rossini, Bellini and
Donizetti, and we see it in our own day, in
the case of Verdi. -
It was at this point that Mozart modestly
entered on the musical inheritance from the
past. A youth of fourteen will certainly not
change or attack what more than a century
and the whole educated world has approved
and admired. But how he took up into his
work the several features of the “fabulous
history” of the old, unfortunate king of Pon-
tus, Mithridates, and united them into glowing
music, we learn from the critic of the day,
after the performance of the piece on the 26th
of December, 1770, in the following words:
“The young Capellmeister studies the beauti-
ful in nature, and then gives us back that
beauty adorned with the rarest musical grace.”
Envy and intrigue were, indeed, not wanting
here, either. But Wolfgang was equal to the
task of taking care of himself, and even of
adapting himself to the whims of the singers.
“If this duet does not give satisfaction, he can
WONDERFUL SUCCESS. 27
re-arrange it,” the first sopranist exclaimed;
and people were very much surprised to see
the tone of the home opera, its chiaroscuro,
as they called the beautiful discordance of the
different pieces with one another, so accurately
hit by a young beginner. Cries of Evviva il
maestro/ Evviva il maestrinoſ were heard on
every side; the work had to be repeated twenty
times, and it was immediately ordered for five
other stages, among them that of Mozart's own
beloved capital—all of which, however, accord-
ing to the custom of the time, turned only to
the advantage of the copyist.
The object of the first trip to Rome, in
1770, was thus attained. Wolfgang had not
spared himself, and his father had to keep a
watchful eye on him. Uninterrupted labor
and earnest occupation had given so serious a
turn to his mind—and he was always nat-
urally reflective—that his father thought well
to invite some friends to his home while Wolf-
gang was composing. He asked others to write
him jocose letters, in order to divert him. The
musical genius and the inner man were ripen-
ing side by side. At the age of fifteen he had
the maturity of a full-grown youth.
28 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
—”
Even now the chords of his nature, which
lent to his melodies that most fervid of tones
which we think we hear even when only Mo-
zart's name is mentioned, those tender feelings
of the heart which made him above all the
minstrel of love, are heard in the soft vibra-
tions of his music. In his hearty attachment
to his mother and sister, we see the develop-
ment of what the family-friend already men-
tioned has told us of his innate craving for af-
fection when only four years old. His little
postscripts to his father's letters about this
journey are delightful reading. He never for-
gets the dear ones at home. He inquires about
each one in turn; and even the “weighty and
lofy thoughts of Italy,” where he was frequent-
ly “distracted by mere business,” do not keep
him from doing so. He tells his mamma he
kisses her hands a billion times, and Nanner!
that he kisses her “cheek, nose, mouth and
neck.” On post-days, he goes on, “everything
tastes better,” and only the abundance of his
bantering in these notes preserved in the Mo-
Zarteum can give any idea of his overflowing
tenderness for his sweet sister.
But it was not long before he discovered
FIRST LOVE. 29
beauty in others than his sister. His young
eye caught sight of the prime donne and
pretty ballet-dancers of Italy; but, with the fair
ones, he had formed a more intimate personal
acquaintance in Salzburg, where his sister had
friends of her own sex. “I had a great deal
to say to my sister, but what I had to say is
known only to God and myself,” he wrote
from Italy; and shortly after, still more sug-
gestively: “What you have promised me, my
dear ( you know you are my dear one),
don’t fail to do, I pray you. I shall surely
be obliged to you.” This was during his sec-
ond journey to Rome, when his short and rest-
ful stay in his beautiful home allowed his heart,
so to speak, repose, and afforded him leisure
to busy himself with other matters than music.
“I implore thee, let me know about the other
one, where there is no other one; you under-
stand me, and I need say no more,” he adds,
evidently desiring to cover something up, and
what could there be for him to cover up but a
tender feeling of the heart? Later he adds:
“I hope that you have been to see the young
lady; you know which one I mean. I beg of
you when you see her to pay her a compliment
30 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
for me.” There certainly is nothing more
easy of explanation than that the young artist
was attracted by the fair sex, whose admira-
tion for him was so unbounded. Nothing so
charms woman as fame and greatness, espe-
cially when fame and greatness have an intel-
lectual foundation; and was not the young
cavaliere filarmonico famed beyond all men
living? His mere appearance, indeed, made
no very powerful impression at the first sight.
He was small of stature. According to the
account given of himself, in one of his letters,
he was “brought up on water.” His head
seemed to be too large for his body, the result
of an abundance of beautiful flaxen hair; and
only his natural ease and grace of move-
ment made him—especially in the costume of
the past century—irresistibly charming, an
effect which was heightened by the thoughtful
expression of his beautiful greyish-blue eyes.
But when this excitable young man, in his vel-
vet coat, knee-breeches, silk stockings, buck-
led shoes, galoon-hat and sword, was thought
of as the celebrated maestro, whose fame was
only beginning; or when he was heard play
and seen producing his own compositions, the
IN MILAN. 31
impression was changed, and the place of mere
physical attraction was taken by the unspeak-
able charm of the mind and heart, by the
spell-binding, mysterious force of creative gen-
ius. But woman loves the power of genius,
and surrenders her entire self to it. A kiss
from pretty lips when he had written a new
minuet, he considered a beautiful “present,”
and kisses do not come singly.
But now little time remained to him for
the half-innocent, half-sensuous idyls of the
eighteenth century. He was again engaged
for the first season of the year, 1773, in Milan,
this time for a consideration of one hundred
and thirty ducats, and in the meantime, he
received another commission, probably in con-
sequence of the reputation of “Mithridates,”
to help celebrate the marriage of a son of the
Empress Maria Theresa, in Milan, by means
of a serenata, i. e., a kind of little opera.
This was in the summer of 1771, and in Au-
gust both father and son were in Milan again.
The subject-matter was Ascanius in Alba.
But flattery for the noble couple chiefly filled
this theatrical sketch, a fact which by no means
kept Wolfgang from doing his best. He
32 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
writes: “Over us is a violinist, under us an-
other, next us a singing master, and in the
only remaining room a hautboyist, all of which
makes composing very pleasant, and suggests
many ideas to one.” These ideas must have
been of great consequence to him at this time,
because his rival, the composer of the princi-
pal opera, was Hasse, the then most celebrated
composer in Italy, the “dear Saxon,” as the
Italians called him, a man who had presented
them with so many hundred operas that he
could not count them himself. The libretto
did not reach him until the end of August,
and the festivities were to take place in Octo-
ber. “And then my fingers pain me so from
writing,” he says, in an exculpatory way, after
four weeks, to Nannerl. There were now
wanting only two arias. Thanks to the elas-
ticity of his nature, he preserved his health;
but the fact that he “was always sleepy”
shows how very hard he had worked, nay, that
he had worked too hard.
He did not fail of success. The noble couple
set an example to the public by their appro-
bation, and the father writes: “I am sorry;
Wolfgang's serenata has so badly beaten
THE ARCHIBISHOP. 33
Hasse's opera that I cannot describe it.” And
it is said that the latter, with a delightful ab-
sence of envy, exclaimed: “That boy will send
us all to oblivion.” How true was the proph-
ecy, and how many, in all ages will not this
same Mozart eclipse by his refulgence 1
The play was, contrary to custom, repeated
several times, and on this occasion a diamond
snuff-box from the arch-duke was added to
the honorarium usually paid.
In December, 1771, we find the Mozarts at
home once more, but enjoying the pleasant
prospect of new laurels in Italy. It was well
that there was such a prospect before them;
for the death of Archbishop Sigismund placed
a new master over them. His successor, Je-
rome, whose election was received with feel-
ings anything but joyful, was destined to leave
a sad page in Mozart's life.
The citizens of Salzburg entrusted their cel-
ebrated young fellow-townsman with the com-
position of the music for the occasion of their
demonstration of respect to the new archbishop.
It was the “Dream of Scipio.” Besides this,
there was little in Salzburg to be done. In
the capacity of concertmeister to the arch-
3
34 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
bishop, to which position he was appointed
after his success in Italy, he had to write the
music for the court and for the cathedral. In
those days people were ever craving for some-
thing new in their favorite art; and while Mo-
zart's masses, yielding to the theatrical tenden-
cy of the time, like those of Haydn, have more
of a pleasant play in them than of church grav-
ity, and are therefore of less importance to
posterity, the composition of symphonies car-
ried him into a department which, created by
Haydn, was destined, through Mozart, to
lead to that mighty phenomenon, Beethoven.
The form of the sonata, which is the basis
of the symphony, also had originated in con-
sequence of a more and more poetico-musical
development from the suite which introduced
a series of dances, the allemande being the
first. And as the dance itself is a direct imi-
tation of natural human movement and pas-
sion, the Sonata and symphony, together with
the quartette, became more and more, the ex-
pression of the personal experience and feel-
ings of the composer, who, the more deeply and
grandly he conceived the world, was able to
give of it, in his music, a more beautiful and
THE ARCHIBISHOP. 35
ravishing picture—an art which afterwards
reached in Beethoven's symphonies a height
unsurpassed as yet. -
What poetry and prose were for the opera,
the joy and the sorrow of life felt by the com-
poser himself were for the piano and the
orchestra—the impulse and poetical bait to
musical composition. We shall soon find
Mozart's life reflected in his art, and it is this
that makes the biography of the man so pe-
culiarly attractive and so full of meaning.
In November, 1772, we find our two travel-
ers in Italy again. The opera of Silla had to
be written for Milan. And now, what the
father desired above all, was to see his son an-
chored there in a permanent position. He
first made some arrangements in Florence.
He could not feel at home in Salzburg after
the appointment of the new archbishop. The
latter was, indeed, friendly to intellectual prog-
ress, and opposed to the gloomy rule of the
priesthood, but, at the same time, he was him-
self too much of a tyrant to be able to bless
his people by diffusing prosperity among them,
or to win their love. His mode of government
could not be acceptable to the independent
36 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
spirit of the father any more than to the lib-
erty-loving genius of the son; and this all the
more, as he had no real feeling for, or under-
standing of art, or of the Sovereign rule of
genius. And so it happened, that the father,
even during his journey, found it hard to ban-
ish what he called his “Salzburg thoughts”
from his mind. He was disappointed because
he accomplished nothing in Florence, and this
added to his trouble.
But he now met with compensation in Milan.
In his letters, Wolfgang says: “It is impos-
sible for me to write much, because, in the first
place, I know nothing to write about, and in
the second place, I do not know what I am
writing; for all my thoughts are with my
opera, and I am in danger of writing a whole
aria to you instead of a letter.” The per-
formers were very well satisfied this time too,
and what an effect the work must have pro-
duced is attested by a mishap which occurred
to the principal male voice. He had unwit-
tingly provoked the prima donna to a fit of
laughter, which confused him so much that he
began to gesticulate himself in a most unman-
nerly way. The audience, whose patience had
MORE OPPOSITION. 37
been taxed to the utmost by being obliged to
wait for the archduke, who lived in the city,
caught the contagion, and began to laugh like-
wise. Spite of this, the opera proved victori-
ously successful the first time it was performed,
and was repeated more than twenty times.
This closed Mozart's real work for the Ital-
ians. He would certainly have been called
upon to do much more in that country, but
the Archbishop of Salzburg refused him leave
of absence, saying that he “did not want to
See his people going begging about the coun-
try.” And yet Mozart himself said subse-
quently: “When I think it all over, I have
nowhere received so many honors, and no-
where been so highly esteemed as in Italy. A
man has good credit indeed when he has writ-
ten operas in Italy.” And, in reality, it was
due to his success in Italy that Mozart was,
two years after this, called to Munich to write
the music for another Italian opera. This was
the charming opera buffa (comic opera), the
La finta giardiniera; and here Jerome
could not refuse his permission; his relations,
personal and official with the neighboring
elector's court, did not allow him to do so.
38 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
The elector Maximilian III. was a kindly,
good-hearted gentleman, and very fond of
music himself. He had long before manifest-
ed a great deal of interest in Mozart, and
knew as well as anybody what success the
young composer had met with in the world.
Mozart saw himself loved and honored, and
the excellence of the opera in Munich was a
great incentive to induce him to do his very
best in the performance of the task now given
him. In it we find early traces of those liv-
ing streams of pleasant feelings which flowed
from Mozart's heart. The words of the opera
had been frequently set to music; but the peo-
ple said that no more beautiful music had ever
been heard than that of Mozart's opera, in
which all the arias, without exception, were
beautiful. “Thank God,” he wrote on the
14th of January, “my opera was put upon the
stage yesterday, and came off so well that I
find it impossible to describe the bustle to
mamma. In the first place, the theater was
so very crowded that a great many people had
to go back home. Every aria was followed by
a frightful hubbub and cries of viva maestro /
Her highness the electoress and the electoress
SUCCESS OF THE OPERA. 39
dowager, who were just opposite me, saluted
me with a bravo / When the opera was out,
there was nothing to be heard but the clapping
of hands and cries of bravo / interrupted by
pauses of silence, only to be taken up again,
and again. After this, I went with papa into
a room, through which the elector had to go,
where I kissed the hands of his highness, of
the electoress and of the nobility, all of whom
were very gracious to me. Early this morn-
ing his grace, the prince-bishop of Chiemsee,
sent a special messenger here to congratulate
me on the fact that the opera had proved so
unprecedently successful.” The prince-bishop,
who had been a canon of the cathedral in Salz-
burg, and loved Mozart very much, had, it is
very likely, procured for him the commission
from Munich, and hence his enhanced interest
in Mozart, and the peculiar satisfaction he felt
in his great success.
Even the archbishop himself was an unwil-
ling witness of the triumph of his concertmeis-
ter, to whom he showed so little respect. He
had not, indeed, seen the opera himself, be-
cause it was not performed during his visit,
which was a mere visit on business connected
40 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
with his office; but, as the father writes, he
could not help hearing Mozart's praise, and
accepting many solemn congratulations on
having secured the services of so great a gen-
ius, from all the elector's household and from
the nobility. This confused him so much
that he could answer only with a nod of the
head and a shrug of the shoulders. We shall
, soon see that all this did not redound to Mo-
zart's welfare and advantage.
An operetta, the Il Re Pastore, “The Royal
Shepherd,” written in honor of the sojourn of
the Archduke Maximilian Francis in Salz-
burg, in the same year, 1775, must also be
classed among the youthful works of our artist.
He had now passed his twentieth year. He
had learned all there was to be learned, and
proved it in many ways by what he had achiev-
ed in practice. His feelings urged him to
display his powers before the world. He felt
himself a man with
“Muth sich in die Welt zu wagen,
Der Erde Weh, der Erde Glück zu tragen.”
His boyhood was over; the youth was grow-
ing into the man, and the man craves to try
his strength—craves action.
1MOZART IN BOME. 41
This craving brought our artist, for the first
time, into a personal struggle with life; and as
he was compelled henceforth to carry on that
struggle alone, experience quickly strength-
ened his moral power; and we find him no
longer simply the divinely favored artist, but
the strong, noble-minded man as well.
C H A P T E R II.
1777—1779.
THE GREAT PARISIAN ARTISTIC JOURNEY.
Disgusted With Salzburg—In Wienna Again—Salzburg Soci-
ety—Character of Musicians in the Last Century—Jerome
Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg–Mozart's Letter to
Him—The Father's Solicitude for His Son—Paternal Ad-
vice—New Compositions — Incidents of his Journey —
Meets With Opposition—Secret Enemies—His Ambition
to Elevate the Character of the German Opera—Disap-
pointments—His Description of German “Free City"
Life — Meeting With Stein — In His Uncle's Family—
“Baesle "—Meeting With the Cannabichs—Attachment
for Rosa Cannabich—Influence of this Attachment on His
Music—The Weber Family—The Non so d'onde viene—
Circumstances of its Composition.
IN a letter written in the year 1776, Wolf-
gang complained to Father Martini, of Bolog-
na, that he was living in a city in which musi-
cians met with little success; that the theater
there had no persons of good ability, because
persons of good ability wished good pay; and
he adds: “Generosity is a fault of which we
cannot be accused.” He informs the reverend
father that he was engaged writing Church
music and chamber music, but that the pieces
(42)
HOME IIFE. 43
had to be always very short, because such was
the desire of the archbishop, and he closes
thus: “Alas, that we are so far away from
you, dearest master. Were we nearer to each
other, how much I would have to say to you.”
It is easy to see that the young maestro felt
impelled to go where he might breathe a freer
air, and prove by his deeds the power that was
in him. As early as in the summer of 1773,
the father and son were again together in Wi-
enna, but not even the shrewdness of the
father, with all his experience, could devise
any way to the success he desired there, and
Wolfgang himself wrote from Munich to his
mother that she should not wish for their im-
mediate return, for she knew well enough how
much he needed a breathing spell, and he
says: “We shall be soon enough with —.”
They lived at home, father, son and daugh-
ter, a happy family in their own narrow cir-
cle. They had, we are glad to say, some true
and trusted friends with whom they employed
the little leisure which they could afford to
take, in the parlor games customary at the
time, and other simple pleasures. And this
leisure was small indeed, for they had to try
44 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
to make both ends meet by writing musical
compositions and giving instruction in music.
The father's salary amounted to only forty
marks, and the son's to only twenty-five marks
a month. No wonder he wrote: “generosity
is not our fault.” But their sense of refine-
ment was offended yet more by the rude man-
ner and the coarse tone prevalent in the place.
The Salzburgian was looked upon as a fool,
and the merry Andrews of Vienna mimicked
his dialect. The mode of life and the views
of the higher and lower “noblesse” were of a
nature still less agreeable and refined. Mo-
zart, who much preferred even the manners
of the “boorish Bavarians,” as they were then
universally called, to that of the Salzburg no-
bility, relates, in his letters, how one of the lat-
ter expressed so much surprise and crossed
himself so frequently at the Munich opera,
that they were greatly ashamed of him.
It is notorious that Mozart's real colleagues,
the musicians, had a well-merited reputation
during the last century, as “drunkards, games-
ters and dissipated, good-for-nothing fellows.”
This was one of the reasons which inspired
him with so great a hatred for Salzburg. “No
JOSEPH HAYDN. 45
decent man,” he writes, “could live in such
company.” He was ashamed of them, and of
the coarse and dissolute music of the court.
Michael Haydn himself, Joseph Haydn's
brother, a very clever composer, was not free
from at least one of these vices. There was
no one in Salzburg but knew Haydn's little
drinking room in the Stiftskeller (monastery
wine-cellar). On one occasion, when the or-
ganist of one of the city churches, drunk on the
organ-seat, was struck with appoplexy, Wolf-
gang's father wrote to him asking him to
divine who had been appointed his successor.
And he proceeds: “Herr Haydn l—all laugh-
ed. He is, indeed, an expensive organist. He
drinks a quart of wine after every part of the
mass. He sends Lipp (another organist) to
attend the other services—another man,” he
adds forcibly enough, “who wants a drink.”
How now could it be said that here, in his
own real province, the young artist found a
reward worthy of his fiery spirit and of his
already tested powers?
We have heard himself complain of the
theatre, the parlor, and the orchestra. A
wandering troupe performed in the theatre
46 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
during the winter. The court-concerts were
limited to, at most, an hour, during which sev-
eral pieces had to be performed. Masses, even
the most solemn, were not allowed to be longer
than three-quarters of an hour. Moreover,
the orchestra was a small one, without as much
as even a clarionet. That, notwithstanding
all this; that thus confined and narrowed, and
with means thus limited, Mozart was able to
produce works such as we possess in his masses,
symphonies, and chamber music—works which
far surpass those of his contemporaries, and
find a worthy place by the side of the music
of the same kind by Joseph Haydn, is a tri-
umph which bears eloquent testimony to his
industry and genius. But he could never be
satisfied in Salzburg. That same genius urged
him out into a purer atmosphere, in which
action such as he was capable of, becomes pos-
sible, in which he might come in contact with
men of culture. His resolve was made. The
world was before him, and he said to himself:
Go forth !
But in his way stood, bold and dark, the
& 6 —” to whom they had, as Mozart
writes, returned soon enough, the “Mufti,” as
JEROME COLLOREDO. 47
he called the man “with the keen glance from
his grey eyes, the left of which was scarcely ever
entirely open, and the rigid lines about the
mouth”—Archbishop Jerome Colloredo. This
man really could not appreciate how much he
possessed in Mozart. “Let them only ask
the archbishop, he will put them immediately
on the right path,” Wolfgang writes, on one
occasion, referring to him concerning a concert
which had met with unusual success in Mann-
heim. The principal cause of complaint, how-
ever, was the archbishop's niggardliness. He
was thus rigorous with those in his employ, lest
they should make any claims upon him. Mo-
zart wrote, at a later period: “I did not venture
on contradiction, because I came straight from
Salzburg, where the faculty of contradiction
has been lost by long abstinence from using it.”
Whatever he composed was wrong, found fault
with, and unsparingly. On one occasion, the
archbishop had the face to tell Mozart that he
did not understand anything of his art, and that
he should first go to the Conservatory at Naples
to learn something about music, and this to
Mozart, the Academician of Bologna and Ver-
ona, the far-famed composer of operas! We
48 TEIE IIH'E OF MOZART.
are informed that he never flattered Mozart
except when he wanted something; and Leo-
pold told Padre Martini that, otherwise, the
archbishop never paid Wolfgang a farthing
for his compositions.
Suffering from the mania of the time, Je-
rome preferred the Italians in matters of mu-
sic, and had surrounded himself with Italian
musicians. The Mozarts were, in consequence,
set back in every way and made the victims
of “persecution and contempt.” All the ele-
ments of variance were here. A breach was
inevitable; for on the one side were the father
and son, both very frank, clear-headed and
witty; Wolfgang, with something in him of
the impetuosity of youth, conscious of his
power and of the opinion which the world had
of him, a consciousness which he took no
trouble to conceal; on the other the archbish-
op, whose peculiarity it was to allow himself
to be impressed by persons of fine, handsome
figure, but not to respect little, insignificant-
looking people like the slender, twenty-year-
old Mozart. -
We have Mozart's letter to the archbishop.
It saw the light—being found among the of
MOZART's LETTER. 49
ficial papers of the archbishopric—just one
hundred years after it was written. It gives
us a great deal of information concerning a
circumstance which had a great influence on
Mozart's life, and which was finally the cause
of the most decided catastrophes to him. It
shows us, at the same time, what was the entire
tone of the period, and especially of Salzburg
subserviency. Mozart writes:
“To HIs ILLUSTRIOUS GRACE, MosT REVEREND
PRINCE OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE :
JMost Gracious Liege Lord and Herr Herr /
I dare not trouble your illustrious grace with any
minute description of our pitiful circumstances. My
father has most humbly, upon his honor and conscience,
and with all truth, called the attention of your illus-
trious grace to those circumstances in his most humble
petition presented to your grace on the 14th of March
of this year. But as your illustrious grace's most gra-
cious and propitious decision, which was hoped for, did
not come to him, my father would have most humbly
begged your illustrious grace, as long ago as the month
of June, most graciously to allow us to make a journey
of a few months, to the end that we might in this way
do something to help ourselves in our necessity, were
it not that your illustrious grace most graciously or-
dered that all your grace's musicians should keep them-
selves in readiness for the occasion of his imperial
majesty's [Joseph II] passage through your grace's
4
50 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
city. After this, my father most humbly asked this
same permission, but your illustrious grace refused it
to him, and most graciously expressed a conviction that
I, who am only half engaged in your grace's service,
might travel alone. Our circumstances are those of
urgent need. My father resolved to send me on my
way alone. But here also your illustrious grace in-
terposed some most gracious objections. Most gra-
cious liege lord and Herr Herr, parents laboriously
strive to put their children in a position such that they
may earn their own daily bread; and this is a duty
which they owe to themselves and to the state.
The more talents children have received from God,
the greater are their obligations to make use of those
talents for the amelioration of their own and ther pa-
rents’ circumstances, to assist their parents and to take
heed for their own advancement and for the future.
The gospels teach us thus to put our talents out at in-
terest. I therefore, in conscience, owe it to God to be
grateful to my father who spends untiringly his every
hour on my education; to lighten his burthen; and to
care for my sister; for it would pain me greatly if, af-
ter spending so many hours at the piano, she should
not be able to turn what she has so laboriously learned
to account.
Your illustrious grace will, therefore, most gracious-
ly allow me to ask most humbly for my dismissal from
your grace's service, as I am forced to make use of the
month of September this fall which is just beginning,
so that I may not be exposed to the inclemency of the
severe weather of the cold months which follow so
MOZART's LETTER. 51
soon upon it. Your illustrious grace will not take this
most humble petition of mine ungraciously, as your
grace most graciously pronounced against me three
years ago, when I asked leave to travel to Vienna, told
me that I had nothing to hope for, and that I would do
better to seek my fortune in some other place. Most
humbly do I thank your illustrious grace for all the
high favors I have received from your grace, and with
the flattering hope of being able to serve your illus-
trious grace with greater approval when I shall have
reached man’s estate, I commend myself to the favor
and grace of
Your most illustrious Grace,
My most gracious liege-lord and Herr Herr.
Most humbly and obediently,
WOLFGANG AMADEUs MozART.
[Addressed]
To HIs ILLUSTRIOUS GRACE
THE ARCHBISHOP OF SALZBURG, etc., etc.;
The most humble and obedient petition of Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart.”
It is no easy matter to imagine all that must
have occurred before the father resolved to
permit his son to take a step which might pos-
sibly cost himself both his position and his
livelihood, but it may all be very readily di-
vined from the following passages in the Mo-
zart letters. The son writes: “I hope that
you meet with less vexation now than when I
52 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
was in Salzburg, for I must confess that I was
its sole cause.” And again: “I was badly
treated, I did not deserve it. You naturally
sympathized with me, but too much. That
was the principal reason why I hastened away
from Salzburg.” And the father: “You are,
indeed, right, my dear Son. I felt the greatest
vexation at the contemptible treatment which
you received. It was that that preyed on my
heart so, that kept me from sleeping, that was
ever in my thoughts, and which would have
surely ended by consuming me entirely.”
And here follows an outburst characteristic of
the feelings of the Mozarts: “My dear son,
when you are happy, so am I, so is your
mother, so is your sister, so are we all. And
that you will be happy I hope from God’s
grace, and through the confidence I place in
your sensible behavior.”
And, indeed, this last was the only cause of
Solicitude the father had when his son started
on his journey. Not that he had any doubt
as to the young man's character or goodness
of heart. He had as much faith in both as in
the “superiority of his son's talents.” What
alarmed him was Wolfgang's want of experi-
HIS CHARACTER. 53
ence. Wolfgang had never traveled alone.
And who had better opportunity to know the
extent of this inexperience than the faithful
mentor who, as the son himself confesses, had
always served him like a friend, nay like a
servant? The father's utterances here are full
of beauty. They show us many a trait charac-
teristic of the whole life of the yet youthful but
immortal prodigy of art.
The father writes: “You know, my son,
that you will have to do everything for your-
self, and that you are not accustomed to get
along entirely without the help of others; that
you are not very familiar with the different
kinds of coin, and that you have not the least
idea how to pack your things, or to do much
else which must be done.” He continues: “I
would also remind you, that a young man,
even if he had dropped down from heaven and
stood head and shoulders above all the masters
of art, will never get the consideration due him.
To win this, he must have reached a certain
age, and so long as a person is under twenty,
enviers, enemies and persecutors will find mat-
ter for blame in his youth, in the little impor-
tance attached to him and his Small experience.”
54 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
And later: “My son, in all your affairs, you
are hasty and headlong. Your whole charac-
ter has changed since your childhood and boy-
hood years. As a child, you were rather seri-
ous than childish. Now, as it seems to me,
you are too quick to answer every one in a
jesting way at the very first provocation; and
that is the first step towards familiarity which
one must avoid in this world, if he cares to be
respected. It is your good heart's fault that
you can see no defect in the person who pays
you a clever compliment, who professes esteem
for you and lauds you to the heavens, and that
you take him into your confidence and give
him your love.”
Even if all this paternal chiding was pro-
voked only by the one special cause of which
we shall soon have something to say, it is, nev-
ertheless, true that the father here touches
upon some of Mozart's characteristic traits,
especially his confiding goodness of heart, his
wit and jocoseness in everything, which were
led into wrong channels by the quickness of
his mind. The parting of father and son was
heart-rending indeed. We are sure that the
words in which Leopold Mozart describes his
PARTING OF FATHER AND SON. 55
feelings, when Wolfgang, in company with his
mother, started out on his travels in Septem-
ber, 1777, came from the very bottom of a
father's heart. “After you had gone,” he
writes, “I went, very tired, up the steps and
threw myself in a chair. I tried hard to re-
strain myself on the occasion of our leave-
taking, that I might not make our separation
still more painful, and in my excitement I
forgot to give my son a father's blessing. I
ran to the window and begged a blessing upon
both of you, but I did not see you go out
through the gate, and we could not but think
that you had already passed it, because I sat
there a long time without thinking of any-
thing.” Nannerl cried so much that she was
taken sick, and it was evening before either
she or her father had so far recovered from
the shock as to be able to distract themselves
by attending to some little home duties, and
enjoying what remained to them of domestic
bliss. “Thus did this sad day pass—a sadder
day than I believed life could ever bring me,”
says the father, in his account of it, when an-
swering the first letter he received from his
Son after his departure.
56 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
Wolfgang himself was very cheerful. He
was out again in the bracing atmosphere of
freedom. His confidence in human nature,
the result of inexperience, hid from his eyes
the thorns of life which were destined hence-
forth to sting him till he died. Trusting in
his talents and his good will, he thought that
his pathway would be strewn with roses. His
father, in a somewhat gloomy excess of zeal
writes him : “Cling to God, Ibeg you; you must
do it, my dear son, for men are all knaves.”
.“The older you get and the more
you have to do with men, the more will you
learn this bitter truth. Think only of the
many promises, all the sycophancy and the
hundred other things we have met with, and
then draw your own conclusions as to how
much you can build on human aid.” All
Salzburg wondered and revolted at the course
pursued by the archbishop, for young Mozart
got his dismissal immediately and in a very
unkind and ungracious way. The father, in-
deed, was allowed to retain his position, but
the dissatisfaction of the court at the loss was
very great, for strangers found nothing to ad-
mire but Wolfgang. One of the cathedral
DISAPPOINTMENTS. 57
canons afterwards admitted this to Mozart him-
self, and the steward of the household, Count
Eirmian, who was very fond of Mozart, gives
the following account of a conversation over-
heard by him while waiting on the court:
“We have now one musician less. Your
illustrions grace has lost a great performer.”
“HOW SO 2 ”
“He is the greatest piano-player I ever
heard in my life. As a violinist he served
your illustrious grace exceedingly well, and he
was besides a very good composer.”
The archbishop was silent.
All this was a rich source of satisfaction to
Wolfgang, but it did not lessen his father's
cares. The preparations for his journey were
of course very carefully made, even in the mi-
nutest details, especially in what related to his
compositions, that he might “be able to show
what he could do in everything: ” in concertos
for the piano and violin, Sonatas, airs and en-
semble pieces of the most various kind. The
Sonatas for the piano alone—as we would re-
mark here to the lovers of music—known as
Nos. 279—284 in L. Koechel’s “Chron, themat
Verzeichniss,” are, as to their form, perfectly
58 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
full of beauty, and the matter of them frequent-
ly interests us by the distinctness of its almost
speaking pictures of life. More significant and
important yet is the Sonata in C major. Its
Andante cantabile, in F major (*), is a dram-
atic scene which, although on a small scale,
clearly bespoke the hand of the future composer
of Figaro and Don Giovanni. And the varia-
tions with which the Sonata in A major (#)
begins were hardly equaled by Beethoven in his
Op. 26. The trio in the minuet, on the other
hand, was a full scene from life, taken from the
Carnival to which the closing Alla Turca al-
ludes. Compared with these youthful works of
Mozart—for they belong to the end of the year
1770—what are the sonatas of Ph. E. Bach,
and even of Joseph Haydn 2
The travelers had also, with the assistance
of the father, made every other preparation for
their journey. The boot-tree or stretcher,
even, which was, at the time, a necessary part
of a traveler's outfit, was not forgotten. And
yet their first stopping-place was near enough.
The father had once before knocked at the
doors of Munich. Now the son went to seek
his fortune by calling personally on the good-
hearted elector. ;
HIS JOURNEY. 59
We can here, of course, touch only on the
principal incidents of Mozart's journey, on
those which influenced his subsequent life,
and must refer the reader for more detailed
information to his letters. We find in them
the clearest and most charming descriptions of
his life. They appeal to our deepest feelings;
for they are addressed, almost without excep-
tion, to the father. The father's answers had
to be very explicit, for there was ample room
for advice and timely precaution, much to de-
ter from or to make good again, as occasion
required, and not a little place for admonition.
In every one of them, we find the reflection of
the solid worth of these two faithful souls, a
worth which was destined to find a really ideal
and transfigured echo in Mozart's music. This
journey had for effect the development of Mo-
zart's inmost nature. It gave his artistic cre-
ations that sovereign and catholic character
for which they are so remarkable.
Wolfgang wrote some letters home, when he
reached the first station. In one of them we
read: “We live like princes. There is noth-
ing wanting to complete our happiness but papa."
But, please God, all will be well with us.” . . .
60 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
“I hope that papa will be cheerful and as well
Satisfied as I am. I can put up very well with
my lot. I am a second papa. I look after
everything. I have undertaken to pay the
postillion, too, for I can talk to the fellows
better than mamma can. Papa should take
care of his health, and remember that the mufti
J. C. [Jerome Colloredo] is a mean fellow, but
that God is compassionate, merciful and kind.”
No sooner, however, had they reached their
first stopping-place than things began to wear
a different aspect. Mozart received, indeed,
a warm reception. There was no lack of admi-
ration for, or of recognition of his genius.
But he met with no success. His receipts were
k mall, and employment hard to find. The inn-
keeper, Albert, of the sign of the “Black Ea-
e” (the hotel Detzer of the present), received
them. Albert was known as the “learned
host,” and took no small interest in art. Mo-
zart first called on the manager of the theatre,
count Seeau. He thought that if he had only
one more opera, all would be well with him.
He next visited the bishop of Chiemsee, to
whom he owed it that he had the opportunity to
compose the Verstellte Gaertnerin. Everybody

NYMPHENBURG. 61
knew of his arrival, and advised him to go direct
to the elector, who was a patron of the fine arts,
and esteemed Mozart himself very highly.
But many days did not pass before Wolfgang
discovered that the bishop had had a pri-
vate conversation at table, in Nymphenburg,
from which he gathered that he could ac-
complish very little in Munich. The bishop
said: It is too soon yet. He must go; he
must take a trip to Italy and become famous.
I refuse him nothing; but it is too soon yet.”
The father was right; the want of good will
hides itself too frequently behind the mask of
“youth and too little experience. And yet,
we must ask, who was so much more celebrated
than this young Cavaliere filarmonico 3 The
electoress, too, shrugged her shoulders, but
promised to do her best.
Mozart, however, insisted on going to Nym-
phenburg. The elector wanted to hear mass
just before going to hunt. Mozart thus dram-
atizes the scene in one of his letters:
“With your electoral highness's permission,
I would fain most humbly cast myself at your
highness's feet and offer my services to your
highness.”
62 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
“Well, have you left Salzburg for good?”
“Yes, for good, your electoral highness.”
“But why for good? Have you quar-
reled?”
“Well, please your electoral highness, I on-
ly asked leave to take a trip. This was re-
fused me, and hence I was compelled to take
this step, although I had long comtemplated
leaving, for Salzburg is no place for me.”
“My God, and you a young man l’’
“I have been in Italy three times. I have
written three operas, am a member of the
Academy of Bologna, and have been obliged
to undergo an examination on which many a
master has been obliged to work and to sweat
over for four or five hours. I got through it
in an hour. This may prove to your highness
that I am able to be of service at any court.
My only wish is to serve your electoral high-
ness, who is himself a great . . . .”
“Yes, my dear child, but I am sorry to say
that there is not a place vacant. If there was
only a vacancy.”
“I assure your highness that I would cer-
tainly do honor to Munich.”
“Well, it's of no use to talk that way,
there's not a place vacant.”
COUNT SEEAU. 63
We have here given the whole dialogue.
It is a typical example of the way in which
princes and magnates treated Mozart through
the whole of his short life. There never was
“a vacancy” for him. Real genius finds no
place to lay its head. It would seem as if its
god-given nature were fated to find nothing
earthly to cling to.
But, to continue. Spite of this positive de-
claration, Mozart was not deterred from trying
it again at court, and this spite of the fact that
his father had written to him that the elector
could not create a new place without any more
ado, and that, besides, there were always secret
enemies in such cases, who prevented a thing
of that kind out of anxiety to save their own
skin. Yet friends, true and false, found
means to flatter him. First of all, there was
count Seeau, who had a pecuniary interest in
the theater, and understood what advantage a
fertile mind like that of Mozart might be to
him. He knew how to amuse Mozart, whom,
on the occasion of the performance of his first
opera, he saw to be all fire and flame, with fair
hopes: Mozart was to write a German opera
of the heroic kind, and this appealed power-
64 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
fully to his patriotic feelings. He himself
next stirred up his own friends. A number
of those interested in him, it was proposed,
should club together, and enable him, by a
regular monthly contribution, to remain in
Munich until he had written such a work,
and thus obtained a foothold. Seeau had, in-
deed, expressed himself to the effect that he
would like to retain Mozart, if he had only
“a little assistance from home.” Mozart
wanted to pledge himself to write four Ger-
man operas a year, partly comic and partly
serious, and estimated that his profits from
them would be at least eight hundred and fifty
marks, or about two hundred dollars; that
Count Seeau would give at least five hundred,
and would be always invited—and how much
there was to be gained here! And he adds:
“I am very much liked here even now; but
how popular Ishould be if I could only elevate
the German opera! and this I certainly would
be able to do, for I felt the greatest desire to
write when I heard the German vaudeville.”
“Wolfgang's first castles in the air!” the
father must have said to himself when he read
these lines. The “learned host” who had ta-
GERMAN OPERA. 65
ken the matter of contributions in hand with
honest zeal and with a true interest in young
Mozart, could not find so many as ten persons
to give a trifle over a ducat a month to aid in
the good cause. Yet it must be remembered
that the German national taste for art was fast
awakening together with the freedom of Ger-
man national, intellectual life—the result of
many causes, but especially of the deeds and
exploits of Old Fritz (Frederick the Great);
and, that a German national opera was among
the ideals both of princes and artists—at least
of those of them who shared in the broader and
nobler thought of the period. We shall have
something to say on this point further on.
Thus are we able to understand Wolfgang's
warm attachment for the German opera—and,
indeed, had not the prima donna Kaiser “drawn
many and many a tear from him”—as well as
his arduous endeavor to obtain a firm and
permanent foothold in Munich. But Wolf-
gang's success as a virtuoso made the father
believe in him completely, and inspired him
with confidence, spite of this first want of suc-
cess. The son writes: “At the very last, I
played my own cassation in B major. Every
5
{36 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
-*
one wondered. I played as if I were the great-
est fiddler in Europe.” To which the father
answered: “You don’t know yourself, my son,
how well you play the violin when you only
do yourself justice and care to play with heart
and spirit, just as if you were the first violinist
in Europe.” A cassation is a piece of music
in the form of Beethoven's septett, but intended
for a solo-instrument, and especially for sere-
nades. *
But he was doomed to disappointment. To
see how the father watched over the credit of
his son who, in his first endeavors to attain
success, had fallen into a condition of depend-
ence entirely unworthy of him, and thus be-
come a laughing-stock for the archbishop; and
how the son excused his inconsiderate and in-
ordinate zeal by pleading his passion for the
opera, we must consult the letters of both.
Wolfgang, with his characteristic amiability,
says: “I speak from my heart, and just as I
feel. If papa convinces me that I am in the
wrong, I shall submit, however reluctantly;
for I am out of myself the moment I even
hear an opera spoken of.”
They left Munich on the 11th of October,
PATERNAL AIDVICE. 67
1777—that is, a full fortnight after their arri-
val. The father reminds them that neither
“fair words, compliments nor bravissimos pay
the postmaster or the host.” “Do all you
can to earn some money, and be as careful as
possible about your expenses. The object of
your journey is, and must be, either to obtain
employment or to earn money.” This last,
however, was not their object in the rich and
free imperial city of Augsburg, whither they
first directed their steps, because it was their
father's birthplace. They received a warm
welcome there from the father's brother, like
Wolfgang's grandfather, a book-binder. Mo-
Zart's playing and composition, as well as him-
self, here as everywhere else, met with the
greatest recognition, both in public and private,
but he did not succeed in giving a concert.
The “patricians” were not in funds. And
when the Protestant patricians invited them
to their boorish academy (to the vornehmen
Bauernstub Akademie), the total amount of
the present made was—two ducats. “I’m very
sure,” the father says, “they would scarcely
have gotten me into their beggarly academy;”
and, we may add : “The prophet is without
honor in his own country.”
68 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
But he has erected the best possible monu-
ment to those Gothamites, so foolishly proud of
their old imperial-city denizenship. In Mo-
zart's letters to his father, we get an exquisitely
faithful picture of “free city’’ life and “free
city’ men, with the exaggerated self-con-
sciousness and self-satisfaction of inherited
possession and honor, so frequently met with
in them that even mere youths seemed almost
in their dotage. One cannot but grow merry
at the expense of that narrow little world.
“His grace,” the chamberlain to the exchequer
of the town, Herr von Langenmantel the “my
lords,” his sons, and his “gracious ” young
wife, fare all the worse under the lash of the
Mozart's well-known “wicked tongue,” be-
cause Mozart might reasonably have hoped to
find a becoming welcome in his father's birth-
place. Even the golden spur given Mozart
by Pope Ganganelli did more to charm these
“free citizens” than it did to remind them of
the honors so young an artist had already won,
and that he was, in consequence, the peer of
any one of them. One officer of the imperial
army, especially, who ignored this fact, was
very properly snubbed, and taught the lesson
MEETING WITH STEIN. 69
that Mozart was not to be made sport of We
read in one of the father's letters. “Whenever
I thought of your journey to Augsburg, I
could not help thinking of Wieland's Ab-
derites; a man should get an opportunity to
See in natura what in reading he considers a
pure ideal.” But Mozart had here the best
of opportunities to pursue those studies which
the artist needs, in order to paint from life.
We are reminded of his experiences, like
those in Augsburg, by the brutal, self-destruc-
tive, ridiculous haughtiness of Osmin in the
“Elopement from the Seraglio.”
Mozart's meeting with the celebrated piano
manufacturer Stein, to whom he left it to
guess who he was, was a very cheerful meet-
ing, and the manner of it such as Mozart de-
lighted in. He again characterizes as “bad”
the playing of Stein's eight-year-old little
girl, afterwards Frau Streicher, who played
so honorable and womanly a part in Beetho-
ven's life. His intercourse with his uncle's
family, in which the presence of his niece,
(das Baesle), a young girl of eighteen, served
somewhat to exercise his affections, and was
the Occasion, afterwards, of a series of jocose
70 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
letters between them. He writes: “I can
assure you, that, were it not that it holds a clev-
er uncle and aunt and a charming “Baesle,” I
should regret exceedingly having come to
Augsburg. “Baesle” and he seemed made
for one another, he thought; “for,” as he said,
“she, too, has a little badness in her. The
two of us banter the people, and we have very
amusing times.”
Their separation was of such a nature that
the father had the “sad parting of the two
persons, melting into tears, Wolfgang and
Baesle,” painted on a panel in their room.
All else concerning this sojourn in Augsburg
must be looked for in the letters themselves,
where the reader will find some exquisite
genre painting.
“How I like Mannheim 2 As well as I
can like any place where “Baesle’ is not,”
we soon hear him answer ; for Mannheim,
the home of the elector, Karl Theodore, who
was as fond of reveling as he was of art, was.
the next nearest destination our travelers had
in view in order to attain Wolfgang's main.
object. True, he did not attain his object here
either, but he had there that first genuine
CANNABICH. 71
heart-experience which helped to mature his
character as much as his mind was already de-
veloped beyond his years.
His next meeting was with the electoral
Capellmeister, Cannabich, who knew him when
he (Mozart) was a child. He was “extraor-
dinarily polite,” but the orchestra stared at
him. As he writes: “They think that be-
cause I am so little and young, I have not
much that is great in me; but they will soon
see.” And the mother, soon after : “You
cannot imagine how highly Wolfgang is es-
teemed here, both by musicians and others.
They all say that he has no equal. They fair-
ly deify his compositions.” And yet, so far,
he had composed nothing here that could be
called really great, no opera; and to write one
was the chief reason why Mozart protracted
his stay in Mannheim so long. Karl Theo-
dore was, above all, the promoter and protector
of those who endeavored to create a German
national operatic stage, and his orchestra, un-
der the leadership of Cannabich, was so ex-
quisitely good that it and old Fritz's tactics
were considered the most significant and note-
worthy phenomena in Europe at the time.
72 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
—i.
Moreover, the elector was very affable with
his musicians, who were everywhere looked
upon as “decent people’—a complete con-
trast with those of Salzburg.
The pleasure-seeking tone of the court had,
indeed, invaded the middle classes of society,
also; but what did Mozart's pure heart know
of that? On the contrary, he was destined to
find, even in voluptuous Manheim, a love as
beautiful as it was pure.
His heart was now completely open to that
irresistible impulse of the human breast.
Even when in Munich composing, his Gaert-
nerin aus Liebe, he once said to his “dearest
sister:” “I implore you, dearest sister, do
not forget your promise; that is, to make the
visit, you know, . . . . . for I have my rea-
sons. I beg of you to make my compliments
there, . . . . but most emphatically . . . and
most tenderly . . . . and . . . O . . . well,
I should not trouble myself about it. I know
my sister too well; she is tenderness itself.”
His trifling with “Baesle” had left no im-
pression on his heart of hearts. She was
both in mind and culture too much of the
bourgeoise, too immature to captivate him.
SOCIAL HAIBITS. 73
His jocose correspondence with her affords
sufficient proof of this. But now we see that
Cupid himself directed his pencil.
Young Mozart next informs us of the merry
times he had at the houses of the musicians
of a city, in which, as a writer of the times
says, “the ladies,” were beautiful, sweet and
charming. We soon find him again, “as
usual,” at Cannabich's, for supper. Of an
evening of this kind, spent there, he writes:
“I, John Chrysostome Amadeus Wolfgang
Sigismund Mozart, plead guilty, that, day be-
fore yesterday and yesterday, as I have done
frequently, I did not come home until mid-
night, and that from ten o’clock, in the
presence and society of Cannabich, his wife
and daughter, of Messrs. Ramm and Lang
[two members of the orchestra], I have made
rhymes, and not of the most exalted nature,
in words and thoughts but not in deeds. I
would not have acted in so godless a way were
it not that Lisel had excited me to it, and I
must confess that I found real pleasure in it.”
On one occasion, at the house of the flute-
player, Wendling, he was in such excellent
humor, and played so well, that when he had
74 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
finished, he had to kiss the ladies. He tells
us that, in the case of the daughter, he found
this a very easy and pleasant task. She had
been the elector's sweetheart, and, as Schubart
says, in his Aesthetik der Tonkunst, the
“greatest beauty in the orchestra.”
But Rosa Cannabich “a very sweet and
beautiful girl,” as he writes of her himself, fet-
tered him with the complete irresistibleness of
her innocent charms more than could even
this blooming flower. And this was the be-
ginning of those sweet love-songs which now
flowed in pure tones from his poet-heart; and,
hence, this event marks a period in our artist's
life. He writes, shortly after his arrival in
Mannheim : “She plays the piano very sweet-
ly, and to make him (the father) a fast friend,
I am writing a sonata for mademoiselle, his
daughter.” When the first allegro was fin-
ished, a young musician asked him how he
intended to write the andante. “I shall
fashion it after mademoiselle Rosa's character,”
he answered; and he informs us further:
“When I played it, it gave extraordinary satis-
faction. It is even so. The andante is just
like her.”
ROSA CANNABICH. 75
What was she like? A painter subsequently
wrote of her thus: “How many such beauti-
ful, priceless hours did heaven grant me in
sweet intercourse with Rosa Cannabich, Her
memory is an Eden to my heart; ” and Wolf-
gang now wrote of her that, for her age, she
was a girl of much mind, and of demure and
serious disposition, one who said little, but that
little in an affable, nay, charming manner.
In Naples stands Psyche, a rose just opening.
Mozart possessed the same refined, antique
feeling for the soul-statue of man. Here, be-
fore his clear-seeing artist eye, the bud that in
it lay was fully blown. This fruitful heart-
life was destined soon to sow deeper germs in
his own soul, and to cause his own art to bloom
fully forth.
Here, accordingly, we discover one of those
turning points in the development of Mozart's
inner nature, which had much to do with his
intellectual growth, inasmuch as his passion
disclosed to him for the first time the meaning
of the homely truth, that both life and art are
serious things. We proceed to show how this
effect was produced.
The court had heard him in the very first
76 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
week of his stay in Mennheim. “You play
incomparably well,” said the elector to him.
Shortly after Mozart spoke to the elector as
“his good friend,” and the latter began: “I
have heard that you wrote an opera in Mu-
nich.” “Yes, your highness,” Mozart replied,
“I commend myself as your grace's obedient
servant. My highest wish is to write an opera
I beg your highness not to forget me quite
I know German also, and may God be praised
and thanked for it.” “That is not at all im-
possible,” answered his most serene highness,
and so Mozart made his arrangements for a
longer Sojourn in Mannheim. He took some
pupils, and as we saw when speaking of the
pretty Rosa Cannabich, he wrote sonatas, or
variations for them. For this he needed a
copyist. But copying was, as he once com-
plained to his father, very dear in Mannheim,
and he was, therefore, overjoyed, copying be-
ing to himself a real torment, after a while—
it was at the beginning of 1778—to find a man
who performed that task for him, in consid-
eration of his instructing his daughter in
music.
This man was Fridolin von Weber, brother
THE WEBERS. 77
of the father of C. M. von Weber, and at that
time, a prompter and a copyist in the Mann-
heim theater. The daughter's name was
Aloysia, later the celebrated singer, Madame
Lange.
The family had seen better days, but the
father's passion for the stage had led him into
these straits, where he had for years to sup-
port a family of six children on an annual
salary of three hundred and fifty marks. But
he made such good use of his knowledge of
music that his second daughter, who was at
this time—she was in her fifteenth year—an
excellent singer, cooperated with him at the
theater, and thus doubled her father's salary.
Mozart as a musician felt at home in the fam-
ily—for the eldest daughter, Josepha became
afterwards Frau Hofer, for whom the “Queen
of the Night” in the Magic Flute was written
—and so the sympathy of his good heart was
soon awakened. “She needs nothing but ac-
tion, and then she will make a good prima
donna on any stage. Her father is a thor-
oughly honorable son of our German father-
land. He brings his children up well, and
that is the very cause why the girl is persecuted
78 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
here.” Thus did he sum up the chief points
in this affair in the first news he sent home.
Subsequently he wrote a propos of a perform-
ance at the house of the princess of Orange:
“I may pass over her singing with a single
word—it was superb!” And at the close of his
letter: “I have the inexpressible pleasure to
have formed the acquaintance of thoroughly
honest and really Christian people. I only
regret that I did not know them long ago.”
This tells the whole story. He henceforth
devoted nearly all his leisure to the family,
rehearsed with the young vocalist all her arias,
procured her opportunities to have her music
heard, and had the satisfaction to know that
Raaff himself, the most celebrated tenor in
Mannheim, and even in Germany, declared
that she sang not like a pupil, but like an
adept in the vocal art.
One incident here deserves to be specially
mentioned, for it had a decided, far-reaching
and direct influence on Mozart's action, and on
his development as an artist. He had set
about writing an aria for the great tenor al-
ready mentioned, in order to win him over for
his contemplated opera. “But,” he writes,
MISS WIEBER. 79
with the utmost frankness, “the beginning of
it seemed to me too high for Raaff, and I liked
it too well to change it. I therefore resolved
to write the aria for Miss Weber. I laid it
aside, and resolved on other words for Raaff.
But to no purpose. I found it impossible to
write. The first aria haunted my mind and
would not away, and then I decided to write
it out to suit Miss Weber exactly.” -
What was the import of those words which
he selected simply because an air to the same
words, composed by the London Bach, had
pleased him so much and kept forever ringing
in his ears, and because he wanted to try
whether, spite of everything, he was not able
to write an aria entirely unlike Bach’s? What
were the words?
A king orders a youth who has made an at-
tempt upon his life to be led to execution.
But when he sees the young culprit, he imme-
diately exclaims: “What is this strange pow-
er that agitates and moves me? His face, his
eye, his voice My heart palpitates; every
fibre of my body quivers | Through all my
feelings I look for the cause of this strange
effect, and cannot find it. What is it, O God,
80 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
what is it that I feel?” And hereupon fol-
lows that very aria, Non so d’onde viene:
“I know not whence this tender feeling.
Mere pity cannot produce a change so sud-
den l’ Was not this the condition of Mo-
zart's own heart? He imagined that pity,
and pity only, for the condition of the We-
ber family, and, at most, an interest in the
“beautiful, pure voice,” and wonder at the
combination of so much ability with such ex-
treme youth, bound his heart to their home;
but it was not that ; it was the undivined
depths which the first feeling of love opens
before us; the wonder, the charm, the trem-
bling, glowing exultation, the heart-felt, float-
ing, exquisite bliss which with a longing fore-
boding discovers us to ourselves for the first
time, and which, in the throes of our heart of
hearts, seems to give a new birth to every drop
of blood in our veins. In such a state, we may
imagine, it was that he sang this: Non so d’onde
viene—not as a musician, not as an artist, but
urged thereto by that powerful, irresistible im-
pulse of the heart which, in the last instance,
begets in us all our truest life. And as Pygma-
lion, in a fit of such fiery ardor, moved the marble
NON so D’ONDE VIENE. 81
so Mozart melted in this first fire of the fullest
and most human offeelings, the elemental sub-
stances of all music, and gave it what it hither-
to had possessed only in isolated cases and acci-
dentally, an impression full of Soul, a meaning
to its every tone.
It is hard to find before Mozart, except it be
in national melodies, anything of this living,
animated, thoroughly personal expression of
feeling, such as we possess in this Non so d’onde
viene. It is like Aloysia's picture itself. Here
we find a language plainer and more univers-
ally intelligible than words. It charms and
enchants us; looks us in the face; speaks to us
with an expression as if we alone were address-
ed. This is the highest, the very highest effect
of art, and this the time when it becomes a
second, an ideal, a transfigured life. The lan-
guage which Mozart thus acquired for his art,
he never forgot or dropped. He embellished
it, amplified it, deepened it, until he reached
that expression of the soul in which, like the
melody in the Magic Flute, the soul itself
stands face to face with its Creator, and in the
calmness of its bliss, feels that it is “the image
of God,” and His portion forever.
6
82 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
We here close the account of Mozart's inner
awakening. We may now compare with his
first heart-trials his first intellectual exploits,
the very beginning of which was this aria, Non
so d’onde viene, to write which he was inspired
by his love for Aloysia Weber.
CH A PT EIR III.
1779–1781.
IDOMENEO.
New Disappointments—Opposition of the Abbe Vogeler—
Mozart and the Poet Wieland–Wieland's Impressions of
Mozart—German Opera and Joseph II.—The Weber Fam-
ily—Aloysia Weber—Mozart's Plans—His Father Opposes
them and his Attachment for Aloysia–Mozart's Music and
Heart-trials—In Paris–Disappointments there—Contrast
Between Parisian and German Life at this Time—New In-
trigues Against Him—Invited Back to Salzburg—“Faith-
less "Aloysia–Meeting of Father and Son—Reception in
Salzburg—“King Thamos "–Character of Mozart's Music
Composed at this Time—Invitation to Compose the Id-
omeneo—Success of that Opera—Effect of the Idomeneo
on the Italian Opera.
MOZART's way is henceforth through the tor-
tuous paths of life. Disappointment after dis-
appointment meets him. He becomes familiar
with suffering and sorrow, but they point him
to a higher goal than that of mere immediate
success. The severest trials of his affections
broaden his heart and make room in it for in-
terests other than his own—an effect which
unveils the real worth of the artist.
(83)
84 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
It would be a great mistake to suppose that
Mozart, at this time, was completely entangled
| in the meshes of love. He did not forget his
| high vocation, and even in this affair of the
' heart, his art had no small influence. He
writes to his father: “My dear miss Weber
has done herself and me credit beyond expres-
sion, by this aria. All said that they were
never moved by an aria as they were by that
one. But then she sang it as it should be sung.”
And yet she “had learned the aria by herself.”
and sang it “in accordance with her own taste.”
How well that taste must have been already
cultivated, and what a good teacher the young
composer must have been! But does not Pla-
ten sing:
“Mein Herz und deine Stimme
Werstehn sich gar zu gut!”
Aloysia, in later years, contributed more
than any other vocalist to make the world ac-
quainted with Mozart's music and to teach peo-
ple to understand it. And this was necessary.
For, even Mozart's melodies, which seem to us
now so easily and so universally intelligible,
found it, in their own day, and this not unfre-
*My heart and thy sweet voice, dear,
Understand each other too well—too well,
HIS LETTERS. 85
quently, no easy matter to hold their own; and
it was only very gradually that they were given
the preference over the incomparably more
languid melodies of the time, especially over
the florid style of the Italians.
Even now, he had in this successful effort,
the hoped-for opera in Mannheim, mainly in
view; which would thus and through his own
efforts have a prima donna as well as a first
tenor. But even here his hopes were destined
to disappointment. We cannot now enter into
details, but must refer the reader to Mozart's
letters to his father. They afford us a true
picture of the culture, musical and other, of a
small German court of that period, which had
a very decisive influence on German art.
From these letters we learn, first of all, that
the real object of his visit was kept steadily in
view. They tell us of his plans, and give us
detailed accounts of his industry in his art,
with here and there an outburst of the un-
known feeling that animated him. Mozart,
who was so fond of doing nothing but “spec-
ulating and studying:” that is, who loved to
live only for art and in art, diligently endeav-
ors to find Scholars to instruct and tasks i
86 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
composition of every description, even for the
flute, for which he had so little liking. He
has still a firm faith in the intention of the elec-
tor to charge him with the composition of at
least one German opera. He had heard an
opera of that kind—“Guenther von Schwarz-
burg,” by Holzbauer—here in Mannheim, and
what would he not have been able himself to
produce with artists like Raaff, his own Weber,
and the celebrated Mesdames Wendling, under
the leadership of a Cannabich! At all events
he here learned what might be expected of a
good orchestra, just as he had previously learn-
ed in Italy how to write for song.
When, now, Mozart's prospects for an opera
were becoming obscured—we have no certain
information as to the causes of this, but may
safely assume that the well-known abbe Vog-
ler, Capellmeister, in Mannheim, Mozart's life-
long opponent and even enemy, was not with-
out influence here—and there was little prom-
ise of the realization of his hopes, it would
have been very natural that he should think of
pursuing his journey further, especially as Paris
was now not so far away. Some of the musi-
cians of the orchestra, Wendling, Ramm and
THE POET WIELAND. 87
Lang proposed to him to go there with him in
the Lenten season and give a concert with him.
They thought that their influence would help
him to get orders for all kinds of composition,
and even for an opera. And, to keep him, for
the time being, in Mannheim, spite of his hav-
ing himself written to his father that the elec-
tor did nothing for him, they endeavored to
procure pupils and compositions for him.
Added to this was an event which strongly en-
gaged him to stay, the rehearsal of another
German opera, “Rosamunde,” by Wieland;
and it is of interest to learn what Mozart, with
that frankness which characterized him, had
to say of other celebrated men of that period.
His description of Wieland can scarcely be
called flattering. He describes him a man,
“with a rather childlike voice, looking steadily
through his glasses, with a certain learned
coarseness, and occasionally stupid condescen-
sion.” Yet he excuses the poet because the
people of Mannheim looked upon him as upon
an angel dropped down from heaven. Besides,
Wieland did not yet know the artist himself,
and may, therefore, not have treated him in a
becoming manner. For, soon afterwards, we
88 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
read in one of his letters: “When Herr Wie-
land had heard me twice, he was charmed.
The last time, after paying me all possi-
ble kinds of compliments, he said: ‘It is a
real good fortune for one to have seen you!’—
and he pressed my hand.” -
Wieland had, by his appeal in the “Essay
on the German opera,” in the Deutsche Mer-
kur in 1775, become the principal representa-
tive of those who were endeavoring to create
a German national opera, and thus Mozart's
meeting with him was of the utmost impor-
tance, and had a great influence in promoting
the end contemplated. The performance of
“Rosamunde” was, however, prevented by the
sudden death of the elector, Maximilian III. of
Bavaria, as Karl Theodore had to go to Mu-
nich about New Year's. Still, the idea of
a German opera continued a motive power in
Mozart's soul. He even now writes about the
intention of the Emperor Joseph II. to es-
tablish such an opera in Vienna, and of his
looking seriously about for a young Capell-
meister with a knowledge of the German lan-
guage, one possessed of genius, and able to
produce something entirely new. The man.
THE WENDIIINGS. 89
who was one day to compose the “Elopement
from the Seraglio,” and the “Magic Flute,”
exclaims: “I think that there is there a task
for me.”
At first, nothing came of this, much as Mo-
zart, in his present circumstances, might have
desired such a position. But it had the effect
of changing his plans entirely, and this change
of plans is worthy of more than passing men-
tion, since it was attended by a powerful agita-
tion and perturbation of his whole mind and
heart. Besides, it throws a new light on his
relations to his “dear Weber.”
The father, who confidently believed that
Wolfgang had gone to Paris, and who had giv-
en him excellent advice on every point, telling
him among other things that he would do best
to bring his mother back to Augsburg, Sud-
denly received the information that Wolfgang
was not going to Paris. The Wendlings' way
of living did not please him, he said; they
had “no religion;” besides, he added, he did
not see what he was going to do in Paris; he
was not made to give lessons in music. “I
am,” he goes on, “a composer and born to be a
Capellmeister. I must not bury the talent
|
90 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
|
|
\
\
with which God has so richly gifted me—I
think I may speak of myself in this way with-
out pride—and I would be burying it by tak-
ing so many scholars.”
What was it that he craved ? Why does
he lay so much stress on the talent he pos-
sessed ? He wanted to go to Italy with the
Webers and write operas there, in which the
daughter was to act as prima donna.
He writes: “The thought of being able to
help a poor family without having to do any
injustice to myself is a genuine pleasure,” and,
in these few words, he lays his whole soul
open before us. Possessed by this honest,
benevolent feeling, he is only half conscious of
the wish to be able to remain with the charm-
ing girl and to make her his own at last, by
his ability and his profitable productions as a
composer of Italian operas. Some weeks pre-
viously, he had written to a friend in Salzburg:
“That is another mercenary marriage, a mar-
riage for money. I would not marry in that
way. I want to make my wife happy, and not
to make a fortune by her.” At first they only
intended to give concerts. He tells his father:
“When I travel with him [Weber] I feel just
THE WEBERS. 91
as I used to when I traveled with you. And
that is the reason I am so fond of him; be-
cause, with the exception of his external ap-
pearance, he is just like you. He has your
character and your way of thinking. I did
not need to trouble myself about anything.
Even the mending of my clothes was seen to.
In a word, I was served like a prince. I am
so fond of this distressed family, that I desire
nothing so much as to be able to make them
happy, and perhaps I may be able to do it.”
It was in memory of his triumph in Italy
that he himself counseled going there, and
advised his father that the sooner he renewed
his connections with it the better, so that he
might get a commission for an opera that sea-
son. He would pledge his life that her (Aloy-
sia's) singing would be a credit to him. They
would next visit his home, and Nannerl would
find a companion and friend in Aloysia; for
she had in Mannheim a reputation like that of
Nannerl in Salzburg, her father like his own,
and the whole Weber family a reputation like
the Mozart family’s. “You know,” he con-
cludes, “my greatest and most ardent desire
to write operas. I am jealous, to the extent of
92 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
vexation, of every person who writes one, and
I could cry my eyes out whenever I hear or
See an aria. I have now written to you about
every thing just as I feel in my heart. I kiss
your hands a thousand times, and until death
I remain your most obedient son. W. A. Mo-
zart.”
But the mother secretly added a post-script
to this letter, saying that Wolfgang would sacri-
fice everything for the Webers; that it was
|
true Aloysia sang incomparably well, and that
the Wendlings had never treated her exactly
right, but that the moment he had become
acquainted with the Webers, he changed his
mind about Paris.
Although the prudent father was “almost
beside himself” when he heard of Wolfgang's
plan of roving about the world with strangers,
he begins by laying before him as clearly and
distinctly as possible, how almost entirely use-
less his course had been since he started on
his journey, and by a thousand reasons endea-
voring to make him see plainly the impossi-
bility of carrying out his design. His let-
ter is throughout replete with love for his
child, with moderation and discretion, but he
PATERNAL CHIDING. 93
nevertheless makes full use of his right as a
father, and does not even hesitate to employ
the incisive irony of his nature. He begins
by telling him that he now recognizes his son
only by his goodness of heart and his easy
credulity—one must read this beautiful, long
letter and bear in mind the time and place of
its writing to appreciate it, for it is a monu-
ment to the good sense that ruled in Mozart's
family—that all else is changed, and that for
him happy moments like those he used to have
were passed; that it lay with his son alone to
decide now whether he would gradually ac-
quire the greatest renown ever enjoyed by a
musician—and he owed this to his talents
—or whether, ensnared by the beauty of a
woman, he would die in a room full of suffer-
ing and hungry children. He says: “The
proposition to travel with Mr. Weber and,
mark well, with his two daughters made me
almost run mad.” Thus giddily to play with
one's own and his parents’ honor! And how, he
asks, could a young girl suddenly attain success
in Italy where all the greatest vocalists were to
be found? Besides, just then, war was im-
pending—on account of the Bavarian succes-
94 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
|
f
sion. Moreover, such plans were plans for
small lights, for inferior composers, for daubers
in music. And, at last, he cries out to his son
forcibly enough : “Get thee to Paris. Have
the great about thee. Aut Caesar, aut nihil/
The very thought of seeing Paris should have
kept you from indulging in such foolish
whims.”
When Wolfgang received this letter he be-
came ill, such was its effect upon him. Not
one of his most sacred feelings but was touched
by it—his love, his sense of duty, his honor,
and his pride in his art. On one point alone
his father had said nothing : his love. To
have spoken of it would have been unavailing.
And yet he reminded him of all his changing
inclinations, of his tears for the little Kaiser
girl in Munich, his little episode with “Baesle,”
and his andante for sweet Rosa Cannabich.
And so Wolfgang's childlike feeling bent to
his father's will, and his inexperience, to his
father's tried and tested prudence. He had,
he assured his parents, done all that he had
done, out of devotion to the family, and they
might believe what they liked about him, pro-
vided they did not believe anything bad of
IN PARIS AGAIN. 95
him, for he was “a Mozart and a well-minded
Mozart.” And at last, the full sun of confid-
ing love breaks out again : “After God, my |
papal This was my motto as a child, and I
am true to it yet.” J
Preparations were immediately made for his
departure, and, after a little, Mozart was in
Paris. The sonata for the piano in A minor,
which bears the date “Paris, 1778,” tells us
by its energetic rhythm and the passionate la-
ment of the finale, better than all else, what
was going on, at that time, in Mozart's soul.
It is the most direct language of a heart bowed
down with Sorrow, and discloses to us, just as
the aria Non so d’onde viene did, a short time
before, a region newly conquered to poetic ex-
pression, in tones. And, indeed, we find that
Mozart's character had noticeably matured af-
ter these first struggles with his beloved father,
The sudden death of his mother in Paris con-
tributed largely to intensify and elevate this,
his earnestness of mind. Upon its heels fol- |
lowed the painful disappointment, that his
love for the beautiful Aloysia was a mortal
one, and he had, at last, though with great
difficulty, to overcome himself and return to .
96 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
Salzburg, which he so thoroughly hated. Such
are the events and experiences which lead us to
the first real master-piece of our artist, to his
Idomeneo. We shall meet again in his later
years with the traces of the trials of these
days in Mannheim, and especially of the full
recognition of the worth of a father's control-
|ling love, as he then most decidedly experi-
enced it.
To continue our narrative. His father
writes: “I have no, no not the least want of
confidence in you, my dear Wolfgang. On
the contrary, I have every confidence in your
filial love. On you I base all my hopes.
From the bottom of my heart, I give you a
father's blessing, and remain until death your
faithful father and your surest friend.” Such
was the parting salutation he received from
home, when starting on his journey to a for-
eign land. And Wolfgang himself writes:
“I must say that all who knew me parted with
me reluctantly and with regret.” Aloysia
had, “from goodness of heart,” knit a little
memento for him. They all wept when their
“best friend and benefactor departed.” He
says: “I must ask your pardon, but the tears
ITALIAN OPERA. 97
rush to my eyes when I think of it.” Be-
sides, there was now “neither rhyme nor rea-
son ’’ with him in anything. He had, how-
ever, done his father's will, and this was some
consolation to him. He soon learned that
Raaff had come to Paris; and what pleased
him more, Raaff promised to take care of his
dear Aloysia's future.
In Paris, he met scarcely anything but dis-
comfort and disappointment. The style of
Parisian music did not please him. The Ital-
ian arias were distorted and the indigenous,
whining in singing grated on his musical feel-
ings which craved above all the charm of the
beautiful. And yet it was at this time, in
Paris, that there was a decided controversy
between two schools of music; between the
disciples of Gluck and Piccini.
We saw above that, in the Italian opera,
melody, the florid style (Coloratur) and vocal
virtuosity became predominant. But the
French had developed their opera independ-
ently. Action and a corresponding musi-
cal recitation in keeping with the words, were
considered by them its chief features. The
German Gluck at this point began his work in
7
98 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
France. He was guided here by his own good
sense; and by theoretical demonstrations he
proved the weakness of the Italian style. He
had already turned his attention to the sub-
lime tragedies of the Greeks, and captivated
Paris by his Iphigenia in Aulis. But as the
great mass always favors trifles and the fash-
ion, this innovation was soon confronted by a
formidable opposition, which after all was only
a further development of the national French
opera. Contrary to the usual French custom,
and misled by Rousseau's influence, the Italian
opera was put above the nation's own, and a
foreigner, the Neapolitan Piccini, called to
Paris to retaliate on Gluck.
We know now who came off the victor in this
struggle. Mozart's feelings ranged him, at first,
on the Italian side—that is, on that side so far
as music alone was concerned. But his Ger-
man nature told him that the ultimate source
of music lay in that earnestness of feeling and
of intellectual life which is the creator of poe-
try, and above all of tragic poetry; and here
\the Italians were altogether too superficial to
satisfy him. And, then, he involuntarily fa-
vored the earnest endeavors of the French
PARISIAN INIFE. 99
opera, much as he disliked the French music
of the time. And, indeed, the whole mode of
the really historic life of Paris, contrasted with
the political wretchedness of Germany and
Italy, must have made a forcible impression on
his mind, spite of his many disagreeable expe-
riences there, and of the many inconveniences
and troubles he had to put up with. And,
more than all else, the high regard in which
the stage, at that time, was held, in France,
did not escape his observation. It made a de-
cided and lasting impression on his mind. In
his letters, he subsequently made particular
mention of the fact that the clown was ban-
ished even from the comic opera there. It
was not, indeed, until he was about to leave
Paris, that he became conscious of this greater,
richer, more vigorous life, of a life such as
was evidenced ten years later by the great
Revolution. But the fact remains that he did
become conscious of it, and, as a consequence,
his artistic taste and aims acquired greater
fixedness and value. This was Mozart's gain
from his stay in Paris at this time. It was a
gain of the mind which richly compensated
for his want of pecuniary success.
100 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
The detailed account of this sojourn in Paris
is to be found in Mozart's own letters. It is a
very vivid one, very clear, and the language
used is frequently very strong. The letters
themselves constitute a piece of the history of
the art, and culture of the Paris of the time.
The death of his mother, the result of a way of
living to which she was not used and of great
depression of spirits, had a very sad effect on
his mind. But when he saw that he had no
need to worry, at least about his father, he felt
greatly encouraged, and the prospect of writing
an opera for Paris infused new life into the
sluggish blood of our young artist. A cheering
evidence of this is to be found in the so-called
French symphony which he wrote just at this
time; and we can see what purely external
cause it was that gave it its peculiarly lively
tone. It was the character of the French them-
selves, with their peculiar love of life and of the
external. All his hearers were carried away
by a lively passage of this kind in the very be-
ginning, but in the finale he took the liberty
with his ingenuous musical audience to crack
a joke like that subsequently played by Haydn
in London, by the beating of the kettle-drum
CAMBINI. 101
suddenly to attract the attention of the listeners.
Contrary to the custom usual in Paris, he had
two violins to begin to play piano, immediate-
ly followed by a forte. When they were play-
ing piano a sound of sh-sh-sh—called for a
dead silence; but “the moment his audience
heard the forte, they broke out into hand-clap-
ping and applause.” Thus adroitly and im-
mediately did he employ in Paris the manner
of working up a climax which he had
noticed in Mannheim.
But envy and intrigue still dogged him.
He fairly dazzled the Italian maestro, Cambini,
the very first time he met him. Mozart played
one of Cambini's quartets from memory, and
executed it in such a manner, that the latter
exclaimed: “What a head that man has!”
Cambini, after this, took care that no more
of Mozart's compositions should be performed
in public, and hence he had to resort once
more to the giving of lessons in music, to
make ends meet. This was exceedingly diffi-
cult in Paris, and especially for an artist who,
as he himself wrote at the time, was, so to say,
“sunk in music—one whose thoughts it always
occupied, and who liked to speculate, study
and reflect the live-long day.”
|
102 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
~
/
f
) remained ignorant of them through life. As
A friend whom he had made during his pre-
vious stay in Paris, the encyclopædist, Grimm,
was not of much use to him this time either.
Wolfgang was not the man to see his way in
such a city, or in such society. And Grimm.
wrote to the father that his son was too true-
hearted, too inactive, too easily captivated, too.
/little versed in the arts which lead to success.
| This, indeed, was Mozart's character. He
knew little of the ways of the world, and he
nothing came of his prospects to write an
opera, his father could not but wish that he
might leave Paris entirely, which, after his
mother's death, he considered a dangerous
place for him.
Wolfgang had turned his eyes towards Mu-
- nich, where Karl Theodor was now elector.
But the war still kept everything in a state of
stagnation there. In the meantime, a vacan-
cy occurred in Salzburg itself. A Cappell-
meister was needed in that city. Many a hint
had been given the father previously, on an-
other occasion, when a vacancy was created by
death. Now he was appealed to again, at
first in a round-about way and then directly.
ALOYSIA. 103
And what was the bait he held out to his son?
Aloysia! The archbishop wanted a primadonna,
also, and Wolfgang had already urged his father
to take an interest in her welfare. He did
not, at first, agree to the arrangement, but
when it was certainly decided that he could
have the position and was sure of more be-
coming treatment than he had formerly re-
ceived there, and, when he heard that Miss
Weber was very ardently desired by the
prince and by all, his hatred for Salzburg and
its hard and unjust archbishop abated. But
without the positive assurance that he would
be granted leave of absence to travel, an as-
surance which he received, he would not have
been completely satisfied; for, he writes: “A
man of only ordinary talent, always remains
ordinary, whether he travel or not ; a man of
superior talent, and it would be wicked in me
to deny that I possess such talent, deterior-
ates by remaining always in the same place.”
But, in the meantime, Aloysia found a
place in Munich. Mozart learned this fact
before his departure, and all his aversion for
Salzburg was again suddenly awakened. Paris
again stood out before him, a place in which
104 THE LIFE OF MOZART, *
|
he would certainly have “earned honor, fame
and money, and where he would have been
able to free his father from debt.” He now
thought of getting a place once more in Mu-
nich himself, for he had recently learned
again how much the girl loved him. Rumors
of his death had been put in circulation, and
the poor child had gone to church every day
to pray for him. Writing of this incident, he
says: “You will laugh, I can not; it touches
me, and I can’t help it.” But this was a seri-
ious matter with the father. His own place, as
# well as his daily bread, was certainly at stake
now, if Wolfgang retreated!
The journey was proceeded with this time
slowly. And, indeed, what cause was there
for haste? He made a long stay in Strass-
burg and Mannheim, and entered into some
negotiations there about the composition of a
melodrama. “On receipt of this you shall
take your departure,” was the positive order
sent him; and yet there was “a real scramble”
for him at Mannheim. His father consoles
him by assuring him that he is not at all op-
posed to his love for Aloysia, and this all
the less, since now she was able to make his
ALOYSIA. 105
fortune, not he hers l While on his journey,
Mozart had invited “Baesle” also to Munich,
adding: “You will, perhaps, get a great part
to play.”
But, strange!—Aloysia does not seem, when
he enters, to recognize the very man for whom
she once had wept. Mozart, therefore, seated
himself hastily at the piano, and sang aloud:
“Ich lass das Maedl gern, das mich nicht will!”.'
This was told by Aloysia's younger sister,
Constance, who was afterwards Mozart's wife,
to her second husband, and she gave as the
reason of it, the fact that Aloysia's taste was
offended because, following the custom of the
time, he wore black buttons, in mourning for
his mother, on his red coat. It may be, how-
ever, that the officers and gentlemen of the
court pleased the prima donna better than the
littleman whose heart-tones had once entranced
her. This time also, he left the faithless one a
gift, a composition of his own, not, however,
one which sprung from his heart, but one
which showed his power as an artist. The
aria which he now wrote for her, Popopoli di
Tessaglia, discovers to us completely the full
* “I gladly leave the maiden who does n’t care for me.”
106 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
meaning of his Non so d’onde viene, in his own
life.
Aloysia was not happy. We shall have
more to say of this hereafter. Mozart did not,
at this time, weep away his grief in tones.
His pride vanquished his love. But his let-
ters depict the state of his mind all the more
truly, now that the hopes he had entertained
of obtaining a position in Munich turned to
smoke. Still, his present sojourn in Munich
was destined to lead soon to a very important
event in his life as an artist. He regrets that
he cannot write, because his heart is attuned to
weeping. A friend told the father that
Wolfgang cried for a whole hour, spite of all
efforts to dry his tears. And, writing of
Mozart's beautiful inner self, he says: “I
never saw a child with more tenderness and
love for his father than your son. His heart
is so pure, so child-like to me, how much
more pure and tender must it be for his father!
Only, one must hear him ; and who is, there
that would not do him justice as the best of
characters, the most upright and most ardent
of men!” We think we hear the sounds of
the well-spring from which the tones of the
EIATRIED FOR SALZBURG. 107
*--a
Idomeneo and the aria of the Ilia were soon to
flow.
The meeting of father and son could not
fail to be a very touching sight. To form an
idea of their feelings on that occasion, one
must read the letter written by the father, af-
ter he received the news of the mother's ill-
ness. Wolfgang came home immediately, but
he came without her, the dearly beloved wife
and mother. Every one received him with
open arms; but he had already written :
“Upon my oath and upon my honor, I say I
can not endure Salzburg or its people; their
language and their whole mode of life is un-
bearable to me;” and the chief cause of his
feeling thus lay in his art. He said later:
“When I play in Salzburg, or when one of my
compositions is produced there, I feel as if
only chairs and tables were my listeners.”
After this, it is easy to understand why Salz-
burg was not to his taste. He says: “When
one has trifled away his young years in such
a beggarly place, in inaction, it is sad enough,
and besides, a great loss.”
“Baesle’s” merriness helped him to while
away the first week of his second stay in his
108 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
dull native city, in the beginning of 1779. But
her simple ways could not now make her what
she was to him, when he was less matured in
mind and heart. His work was his most agree-
able pastime, and, spite of everything, produc-
tions of the most varied nature written during
his sojourn in Salzburg, afford very abundant
proof of this. The symphonies he now wrote
were, indeed, greatly excelled by others which
he subsequently composed, and the masses
eclipsed by his great requiem. But the music
to a tragedy, “King Thamos,” has a sound so
full and so appeals to the soul, that we feel the
presence in it of the greater life-trials he had
experienced. And hence it is that Mozart was
subsequently able to adapt its choruses to other
words, and to introduce them to the world as
“hymns.” Their tone reminds us of the solemn,
serious choruses of the “Magic Flute,” the drift
of which was followed also in the matter of the
drama. The composition of these works was
due to Schikaneder, of whom we shall have
something more to say when speaking of the
“Magic Flute.” He was, at this time, director
of the theater at Salzburg, and Mozart receiv-
ed an order to write a comic opera for him.
THE “IDOMENEO.” 109
This was the “Zaide” and the plot embraced a
tale of abduction. Its composition was fast
drawing to a close when, at last—it was in the
fall of 1780—he saw signs of redemption from
his captivity. He received an invitation to
compose an opera for Munich. It was the
Idomeneo, and its success sealed Mozart's fate
for all subsequent time. With the exception
of a short visit paid there, he never saw
Salzburg again.
The subject of this work is the old story of
Jephtha's vow. The scene, however, is trans-
ferred to Crete, whither its king Idomeneus,
returns after the destruction of Troy. In a
frightful storm which occurred during his
journey, he vows to Neptune the first human
being he shall meet. The victim is his own
son, Idamante. Idomeneus wishes to send
him away into a foreign country. But Nep-
tune causes a still greater storm to rage and
the whole country to be devasted by a monster.
The people meet and hear of the vow that
Idomeneus has made. When Idamante him-
self who, in the meantime, had slain the mon-
ster, is informed of his fate, he is ready to ap-
pease the anger of the god. Whereupon,
110 THE LIFE OF MOZART,
Ilia, who loves him, throws herself between him
and his father, and asks that she may suffer
death in his place. But just as she casts herself
on her knees, “a great subterraneous noise is
heard, Neptune's statue trembles on its base.
The high priest is transported out of himself,
all stand motionless with fear, and a deep ma-
jestic voice proclaims the will of the god:” that
Idomeneus shall abdicate the throne, and that
Idamante and Ilia happily united shall ascend
it.
It is easy to see that we have here great and
grave situations in the life of human creatures.
Mozart knew how to do them justice. He
grasped their very kernel and allowed that
which was only of secondary importance to
remain secondary. The whole, although taken
from a French libretto, had been, according to
the custom of the Italian opera of the time,
broken up into a great many fragments for the
purposes of music, and among them we find,
especially, a large number of arias; and hence
it did not satisfy true dramatic taste. But
even these disjointed pieces, it mattered not
whether they gave expression to sorrow, terror,
tenderness or joy, united to or mixed with one
MOZART's SKILL. 111
another—were always full of what they were
intended to express, and were, not unfrequent-
ly, overflowing with musical beauty. It was
only when he conceded, too much to the in-
competence or narrowness of singers, that
any sacrifice was made to the traditional
form and sing-song of the Italians. But
there were in the plot, and they were
its chief part, some powerful scenes, suscepti-
ble of really dramatic presentation ; and here
Mozart demonstrated that he was a great mas-
ter of the stage, and that he had adopted
Gluck's innovations not to allow the singers
and their florid style, but the music to govern,
and the music as the highest expression of the
poetry, that is of the dramatic scene which is
performing. Mozart's own letters give us
many details of great interest in this connec-
tion.
He again met his Mannheim artists, singers
as well as the orchestra—all but Aloysia, who
had been called a short time previously, to
the national operatic theatre in Vienna—in
Munich, and he was therefore well prepared
to go to work. And he was anxious to do so,
for it was a long time since he had an oppor-
112 TEIE LIFE OF MOZART.
tunity to show his full powers on the stage.
He felt happy, nay, delighted, since his arrival.
He lived in the Burggasse. A bronze tablet
bearing his portrait has since been placed on
the house in which he lived. The elector
greeted him most graciously, and when Mo-
zart gave expression to the peculiar ardor he
felt, he tapped him on the shoulder and said:
“I have no doubt whatever; everything will
be well.” Every one was delighted and aston-
ished at the rehearsal of the first act. Much
had been expected of him, but the perform-
ance surpassed all expectation. Frau Can-
nabich, who had been obliged to remain at
home with her sick daughter, Rose, embraced
him, so overjoyed was she at his success; and
the musicians went home almost crazed with
delight. The hautboyist Ramm, with whom
Beethoven played his quintet op. 16, in
1804, told him on his word as a true son of
the fatherland, that no music had ever made
such an impression on him—referring to the
double choruses during Idomeneus's shipwreck
—and what joy would it bring to his father
when he heard of it!
The latter cautioned him from home to také
HIS WIEWS ON MUSIC. 113
care of himself. He knew his son. And, in-
deed, Wolfgang had a slight attack of illness
at this time. He writes ingenuously enough :
“A man gets easily over-heated when honor
or fame is at stake.” But he was soon well
again, and able to write: “A person is indeed
glad when he is at last done with so great and
so toilsome a piece of work; and I am almost
done with it; for, all that is wanting now is
two arias, the final chorus, the overture, the
ballet—and adieu partie.” The father had
reminded him not to forget to make his music
popular. It was the “popular ’’ in music that
tickled the long-eared. Wolfgang replied
that there was music in his opera for all kinds
of people, the long-eared excepted. And in-
deed the work contained ballet-interludes,
and besides the most popular of all kinds of
music, the dance. Mozart's genius permitted
him, as we have seen, to make many a con-
cession to the peculiarities of the singers, spite
of the gravity of the subject. But where this
same gravity was paramount, as in the quar-
tet of the third act, he had trouble enough.
The oftener he put it on the stage, the greater
was the effect it produced on himself, and it
|
8
114 THE LIFE OF MOZART,
was liked by all, even when only played on
the piano. Raaff alone found it too long, and
not easy enough to sing.
Mozart replied to his objections: “If I only
knew a single note that could be changed! But
I have not been as well satisfied with anything
in this opera as with the quartet;” and Raaff
was himself afterwards, as he said, “agreeably
disappointed ;” and just as delighted were the
four musicians: Wendling, Ramm, Ritter and
Lang, who had an obligato accompaniment to
the aria of Ilia, in the first act, and who were
thus given an opportunity to appreciate Mo-
zart's skill; for it was the profound rapture
that comes from joy and love which was here
to be expressed in music. And as Mozart
had once given expression to that rapture in
his Non so d’onde viene, he again gave it a
voice in the premature evening of his life in
the aria :
Dies Bildniss ist bezaubernd schoem."
The aria of Ilia reminds us of both. But the
quartet is the crowning glory of Gluck's en-
deavor to allow each singer to express himself, at
every moment, as far as possible, in accordance
* “This picture is charmingly beautiful,”
THE “IDOMENEO.” 115
with his own individuality. Even in Mozart's
works, we find little like it; and at that time
such musical wealth was entirely new and un-
heard of.
The elector said laughingly, after the thun-
der-storm in the second act: “One would not
think that that small head could carry so
much.” And then the choruses, when the
people, during the storm, utter their cry of
horror! The members of the orchestra said
that this chorus could not but freeze the blood
in one's veins. And yet the third act was in-
comparably richer. Mozart himself says:
“There is scarcely a scene which is not ex-
ceedingly interesting,” and that “his head
and hands were so full of it that it would be
no wonder if he were to become the third act
himself.” He thinks, however, that it would
prove as good as the first two. He says: “but
I believe infinitely better, and that it may be
said: Finis coronat opus (the end crowns the
work). For the address of the high priest on
the sufferings of the people, caused by the
sea monster, the solemn march, and the oracle
itself, Gluck's Alceste may have served as a
model. The magnitude of these tragic ele-
116 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
ments at least were well understood; and no
one can, even to-day, remain unmoved by
these tones. But it became also a school of
the genuine dramatic style in music; and the
orchestration was the best that Mozart had
produced. From it, all who followed him
learned the best they knew.
Of the presentation of the opera itself on
the stage, in January, 1781, we have no de-
tailed information. But the impression made
by it must have been in keeping with that
created by the rehearsals. That the Idomeneo
lives now only in the concert hall, is due to the
Italian words, which interrupt the acting at
almost every step. Mozart put an end to the
absolute rule of the Italian opera by his Ido-
meneo. It henceforth had only a national
character. Mozart compelled the composers
of opera, from this time forward, to take
another course, and to comply with Gluck's
demands, which have lifted the opera of our
age to the height of the genuine drama.
But the first and fully decisive steps in this
direction, were the Figaro and Don Giovanni.
We now turn to them. The Idomeneo, as it
was Mozart's first master-peace, monumental
THE “IDOMENEO.” 117
in its style, constituted, together with the op-
eras which followed it, the transition to an en-
tirely new epoch in his life, to the period of
his complete independence, both as an artist
and as a man.
C H A P T E R IV.
1781–1787. *
THE ELOPEMENT FROM THE SERAGLIO—FIGARO–
DON GIO WANNI.
Opinions on the Idomeneo—Tired of Salzburg–Goes to Vienna
—The Archbishop Again—Mozart Treated by him with
Indignity—Paternal Reproaches—Assailed by Slander—
He Leaves Salzburg—Experiences in Vienna—Austrian
Society—The German Stage—The Emperor Expresses a
wish that Mozart might Write a New Opera—Mozart's
Love for Constance Weber—Description of Constance—
Performance of the New Opera—Mozart's Marriage—
The Emperor's Opinion of Mozart's Music—Mozart's In-
terest in the Figaro–Particulars Relating to its Compo-
sition—Its Success—Mozart's Poverty — Mozart in Bo-
hemia—His Popularity in Prague—Meaning of the Don
Giovanni–Richard Wagner on Mozart.
WE are told that Mozart, even in his later
years, prized the Idomeneo very greatly, and
it is certain that connoisseurs have always
entertained a very high opinion of its music.
It combines the freshness of youth, great
force and vitality, with a great variety in in-
vention, and has all the characteristics of art.
It is easy to conceive that the consciousness of
(118)
DISSATISFACTION. 119
being the possessor of so much power, espec-
ially while he was engaged on the work itself,
made Mozart's bosom swell, and that in such
moments the memory of the narrowness and
“chicanery’ of Salzburg must have been ex-
ceedingly mortifying to him. “Out! out in-
to the wide world and into the air of free-
dom!”—he must have heard now ringing in
his ears as he had four years before. And
had not Vienna, at that time the capital of
Germany, intellectually advanced, and had
not the Emperor Joseph, established a nation-
al opera there? .
As early as in December 1780, he had writ-
ten to inquire how it stood about his leave of
absence. He told his father that he was in
Salzburg only to please him, and that, most as-
suredly, if it depended on him, he would have
scorned the place; for, he adds, “upon my
honor, the prince and the proud nobility be-
come more intolerable to me every day.” It
would now, he said, be easy for him to get on
in Munich without the protection of the great,
and it brought the tears to his eyes when he
thought of the state of things in Salzburg. Yet
he could stay longer than his leave of absence
120 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
allowed him; for the archbishop remained
some time in Vienna on business, and thus
Mozart found leisure, after the opera was com-
pleted, to rest in Munich and to participate in
the pleasures of the carnival, while otherwise
his greatest diversion would have been to be
with his beloved Rose and the Cannabichs.
In the midst of this youthful jollity, which
seems very natural after the great strain upon
the minds of all during many months, he re-
ceived the archbishop's order to repair to:
Vienna. This was in the middle of March,
1781. Jerome was witness of the ostentation
of the princes in that city; and what reason
was there why his “illustrious grace” should
not cut a figure also? His eight handsome
roan horses were there already. The members
of his household followed him, and who was.
there who, in the music at a feast, had a Mo-
zart to show 2 Thus did our artist unexpect-
edly realize his wish to come to Vienna; and
circumstances so had it, that he remained
there.
His reception was a good one. He had in-
deed, as was the custom of the time, to sit at
table with cooks and valets de chambre, but.
MALTREATMENT. 121:
these he kept at a proper distance by “great
gravity” and silence. Yet even now we hear
that the archbishop was only giving himself
airs with his attendants; for when an opportu-
nity presented itself for Mozart to show his
powers, in other noble houses, the archbishop
refused him permission to do so; and still, it
was only in such houses, that he could expect
to meet the Emperor Joseph-a circumstance
on which everything now depended. Rather
did this domineering ecclesiastic do all in his
power to make Mozart feel his dependence
more keenly. The father did all he could to
appease him, but Wolfgang felt that the arch-
bishop used him only to tickle his own ambi-
tion; that, in all other respects, that worthy
served only to hide his light. Besides he
had to stand about the room like a servant.
Yet Mozart tells us how, at a performance at
prince Galizin's, he had left the other musi-
cians entirely, and how he had gone directly
up to the host in the music room, and remain-
ed with him. Nothing was paid him for his
compositions for the archbishop's soirées.
Mozart, indeed, helped to lendeclat to a con-
cert for the widows of deceased musicians in
122 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
the Haydn Society, because “all the nobility
of Vienna had tormented the archbishop to
permit him to do so.” But his grace would
not allow him to give a concert for his own
benefit, spite of the fact that he had been re-
ceived so well. The hardest blow of all to
our artist was the news that he would have
to go back to Salzburg with the rest. He
at first paid no attention to intimations of this
nature, for he wanted to give a concert before
he left. He had, besides, a prospect of a posi-
tion in the imperial city itself. But his fath-
er at home would agree to nothing.
Mozart now writes “in natural German,
because all the world should know it,” that
the archbishop owed it entirely to his father
that he did not lose him yesterday, for all time.
He had been annoyed altogether too much at
the concert yesterday. After a little, dissen-
sion broke out in earnest. “I am out of my-
self. My patience has been tried so long that
it is at an end.” The archbishop had, even
before this, called him “a low fellow,” and
told him to go his way. Mozart bore it for
his father's sake. Then he was ordered sud-
denly to leave the house, and he went to old
THE ARCHIBISHOP. 123
Madame Weber's, and had to live at his own
expense. He, therefore, did not want to go
until this outlay at least was made up for.
“Well, fellow, when do you go?” snarl-
ingly asked this prince spiritual, and he then
proceeded, in a single breath, to tell him that
he was a dissipated fellow, that no one used
him so badly, and that he would stop his pay.
We scarcely believe our ears when we hear a
prince-bishop call our artist a Scamp, a young
blackguard, an idiot! Wolfgang's blood be-
came too hot at last, and he asked whether his
illustrious grace was not satisfied with him.
“What? Threats 2 You idiot | There’s
the door l I will have nothing more to do
with such a miserable villain.”
“Nor I with you.”
“Then go!”
Such was the dialogue between a prince and
an artist of the past century ! It tells us
something of its culture and civilization. Mo-
zart's account of this scene concludes: “I
will hear no more of Salzburg. I hate the
archbishop even to madness.”
But this was not the worst. “I did not
know,” says Mozart, “that I was a valet de
124 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
chambre ; that overcame me entirely; and
my father should be glad that he has not a
man dishonored for his son.” But now syco-
phantic flunkies began to busy themselves
with the affair. They knew that the arch-
bishop did not like to lose an artist whom
such efforts had been made, before his eyes, to
retain in Vienna. The master of the house-
hold, Count Arco, therefore, did everything
that in him lay to quiet the matter. He re-
fused, “from lack of courage and a love of
adulation,” to accept Mozart's petition for dis-
missal. But when the latter insisted on it,
with a brutality not unworthy of his master,
Arco threw the noble artist out the door—
with a kick!
After his personal audience with the arch-
bishop, Mozart's blood boiled; he trembled
from head to foot and reeled on the street like a
drunken man. Now he assures us that, when
he meets the count, he will pay him back the
compliment he received from him. In the
ante-chamber he did not, like Arco himself,
wish “to lose his respect for the prince's apart-
ments,” but then he was determined that “the
hungry donkey should get an answer from him
PATERNAL CHIDING. 125
that he would feel,” even if it were twenty
years before a suitable occasion presented it-
self to give it. And when his father recoiled
at the boldness of such an attempt, our young
artist gave expression to a sentiment which
lifted him high above all that environed him,
and stamps him one of the noblest representa-
tives of human nature. We have chosen that
sentiment as the motto of this his biography:
“The heart is man's title to nobility!”
More painful than all these insults to the
manly honor of our young artist were the heart-
aches caused him by the very person who
should have understood him best, by his own
father.
The latter had been obliged to write to him:
“Do not allow yourself to be misled by flat-
tery. Be on your guard.” Now reproach
was added to mistrust, and Wolfgang was ac-
cused of endangering his father's subsistence,
in his old age. He compared Wolfgang to
Aloysia, who had scarcely secured a good po-
sition in life than she joined her fortunes to
those of a comedian—the celebrated Joseph
Lange—and neglected her own people. He
even went so far as to demand that his son
126 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
should withdraw his petition, adding that he
was in honor bound to do so. There was not
in all of this a single trait by which Mozart
could recognize his father. He could, indeed,
he said, recognize “a father, but not the best,
the most loving of fathers, the father solici-
tous for his own honor and the honor of his
children,_in a word, not my father.” And
he concludes: “Ask me to do anything you
want, anything but that. The very thought
of it makes me tremble with rage.” What
he had achieved made Mozart, as an artist,
manful and sure of himself; and these suffer-
ings had a similar effect on him as a man;
but, compared with the latter troubles, all
that he had previously undergone was light
indeed. We know how deeply and fully Wolf-
gang loved his father; but to understand his
state of mind at this trying time, one must
read the father's own letters. He reproaches
his son, even with a want of love, with being
a pleasure-seeker in the great city, and with
keeping company with the frivolous! The
slanders of strangers and the father's own sus-
picions conspired to make things worse; and
in the circulation of these slanders, a pupil of
HE IS SILANDERED, 127
the abbe Vogler, J. P. Winter, subsequently
known by his Unterbrochemes Opfer:fest, play-
ed a leading part. The way in which Mozart
repelled these slanders, lays his whole heart
open before us. It was what might have
been expected of one whose art was so thor-
oughly pure and peaceful. He says, with the
utmost modesty and simplicity: “My chief
fault is that, appparently, I do not act as I
should act; ” and in answer to all other sland-
ers, he replies, with the most charming º
sciousness of self: “I need only consult my
reason and my heart to do what is right and
just.”
Thus was Mozart's relations with Salzburg,
which had never brought him much happiness
or honor, dissolved for all time. He lost, it is
true, by this dissolution, the loving confidence
of his father; but painful as this loss was to
him, it was not without compensation. He
obtained personal freedom and conquered for
himself a place in which his already highly de-
veloped individuality as an artist was at liberty
to act, room for the workings of his creative
genius. This and his love and marriage, which
put him in possession of something which he
128 TEIB. LIFE OF MOZART.
could permanently call his own, are further de-
cisive events in our artist's life. We shall see
their effects on his art, and, in the creation of
such magnificent works as the “Elopement
from the Seraglio,” “Figaro” and “Don Giov-
anni.” His recent personal experience had
| given him that insight and that inward free-
dom without which his towering, life-experi-
enced style and his supreme power of depicting
character are impossible.
The time and place were favorable to the
production of such works. And it was not
simply the oppressive feeling of the humiliating
and narrowing circumstances of his position
hitherto, but the joyful consciousness that, as
his genius Soon perceived, he was at last in the
place in the world best suited to his taste, in
Vienna, that this time caused him to conceive
and hold fast to his desire. Und wenn die
Welt voll Teufel waer/ —“And though the
world were full of devils!"—we may discover
something of the desperate resolution which
these words imply, in his struggle at this time
with his dearest of fathers; a resolution gener-
ated, doubtless, by the circumstances in which
he now saw himself suddenly and accidentally
LIFE IN VIENNA. 129
placed, and which were so favorable to his art,
and to a becoming mode of living. He felt
that he had come here to grow to his full sta-
ture; and the instinct of artistic creation, like
the instinct of love, is involuntary and irresist-
ible. The father did not understand this. He
had to be won over by prospects of material
success, and this success Wolfgang was able
confidently to promise himself and his father.
Nor was he wanting here. And if we are
obliged to confess that Mozart, even in the
rich city of Vienna, almost starved, and that
he died before his time, the cause was, in the
first place, that his genius was too great to be
fully appreciated by his contemporaries and
his environment, and then that he was so
wrapped up in his sublime task, that the world
gradually receded from him, and it became an
easy matter for the envious and his enemies to
rob him of the visible fruits of his success, and
|
|
to limit him to the joys and sunshine of his /
art. His art, indeed, throve even in Vienna,
far beyond what he had hoped. It was more
than his contemporaries could appreciate or
understand. And, indeed, where would we be
to-day without Mozart 7 As well as Goethe,
9
130 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
he touched the purest, the ultimate feeling of
beauty in art, and opened to our view the in-
nermost and deepest depths of the human
soul. It was more than all else, Vienna and
Austria that helped him to do this.
During the period, beginning with 1780,
Austria had recovered from the effects of the
wounds it received in the Seven Years' War.
The people were well-to-do, and the rich no-
bles of the eastern provinces, the Esterhazys,
Schwarzenbergs, Thuns and Kinskys left im-
mense amounts of money in the capital. The
state of society was not yet disturbed. The
nobility and middle class lived in harmony
with one another. Above all and dearly loved
by all, sat throned, the Emperor Joseph II., an
ideal Austrian, whose like had not been seen
since the time of Maximilian I. The empe-
ror Joseph was, so to speak, the counterpart,
both in disposition and education, of old Fritz
(Frederick the Great), who was the ablest rep-
resentative at that time of practical German
energy and intelligence. This it was that gave
the Austrian, and above all the Viennese, dis-
position that peculiar character from which
sprang a style of art which had no predecessor
LIFE IN WIBNNA. 13t
and no counterpart that could be called its
equal save in Raphael and the antique—Ger-
man chamber music. Haydn's, Mozart's and
Beethoven's quartets alone sufficed to make
this Viennese period, from 1775 to 1825, a
stretch of fifty years, forever memorable. But
besides, there was the instrumental music of
this brilliant musical triad whom Gluck had
preceded.
Life at this time in Vienna was overflowing
with a warm sensuousness, unpolluted by the
coarseness of vice. Men gave themselves up
unconstrained to their emotions. This itself
is the most natural and most fertile soil for
productions of the mind, intended, primarily,
to operate on the senses, and through the
senses to speak to our heart of hearts and to
our mind of minds. It is the most fitting soil
for art. And hence, we find here the first and
most indispensable of all conditions precedent
to the full bloom of music. Life in the Aus-
trian capital, sunk apparently in sensuousness,
had, like a reflection of the ever brightening
and warming sun, in its depths, that German,
joyous good-nature, that deutsche Gemueth,
that leveling peace, and that beautiful dispo-
132 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
sition which allow every living creature to do
what pleases him best and go his own way.
Added to this was the high degree of educa-
tion which distinguished Vienna at the time,
and which was influenced, in part, by direct
contact with the period of the highest Italian
culture, the renaissance. It had noble houses,
wealthy and refined families of the middle
class and of the learned, and above all, its
emperor —if not in music, in all else the most
nobly cultured! We have only to think of
the other capitals at the time, Paris, London,
and even Berlin, to be convinced that a Gluck,
a Haydn, a Mozart, or a Beethoven, could
never have thrived in any of them. They
thrived in Vienna; and the last two artists
asserted that it was in Vienna only that they
could have thrived, that is developed that
art, the germ's of which they felt themselves
to possess as a talent cofided to them.
We may inquire, more particularly now, how
it stood with music and the theatre in those
days. Many of the great houses had music of
their own; the wealthiest princes had not un-
frequently their private orchestra; other fami-
lies string-quartets or the piano; and the latter
MUSIC IN VIENNA. 133
was, as Ph. E. Bach says, intended for music
that went direct to the heart, and not simply
for children to practice on. No such golden
age of music had been seen since the days of
the North German School for organists, which
had produced that eighth wonder of the world,
Sebastian Bach ; and Beethoven recalled it,
with a feeling of melancholy, when, with the
great wars of the Revolution a desolate period
began, in which men's souls and with them mu-
sic, the soul's own art, were struck dumb. Philip
Emanuel Bach, the younger son of John Se-
bastian Bach, it was, who had led music out
of the stage which had religion for its center,
and opened to it by his sonatas fuer Kenner
wnd Liebhaber, the domain of purely human
thought and feeling. “He is the parent, we
the children,” said Mozart, speaking of him-
self, and J. Haydn. Haydn also made a sim-
ilar admission.
It was these two men indeed, who, so to
speak, gave expression to the whole of human
life in this unrestrained language of music,
and who, together with Beethoven, opened the
hearts of their age and of humanity, by their
Sonatas, symphonies, and quartets. This ex-
134 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
plains why Mozart was able to write that the
ladies detained him at the piano a whole hour
after the concert, adding: “I think I should
be sitting there still, if I had not stolen
away!”
Again, he writes to his sister: “My only
entertainment is the theater. I wish you
could see a tragedy played here. I know no.
theater in which all kinds of plays are very
well produced, unless it be here.” Shroeder
no doubt contributed largely to produce this.
effect. Then Shakespeare's plays had begun
to attract attention in Germany, and German
dramatic literature to blossom forth in Lessing
and Goethe. No wonder that “Figaro” and
“Don Giovanni,” now began to engage his atten-
tion. We have already spoken of a national
German theater. It is not to be supposed that
the Emperor Joseph II. sympathized with the
Germans in music. His early impressions.
caused him to favor the Italian school, and,
cultivated as was his talent for music, it was.
not great enough to enable him to overcome
them. But he was compelled to assist the na-
tion in its endeavors in this sphere, since Fred-
erick the Great had anticipated him in almost
GERMAN OPERA. 135
every other. Thus Vienna, together with
Mannheim and Weimar, constituted the glo-
rious triad, the creators of German music and
of a German stage; and the full significance
of German endeavors, in this direction, may
be inferred from the path of light beginning
with Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” followed by Bee-
thoven's Symphonies, and ending with the
“Ring of the Niebelungen” in Bayreuth in
1876. Verily a cycle of art, of which Ger-
many may well be proud!
Mozart came just in time for the German
operatic stage. Gluck had stopped composing;
his victory was a decided one; he had almost
reached his zenith; he was approaching his
seventieth year. True, his pupil, Salieri, was
the “idol of the emperor;” but he was an Ital-
ian, and the remaining Viennese composers of
the time were of littleorno importance. Haydn,
properly speaking, did not busy himself in
this sphere of the drama, and besides, he lived
the greatest part of the time in Eisenstadt with
prince Esterhazy. Northern Germany had no
longer anything to show of those things which
mark an epoch in history; and, what is more
its preponderantly “learned” or formal music
136 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
would not have pleased the taste of the Vien-
nese. What then could be more natural than
that they should open their arms to the young
maestro who, in a new field, had just given
evidence of his transcendent power 2 And, in-
deed, shortly after Mozart's arrival in Vienna,
the Emperor himself had given expression to a
wish that he might write a German opera of
this kind; and we are informed that after
Count Rosenberg, the manager of the theatre,
had heard the Idomeneo at a private rehearsal,
he ordered the writing of a libretto for Mozart.
This was “Belmonte and Constance,” or the
“Elopement from the Seraglio.” Mozart tells
how he was so cheered by this, that he hasten-
ed to his writing table with the greatest eager-
ness and sat at it with the greatest pleasure.
He finished, at this first sitting, one of the
arias of the Belmonte, and that the most beau-
tiful of them all—the 0 wie aengstlich, o wie
jeurig/ -
The whole matter was postponed for a time,
but to no disadvantage; for, in the meanwhile,
Mozart experienced things which gave him
that wonderful depth of coloring and that
golden, mature sweetness which, besides himself
EIIS MARRIAGE. 137
and Raphael, scarcely another possesses—love
moved him to the innermost depths of his
Soul. This love had as much influence on his
life as on his music. It led to that most decid-
ed union of human hearts, marriage; and hence
we have here to consider this important bit
of the life of our artist, in his case as in all)
others, made up of anguish and bliss.
We have seen already that when Mozart was
compelled to leave the archbishop's palace, he
hastened to the house of the Webers. Of his
removal thither he wrote: “There I have my
pretty room, am with obliging people ready to
assist me in everything, when necessary.” After
the death of her husband, Madame Weber sup-
ported herself by renting rooms, so that her
daughters might remain with her. She lived
in the Auge Gottes, which is still standing in
the Petersplatz. The father's suspicions were
immediately awakened; and Mozart writes in
answer to his expression of them: “In the case
of Aloysia [Lange] I was a fool, but what may
not a man become when he is in love!” For
the present, Mozart was concerned only with
finding comfortable lodging quarters and peo-
ple who might take a personal interest in his
138 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
father and in the devouring anger and sorrow
which possessed him, on account of the course
pursued towards him by the archbishop; and
this interest he found here. And, indeed, now
that he had to compose incessantly in order to
eke out a livelihood, he needed a “clear head
and a quiet mind.” His father, however, in-
sisted on his leaving the Webers, and in the
fall, he finally consented to quit them. But
he greatly deceived himself when he said that
he left them only on account of “the gossip of
the people,” and wanted to know why he should
be so recklessly taken to task, because he had
moved into the house of the Webers, as if that
meant that he was going to marry the daughter.
The tender care which the third daughter
Constance took of him and the disposition she
manifested to do him every service in her pow-
er, generated in him the desire to care for and
serve her, in like manner.
We cannot here enter into the minute de-
tails of the origin and tenacity of this beauti-
ful affair of the heart; and we, therefore, con-
fine ourselves to that which is most essential.
Constance Weber was born in 1764. She
was now in her eighteenth year, and eight
HIS WIFE. 139
years younger than Mozart. She had been
one of his pupils in Munich. He gave her
lessons on the piano then, and now he was
teaching her vocal music as well. Thus Mo-
zart had, on both occasions, an inducement
other than his feelings, to bring him to the
house of the Webers. Music at first threw
him and Constance involuntarily together;
but the language of the soul was destined
Sooner or later to create a more intimate bond
between them. In the evening they had their
little chats; they were joined by friends of
Constance's own sex; and Mozart, in a letter
written long after he was married, tells how
they played “hide and seek” with them.
Then again, a great many circumstances con-
spired to decide him to make choice of a partner
for life. There were his years, and his tem-
perament which inclined him to a quiet mode
of life. From his earliest youth, he had never
been taught economy, and as a consequence
now had many unnecessary expenses. He
felt lonely and desolate, when, tired by the
exhausting labors of the day, he was not with
the Webers. When he left their house in Sep-
tember, he was like a man who has left his
140 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
own comfortable carriage for a stage-coach.
And when, with that instinct which belongs
only to our deepest feelings, he became gradu-
ally conscious that she was “the right one,”
he frankly laid before his father the necessity of
his marrying and his settled purpose to marry.
He writes in December, 1781: “But who is
the object of my love? Do not be horrified, I
pray you. Surely, not one of the Weber girls?
Yes, one of the Weber girls, but not Josepha,
not Sophia but Constance, the middle one.”
And then he gives us a description which
must have been somewhat exaggerated and
colored by his feeling at the time. In no fam-
ily, he tells us, had he found such inequality.
The eldest daughter was lazy and coarse, and
a little too knowing. Her tall sister was false
and a coquette; and yet he had written in the
spring that he had some liking for her. The
youngest, Sophia, of whom we shall have some-
thing to say further on, was still too young to
be much. She was nothing more than a good
but giddy creature. He adds concerning her:
“May God preserve her from temptation 1"
Next comes a description of his dear Con-
stance. He says of her: “The middle
CONSTANCE, 141
daughter, my dear good Constance, is a martyr
among them, and, on that very account, per-
haps, the best-hearted, cleverest, in a word,
the best in every way, among them. She
takes care of everything in the house, and yet
can please nobody.” He could if he desired,
write whole pages of the ugly scenes in that
house. It was these very scenes which had
made the two so dear to one another. They
tested their mutual affection.
And now he describes Constance herself.
She was not ugly, but then she was far from
being beautiful. All her beauty consisted in
two small black eyes, and a fine figure. She
had no wit, but common sense enough to en-
able her to fulfill her duties as a wife and
mother. That she was not inclined to be
lavish in her expenditures, was by no means
true; but she was accustomed to being plain ;
for the mother used the little she had on the
other two. She could make all her own
things, understood housekeeping, and had the
best heart in the world. “I love her,” he
says, “and she loves me with all her heart.
Tell me now, could I desire a better wife 2''
The best commentary to these words is fur-
142 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
nished by the pieces which were already fin-
ished for “Belmonte and Constance,” but
above all by the O wie aengstlich, o wie few-
'rig," which dates from the summer of 1781,
and the aria Ach ich liebte, war so gluecklich,
the text of which is extant in Constance's own
handwriting.
But the painful lot of separation was des-
tined at least to threaten him. First the
father, next the daughters' guardian, then the
mother, and lastly his loved one's own stub-
born willfulness—the willfulness of youth—
menaced him with the destruction of his hap-
piness. His life's happiness was indeed at
stake here. This is very evident from Mo-
zart's letters written during this time of trouble;
and no one can know Mozart thoroughly who
does not follow him through this his heart
trial.
Turn we now to the artistic results of this
new existence in Vienna. Of course much
piano and chamber music had been produced.
The craving for something new continued
great in all Viennese circles. And who
* “O how anxiously, O how fiery!”
* Ah, I loved and was so happy.
SUCCESS OF HIS OPERA. 143
was better prepared to satisfy that craving
than Mozart whose fame and even support
now depended on the reception he met with
in the imperial city? Everything turned
on the opera given him to compose, and
fortunately its composition was resumed in
the following spring, that of 1782. And
spite of all the vexation he had to en-
dure from his own father and the mother of
his betrothed, he was ready with it, in time.
To accomplish his task, he had frequently to
Write until one o'clock at night and to be up
again at six in the morning. And although
he could not devote to it all his time, all his
strength, all his mind, all the powers of his
fancy nor such minute labor as he had to the
Idomeneo, he was able to tell his father that
he felt exceedingly well pleased with his op-
era. He generally followed only his own
feelings, but on this occasion he had as much
regard as possible for the taste of the Viennese
people; and their taste in such matters inclin-
ed to subdued hilarity and to the comic.
These therefore, are the prevailing characterist-
ics of the work. Of Belmonte's Owie aengst-
lich he writes himself: You can see the
144 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
trembling, the shaking. You can see how
the swelling bosom heaves. It is expressed by
a crescendo. You can hear the whispering
and sobbing in the first violins with sor-
dines and a flute in unison. The O wie der
aengstlich was everybody’s favorite aria as
well as his own. And yet the rondo Wenn
der Freude Thraenen fliessen," was still more
enrapturing. It contains also that celebrated
passage:
“Ach Constanze dich zu sehen
Dich voll Wonne und Entzuecken
An dies treue Herz zu druecken.”
in which German music for the first time ful-
ly learned the language of manly love and de-
votion, just as it first had found the musical
sublimity of religious feeling in the chorale.
Through Belmonte, the character of the “Ger-
man youth,” was, so to speak, fixed in music
for all time. Think only of Beethoven's Flor-
estan, and Wagner's Walther von Stolzing.
But the character of the stupid, coarse and
wicked master of the Harem, Osmin, thus
comically and powerfully drawn, but with all
the nobility of style as to its form, was new
also. He is no other than the “starched
*When the tears of joy are flowing.
THE PERFORMANCE. 145
stripling,” the son of a puffed-up Augsburg
bourgeois. We have here a picture of the
brutal haughtiness of the Salzburg harem,
with its model steward of the kitchen. But
the vengeance of the artist is noble, and pro-
duces an ennobling effect on whole genera-
tions. We must read his letters to see how
fully he was conscious of the comic even in
Osmin's aria: Drum bein. Barte des Pro-
pheten, and that all folly and excess are their
own punishment, and become an object of de-
rision. We find here in this sketch the en-
tire material from which, two generations later,
the “Dragon * of the Niebelungen ring was
built. The heavy rhythm in the very first
song, the rudeness of the entire movement,
the almost roaring “trallalara”—are the ex-
pression of the untamed savagery of brute na-
ture, the grandeur of coarseness in miniature.
We now turn to the performance. This
took place on the 12th of July, 1782. It
seemed as if the applause of the crowded house
would never cease. The audience was sur-
prised, charmed, and carried away by the
beauty and euphony of the music—music full
to overflowing with life, and which did not
10
146 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
sacrifice nobility of form to truth of portrait-
ure, nor depend for its seductive power on
glittering dialogue. Performance followed
performance in quick succession, and this
spite of the fact that intrigue in theatrical
circles labored strenuously to prevent its rep-
etition. The Italians, with Salieri at their
head, looked with displeasure at the rise of
the German operatic stage. It disturbed them,
and threatened to do away with their exclusive
rule. They went so far even as to entice the
performers away so that the presentation of
the opera became very difficult; whereupon
Mozart writes: “I was in such a rage that I
did not know myself.” But they could not
prevent the audience's crying bravo! and
Mozart himself says: “It does one good to
get such applause.” The “Elopement” is the
first link in the unbroken chain of effects and
triumphs which ends in the dramatic produc-
tion of our days, confined to no one nation—a
production destined, in a generation, to rule
Europe more powerfully than did the Italian
opera in those days, and which even now suc-
ceeded in impeding the success of this first Ger-
man opera and banishing it from the stage.
HIS MARRIAGE. 147
This actually happened, and the emperor
Joseph, was weak enough to allow the Italian,
school to obtain the upperhand to such an ex-
tent that Mozart himself could not help join-
ing in the chorus of those priests of Bacchus;
but then he gave that chorus a beauty and full-
ness which it had not possessed before. This
result was attained in the Figaro, of which we
shall speak next.
The first thing that occupied his mind after
the completion of his great task was, of course
—and it was very natural that it should be so
—his union with Constance. And, indeed,
after the success he had met with, what
reason was there why he should not venture to
get married and to found a home of his own?
Speaking of the work, Joseph II. had said:
“Too pretty for our ears, and an infinity of
notes, my dear Mozart l” To which the lat-
ter with noble frankness replied: “Just as
many notes as are necessary, your majesty!”
But Gluck, who was by far the highest author-
ity in Vienna on theatrical matters, had the
opera performed for himself specially, al-
though it had been given only a few days be-
fore, and he complimented the composer very
148 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
highly and invited him to dinner. This au-
gured better for Mozart's future than all else.
He had, however, other patrons. Prince Kau-
nitz, known as the “Kutcher von Europa,”
the Coachman of Europe, expressed great
dissatisfaction with the emperor because he
did not value men of talent more, and allowed
them to leave the country. Among other
things he told the archduke Maximilian, on
one occasion when the conversation turned on
Mozart, that men like him appeared in the
world only once in a century, and that for
that reason some effort should be made to keep
them.
Mozart now brought every influence he
could to bear on his father. The vexation al-
ready caused him by the girl's mother brought
it to such a pass, that he was forced to take her
to his friend and patroness Frau von Wald-
staedten. He writes about this time: “My
heart is troubled, my brain is crazed! How can
a man think or work under such circumstan-
ces?” But the father looked upon the mar-
riage as a misfortune to him, and instead of
his consent to it, he gave “only well-meant ad-
vice.” Mozart, therefore, made short work of
HIS MARRIAGE. 149
it, and, with the assistance of his patroness,
he acted the Elopement from the Auge
Gottes, as he afterwards jocosely called his
marriage. The baroness herself wrote to the
father, smoothed over the difficulties in the way
as best she could, even procured the money
necessary to have the marriage contract drawn
and dispensation from having the bans called
in the church. The two who loved each other
so well, were married on the 4th of August
1782. We must turn to Mozart himself for
an account of it. *
He tells us that, shortly after, the father's
consent was received. There was no one
present at the marriage ceremony but the
mother, the youngest sister, the guardian and
two witnesses. And he adds: “The moment we
were made one, my wife as well as myself be-
gan to weep, which touched every one, even
the priest; and they all cried when they wit-
nessed how our hearts were moved.” The
marriage feast consisted of a supper at Frau
von Waldstaedten’s, of which Mozart writes:
“It was more like a prince's than a baron’s.”
A few days later, he writes: “For a considera-
ble length of time, while we were yet single,
150 TEIE LIFE OF MOZART.
we went together both to mass and commun-
ion, and I find that I never confessed and com-
municated as devoutly as by her side; and the
same was the case with her. In a word, we
are made for one another, and God who or-
dains all things, and who therefore has brought
about all that has passed with us will not for-
sake us.” And He did not forsake them.
Their marriage was blessed, truly blessed; for
it had its foundation in love; and even leaving
his music out of consideration, we shall hear
this sweetest echo of life, the joyful notes of
pure, tender love, echo as clearly through the
world as the name of Mozart, himself a minstrel
of love.
For an account of the cheering and touch-
ing tenacity of the love of our artist, we must
refer the reader to our large work on Mozart,
in which we have endeavored to give a pic-
ture or rather a history of a part of his life of
which the world has entertained an entirely
false idea. There is no reason why a single
trait in Mozart's character should be con-
cealed. Its every feature is human, and even
his weaknesses are amiable and readily excus-
able. If that highest of all moral precepts:
F-
DISAPPOINTMENT. 151
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,
be applicable anywhere, it is here. We shall
have something more to say on this subject
below. We now turn to Mozart's subsequent
achievements.
The emperor, indeed, valued Mozart's talent
decidé very highly, and one day summoned
him to meet Clement, in single combat, that
his majesty might enjoy his immense superi-
ority over the more formal talent of that re-
nowned Roman. But the emperor did not
recognize the full value of the Elopement from
the Seraglio, which he once characterized by
saying of it: non era gran cosa—“it did not
amount to a great deal.” This grieved Mozart
sorely. He even thought of leaving Vienna
in consequence of it, and of going first to
France and then to England. In the mean-
time, the Italian musicians in Vienna, prob-
ably because of the steady and great success
of the Elopement from the Seraglio, had induc-
ed the emperor to order a new and excellent
opera buffa, which gave great satisfaction.
Mozart wrote of it: “The basso buffo is re-
markably good; his name is Benucci.” Lor-
enzo da Ponte, known to-day as the poet of
152 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
the two greatest opere buffe of the world—our
Figaro and Don Giovanni had been in
Vienna for some time, and was there now.
He had promised Mozart, who of course had
an eye on this Italian opera, a new subject as
soon as he had finished one for Salieri. Two
years passed away, but Da Ponte's word was
kept at length. In the meantime, Mozart had,
on the occasion of his visit to Salzburg, in the
fall of 1783, begun a comic opera, “Die Gans
von Cairo’—“The Goose of Cairo.” It was,
however, never completed. The libretto was
too bad and the goose-story too “stupid.”
To this epoch, ending with the Figaro, be-
longs a large abundance of purely instrumen-
tal music. The quartet for the piano with
wind instruments was ready on the 24th of
March, 1784; the fantasy in C major, which
was never surpassed even by Beethoven, and
the Veilchen, in the spring of 1785; the piano.
quartet in G minor, which Mozart called the
best he had written in his whole life, in July
of the same year; and the six quartets, dedi-
cated to Joseph Haydn, the creator of that
species of music, in the fall of that year (1785),
a year which must be considered among the
FIGAIRO. 153
most fertile of his life. And yet, even at this
time, Mozart was engaged on the comic opera
above named, and had begun another, the
Il Sposo deluso, “The derided Bridegroom,”
which he dropped, to work on the Figaro.
Scarcely had this last subject begun to occupy
his mind, than it took possession of it entirely.
Not even to the Idomeneo and the Elopement
from the Seraglio did he devote himself so en-
tirely as to the Figaro. Into this last he put
all his individuality. It was the first subject
which occupied all his mind and soul, and, at
the same time, afforded him an opportunity to
show the real brilliancy of his wit and of his
musical capacity. In this work, we have a
perfect whole, a gem which shines with daz-
zling brightness. A few weaknesses due to its
derivation from the Italian opera are cancelled
by its excellences. It is a picture of life which
seems indeed to belong to one particular period,
but which, after all, shows us human nature
itself with all its weaknesses, the butt of ridi-
cule or the object of pity.
Count Almaviva, who, with the assistance
of Figaro, the barber of Seville, had won his
beautiful countess, is enamoured of her more
154 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
charming waiting-maid, Susanna; and the lat-
ter is in love with Figaro. An effort must be
made to cure the count of his folly. His
jealousy is first excited against the page. To
accomplish this, the help of a great many other
persons becomes necessary; and thus we get a
whole series of exquisite scenes ending in the to-
talbewilderment of the count. The second part
—the opera buffa has generally only two parts,
having been originally nothing more than an
“intermezzo,” between the three acts of the
grave opera, opera seria—finds Susanna at
the count's, arranging a secret rendezvous
with him for the evening, in the garden. The
ladies had so arranged it that the countess
herself, disguised as Susanna, should be in
the garden at the time of the rendezvous, and
that Susanna should play the countess and
surprise the two by her sudden appearance on
the scene. The page arrived too. The count
gives him a box on the ear for his dainty at-
tentions to the disguised countess. The page
carries his grievance to the jealous Figaro,
who, warned of the infidelity of his Susanna,
had approached too near, notwithstanding the
darkness. He makes a passionate declaration
FIGARO. 155
of love to the supposed countess, although she
had given him to understand who she was, in
the presence of the count. This of course,
brought matters to a crisis. The count orders
lights to be brought. Covered with shame
at the discovery he makes, and lovingly for-
given by the countess, he is, as we may reasona-
bly assume, cured of his wicked weakness for
all time.
Such was the course of Mozart's opera. It
was attractive and cheerful, and for the time,
not too daring. Mozart invested the female
characters of the piece with the utmost good-
ness of heart and purity of soul. Even from
the haughty giddiness of the count, he took
the sting in such a way that we leave the pre-
sentation of this piece of human weakness en-
tirely satisfied.
It was otherwise with the original work, the
Le Mariage de Figaro ou la folle Journée,
of the same Beaumarchais from whom Goethe
borrowed his Clavigo. In it we find the vices
and above all the high-handed violence of the
nobility scourged with such a regardlessness of
consequences, that the piece must be looked
upon as a species of prelude to that historic
156 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
night in August, 1789, on which every privi-
lege of the nobility was wiped out with a stroke
of the pen. It shows us at the same time the
cordial gentleness and dignity of the man,
Mozart, who had himself personally experi-
enced the brutal pride of the privileged
classes, and this in the most revolting *:
He, however, solved the whole problem in the
kindest of humor, with a sympathy which
may be seen shining through tears; explaining
it by the limitations and weaknesses of human
nature. This work was Mozart's own even
from the ordering of the libretto; and he it
was that made choice of it.
The following are the particulars relating
to its composition. Lorenzo da Ponte, of whom
we made mention above, and who was at first
so completely on the side of Salieri and the
Italians, now turned to Mozart, in order to
save his place, as libretto-poet, which he was
in danger of losing. Paisiello, at this time a
man of world-wide reputation, had come to
Vienna, and achieved the greatest success with
an opera—“King Theodore.” In order to
supplant the poet of the opera, Casti, Da Ponte
composed a libretto for Salieri, with which,
HIS SUCCESS. 157.
however, Salieri made so complete a failure,
that he swore he would rather have his fingers
cut off, than set another verse written by Da
Ponte to music. Salieri now turned to Casti
and met with great success in his “Grotto of
Trophonius.” Da Ponte who saw his position
as poet for the theater in peril, in consequence
of this, had recourse to Mozart. Thus it was
the intrigue and jealousy of the Italians which
eventually helped Mozart to the place which
he was born to fill; and thus Salieri's blow
recoiled upon himself, for Mozart proposed
Beaumarchais' piece which had been given in
Paris, in the spring of 1784, and had produced
an immense sensation there. But the king had
forbidden the piece in Vienna because of its
“immoral style.” Besides, he had some doubts
as to Mozart's capacity. Mozart, he said, was
a good composer of instrumental music, but
had written an opera which did not amount to
much. On this account, Mozart went quietly
to work. He first composed a part of his opera,
and Da Ponte then took occasion to have the
emperor hear the part thus composed. His
imperial majesty immediately ordered the com-
pletion of the work, and subsequently its per-
formance.
158 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
Such is the story as it is to be gathered from
the memoirs of the writer of the libretto and
of one of the singers, O’Kelley, an English-
man. Both prove that the Italians now moved
heaven and earth to shut Mozart out from the
stage, and that, as a matter of fact, the emperor
was obliged personally to interfere in his be-
half, in the case of the Figaro. Moreover, just
at this time he gave Mozart a token of his favor
by commissioning him to write an opera
called the Shauspieldrector, or “The Manager
of the Theater,” for a garden-festival at
Schoenbrunn. The subject of this opera is the
competitive trial of two prima donnas before
the manager—a comic piece which his enemies
subsequently endeavored to interpret as a pic-
ture of scenes in his own life.
The Italians, indeed, had reason enough for
fear. Salieri subsequently gave expression
to their feelings when he said, it was well
that Mozart was dead, since, if he had lived,
it would soon have come to such a pass that
not one of them would get as much as a mouth-
ful of bread for his compositions. These com-
positions are, indeed, valueless to-day, while
Mozart’s work is immortal, and while arias
f
THE PERFORMANCE. 159
like Will der Herr Graf ein Taenzlein.wagen,
Meue Freuden neue Schmerzen and Ihr die
ihr Triebe, will live as long as music lives.
We shall now hear what an effect the actual
performance of the opera which took place on
the first of May, 1786, had on him. The fol-
lowing account, which has in it something of a
Mozart-like amiability, is by the singer Kelley:
“Of all the performers of the opera at that
time, there is only one still living—myself.
[He sang the parts of Basilio and the stuttering
judge.] It must be granted that no opera was
ever better performed. I have seen it at dif-
ferent times and in all countries, and well per-
formed; and yet the very first performance of
it compared with all others is like light to
darkness. All the original players had the
advantage of being instructed by the com-
poser himself, who endeavored to transfer his
own way of looking at it, and his own enthu-
siasm to their minds. I shall never forget his
little, vivacious face glowing with the fire of
genius. It is just as impossible to describe it
as to paint the Sunbeam.
“One evening, when I visited him, he said to
me: “I have just finished a little duet for my
160 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
opera, and you must hear it.’ He seated him-
self at the piano and sang it. I was carried
away, and the musical world will understand
my transport—when I say that it was the duet
of the countess, Ulmaviva with Susanna: So
lang hab' ich geschmachtet. Nothing more
exquisite had ever before been written by hu-
man being. It has often been a source of
pleasure to me to think that I was the first who
heard it. I can still see Mozart in his red fur
hat trimmed with gold, standing on the stage
with the orchestra, at the first rehearsal, beat-
ing time for the music. Benuccisang Figaro's
Dort vergiss leises Fleh’n, suesses Wim-
mern, with the greatest enthusiasm and all
the power of his voice. I stood beside Mozart,
who repeatedly cried “bravo! bravo! Benuccil’
in subdued tones. When Benucci came to
the beautiful passage: Bei dem Donner der
Karthaner, he allowed his stentorian voice to
resound with all his might. The players on
the stage and in the orchestra were electrified.
Intoxicated with pleasure, they cried again
and again, and each time louder than the pre-
ceding one, ‘bravo! bravo! maestro! Long
live the great Mozart!” Those in the orchestra
SUCCESS. 161
beat the music stands incessantly with the
bows of their violins, thus expressing their en-
thusiasm. It seemed as if this storm of ap-
plause would never cease. The little man re-
turned thanks for the homage paid him by
bowing repeatedly. The finale at the end of
the first act was received with similar delight.
Had Mozart written nothing but this piece of
music, it alone would, in my humble opinion,
have stamped him the greatest master of his
art. Never was there a greater triumph than
that of Mozart and his Figaro.”
This is the only detailed account which we
possess. The father had heard enough of the
astonishingly powerful intrigues caused by his
son’s great talent and the respect in which he
was held. Now he was able to write to his
daughter, that five and even seven parts of the
opera had been repeated, and that one duett
had to be sung three times. The Italians in-
duced the emperor to forbid these repetitions.
But when he spoke to the singers of “this
favor he had done them,” the person playing
the part of Susanna frankly replied: “Do not
believe that, your Majesty. They all wish to
hear dacapo cried. I at least can assert that
11
162 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
*m-.
of myself.” Whereupon the emperor laughed.
But we may ask, was Mozart's fortune now
made 2 He was, indeed, at this time, in such
pinching circumstances that he had to apply
to his publisher, Hofmeister, for such petty
advances as a few ducats.
The house was always full to overflowing,
and the public never tired of applauding Mo-
zart and calling him out. But care was now
taken that the performances should not follow
one another too frequently or too rapidly, the
effect of which would soon have been an im-
provement in the taste of the public. More-
over, the success of a new opera, Una Cosa
rara—it serves in the Don Giovanni as table-
music—by Martin, the Spaniard, was enough
to throw the Figaro into the shade both with
the emperor and with the people, and then to
displace it entirely. The success of that opera
was incredible, and such as might have been
expected from a public whose noblest repre-
sentative, the emperor Joseph himself, told
Dittersdorf the composer of Doctor und
Apotheker, that he liked Martin's light, pleas-
ant melodies better than Mozart's style, who
drowned the voice of the singers with the noise
DON GIO WANNI. 163
of the accompaniment. “Happy man,” said
Mozart to the young composer Gyrowetz, who
went to Italy in the fall of 1785, “if I could only
travel with you, how glad I would be! I
must give a lesson now in order to earn a pit-
tance.” He thought again of going to Eng-
land, but no inducement to go there offered.
And yet the Figaro was attended by very
immediate success even to its composer. It
gave occasion to the writing of the Don Gio-
vanni; and this leads us to the conclusion of
a chapter in Mozart's life descriptive of a
portion of that life as important as it was
replete with action.
The love of the Bohemians for music and
their skill in the art are well known. After
Mozart had made his first appearance in
Vienna, the people of Prague appropriated
him just as they have Richard Wagner in our
own day, and the Figaro which followed the
JElopement from the Seraglio was received
with an 'amount of applause which can be
compared only with that subsequently ac-
corded to the Magic Flute. It was given almost
without interruption during the whole of the
winter 1786–87. The enthusiasm of the
164 THE LIFE OF MOZART,
audiences was unparalleled. They never tired
of hearing it. Arrangements for the piano,
for wind-instruments, quartets, dances, etc.,
were made from it. Figaro was re-echoed
in the streets, in gardens, and even the harper
had to play its Dort Vergiss if he wished to
be heard.
It was the orchestra and a society of “great”
connoisseurs and amateurs that invited him to
Prague. Nothing could have been more agree-
able to Mozart than to be able to show his
enemies in Vienna that he was not yet without
friends in the world. His wife accompanied
him. It was in January, 1787. Count Thun,
one of the first chevaliers and musical connois-
seurs of Prague, was his host. He gave every
day a musical entertainment at his own home.
He found great delight in the intercourse of
loving friends of his art, friends who recognized
his genius. The very first evening, a ball was
given by a well-known society in Prague—the
“elite of the beauties of Prague.” Writing of
it himself, Mozart says: “I was delighted to
See all these people moving about so truly
happy, to the music of the Figaro trans-
formed into counter dances and waltzes. Noth-
FIG.A.R.O. 165
ing is talked of here but the Figaro. The peo-
ple visit no opera but the Figaro. It is noth-
ing but Figaro/”
He was to direct the work in person, to the
infinite delight of all. He himself paid a high
compliment to the execution of the orchestra.
They always played with great spirit. Two
concerts followed. An eye-witness writes:
“The theatre was never seen so full of human
beings. Never was delight more universal.
We did not, indeed, know what most to ad-
mire, the extraordinary composition or the ex-
traordinary playing. The two together pro-
duced an impression that was sweet enchant-
ment. But when Mozart, towards the close,
played a number of fantasias alone, this con-
dition was resolved into one of overflowing
expressions of approval.” Mozart appeared,
his countenance radiant with genuine satisfac-
tion. He began with an enthusiasm that kept
increasing from the first, and had accomplish-
ed greater things than had ever before been
heard, when a loud voice cried out: “From
Figaro!” whereupon Mozart played the favor-
ite aria, Dort vergiss, improvised a dozen of
the most interesting and artistic variations and
166 TEIIR, LIFE OF MOZART.
closed this remarkable production amid thun-
ders of applause.
This was certainly one of the brightest days
in Mozart’s life. He had reached the climax of
success. In the applause of the multitude, he
saw a reflection of his own intellectual features
which called that applause forth. Strange
thoughts now possessed his soul. Feelings
never felt before stirred within him. When a
person has reached a height like that now ob-
tained by Mozart, he is in a position to em-
brace in his horizon all that lies below and
around him. It was the first time that his
life-sparkling mind did this, but we shall see
that it did so now. The incessant intrigues of
his opponents and enemies—intrigues so vio-
lent and great, that, when he died, it was ru-
mored he had been poisoned—devoured his
life like a vulture, and ended it before his time.
The consciousness of this first came to him
with all its melancholy amid the infinite ju-
bilation we have just described, in the midst
of all this joy and recognition of his genius.
He now, for the first time, had a perception of
life’s close, of life's tragic play, as reflected in
Don Giovanni; and this was the result of his
DON GIO WANNI. 167
journey to Prague. For when, in the overflow-
ing joy of his heart, Mozart said that he would
like to write an opera expressly for such a pub-
lic, the director of the theatre, Bondini, took
him at his word, and closed the contract with
him for the following autumn, at one hun-
dred ducats.
Da Ponte relates that, on this occasion, he
proposed the subject-matter himself. He had
perceived that Mozart's genius required a
sublime and many-sided poem. And, indeed,
this, like Faust, was a subject-matter on which
writers of all nations had long labored. Don
Giovanni represents the indestructible in-
stinct of life, as Faust does the instinct of
knowledge, showing how that instinct is ever
annihilating and reproducing itself. The hero
is given up to the fullest enjoyment of life
regardless of consequences. Cheerfully and
freely he surrenders himself to it. No
shackles bind him. Opposition only adds to
his strength. But this very wantonness is,
at last, the cause of his ruin. This was the
conclusion of the whole, extended, original
Spanish play chosen by the poet of the
libretto.
168 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
Don Giovanni rushes into the apartment of
Donna Anna, who is waiting for the arrival of
her beloved Don Octavio. Her cry for help
calls out her father. A duel puts an end to
his aged life. On the street, Don Giovanni
and his servant Leporello, are met by the for-
saken Elvira. She complains, gives expres-
sion to her grief and loads him with re-
proaches. He hastens on his way in the search
after pleasure. Zerline, the bride of the young
Marsetto is next snatched away from him by
Elvira's jealousy. But he has invited the
whole company to the castle. He is again met,
(everything even now foreshadows the catas-
trophe) by Donna Anna with Octavio. They
seek his assistance on account of the murdered
father. But Donna Anna, whose suspicions
had been already awakened by Elvira, recog-
nizes him as the murderer. They next appear
masquerading in black at the banquet, and just
as Don Giovanni is on the point of carrying
away the rustic beauty, they come up to him;
a struggle ensues, and master and Servant are
saved only by the most masculine boldness.
This is the first act of this opera, which is also
considered an opera buffa.
DON GIO WANNI. 169
The second act finds Don Giovanni en-
gaged in a quarrel with Leporello. Leporello
does not want to serve so dangerous a master
any longer. But money atones for the anxi-
ety he endures. Elvira appears on the balco-
ny. Don Giovanni changes clothes with Le-
porello and swears love to her anew. She
comes down and at an artificial noise, made
by Don Giovanni, flees with Leporello into
the darkness. This is followed by a serenade
to her waiting-maid, Leporello's beloved.
Marsetto and his peasants, armed with guns,
now appear. But Don Giovanni, dressed as
Leporello, succeeds in getting his friends
away, and in coaxing the weapons from Mar-
setto himself. He then cudgels him soundly,
whereupon Zerline consoles him with her
promises. Elvira now looks in the dark for
the supposed lover. The anxious Leporello
endeavors to escape. Don Octavio and Donna
Anna suddenly appear with torches and see
that this time they have the servant instead of
his master. The former escapes and accord-
ing to agreement meets Don Giovanni in the
churchyard. Their godless conversation is
suddenly interrupted by a voice which says:
170 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
“Presumptuous man, let those rest who have
gone to sleep!” It is the statue of the Comthur.
Don Giovanni haughtily forces Leporello to
invite him to dinner. In the midst of the
revels of the table—for which Martin’s Cosa
'rara furnished a part of the music, as, in
Prague, did the Dort vergiss—in the midst of
the most luxurious joys of life, which not
even the warning voice of the loving Elvira
could dispel, the stony guest approaches him,
and announces his sentence to him:
“Down into the dust and pray!”
“Tell women to pray!”
“Be converted l’’
6& No! 99
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Now thy end has come
Yawning abysses open, and spirits of hell
drag the dastard into the dismal grave, alive.
We know what the cheerful phase of the
life of the past century was. It has found a
more fiery expression in Don Giovanni than
even in the Figaro. The Renaissance had in-
troduced anew the free enjoyment of life of
the ancient world. Think only what the
| 22
DON GIO WANNI. 171
Borgias were ! From Italy and Spain it had
made its way to France, when people there, for
the first time, became conscious that they were
“dancing on a volcano.” The feeling that
there hangs a necessary and tragic sentence
over the mere sensuousness of life, which is,
after all, but a powerful picture of the
transitoriness of all things earthly—a transi–
toriness which will always remain a dark
enigma to the living themselves, and which
therefore fills the proudest life with a certain
melancholy—this feeling, which constitutes
the poetic nucleus of the whole story of Don
Giovanni, no one of all who have treated the
subject, in an artistic manner, has fathomed
or shown the power of, even in a remote
degree, as did Mozart. The music, on the ap-
pearance of the stony guest, springs from
the same fountain as Faust’s most beautiful
and profound monologues. It is the con-
sciousness, the heart-felt knowledge of the per-
manent duration of human life; and we have
seen how life itself led Mozart, the artist and
the man, to this heart-felt knowledge and to
the feeling of something really eternal in the
changes that surround us.
172 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
The following further details as to the
origin of Don Giovanni are not devoid of
interest.
Da Ponte's boasting in his memoirs is in-
deed exquisite, and shows that, after all, he
had no idea what the value of the material of
Don Giovanni was. He had the three dis-
tinguished opera composers of Vienna at the
time to write for, and he quieted the doubts of
the emperor as to the success of such a task, by
telling him that he would write during the
night for Mozart and keep thinking of Dante's
Hell, in the morning for Martin, and read
Petrarca, in the evening for Salieri, when
Tasso should be his companion. With a
bottle of tokai and some Spanish tobacco be-
fore him, and the sixteen-year-old daughter of
his hostess, as his muse beside him, he says he
began his work, and in two months the whole
was finished. -
And how about Mozart? When at the be-
ginning of April, the libretto of this poetical
judgment on human life had come into his
hands, his soul was directed with redoubled
energy to its serious meaning. He received
at that time, the news of the grave illness of
BEETHOWEN. 173
his father, which led him to give expression
to some remarkable sayings about death as
the “true goal of our life—man's true, best
friend.” We shall yet see what suggested
this. Besides, he had shortly before lost his
“best and dearest” friend, Count Hatzfeld, and
now, on the 28th of May 1787, he lost his be-
loved father also. The quintet in G minor
dates from this time. The depths of his soul
open up before us here. This quintet is a
prelude to Don Giovanni. At this time, too,
it was that the court organist, Ludwig Beet-
hoven of Bonn, now in his sixteenth year,
paid him a visit. Mozart paid no attention
to Beethoven beyond predicting his world-
wide fame, so entirely was he pre-occupied
with his new work. The following Septem-
ber, his friend Dr. Barisoni, who had attended
him two years before, when he was very dan-
gerously sick, died; and Mozart wrote under
some of his verses in his album: “It is well
with him!—but it will never be well with me,
with us and with all who knew him so well,
until we are happy enough to see him in a
better world, never to part again!” His
thoughts went beyond the grave and endeav-
174 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
ored to fathom the eternal relations of things.
This was the mood in which he wrote Don
Giovanni. Even into the brightest light of
life, creep at last the dark shadows of annihi-
lation!
In the beginning of September 1787, com-
poser and poet were in Prague. Constance
also had traveled with them. She had to see
that no disturbance from without interfered
with the workings of our artist's laborious
mind. Personal intercourse with the singers
increased his intellectual activity. The first
singer who took the part of Don Giovanni
was lauded to the deaf Beethoven, almost forty
years later, as a “fiery Italian.” The female
singers were not by any means remarkable.
Yet it was said that our artist had been guilty,
during this sojourn in Prague, of all kinds of
gay adventures; and this while he was writing
himself to a friend in Vienna : “Is there not
an infinite difference between the pleasure of
a fickle, whimsical love and the bliss of a
really rational one?” In after years, his ac-
quaintances remembered the happy hours they
had spent with him in Prague. He played at
nine-pins with them in a wine-garden, which
AT WORK. 175
is now adorned with his bust, while at the
same time he wrote out his score at the table
in the place. And in the evening before the
performance he was exceedingly cheerful and
full of jokes. Finally, Constance told him it
was eleven o’clock, that the overture was not
yet written. At his home, with his glass of
punch, such as he liked, he proceeded to per-
form the task which was so irksome to him.
He had the work long since finished in his
head. He had even already played it as well
as two other drafts of it for his friends. On
this account, Constance, in order to keep his
thoughts flowing, was obliged to tell stories
to him. These were fairy tales, like Aladdin's
Wonderful Lamp, and Cinderella. Mozart
frequently laughed over them until the tears
came. Fatigue, however, overpowered him at
last, and his wife allowed him to sleep a few
hours. Yet the copyists received their work
in the early morning, He had, moreover, ac-
cording to his own confession to the director of
the orchestra, never allowed himself to be pre-
Vented from producing something excellent
for Prague, and at the same time assured him,
that he had not acquired his art easily. No
176 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
one, he said, had been more industrious to ac-
quire it than he, and it would be hard to find
a celebrated master whom he had not dili-
gently studied.
It is said that he set the celebrated Reich
'mir die Hand to music five times for Don
Giovanni. He made the singers rehearse to
him separately. He danced the minuet for
them himself; for, strange to say, he once told
Relly that his achievements in dancing were
more remarkable than his achievements in
music. Hence, the players were full of good
will and enthusiasm, the consequence of which
was, that the performance this time, also, was
a very good one. It took place on the 29th
of October, 1787. The house was full to over-
flowing, and Mozart was received with a flour-
ish of trumpets, repeated three times, and ap-
plause which it seemed would never cease.
Such was the reception accorded the opera it-
self, that the director of the theatre wrote to
the composer of the libretto, who, in the mean-
time had returned to Vienna: “Long live Da
Ponte! Long live Mozart! Praise them, all
ye directors and all ye singers! So long as
they live theatres cannot fail to do a thriving
GOETHE'S OPINION. 177
business.” As usual, Mozart himself speaks
modestly of “the loudest kind of applause,”
and remarks to his friend in Vienna, mention-
ed above: “I could wish that my friends were
here a single evening to share my pleasure.
But probably the opera will not be performed
in Vienna. I wish so. People are doing all
in their power to prevail upon me to remain
here a few months and write another opera;
but, flattering as the invitation is, I cannot ac-
cept it.”
And now, as to the work itself. Schiller
wrote to Goethe on the 29th of December, 1797,
that he had always entertained the confidence
that out of the opera as out of the choruses of
the old feasts of Dionysos, tragedy would de-
velop a nobler form. By the power of music,
it attuned the heart to a finer susceptibility,
and, in this way, it might happen that, at last,
even the ideal might stealthily make its way
to the stage. Goethe answered curtly : “You
might have seen your hopes recently realized
to a great extent in Don Giovanni. But in
this respect, that piece stands entirely alone,
and Mozart's death has rendered all hope of
anything like it, idle.” We owe it to Figaro
12
178 TEIE LIFE OF MOZART.
and Don Giovanni, more than to anything else,
that we are able to-day, to assert the contrary,
and that we witness the real dramatic art which
was attained to by Italy in the revival of an-
tiquity in a truly flourishing condition about
us. What Gluck required should be the char-
acteristic points of dramatic composition is here
complied with to the fullest extent; to an ex-
tent which, in many particulars, has not been
yet surpassed. This perfection Mozart owed
to his more accurate acquaintance with the
exigencies of the drama and his supreme com-
mand of all the capabilities of music. The
separate and distinct pieces of music, indeed,
with their pitiful, recurring cadences, remind
us continually that it is with a musician we
have to do, and one whose style was a develop-
ment from the Italian school. But then such
is the poetical intuition of this musician that
the poetical material helps him always to some
new invention in his own art. And while this
art seems to demand that it should be neces-
sarily confined to its own sphere and possess
definite forms, genius is able to so arrange it
that the dramatic action may lose nothing
that properly belongs to it, and yet that the
HIS WORKS. 179
*** *
music may not become simply “the obedient
daughter of poetry.”
Richard Wagner, the great master, who, in
this sphere, is Mozart's only real successor,
says: “Mozart in his operas demonstrated the
inexhuastible resources of music most fully
to meet every demand of the poet on its
power of expression; and considering his
completely original course, this glorious musi-
cian did a great deal more to discover this
power of music, both in respect to truth of
expression, and in the endless varieties of its
causes, than Gluck and all his successors.”
And in this dramatic respect, the Figaro, and
Don Giovanni, unquestionably occupy the
first place. Who is there that does not re-
cognize in Keine Ruh' bei Tag und Nacht,
Wenn du fein artig bist, Treibt der Cham-
pagner, a new language in tones? We here
again witness the noblest acquisitions of the
Idomeneo and the Elopement from the Serag-
lio, in the highest possible perfection concen-
trated in all their energy. It is a miracle of
strength and grace, of spirit and euphony,
of buoyant force, of nobleness, and at the
same time, of truest, deepest feeling.
180 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
Thus the Figaro and Don Giovanni, to-
gether with Germany's classic poetry, occupy a
place at the beginning of a great dramatic
epoch which commenced one hundred years
ago. They are a part of the life of modern
humanity in general. In them Mozart first
fully developed his inexhaustible genius.
And thus it is that these works, like the an-
tique and the art of the Renaissance, belong to
the whole cultured world.
Mozart's concluding labors are a condensa-
tion of all the impressions of his life, and of
all the perceptions of his mind, in their very
depths. The Magic Flute, especially by its
purely human and ethico-religious tendency,
became the starting point of the efforts of an
art which was peculiarly German, but of
which the universal art-creations of the pres-
ent day were born. This leads us to the fifth
and last chapter of our biography.
C H A PTE R. V.
1787–1791.
THE MAGIC FLUTE–TITUS—THE REQUIEM.
Haydn's Opinion of Mozart—Made Court Composer by Joseph
II.-Don Giovanni in Vienna—Mozart's Extreme Poverty
—His Cheerfulness under Adverse Circumstances—“The
Song of the Swan”—Other Compositions—Mozart's Opin-
ion of Handel—He becomes Acquainted with Sebastain
Bach—Mozart's Opinion of Church Music—Traveling
Again—Some of Mozart's Characteristics—Audience with
the Emperor—Petition to his Imperial Majesty—His Re-
ligious Feelings—Joins the Free Masons—History of the
Composition of the Magic Flute—The Mysterious Strang-
er—The Requiem—Success of the Magic Flute—Mozart
as Reflected in his Music—His Industry—Last Illness—
Strange Fancies—Incidents of his Last Days—His Death.
THE composer of Figaro, Mozart himself,
writes in 1785: “If there were only a single
German patriot in a position of influence, with
him things would wear a different aspect.
But, then, perhaps, our national theatre, now
only in bud, would come to full bloom; and,
of course, it would be an everlasting shame
for Germany, if we should seriously begin
(181)
182 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
to think German, act German, speak Ger-
man, and even to sing German!” Chance
would have it, that, towards the close of his
days he was able to give his pen and not
merely his tongue, as he did here, free rein
on this point. And the very fact that his
circumstances became poorer, and that the
parties, which prevailed at the time, succeeded
in relegating him to an inferior social position,
was here of decisive influence.
Haydn now writes to Prague, where Mo-
zart had declined the composition of another
opera: “You ask me for another opera.
With all my heart, if you wish to have some-
thing for yourself alone.” But he would
have had too much to risk in writing for the
theatre there, inasmuch as scarcely any one
could be compared with the great Mozart.
The noble master continues: “For if I could
impress on the souls of all lovers of music, but
above all on the great, the inimitable works of
Mozart; could I endow them with a proper
comprehension of music, and impart to them
the feeling with which I understand and feel
them, the nations would emulate one another
for the possession of that jewel.” Prague, he
COURT-COMPOSE.R. 183
said, should keep such a man, but at the same
time, it should remunerate him properly, for
when not properly remunerated the history of
genius is sad indeed. And he concludes: “It
grieves me sorely that Mozart, who has no
equal, has not yet been engaged at Some royal
or imperial court . . . . Pardon me for not
keeping to my subject, but I am so fond of the
man.”
Schwind, the painter, who, during his youth
in Vienna, knew very many of Mozart's
friends, writes: “People spoke of him as one
speaks of the person he loves. Why was it
that “the great’ did nothing for him 7”
The success of the Don Giovanni in Prague
had a good effect in Vienna, and when it was
learned that Mozart was going to leave that
city for England, Joseph II. named him—it
was on the 7th of December, 1787—his court-
composer with a salary of 800 guldens in all;
of which Mozart once wrote on his tax-returns:
“too much for what I do, too little for what I
might do.” In his position, he had no duties
but to write the dancing music for the im-
perial masquerades! And yet, the position
which Gluck held from the emperor with a
184 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
salary of two thousand guldens had just be-
come vacant by that composer’s death! Mozart
must have had wicked enemies and enviers
and only half friends, at this court. His pa-
tron, Maximilian Francis, elector of Cologne,
was now in Bonn, where he had found young
Beethoven, and the emperor himself liked the
lighter music better than Mozart's. Thus
Salieri again gained the advantage; and before
the opera Azur, which had been ordered
by the emperor, was given, Don Giovanni was
not to be thought of
Yet, the emperor finally ordered its per-
formance also. It took place on the 7th of
May, 1788; but the opera did not give satisfac-
tion. Da Ponte writes: “Everybody, Mozart
alone excepted, was of opinion that the
piece would have to be re-written. We made
additions to it, changed pieces in it, and yet,
a second time, Don Giovonni did not give sat-
isfaction.” According to Da Ponte, however,
this did not keep the emperor from saying,
that the “work was magnificent, more beautiful
than Figaro, but no morsel for the Viennese.”
Mozart, to whom this saying of the emperor had
been carried, replied: “Only give them time to.
POWERTY. 185
taste it; ” and, indeed, every performance of the
opera added to its success. Haydn said, in a
company at the house of Count Rosenberg,
which was no rendezvous for Mozart's friends,
that he could not settle their dispute about the
faults of the work, but he knew that Mozart
was the greatest composer which the world
then had. -
And yet, at this very time, Mozart was suf-
fering from want, actual want! The first of
those mournful letters to his friend Puchberg,
the merchant, is dated the 17th of June of
this year. These letters afford us a picture of
his condition during the last years of his life.
They even foreshadow the sad, premature end
of our artist. He received from Don Giovanni,
in Vienna, altogether two hundred and twenty-
five guldens. His compositions were in con-
tents and execution too difficult for the dilet-
tanti, and his feeling and views on art did not
allow him to write otherwise; so that the publish-
ers were not able to pay him much. Besides,
those parts of his compositions which were
really popular, were everywhere republished.
Concerts could not be given all the time, and
his receipts from all sources were too irregular.
186 TEIE LIFE OF MOZART.
His household expenses, spite of his simple
way of living, were great. He had several
children, in quick succession, and Constance
was taken, repeatedly, very seriously ill—in one
instance, for eight whole months. He closes
one of his letters, asking for, and imploring
a little “momentary assistance,” according to
his friend's pleasure, as follows: “My wife
was sick again yesterday. To-day, thank God,
she is better: yet I am very unhappy, always
wavering between worry and hope.”
This affliction of body and mind was a con-
stant trial of his better nature. His letters
next to his music afford us the most beautiful
proof of the purity of his soul and the
depth of his feelings. Yet the last years of
Mozart's life disclose to us a mournful picture
of the existence of a German artist; and it is
only Mozart's own spirit that can lift us high
above the sadness and acrimony which we are
disposed to feel here.
His mind did not grow gloomy. Like the
phoenix, he always rose out of the ashes of
the want that consumed him—more brilliantly
arrayed and fitted for a grander flight. And
it is truer of scarcely any artist than of him,
SYMPEIONIES. 187
that his last note was like the dying strains
of the swan, an echo from another and higher
world, a sound at once joyful and melancholy
such as had never been heard before.
The symphony in E major which was
finished in these summer days of 1788, has in
fact, been called the Song of the Swan. Of it
Hoffman, in his celebrated Phantasiestuecken,
beautifully says: “The language of love and
melancholy are heard in the sweet voices of
spirits. The night breaks into a bright purple
light, and, with an unspeakable longing, we
follow the forms which invite us with friendly
glances into their ranks as they fly through
the clouds to the eternal music of the spheres.”
Immediately following this came the exceed-
ingly powerful and life-like symphony in G
minor, and the Jupiter symphony. Did
mortal ever before hear the quiet jubilation
of all beings as it is heard in the andante of
this last? The man who can write such works
has higher joys than the world can give or
take away. His eye full of the truest hap-
piness, is directed towards an eternal ideal
which refreshes, preserves and blesses him.
The grave little adagio in H minor for the
188 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
piano was also written in this same year,
1788. -
At this time, Handel, with his vigorou
and manly nature entered Mozart's domain.
He was preparing for a friend and patron, the
former ambassador to Berlin, Baron von Swie–
ten, Acis and Galatea and the Messias.
Mozart's opinion of Handel was, that he un-
derstood better than any one else the power of
music, and that when he chose, he could use
chorus and orchestra with overwhelming ef-
fect; even his airs in the Italian style always
betokened the composer of the Messias. But
he was destined soon to become acquainted
with a greater genius, a man all imposing to
him—Sebastian Bach. Handel’s freer form
and his dramatic characterization were not
new to him ; and we may judge from the
Idomeneo that Mozart possessed a power not
unlike that which was peculiar to Handel.
Yet Bach opened to him, both as an artist and
a man, a new world, but one which he had
long half suspected and half known —that
Ocean of polyphony governed with such sov-
•ereign power. And yet the matter lay deeper.
Some one in Leipzig itself—he probably had
CHURCH MUSIC. 189
reference to Bach—had, in a conversation,
called it a burning shame, that it was with so
many great musicians as it had been with the
old painters: they were compelled to employ
their immense powers on the fruitless and
mind-destroying subjects of the church. Mo-
Zart was highly displeased at the remark, and
said in a very sad manner, that that was some
more art-twaddle. And he continued in some
such strain as this: “With you, enlightened
Protestants, as you call yourselves, when all
your religion is the religion of the head, there
may be some truth in this. But with us, it is
otherwise. You do not at all feel the mean-
ing of the words, Agnus Dei qui tollis pecca-
ta mundi, dona nobis pacem. [Lamb of God
who takest away the sins of the world; grant
us peace.] But when one has, from his earli-
est childhood, been introduced into the sanc-
tuary of our religion, and attended its service
with fervor, and called those happy who knelt
at the touching strains of the Agnus Dei and
received the communion, while the music
gushing in tender joy from the hearts of the
faithful, said, Benedictus qui venit, [Blessed
is he who comes in the name of the Lord, it
190 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
is very different; and, when now, these words,
heard a thousand times, are placed before one
to be set to music, it all returns and stirs the
Soul within him.” On this occasion, he re-
called that first composition for the consecra-
tion of a church in his childhood, in Vienna,
and the religious impressions he carried away
from Italy of which we spoke above.
He was now in Leipzig and became ac-
quainted with Sebastian Bach in his church
compositions. Necessity had again started
him on an artistic journey. His friend and
pupil, prince Charles Lichnowsky, who was
Soon destined to play an important part in
Beethoven's life also, had asked Mozart to
travel with him to Berlin where he might
probably be of some use to him with the music-
loving Frederick William II. Our informa-
tion concerning this journey and one that fol-
lowed it, is to be found in those letters to his
wife, of which she herself subsequently wrote
that these unstudied epistles were the best in-
dication of his way of thinking, of his peculiar
nature and of his culture. She says: “The rare
love for me which these letters breathe is su-
premely characteristic of him. Those written
ECOERNER. 191
in his later years are just as tender as those
which he must have written during the first
years of our married life, are they not?” In
those letters, indeed, we have the man, Mozart
as he really was, and what he had gone through
in life, before us.
In Prague, the director of the theatre had
almost so arranged it that he was to get two
hundred ducats for a new opera, and fifty
ducats for traveling expenses. This gave him
new life. One of his old Munich friends, the
hautboist Ramm, who had come from Berlin,
had also told him, in Prague, that the king
had asked him “very often and very anxiously”
if it was sure that Mozart was coming, and
when he saw that he had not come, said: “I
am afraid that he is not going to come.”,
“Judging from this,” says Mozart, “my affairs
will not go ill.” In Dresden, he formed the
acquaintance of Schiller's friend, Koerner, the
father of the poet, whose sister-in-law, Doris
Stock, made a drawing of his picture. But
all the affection he met with only turned his
thoughts more lovingly to his wife and child
at home. He writes, on the 13th of April,
1789: “My dearest wife, if I only had a letter
192 THE TIFE OF MOZART.
from you . . . If I could only tell you all I
have to say to your dear picture | . . . And
when I put it away I let it slide from me
gradually, while I say: Well! well! well!
and, at the last, good night, pet, pleasant
dreams!” The same complete ingenuousness
of a really child-like soul, of which his friends
in Prague were wont to speak. One of them,
Professor Niemetschek, to whom we are in-
debted for the first biography of Mozart, says
of him: “Brimming over with the pleasantest
humor, he would surrender himself to the
drollest fancies, so that people forgot entirely
that they had the wonderful artist, Mozart,
before them.” Closing the letter to his wife,
above referred to, he says: “Now, I think I
have written something which the world at
least will think very stupid; but it is not
stupid to us who love one another so tenderly.”
We shall yet see what a treasure for his art
was this heart of his, which always loved, as it
did, the day he was married. Only genius
can manifest so much innocence and, at the
same time, such depth of feeling. -
In Dresden he played at court and was pre-
sented with “a very pretty” snuff-box. Here,
1HAESSLER. 193
too, was one Haessler, a pupil of Sebastian
Bach, whose forte was the piano and the organ.
This served to stimulate Mozart's ability to a
higher pitch. He had already become ac-
quainted, through Van Swieten, with a num-
ber of Bach's and Handel's fugues. He also
had frequently improvised such fugues him-
self, or noted them down at the request of his
wife. The man who understands polyphony
as Mozart shows he did in the ensembles of
Figaro and Don Giovanni—which testify to
the magnitude of his technic powers chiefly
by the fact that it is only the connoisseur that
notices these marvels—must really insist on
perfect art in this point, also. Mozart writes:
“Now, the people here think that because I
come from Vienna I know nothing whatever
of this kind of music or this manner of play-
ing. I, therefore, seated myself at the organ
and played. Prince Lichnowsky, who knew
Haessler well, persuaded him, after a great
deal of trouble, to play, too.” It then ap-
peared that Haessler had simply learned har-
mony and some modulations by rote from old
Sebastian Bach, and was not able to execute a
harmony properly ; that, as Mozart expresses
194 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
himself, he was, by no means, an Albrechts-
berger—a man well known as one of Beet-
hoven's thorough-bass teachers. But, when
Haessler sat down at the piano, he fared worse
yet.
Mozart now went to Leipzig, itself, and the
successor of the great Sebastian, the cantor
Doles, master of the choir in the church of
Saint Thomas, was very friendly to him. He
first displayed his powers at the organ here.
Says an eye-witness: “Doles was charmed
with the artist’s playing, and imagined Sebas-
tian Bach returned to life.” “With the great-
est facility,” Mozart had put all the arts of
harmony in operation, and improvised the
chorale, “Jesus my trust,” in a masterly man-
ner. This way of working up a chorale was
the peculiar art of the North German school
of artists. As a token of gratitude, Doles
caused Bach’s motetto for eight voices, Singet
dem Herrn ein neues Lied, to be sung for him.
Our artist was overjoyed, and exclaimed: “That
is something full of suggestion!” When Beet-
hoven heard this same motetto with all its ele-
mental power and magnitude, he exclaimed,
referring to its composer: “His name should
OPINION OF BACH. 195
not be Bach (brook), but Meer (the sea).” A
similar expression of opinion is ascribed to
Wagner, who performed the same motetto, in
1848, in Dresden.
When Mozart heard that the church of
Saint Thomas had several other such motettoes,
he asked for them all, and laid the Several
parts on his knees—there being no score—and
on the chairs about him, and gave his whole
soul to their study until he had thoroughly
mastered them. At his request Doles gave
him a copy of them. -
Can we imagine what now passed in Mozart's
soul? The artist recognized the artist. Of
predecessors, with like creative powers, he
could have named only Palestrina. But what
moved him still more, and stirred him to the
very depths of his heart, was the sublimity of
the religious feeling which lives in this spirit,
and which laid hold of and lifted Mozart, the
Catholic, up all the more because Bach was a
Protestant. “Then he grew suddenly quiet,
turned bitter, drank a great deal of strong
wine, and spoke not another rational word,”
writes Rochlitz, who became acquainted with
him at this time, and who subsequently distin-
196 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
guished himself as a writer on Mozart. The
opera here afforded him no opportunity to dis-
play his power, and writing for his own church
had little attraction, since, through the reforms
of Joseph II., the expenses allowed for music,
even for a divine service, the very exigencies of
which had created the art, were curtailed to the
very utmost. But we shall soon see from his
own compositions that he was deeply affected
by the sublime peace of this great choir-mas-
ter. And here, in Leipzig, we notice that he
did not allow melancholy, at least externally,
to lord it over him. He dined the last
evening he spent there at Doles' house. His
host and hostess were very sad, and begged for
a memento from his hand. He wrote, in at
the most from five to six minutes, on two small
leaves of paper, a canon or round for each, one
in long notes and very melancholy, the other
exceedingly droll. “When it was noticed,”
says Rochlitz, “that they could be sung to-
gether, he wrote under the one: “Farewell, we
shall meet again,’ and under the other, “Wail
away like women old.’ It is impossible to de-
scribe what a ridiculous and yet profound, not
to say angry and cutting effect this made upon
IOVE OF AUSTRIA. 197
us all, and if I do not mistake, upon himself,
for, in a somewhat wild voice, he suddenly
exclaimed, “Good-bye, children,” and van-
ished.”
A closer acquaintance with “old Bach,” was
the only lasting gain of this long-extended
journey. Frederick William I. had, after the
frank opinion Mozart had given of his private
band, of which J. F. Reichardt was the leader,
tendered him that position, at a yearly salary
of three thousand thalers. But Mozart asked
himself: “Shall I forsake my emperor?” This
was the expression of the home-feeling he had
for Austria—a feeling the fruitful and foster-
ing soil of which would certainly have been
lost in the sands of a margrave. One hundred
Frederick Sd'or, in a golden snuff-box, and a
commission for three quartets—the king, who
himself played the cello, was very fond of this
kind of music—were, however, a moderate
remuneration.
His friends at home urged him at least to
lay the case before the emperor; for the king
of Prussia had left his offer open a whole year.
Mozart had an audience with his imperial
majesty. The emperor said: “How, do you
198 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
want to leave me?” To which Mozart replied:
“I beg your majesty's pardon; Ishall remain.”
And this was the only result of the audience.
To a friend, who alluded to a possible increase
of salary, he gave the characteristic reply:
“Who on earth would think of that at such
a time?” Mozart was an Austrian and ideal-
ized his emperor, especially at this time, when
Joseph's best intentions were misunderstood in
his own country, and Turkey and Belgium
caused him equal anxiety. Was he, who now
felt himself forsaken by his own, to see him-
self separated from one of the very best of his
subjects? That was more than Mozart's feel-
ings could stand. However, the emperor now
ordered that Figaro should be put on the stage
again. Mozart had added to it the great aria
of the countess in F major, and the renewed
success of the work determined the emperor to
charge him with the writing of a new opera, the
words of which were suggested by the thought-
less bet of two officers. It was the Così fan
tutte (So They All Do, or The Lover's School.)
Two officers and a bachelor make a wager as
to the fidelity of their intended wives, and actu-
ally succeed, with the assistance of the waiting-
COSI FAN TUTTE. 199
maid, and by desperately intimidating them, in
rendering them faithless, each to the other,
whereupon they take refuge in the sorry conso-
lation: Così fan tutte—so they all do.
It is hard to imagine a subject more frivo-
lous. But, leaving out of consideration the
tone of the time—a time when it was palpably
evident that the deluge was impending, and
when people thoughtlessly enjoyed all that was
to be enjoyed—Mozart did not treat it seri-
ously. He rather illustrated by it the mas-
querade character of the opera buffa, made of
it a species of magic-lantern performance, the
excuse for, and the basis, so to speak, of his
dream-like music. And, indeed, that music is
wonderfully balmy, like a half-veiled sunny-
cloudy morning, on which every object is still
concealed, or only duskily seen shining through
the air—such music as only a Mozart could
write. But the words were so trifling and
frivolous that it was soon all over with this
opera, and all efforts to resuscitate it have
proved vain. It was not until life, which had
become a deceptive play to the profoundly
thoughtful mind of our artist, arose before him
like a picture of fairy-land, that he was able
200 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
to infuse into that picture the full breath of
the higher truth, which is not to be found in
such a coarse, hollow-eyed and worm-eaten
reality as the wager of those two officers. This
brings us to the Magic Flute, and to the final
perfection and full concentration of Mozart's
purposes and powers.
Così fan tutte was given on the 26th of
January, 1790, and was very successful. The
work was written entirely in the light style of
Italian music, so popular at the time. But
the man who had prompted it never saw it.
The emperor Joseph was sick at the time it
was given, and fell a victim to the grief and
worry of the last years of his reign, in Febru-
ary, 1790, without having done anything fur-
ther for Mozart. In no year of his life did
Mozart write fewer musical compositions. He
ascribes this fact himself to his extreme pecu-
niary distress. To his shame, and still more
to ours, who have come after him, he was
obliged to write, just at this time, to his “dear-
est friend,” Puchberg: “You are right in not
deigning to answer me. My importunity is
too great. . . . I can only beg you to consider
my circumstances in all their bearings, to pity
POWERTY. 201
and forgive my warm friendship and my trust
in you.” Even his industry did not avail him.
His compositions found no purchasers. They
were above the comprehension of the people
of his time, and thus he was soon left entirely
without the means of support. The keeper of
a neighboring inn surprised him one morning
early, waltzing about his room with Constance.
They were without fuel, and took this strange
way of protecting themselves against the cold.
O the mortal pilgrimage of genius !
A petition to the new emperor, Leopold I.,
and a memorial to an archduke, were drawn up,
the draft of each of which is still extant. The
court had its own orchestra in the court chapel
of Saint Augustine; and, mindful of the
church of Saint Thomas, in Leipzig, Mozart
says, in his petition to the emperor: “A de-
sire for fame, love of action, and a conviction
of my abilities, embolden me to petition for a
second place as Capellmeister, especially, as the
very able Capellmeister, Salieri, never devoted
himself to the church style of music, while I
have made that style a favorite study from my
youth.” He also requested to be allowed to
instruct the royal family “because of the little
202 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
fame the world had accorded him for his skill
at the piano.” He had great hopes because
the emperor retained his petition. But Gluck's
former patron was not friendly to Mozart, and,
besides, it was scarcely to be expected that any
one who had stood in close relations with Jo-
seph I. would find favor in his eyes.
On the 17th of May, 1790, the composer
of Figaro and Don Giovanni was obliged to
write: “I have now two scholars. I would
like to bring the number up to eight. Try to
spread it abroad that I am giving lessons.”
In the meantime, he finished at least three
quartets for Frederick William I., and,
through Swieten, received Handel's Alexand-
er's Feast, and the Ode for Saint Cecilia's day,
to re-arrange. When Mozart saw that, on the
occasion of the presence of the King of Naples,
in September, 1790, he was passed over entire-
ly, and that Salieri, as well as his pupil, Weigl,
were preferred to him, he became convinced
that he would have to seek his fortune in for-
eign parts. The emperor was to be crowned
in Frankfurt, in October. Mozart decided on
going there. He took his eldest sister-in-law's
husband, the violin player, Hofer, with him ;
IAST JOURNEY. 203
for he had no doubt of his success on this oc-
casion. It was not vouchsafed to him, how-
ever, to attach himself to the court as its com-
poser of chamber music, and his silver-ware
had to go to the pawn-shop, that he might
procure as much as a vehicle to travel in.
This journey for the purposes of his art—
it was destined to be his last—is described in
his letters to his “best and dearest wife of my
heart.” They breathe the deepest melan-
choly. In reading them, we cannot fail to
see that the shadows of death were even now
playing about his head.
As if he had not been the most industrious
of workers, he writes to his wife at this time:
“I am now firmly resolved to do my very best
here, and then I shall be heartily glad to be
with you again. What a glorious life we shall
live after this l I shall work—O how I shall
work! that I may never again get into such
a fatal state in consequence of unexpected con-
tingencies.” He was, indeed, literally “im-
mersed” in music. His application had so
distracted him, and his mind was so unhinged
in consequence, that he did not dare even to
cut his own meat in eating, lest he might in-
204 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
jure himself. His strange contortions of
countenance and his strange gestures showed
that his thoughts were far from being in the
world about him. He had fallen into the
hands of usurers, and that “un-christian class
of people,” as he called them, succeeded in in-
volving him completely in their meshes.
But, unfortunately, he was soon forced to
the conviction, that, even in Frankfort, there
was not much for him to do. In a letter of
the 30th of September, 1790, to his wife, he
says: “I am exceedingly glad to go back to
you again. If people could only look into
my heart I would be almost forced to blush.
I am so cold, so icy cold to everything. If
you were with me, perhaps I would find more
pleasure in the kind treatment I receive from
people; but, as it is, my heart is empty.” On
his journey home, he visited Mayence where
Tischbein, Goethe's friend, painted his picture.
He was going to Mannheim. “O the golden
days of a heart's first love!” What thoughts
must have possessed him at this time ! For,
did not all Vienna know how happily he lived
with his Constance, while the unhappy rela-
tions of Aloysia with her husband were matter
POWERTY. 205
of discussion in the public press? But why
was it that the man who, at that time, gave
promise of such a career of happiness, was
now obliged to travel about the world in search
of his daily bread 2 The thought of this filled
his soul with bitterness, at the very time that
he was invited to Munich, on account of the
King of Naples, to a concert at court. He
writes: “A pretty honor for the court of Vienna
that the King has to hear me in a strange coun-
try!” And, indeed, the court’s neglect of him
was the chief cause of the sad plight he was in.
His journey had cheered and strength-
ened him, but it had not improved his
pecuniary condition. He could, in conse-
quence, redeem only a portion of the silver-
ware he had pledged, and the rest of it was
lost entirely through his too great confidence
in a Masonic friend. At this time, one of the
directors of a London concert company, J.
P. Salomon, had come to Vienna to take
Haydn—his old patron prince Esterhazy hav-
ing died—to London. Mozart was to follow
after. His parting with the “old papa.” was
touching in the extreme. We saw above how
deep his feeling of affection was for Mozart.
206 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
The latter, with tears in his eyes, and at a time
when he might well have thought rather of his
own death, said to Haydn who was so much
older: “This is probably our last good-bye, in
this life.” He divined only too well. Haydn
shed bitter tears of sorrow when he heard of
Mozart's premature death a year later, in Lon-
don. He now wrote: “Posterity will have to
wait a hundred years for another like him ;”
and again, many years afterwards: “Pardon
me, but I must always weep when I hear my
dear Mozart's name.” e’
Mozart's soul was deeply affected. But his
mind soared into regions beyond this life,
where compensation for its inequalities would
be found. The debt that weighed upon him
now was light in comparison with the wealth
he had labored so industriously and devotedly
to give the world, and which he was still be-
stowing on it. And hence it has genuine mel-
ancholy, not pain nor plaintive sighs that
filled his soul. The golden light of consola-
tion tinged all his work. A friend had once
written in his album. “Love! love! love! is the
soul of genius.” He now interpreted these
words in the sense of eternal love and merci-
EIIS LATER MUSIC. 207.
ful goodness. A spirit of wonderful sweet-
ness and reconciliation henceforth animates
all his music. We need only remind the
reader of the two “fantasias” for four hands in F.
minor. They were written in the winter of
1790–91 “at the urgent solicitation of a friend,
a great lover of music,” for an orchestrion, in
which one Count Dehm produced, for the ben-
efit of his countrymen, a number of distin-
guished historical characters in wax; and which
was intended for the “mausoleum” of the cel-
ebrated Field-marshal Laudon. In it we reach
the sunny heights of Mozart's genius, and see
how he dived down into, and was absorbed by,
his own hard and chequered life, and how he
was again lifted up to that eternal spring from
which his own as well as Bach's sub-
lime religious art proceeded; the union of
sanctified personal feeling to the sensible pre-
sentation of the Eternal itself, to which the
human soul looks up in silent, earnest faith
and resignation. It was time that another
opportunity were offered to Mozart to give
complete expression to this final and highest
feeling of the human breast; and it was
afforded him. Mere accident led to what he
208 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
aimed at. We are thus brought face to face
with his Magic Flute and Requiem; works
ushured in by those fantasias, like bright morn-
ing stars, just as the quintett in G minor had
preceded his Don Giovanni.
In order fully to appreciate the place these
two works fill in Mozart's own life, we must
turn our gaze backwards, for a time.
We know what Mozart's heartfelt religious
feeling was. He disclosed it in the frankest
way whenever a proper occasion offered. He
was just as honestly attached to his Church.
When he was starting on his great Parisian
journey, in the interest of his art, his father
wrote him: “May the grace of God attend you
everywhere, may it never forsake you, and it
never will forsake you, if you are industrious
to fulfill the duties of a really good Catholic.”
But at this time, the necessity of examining
the great questions of life, death and immor-
tality, and of disclosing to each other, in earnest
conversation, the questions of the Soul, was
very generally felt, by people even outside the
Church. And this all the more, because
neither the Protestant nor the Catholic service
seemed able to satisfy the spiritual cravings
JOINS THE MASONS. 209
of the educated. The Protestant Church was
divided into the opposing parties of orthodoxy
and rationalism. The Catholic Church had
grown torpid, stereotyped in dogma, and its
worship had sunk almost to the level of mere
theatrical mummery. Oneness of spirit soon
led to leagues or unions and orders of which the
order of Free Masons attained the greatest im–
portance. Of the men who constantly bore in
mind the intellectual life and elevation of the
German people, Lessing, Wieland, Herder and
Goethe belonged to this order. And since it
was its aim to realize the highest virtues of
Christianity, the purification of the mind and
heart by the sacrifice of self, and the assistance
of all men, it was impossible that a man like
Mozart should not have felt drawn to it.
He joined the order in Vienna, and so true
did the doctrine of the sanctifying nature of
death as the real “object and aim of life,”
and as the symbol of the self-sacrifice we should
be ever ready to make of ourselves, seem to him
that he did not rest until he had induced his
father to join it also. They, indeed, destroy-
ed the correspondence with one another, on this
subject. But the Magic Flute bears witness to
14 &
210 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
the earnestness with which Mozart held to these
sublime truths of Christianity, even outside the
Church. Its history is as follows:
Schikaneder who, as far back as 1780, had
known how to make use of young Mozart in
Salsburg, had been some years in Vienna, and
had a small wooden theatre in the Stahrem-
berg Freihaus." His inexhaustible good hu-
mor made him very good company, and Mozart
had long enjoyed himself in the circle of his
theatrical friends. Schikaneder had frequent-
ly, when acting as theatrical director, alternate-
ly reveled in superfluity, and almost starved.
Now, in consequence of the competition of the
theatre in the Leopolostadt, he was brought
to the very brink of ruin. This was in the
spring of 1791. He applied to Mozart for a
“piece that would attract.” He said that
he had a proper subject, a Magic Opera, and that
Mozart was the man to write the music for it.
It was an unparelleled piece of impudence, and
one which discloses Schikaneder's whole char-
acter, to ask the emperor's composer, the author
of Figaro and Don Giovanni to write a Magic
* A Freihaus is a house subject to a jurisdiction other than
that in which it is situated.
THE MAGIC ELUTE. 211
Opera for a board booth in the suburbs. But
Schikaneder knew the world and knew Moz-
art. And then he was linked to him by the
ties of brotherhood in the order of Free Ma-
sons. To that brotherhood, Mozart himself
owed the steady assistance he received
from Puchberg. And hence his objections
were soon overcome by the description the sly
director gave of his extreme poverty. “If we
are unfortunate in the matter, it will not be
my fault,” Mozart replied; “for I never yet
composed a ‘magic opera,’” and with these
words, he went immediately to work.
To the clown, Schikaneder, the bird-catcher,
Papageno—who understood so well how to de-
scribe the good natured, rather timid, fanciful,
easy-going nature of the average Viennese—
was of more consequence than the other
nobler characters of the opera. But to the
composer, the chosen play was a reflection of
life such as he had seen it in his own soul for
years, and above all, as it was in the heart of
the loving pair who, separated by adverse fate,
were destined to meet again in more intimate
union; and in the Dies Bildniss ist bezaubernd
Schoen,We hear once more the first heartfelt love
212 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
notes of his youth, more beautiful and more
full of soul than ever. But we would call at-
tention also to the ideal charm and transform-
ation of all the other powers that appear in
this magic play. Mozart really felt the exis-
tence of higher powers, and that they pre-
side over our lives. The rehearsals of the
first act began as early as July; for Schikaneder
had the tact to win Mozart over to himself com-
pletely. He had even given up the summer
house in the garden to him, and endeavored
to provide him with the most cheerful society.
The accounts that have come down to us
representing Mozart as a frivolous pleasure-
seeker originated about this time. But we
need only read the letters which he wrote
during this same time to his wife, who was not
far away,+she was in Baden on account of
sickness, to see that his soul was not in these
outer pleasures. Yet after all, what remained
to him whom the great world disdained but the
little world about him 2 He was now literally
at the bottom round of the ladder, socially.
The fact that he had, besides, to strain every
nerve to eke out a mere existence for his wife
and child, had an effect upon his entire sys-
SCHIECANEDER. 213
tem, which could be removed only by good-
fellowship and wine. The increased action
and concentration of all the powers of his mind
and body, naturally called for in artistic and
above all in musical invention, necessarily leads
to the craving for enhanced enjoyment, if only
for a few moments. And that Schikaneder
knew how to procure such moments of enjoy-
ment for Mozart, that he might own him en-
tirely, and make the composer serve his pur-
poses, we may infer from the story, that after
Mozart's death, which followed so soon on this,
Schikaneder went about crying out: “His
ghost pursues me wherever I go. He is always
before my eyes!”
But more important than the question, how
much of a pleasure-seeker Mozart was, is the
fact that his somewhat irregular mode of life,
at this time had a bad influence on him
mentally. Two causes co-operated to produce
this effect. -
In May, 1791, he had solicited the position
of assistant musician in the church of St. Ste-
phen, for the reason that “he could consider
himself more competent than others for the pos-
ition, because of his more thorough knowledge
214 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
of the church style of music.” He had long
wished to find something to do in this sphere
again, especially since the new emperor had
removed the narrow limits put to it by the em-
peror, Joseph. Now he was asked to write a
requiem, the most solemn music in the wor-
ship of his church; and the request came to
him under the strangest, nay under mysterious
circumstances. A long, lean man, dressed in
gray, with a very serious expression of coun-
tenance, handed him the commission for the re-
Quiem in a very flattering letter. Mozart com-
municated the matter to his wife, saying, at the
same time, that he longed to write some music
of that kind once more, and to produce a work
which friends and foes alike might study after
his death. He took the commission and
asked, as the entire price of the work, fifty du-
cats, without however, fixing the time when
the work should be delivered. The messenger
came once more, paid the money and prom-
ised an additional sum, the composer to write
precisely as he felt, and only when he felt
like writing, but to make no effort to discover
the person who gave the commission, since any
effort of the kind would be in vain.
THE REQUIEM. 215
We now know that it was one count Wal-
segg who gave the commission for the work,
intending to have it performed as his own at
the death of his wife. But the mysteriousness
surrounding the commission took complete
hold of Mozart's mind. He looked upon it as
a commandment from on high. His soul was
already filled with thoughts that lead beyond
the limits of this life. Added to this
was the other circumstance referred to above.
The first act of the Magic Flute was finish-
ed as far as the finale when Schikaneder was
informed, to his sorrow, that the same thing
was being played with the greatest success by
the competing theatre. But he did not des-
pair; it was resolved to change the point of the
play, to transform the wicked wizard who had
stolen the princess whom Tamino was to recover,
into the sage and philanthropist Sarastro, and,
instead of the disconsolate mother, to put the
evil-minded “queen of the night” with her
Moors and the three ladies in black. These
changes occasioned a noticeable disparity and
much that was contradictory in the opera as a
whole; but, on the other hand, Mozart could
now put his whole soul into it, and to this in-
216 THE LIFE OF MOZART,
cident we are indebted for the most earnest and
beautiful effusions of his mind and heart.
The whole work now centered about the idea
of free-masonry. By the earnest trial of their
moral power, mortals must win their higher
immortal portion, and with it their happiness.
The bonds that unite the two lovers are puri-
fied and sanctified, transmuted into the more
powerful and lasting life-bonds of marriage,
which freed from all passion by the labors
- of love and resignation, discloses the real ob-
ject and meaning of love. And, indeed, who
had ever more purely tasted the sweets of this
ever-virginal, marital love than Mozart, who
even now, so many years after he was married,
closed a letter to his wife with these words:
“Good-bye, my dear, my only one. Two thou-
sand nine hundred and ninety-nine and a half
kisses are flying from me through the air.
Put out your hands and catch them; they are
waiting for you. A thousand sweet kisses.
Thy Mozart forever.”
And now as to the character of Sarastro.
Of all the human shapes that Mozart had met
in life, his father's, after that of his beloved
Constance, had the firmest hold upon him, and
|HIS RELIGION. 217
this spite of his misunderstandings of, and
even want of confidence in, his son, in his de-
clining years. And had not his personal ex-
perience with men, next to his artistic expe-
riences, come to him, in real life and even in
public life, in the guise, so to speak, of the
rulers of his existence? Was not the emperor
Joseph and the order of Free Masons the high-
est ideal of purely humanitarian aims that his
imagination could conceive? All this had
nothing whatever to do with his religious
feelings. His Church and his own personal
faith were things apart. He thought, indeed,
that their abuses, as for instance the immod-
erate increase of the religious orders, might
be attacked, but that which constituted their
very core, and their truth, were sublimely
beyond the reach of doubt. But while these
last, in that which is imperishable in them,
now found their holiest expression in the
Bequiem, it could not but be, that those parts
of the new opera descriptive of those higher
purely human aims, should participate in the
Solemn Sacred tones that poured from Mo-
zart's Soul. And hence we need not hesitate
to say that the Requiem and the Magic Flute
218 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
tell us all that Mozart's heart knew and felt
of heaven and of earth, that it transfigured the
earthly in the light of heaven, and sought from
heaven to bring down peace to earth. We
know this both from the chorus: Ogoldene
Ruh” steig hernieder, Kehr in den Menschen
JHerzen wieder, as well as from Tamino's
painful, longing exclamation: O ew'ge Nacht,
wann wirst du schwinden? Wann wird das
Licht mein Auge finden 2° It is the expres-
sion of a homesickness divine, a craving for
God, the highest good for the human soul.
Obstacle after obstacle was placed in the
way of the completion of both works. The
Bohemians had ordered a great opera, Titus
the Mild, for Leopold's coronation. There
were only a few weeks remaining during which
it could be written. Mozart started imme-
diately on his journey. It was the middle of
August. Constance again accompanied him.
As they were entering the carriage, the mys-
terious messenger in gray stood before them.
Mozart quieted him with the assurance that the
Requiem was the first task that would engage
him after his return. Yet this seemed to him
a new warning not to postpone the last work
OVERWORK. 219
of his life; for such he considered the Requiem
to be. He felt unwell even now. He over-
worked himself in Prague—Titus was writ-
ten and put in rehearsal within a fortnight—
and thus accelerated the breaking down of his
already over-taxed, vital energies. Added to
this was the want of success of the opera.
He had this time forgotton the rule “hasten
slowly,” and the quintett in great dramatic
style in the first finale, could not conceal from
his Prague audience, who were certainly indul-
gent, the absence of the artist's peculiar skill.
Titus remained an opera seria, a bundle of
arias, and the applause Mozart was wont to
meet with, failed him, even in Prague. He
was very much depressed in consequence.
He again, indeed, recovered his native cheer-
fulness, but in leaving Prague the tears flow-
ed abundantly. He had a presentiment that
he would never see those friends again.
In the middle of September, he was in Wi-
enna once more. The Magic Flute was to be
put on the stage, and might serve to make up
What he had lost of reputation in Prague.
Besides, it was part of his great life task.
King Leopold had abolished the order of Free
220 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
Masons, and it, therefore, now seemed to Mo-
zart, simply a duty he owed to his order to
put its humane aims in their true light,
by every means in his power. And what a
refulgence streams from the choruses of the
second act, from the overture which, as well as
the introductory march of the same act, so Sug-
gestive of Idomeneo, was only just written
“Through night to light !”—such is the sense
in which Mozart wrote and understood the en-
tire work, the accidental garb of which did
not mislead him in the least. Into one of the
pieces descriptive of this earnestness of moral
trial of the heart, Mozart went as far as to
weave a Protestant chorale. It is the song of
the Geharmischten Maenner—the “men in
mail;” and its “figuration” shows that Mo-
zart had added Bach’s artistic characteristics
to his own. But he had also appropriated his
spirit of deep piety and genuine virtue !
Nothing exhibits more clearly how solemn
and high his vocation as an artist was to him,
nor proves more forcibly that, for him, there
was no secluded spot where alone the ideal and
the divine were to be taught. The ideal and
the divine should, like the sun, shed their rays
THE MAGIC FILUTE. 221
everywhere, and the stage was the place where
our artist felt that he could address, from
his inmost heart, his nation and his contem-
poraries.
And what a work we have before us here !
There never was a greater contrast between
an ideal work of art and the place and occasion
to which it owed its origin, than between the
Magic Flute, one of the starting-points of the
most ideal efforts of the German nation, and
the audiences of a board booth in a suburb
of Vienna |
We must, indeed, leave the trivialities and
absurdities of the libretto out of consideration.
And even here, Mozart's music succeeded in
turning deformity into ideal beauty; and this
spite of the fact that the “bird-catcher,” Schik-
aneder, is said to have suggested many of the
melodies to him which have since come into
such universal favor. There is still a note of
his extant in which we read: “Dear Wolfgang !
In the meantime, I return your pa-pa-pa to
you. I find it about right. It will do. We
shall meet this evening. Yours—Schikane-
der.” A church hymn was afterwards put to
the air: Bei Maennern welche Liebe fuehlen.
222 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
How ideal must not those lines have been
when the higher moral sentiments could be
awakened by so simple an air +.
That best known of all solemn songs: In
diesen heil'gen Hallen, has this very tone of
the dignity of a heart that has mastered itself,
and wisely and lovingly thinks only of hu-
manity. Only the fact that it is as well
known and as familar to us as light and air,
allows us to forget that it is as lustrous as the
one and as etherial as the other. The
character of Sarastro personifies what Mozart
conceived to be the deeper meaning of life.
Pamina is the most beautiful expression of
pure love and tenderness. Tamino is the
ideal character of a youth who restrains his
own feelings under life's stern rule—and thus
insures for himself and those confided to him
by fate, the happiness of life. We need only
ask the attention of the reader to the exclama-
tion in the conversation with the priest, der
Lieb und Tugend Eigenthum!—“love's and
virtue's prize l’” With the fullest expression
of heartfelt conviction, these few tones des-
cribe the whole moral stability of Mozart's
nature.
THE MAGIC FLUTE. 223
It is not hard to see in what relation these
characters stand to the heroes and female
characters of Richard Wagner, and it is not
without reason that Francz List has called
the Ring of the Niebelungen the Magic
Flute of our day. Wagner here filled out
the clear outline of the human ideals which
Mozart drew in the Magic Flute from his
knowledge of the German nature. All the
sublime ideal powers which move and lead us,
from the conscious emotions of our own hearts
to the elemental, primeval forces which de-
termine our will are here found, in the fain-
test outlines, it is true, but still as the first
features of the surest characterization; and as
Osmin points to Fafner, the “three boys” who
lead Tamino, point to the three daughters of
the Rhine who warn Siegfried of his death.
It was the first time that that which lives in
every human breast as the consciousness of the
most intimate knowledge of the real constitu-
tion of the world, and fills us with the feeling
of the eternal, was portrayed with such Ra-
faelite, ideal art in opera. This it is that gives
to the whole work its peculiar tone. Like
the golden light of creation's first morning, it
plays about the opera of the Magic Flute.
224 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
The reception accorded to the work, the
popularity of which is unequalled in any
nation, was in keeping with its merits. The
first representation of it took place on the 30th
of September, under Mozart's own direction.
After the overture, the audience was perfect-
ly motionless: for who could have expected
such solemn, thrilling notes in a Magic
operaž Schenk, who afterwards composed
the Dorfbarbier, the teacher of Beethoven,
who still occupied a place in the orchestra,
crept up to the director's chair, and kissed Mo-
zart's hand, who, continuing to beat time with
the other, gave him a friendly look of recog-
nition and gently stroked his cheek. Our ar-
tist felt that, even here, in this board booth, he
was in his own dear Vienna, in his own be-
loved Austria. But, even after the close of
the first act, the applause was not great, and it
is said that Mozart went pale and perplexed
to Schikaneder, who quieted and consoled him.
During the second act, however, this motley
multitude discovered the message that this
music conveyed to the soul. It was, indeed,
with difficulty that Mozart could now be
moved to appear on the stage. It wounded
SUCCESS. 225
him to the quick to think that the best he
could do was so little appreciated. But he
was soon able to write to his “best and dear-
est wife” at Baden, that, spite of the fact that
it was mail day, the “opera was played before
a very full house and met with the usual ap-
plause.” His feeling for the work is expres-
sed at the close of the letter, in the words
of the incomparable terzetto, when Sarastro
dismisses the two lovers to make proof of
their love: “The hour is striking farewell! we
shall meet again.” With the unconcern of
his own magnanimity he himself ushered in
his mortal enemy, Salieri, and the latter found
the work “worthy of being produced before
the greatest monarch at the greatest festivities.”
And how frequently this very thing has hap-
pened since | But the people continue Mo-
zart's real sovereign, the people in the most
ingenuous innocence of their every impulse and
emotion and of the most ideal view of life's
ultimate nature. And Mozart belongs to the
people. To them, he is not dead.
But the hour of our parting ourselves with
this phenomenal artist and phenomenal man
will soon strike.
15
226 TEIE LIFE OF MOZART.
He now worked uninterruptedly on his Re-
quiem, and the theatre was left to a younger
Capellmeister. He frequently wrote until
two o'clock in the morning. He even refused
to give lessons in music to a lady for a very
dear Vienna friend. He had, he said, a piece
of work in hand which was very urgent and
which he had very much at heart; and, until
it was finished, he could do nothing else.
Even while engaged on the last pieces of the
Magic Flute, such as the march and the
chorus, “O Isis and Osiris,” he sometimes
sank exhausted in his chair, and had short
fits of fainting; for his whole heart and soul
were wrapped up in his work. But he cared
less than ever now about physical exhaustion,
since he was directly concerned with the erection
of a worthy monument to his sentiment and
and feeling of the Eternal in the holy sanc-
tuary itself. He had an earnest feeling of the
terror of guilt, even if the feeling seemed to
him no more than a weakness. But he felt
also, and infinitely more deeply, the power of
forgiving love which was the life of his own
soul. That mighty mediaeval,Christian poem,
the Dies irae, inspired and stimulated his
RELIGIOUS MUSIC. 227
fancy. He wished to show the world its own
painfully tragic meaning and its blessed recon-
ciliation. Certain it is that no composer ever
went to work with a more honest intention to
give a true artistic form to religious expres-
sion in the mass for the dead. True, it is only
certain parts that are in complete keeping
with this deep, religious feeling; while his sec-
ular compositions are throughout appropriate
to the subject treated. The explanation of
this difference is the fact, that Mozart was too
long and too exclusively engaged in writing
operatic music, and that the operatic character
had, as we have already seen, crept into the
music which was now in favor in the service
of the Catholic Church. But these parts, es-
pecially the thrilling accords descriptive of
man's consciousness of guilt, the Gedenke
gnaedig meines Endes, and the close of the
Confutatis, the touching prayer for loving
mercy in the Lacrimosa—these parts were in
entire harmony with the religious feeling of
their author and with his unsurpassed artistic
power. And this it was that made the work
so very dear to himself. It was his favorite,
his dying song. Art had subsequently to
228 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
take another and very different direction in
this department of music, but the language of
the heart overflowing with the feelings of its
God and of the purest confidence in his un-
dying love, will always be heard in this Re-
quiem. That language is its very soul.
We are rapidly approaching the end. The
funeral bell is already tolling. Melancholy is
the last picture in the life of an artist who
never had an equal.
Constance observed the growing infirmity
and melancholy of her beloved husband with
increasing alarm. She did all in her power to
take him away from his work and to brighten
him up by cheerful society. But Mozart, who
was wont to be so social, was turned in upon
himself, depressed, and could give only wan-
dering answers to the questions put to him.
She rode out into the open air with him.
Nature had always had the effect of relieving
and cheering him, so that he worked best
traveling, when he insisted on having his
“portefeuille,” as he called his leather case
filled with music paper, in the side-fob of the
carriage, at hand. They rode out in this
manner, one beautiful November day, into
FAILING HEALTH. 229
the Prater. The aspect of dying nature and
the falling of the leaves suggested to him
thoughts of the end of all things. He now
began to speak of death, and said, with tears
in his eyes: “I know very well I am writing
the Requiem for myself. I am too conscious
of myself. Some one must have poisoned me;
I cannot rid myself of that thought.” His
utter debility without any noticeable external
cause readily suggested that suspicion. He
could not imagine that his strength had been
exhausted by sheer intellectual labor. And
then, had not care and sorrow gnawed at his
vitals for years?
Constance was exceedingly alarmed, and
succeeded in getting the score of the Requiem
from him. She consulted a physician, who
recommended complete rest. This had so
favorable an effect, in a short time, that Mozart
was able to write the cantate Das Lob der
Freundschaft—“the praise of friendship”—for
a newly established lodge, and, shortly after-
wards, to direct its production himself. The
success of the work,+which itself bears inter-
mal evidence to a feeling of greater calmness
and cheerfulness in its author—had a refresh-
230 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
ing and comforting effect upon him. He
now declared his suspicions that he had been
poisoned, the effect of his ill-health, and de-
manded the Requiem back. But a few days
later, he again fell a victim to his melancholy
feelings, and his strength left him. “I feel
that Ishall soon have done with music,” he said
one morning to the faithful person who had
once surprised him waltzing about his room
with Constance, gave him back his wine and
made an appointment to meet him next mor-
ning on some matters of business. When the
latter reached the threshold of Mozart's house,
on the following day, he was met by the ser-
want maid with the news that her master had
been taken seriously sick during the night.
Mozart himself looked at him fixedly from his
bed, and said: “Nothing to-day, Joseph. To-
day we have to do with doctors and apothe-
caries.” -
He did not leave his bed any more after
this. It was not long before worse symptoms
appeared. His consciousness did not leave him
for a moment. Neither did his loving sweet-
ness and kindness. But the thought of his
wife and children filled his heart with melan-
THE REQUIEM. 23%
choly. New and better prospects were now
before him. The Hungarian nobility and
some rich Amsterdam gentlemen, lovers of
music, asked him to write compositions for
them, in consideration of alarge annual honora-
rium. And then there was the success of the
Magic Flute, in which he was deeply inter-
ested. “Now the first act is over ! Now they
have come to the place Dir grosse Koenigin
der Nacht”—he was wont to say in the evening
with the watch at hand. The day before his
death, he exclaimed: “Constance, if I could
only hear my dear Magic Flute once more!”
And he hummed away the air of the “bird-
catcher,” in a voice that was scarcely audible.
But he had the Requiem still more at heart,
and he had so far sketched its principal fea-
tures, that his pupil, Suessmayer who had
also written the recitative for Titus was sub-
sequently able to complete it. During the
afternoon that preceded the last night of his
life, he had the score of the Requiem brought
to him in bed. The Tamino of Schikaneder's
troop took the soprano, Sarastro the bass,
his brother-in-law, Hofer the tenor, and Mo-
zart, as usual, the alto. They sang until they
232 THE LIFE OF MOZART,
reached the Lacrimosa when Mozart burst
into tears and put the score aside. The
thought of his approaching end and of God's
all-merciful, eternal love, filled his heart with
an unspeakable feeling which made it over-
flow with a melancholy joy. This is plainly
evident from the infinitely mild, conciliating
tones in which Mozart has described that day
of tears on which eternal grace and goodness
are to make compensation for the eternal guilt
of men.
His sister-in-law, Sophie, came in the even-
ing. He said to her: “Ah, my dear, good So-
phie, how glad I am you are here ! You
must stay to-night, and see me die. I have
the death-taste on my tongue. I have the
odor of death in my nostrils. And who
will then help my dear Constance?” Constance
hereupon asked her sister to go for a clergy-
man, but it was no easy matter to induce one
to come. The patient was a Free Mason, and
the order of Free Masons was opposed to many
of the institutions of the Church.
When she returned she found Suessmayer
at his bedside. Mozart was explaining to him
how to finish the Requiem, remarking as he
HIS DEATH. 233
did so: “Did I not say that I was writing it.
for myself?” In the evening, the crisis came.
Cold applications to his burning head so shat-
tered him that he did not regain consciousness
any more. Thirty-five years after his death,
his sister-in-law Sophie wrote: “The last thing
thing he did was to endeavor to imitate the
kettle-drums in the Requiem. I can hear him
still.” About midnight he raised himself up.
His eyes had a fixed gaze. He then turned
his head towards the wall and seemed to drop
asleep. He died at one o’clock in the morn-
ing, on the 5th day of December, 1791.
The last account we have of him says: “It
is impossible for me to describe with what an
expression of infinite wretchedness his devoted
wife cast herself on her knees and called on
the Almighty for aid.” She threw herself on
his bed, that she might die of the same sick-
ness, as if the cause of his death was some ac-
cidental disease. The three medical opinions
assigned each a different cause for Mozart's
premature death—inflammation of the brain,
purple fever and dropsyl
The people walked about his house in the
Rauhenstein'gasse in crowds and wept. “The
234 THE LIFE OF MOZART,
poem of the order of Free Masons on the oc-
casion refers, in touching terms, to the way in
which he carried assistance to many a poor
widow's hut. The owner of the art-cabinet
for whom the two fantasias in F minor were
written, came and took an impression of his
“pale, dead face” in plaster of Paris. The
two sublime funeral odes were now made to
serve as his own mausoleum.
Van Swieten took charge of his burial.
But as he left only sixty guldens, a common
grave had to be selected for his body; and
thus it happens that we do not know to-day
where Mozart's last resting place is. When
Constance, sick and sorrowful, went to the
churchyard, some time after the grave-dig-
ger had been replaced by another, who could
not point out where all that was mortal of our
artist lay. Not a friend followed his bier to
the cemetery. All turned back at the gate, on
account of the bad weather. Mozart's skull,
however, was saved, and is preserved in Vienna.
The churchyard keeper's son secretly ab-
stracted it from the grave.
As the parting words of our great artist, who,
spite of all the sorrows he had to bear, pre-
fº
HIS DEATH. 235.
Served, throughout a cheerful, joyous nature,
we may cite the following lines from a note of
his, written near the close of his life—lines elo-
quently indicative of his sweet composure dur-
ing his last days. They run thus: “Dear sir,”
he replies to the admonitions of a friend—the
original autograph, in Italian, is preserved in
London—“willingly would I follow your ad-
vice, but how can I do it? My brain is dis-
tracted. It is with difficulty that I can collect
my thoughts, and I cannot dismiss the picture
of that unknown man from my mind. He is
ever before me, praying for, urging me for,
demanding that Requiem. I continue work-
ing because work does not exhaust me as much
as the absence of employment I know by my
feelings that my hour has come. It is striking
even now. I am in the region of death. I
have reached my end, without having reaped
the pleasure my talent should have brought
me. And yet life was so beautiful My
career opened under such happy auspices; but
one cannot change his destiny. No one can
fix the number of his days. We must be re-
signed and do what Providence decrees.”
“Wir wandeln durch des Tones Macht
Froh durch des Todes duestre Nacht.”
236 THE LIFE OF MOZART.
Thus gravely and solemnly sing the soul-
full and ideally transfigured lovers in the Ma-
gic Flute—Mozart's own confession. It is the
expression of the new and deep spring of life
given to humanity in his music; and Mozart
remained to his latest breath a consecrated
priest of the purifying and sanctifying in-
fluence of his own melodies. His creations
will live as long as humanity clings to the life
of its own soul, and seeks higher nutriment for
that life.
THE END.

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