by Will Durant
He first touched excellence in this form with Piano Concerto No. 9 in E Flat (K. 271). The earliest of his still popular concertos is No. 20 in D Minor (K. 466), famous for its almost childlike “Romanze”; in this slow movement, we might say, the Romantic movement in music began. Whether through laziness or distractions, Mozart did not complete the score of this concerto till an hour before the time appointed for its performance (February 11, 1785); copies reached the players just before the recital, allowing no time for practice or rehearsal; yet the performance went so well, and Mozart played his part so expertly, that many repetitions were called for in the ensuing years.
Mozart offered noble music for other solo instruments. Perhaps the melodious Concerto in A for clarinet (K. 622) comes over the air more frequently than any other of his compositions. In his merry youth (1774) he had great fun with a Concerto in B Flat for the bassoon. The horn concertos were bubbles gaily blown upon the score—which sometimes bore humorous directions for the performer: “da bravo!,” “coraggio!” “bestia!,” “ohimè!”— for Mozart was familiar with more wind instruments than one. Then the Concerto for Flute and Harp (K. 299) lifts us to the stars.
In 1775 Mozart, aged nineteen, composed five violin concertos, all of them beautiful, three of them still in living repertoires. No. 3 in G (K. 216) has an adagio that sent an Einstein into ecstasy,53 No. 4 in D is one of music’s masterpieces, and No. 5 in A has an andante cantabile that rivals the miracle of a woman’s voice.
Little wonder that Mozart produced, especially in the years of his love for Aloysia Weber, some of the most delectable airs in all the literature of song. They are not full-blown Heder, such as found their ripe development in Schubert and Brahms; they are simpler and shorter, often adorning silly words; but when Mozart found a real poem, like Goethe’s “Das Veilchen,” he rose to the peak of the form (K. 476). A violet, trembling with joy at the approach of a pretty shepherdess, thinks how sweet it would be to lie upon her breast; but as she walks along, gaily singing, she crushes it unseen under her foot.54 Was this a memory of the cruel Aloysia? For her Mozart had written one of his tenderest arias—“Non so d’onde viene.” But he attached little importance to such isolated songs; he kept the secret resources of his vocal art for the arias in his operas and his compositions for the Church.
His religious music was rarely heard outside Salzburg, for the Catholic Church frowned upon the operatic qualities apparently expected by the archbishops whom Mozart served. High Mass in Salzburg was sung to an accompaniment of organ, strings, trumpets, trombones, and drums, and passages of merriment broke out in the most solemn places in Mozart’s Masses. Yet the religious spirit must surely be moved by the motets “Adoramus Te” (K. 327) and “Santa Maria Mater Dei” (K. 341b); and the most hauntingly beautiful strain in all of Mozart appears in the “Laudate Dominum” in the fourth of the “Vesperae solennes di confessore” (K. 339).55
All in all, Mozart’s music is the voice of an aristocratic age that had not heard the Bastille fall, and of a Catholic culture undisturbed in its faith, free to enjoy the charms of life without the restless search to find new content for an emptied dream. In its lighter aspects this music harmonizes with the elegance of rococo ornament, with the pictorial romances of Watteau, the calmly floating Olympus of Tiepolo, the smiles and robes and pottery of Mme. de Pompadour. It is, by and large, serene music, touched now and then by suffering and anger, but raising neither a humble prayer nor a Promethean challenge to the gods. Mozart began his work in childhood, and a childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned upon him that the Requiem which he was writing for a stranger was his own.
VII. SPIRIT AND FLESH
Mozart was not physically attractive. He was short, his head was too large for his body, his nose was too large for his face, his upper lip overlapped the lower, his bushy brows darkened his restless eyes; only his abounding blond hair impressed. In later years he sought to offset the shortcomings of his stature and features by splendid dress: shirt of lace, blue coat with tails, gold buttons, knee breeches, and silver buckles on his shoes.56 Only when he performed at the piano was his physique forgotten; then his eyes burned with intense concentration, and every muscle of his body subordinated itself to the play of his mind and hands.
As a boy he was modest, good-natured, trustful, loving; but his early fame, and an almost daily diet of applause, developed some faults in his character. “My son,” Leopold warned him (1778), “you are hot-tempered and impulsive, … much too ready to retort in a bantering tone to the first challenge.”57 Mozart admitted this and more. “If anyone offends me,” he wrote, “I must revenge myself; unless I revenge myself with interest, I consider I have only repaid my enemy and not corrected him.”58 And he yielded to no one in appreciating his genius. “Prince Kaunitz told the Archduke that people like myself come into the world only once in a hundred years.”59
A sense of humor prevailed in his letters, and appeared in his music, till his dying year. Usually it was harmlessly playful; sometimes it became sharp satire; occasionally, in youth, it ran to obscenity. He passed through a stage of fascination with defecation. When he was twenty-one he wrote to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart nineteen letters of incredible vulgarity.60 A letter to his mother celebrated flatulence in prose and verse.61 She was not squeamish, for in a letter to her husband she counseled him, “Keep well, my love; into your mouth your arse you’ll shove.”62 Apparently such fundamental phrases were standard procedure in the Mozart family and their circle; they were probably an heirloom from a lustier generation. They did not prevent Mozart from writing to his parents and his sister letters of the tenderest affection.
He was, on his own word, a virgin bridegroom. Was he a faithful husband? His wife accused him of “servant gallantries.”63 According to his devoted biographer:
Rumor was busy among the public and in the press, and magnified solitary instances of weakness on his part into distinguishing features of his character. He was credited with intrigues with every pupil he had, and with every singer for whom he wrote a song; it was considered witty to designate him as the natural prototype of Don Juan.64
The frequent confinements of his wife, her repeated trips to health resorts, his own absence from her on concert tours, his sensitivity to all the charms of women, his association with bewitching singers and uninhibited actresses, created a situation in which some adventure was well-nigh inevitable. Constanze related how he had confessed such an “indiscretion” to her, and why she forgave him—“he was so good it was impossible to be angry with him”; but her sister reports violent outbreaks now and then.65 Mozart seems to have been very fond of his wife; he bore patiently her deficiencies as a housewife, and wrote to her, during their separations, letters of almost childish endearment.66
He was not a success socially. He judged some rivals harshly, “Clementi’s sonatas are worthless. … He is a charlatan, like all Italians.”67 “Yesterday I was fortunate enough to hear Herr Freyhold play a concerto of his own wretched composition. I found very little to admire.”68 On the other hand, he praised the quartets recently published by Ignaz Pleyel, though they competed with his own. His father reproached him for getting himself disliked because of his arrogance;69 Mozart denied the arrogance, but it cannot be denied that he had very few friends among Viennese musicians, and that his proud spirit raised obstacles to his advancement. In Austria and Germany a musician’s fate depended upon the aristocracy, and Mozart refused to give precedence to birth over genius.
He suffered another handicap in having never gone to school or university. His father had allowed him no time for general education. Mozart had among his few books some volumes of poetry by Gessner, Wieland, and Gellert, but he seems to have used them chiefly as a source of possible librettos. He cared little for art or literature. He was in Paris when Voltaire died; he could not understand why the city had made such a fuss over the old rebel’s visit and death. “That godless rascal Voltaire,” he wrote to his father, “
has pegged out like a dog, like a beast! That is his reward.”70 He imbibed some anticlericalism from his Masonic confrères, but he took part, candle in hand, in a Corpus Christi procession.71
Perhaps it was the simplicity of his mind that made him lovable despite his faults. Those who were not his rivals in music found him sociable, cheerful, kind, and usually serene. “All my life,” his sister-in-law Sophie Weber wrote, “I have never seen Mozart in a temper, still less angry”;72 but there were contrary reports. He was the life of many a party, always willing to play, always ready for a joke or a game. He liked bowling, billiards, and the dance; at times he seemed prouder of his dancing than of his music.73 If he was not generous to his competitors, he was almost thoughtlessly liberal to everybody else. Beggars were seldom repulsed by him. A piano tuner repeatedly borrowed from him and failed to repay. Mozart talked frankly about his high regard for money, but that was because he had so little time or inclination to think of it that he often had none. Thrown upon his own moneymaking resources, and called upon to support a family by competing with a hundred jealous musicians, he neglected his finances, allowed his earnings to slip unheeded through his fingers, and fell into despondent destitution just when, in his last three symphonies and his last three operas, he was writing the finest music of his time.
VIII. APOGEE: 1782-87
He began his free-lance career in Vienna with heartening success. He was well paid for the lessons he gave; each of his concerts in 1782-84 brought him some five hundred gulden.74 Only seventy of his compositions were published in his lifetime, but he was reasonably paid. The publisher Artarin gave him a hundred ducats for the six quartets dedicated to Haydn—a handsome sum for those days.75 Another publisher, Hoffmeister, lost money by printing Mozart’s piano quartets in G Minor (K. 478) and E Flat (K. 493); the musicians found them too difficult (they are now considered easy), and Hoffmeister warned Mozart, “Write more popularly, or else I can neither print nor pay for anything more of yours.”76 Mozart received the usual fee, a hundred ducats, for his operas; for Don Giovanni he was paid 225 ducats plus the proceeds of a benefit concert. He had in these years “a very good income.”77 His father, visiting him in 1785, reported: “If my son has no debts to pay, I think that he can now lodge two thousand gulden in the bank.”78
But Mozart did not put those gulden in the bank. He spent them on current expenses, entertainment, good clothes, and in meeting the needs of mendicant friends. For these and more obscure reasons he fell into debt at the height of the demand for his services and his compositions. As early as February 15, 1783, he wrote to the Baroness von Waldstädten that one of his creditors had threatened to “bring an action against me.... At the moment I cannot pay—not even half the sum! … I entreat your Ladyship, for Heaven’s sake, to help me keep my honor and my good name.”79 He was temporarily relieved by the success of a concert given for his benefit in March, which brought in sixteen hundred gulden. Out of this he sent a gift to his father.
In May, 1783, he moved to a good house at No. 244 in the Judenplatz. There his first child was born (June 17)—“a fine, sturdy boy, as round as a ball.” This event, and the gift, softened paternal resentment of the marriage; Wolfgang and Constanze took advantage of the thaw to visit Leopold and Nannerl in Salzburg, leaving the infant in Vienna with a nurse. On August 19 the child died. Its parents remained in Salzburg, for Mozart had arranged for the performance there of his Mass in C Minor, in which Constanze was to sing. Wolfgang and Constanze outstayed their welcome, for Leopold had to count every penny, and thought three months were too long a visit. On their way back to Vienna they stopped at Linz, where Count von Thun commissioned Mozart to write a symphony.
Home again, he worked hard, teaching composing, performing, conducting. In two months (February 26 to April 3, 1784) he gave three concerts and played in nineteen others.80 In December he joined one of the seven Freemason lodges in Vienna; he enjoyed their meetings, and readily consented to write music for their festivals. In February his father, mollified by the birth of another son to Constanze, came for a long visit. And in 1785 Lorenzo da Ponte entered Mozart’s life.
This Lorenzo had almost as adventurous a life as his friend Casanova. He had begun life in 1749 as the son of a tanner in the ghetto of Ceneda. When he was fourteen Emmanuele Conegliano and two brothers were taken by their father to Lorenzo da Ponte, bishop of Ceneda, to be baptized into the Catholic Church. Emmanuele adopted the bishop’s name, became a priest, had an affair at Venice with a married woman, was banished, moved to Dresden, then to Vienna, and was engaged in 1783 as poet and librettist to the National Theater.
Mozart suggested to him the possibility of making an opera libretto out of Beaumarchais’ recent comedy Le Manage de Figaro. This had been translated into German with a view to staging it in Vienna, but Joseph II forbade it as containing revolutionary sentiments that would scandalize his court. Could the Emperor, who was himself quite a revolutionary, be persuaded to allow an opera judiciously abstracted from the play? Ponte admired Mozart’s music; he was to speak of him later as one who, “although endowed with talents surpassing those of any composer, past, present, or future, had .not been able as yet, owing to the intrigues of his enemies, to utilize his divine genius in Vienna.”81 He eliminated the radical overtones of Beaumarchais’ drama, and transformed the remainder into an Italian libretto rivaling the best of Metastasio.
The story of Le nozze di Figaro was the old maze of disguises, surprises, and recognitions, and the clever hoodwinking of masters by servants: all familiar in comedy since Menander and Plautus. Mozart took readily to the theme, and composed the music almost as fast as the libretto took form; both were completed in six weeks. On April 29, 1786, Mozart wrote the overture; on May 1 the première went off triumphantly. Part of the success may have been due to the jovial, stentorian basso, Francesco Benucci, who sang the part of Figaro; more must have been due to the vivacity and fitness of the music, and to such arias as Cherubino’s plaintive “Voi che sapete” and the Countess’ intense yet restrained appeal to the god of love in “Porgi amor.” So many encores were demanded that the performance took twice the usual time; and at the end Mozart was repeatedly called to the stage.
The income from the production of Figaro in Vienna and Prague should have kept Mozart solvent for a year had it not been for his extravagance, and the illnesses and pregnancies of his wife. In April, 1787, they moved to a less expensive house, Landstrasse 224. A month later Leopold died, leaving his son a thousand gulden.
Prague commissioned another opera. Ponte suggested for a subject the sexual escapades of Don Juan. Tirso de Molina had put the legendary Don on the stage at Madrid in 1630 as El burlador de Sevilla (The Deceiver of Seville); Molière had told the story in Paris as Le Festin de pierre (The Feast of Stone, 1665); Goldoni had presented it in Venice as Don Giovanni Tenorio (1736); Vincente Righini had staged Il convitato di pietra in Vienna in 1777; and at Venice, in this very year 1787, Giuseppe Gazzaniga had produced, under the same title, an opera from which Ponte stole many lines, including the jaunty catalogue of Giovanni’s sins.
The “greatest of all operas” (as Rossini called it) had its première at Prague on October 29, 1787. Mozart and Constanze went up to the Bohemian capital for the event; they were feted so fully that he deferred the composition of the overture till the eve of the première; then, at midnight, “after spending the merriest evening imaginable,”82 he composed a piece which is almost Wagnerian in foreshadowing the tragic and comic elements of the play. The score reached the orchestra just in time for the performance.83 The Vienna Zeitung reported: “On Monday Kapellmeister Mozart’s long-expected opera, Don Giovanni, was performed … Musicians and connoisseurs are agreed that such a performance has never before been witnessed in Prague. Herr Mozart himself conducted, and his appearance in the orchestra was the signal for cheers, which were renewed at his exit.”84
On November 12 the happy couple were back in Vienna. Gluck died three days later, and Joseph II appo
inted Mozart to succeed him as Kammer-musikus— chamber musician—to the court. After much trouble with the singers Don Giovanni was produced in Vienna on May 7, 1788, to scanty applause. Mozart and Ponte made further alterations, but the opera never attained in Vienna the success it had in Prague, Mannheim, Hamburg … A Berlin critic complained that the dramma giocoso was an offense against morals, but he added: “If ever a nation might be proud of one of its children, Germany may be proud of Mozart, the composer of this opera.”85 Nine years later Goethe wrote to Schiller: “Your hopes for opera are richly fulfilled in Don Giovanni”;86 and he mourned that Mozart had not lived to write the music for Faust.
IX. NADIR: 1788-90
The proceeds from Don Giovanni were soon used up, and Mozart’s modest salary hardly paid for food. He took some pupils, but teaching was an exhausting, time-consuming task. He moved to cheaper quarters in suburban Währingerstrasse; debts multiplied nevertheless. He borrowed wherever he could—chiefly from a kindly merchant and fellow Mason, Michael Puchberg. To him Mozart wrote in June, 1788:
I still owe you eight ducats. Apart from the fact that at the moment I am not in a position to pay you back this sum, my confidence in you is so boundless that I dare implore you to help me out with a hundred gulden until next week, when my concerts in the Casino are to begin. By that time I shall certainly have received my subscription money, and shall then be able quite easily to pay you back 136 gulden with my warmest thanks.87
Puchberg sent the hundred gulden. Encouraged, Mozart appealed to him (June 17) for a loan of “one or two thousand gulden for a year or two at a suitable rate of interest.” He had left unpaid the arrears of rent at his former home; the landlord threatened to have him jailed; Mozart borrowed to pay him. Apparently Puchberg sent less than was asked, for the desperate composer made further appeals in June and July. It was in those harassed months that Mozart composed the three “Great Symphonies.”