Mozart’s Journey to Prague
In the autumn of 1787 Mozart, accompanied by his wife, travelled to Prague, where he was to stage the first production of Don Giovanni.
On the third day of their journey, at about eleven o’clock in the morning of 14 September1 and not more than thirty hours distant from Vienna, the couple were driving in the best of spirits in a north-westerly direction, beyond the Mannhardsberg and the German Thaya, not far from Schrems and the highest point of the beautiful Moravian mountains.
‘Their carriage,’ writes Baroness von T— to her friend, ‘a handsome orange-yellow vehicle drawn by three post-horses, was the property of a certain old lady, the wife of General Volkstett,2 who always seems to have rather prided herself on her acquaintance with the Mozart family and the favours she has shown to them.’ This imprecise description of the conveyance in question is one to which a connoisseur of the taste of the 1780s may well be able to add a few details. The doors on both sides of the yellow coach were decorated with floral bouquets painted in their natural colours, and it was edged with narrow gold trimming, but the paintwork in general was still quite without that glossy lacquered finish favoured by modern Viennese carriage-builders. The body moreover was not fully rounded out, though lower down it curved inwards with coquettish boldness; the roof was high and the windows had rigid leather curtains, though at present these were drawn back.
Here we might also make some mention of the costumes of the two travellers. Frau Constanze, carefully saving her husband’s new clothes for special occasions, had packed these in the trunk and chosen a modest outfit for him to wear: over an embroidered waistcoat of rather faded blue his usual brown topcoat with its row of large buttons, each fashioned in a starlike pattern with a layer of red-gold pinchbeck glinting through the outer material; black silk breeches and stockings, and shoes with gilt buckles. The weather being quite unusually hot for the time of year, he had removed his coat and for the last half hour had been sitting bareheaded and in shirt sleeves, chattering contentedly. Madame Mozart was wearing a comfortable travelling dress, light green with white stripes. Loosely bound, her beautiful auburn hair fell in abundant curls over her neck and shoulders; all her life she had never disfigured it with powder, but her husband’s vigorous growth of hair, tied in a pigtail, was today merely powdered more casually than usual.
The road rose gently between the fertile fields which here and there intersected the wooded landscape; at a leisurely pace they had reached the top and were now at the forest’s edge.
‘I wonder,’ said Mozart, ‘how many woods we’ve passed through, today and yesterday and the day before yesterday! I’ve never given them a thought, still less did it occur to me to get out and set foot in them. But now, my darling, let’s do just that, and pick some of those bluebells growing so prettily in the shade. Coachman! Give your horses a bit of a rest!’
As they both stood up, a minor disaster came to light for which the maestro was soundly scolded. By his carelessness, a phial of very expensive eau-de-Cologne had lost its stopper and spilled its contents, unnoticed, over his clothes and the upholstery. ‘I could have told you so!’ lamented his wife. ‘I’ve been noticing a sweet smell for some time now. Oh my goodness, a whole flask of Rosée d’Aurore completely emptied! I’d been saving it like gold!’
‘Why, my dear little silly!’ he consoled her, ‘don’t you see that this was the only way your divine elixir could do us some good? First we were sitting in an oven, and all your fanning was useless. But then suddenly the whole carriage felt cooler. You thought it was because of the few drops I put on my ruffles; we were both revived, and our conversation flowed happily on, when otherwise we should have been hanging our heads like sheep being carted to the slaughter. And we shall be reaping the benefit of this little mishap for the rest of our journey. But come on now, let’s stick our two Viennese snouts straight into this green wilderness!’
Arm in arm, they stepped over the ditch at the side of the road, plunging at once into the shade of the pine-trees, which very soon thickened to darkness, sharply broken only here and there by shafts of sunlight that lay across the velvet mossy ground. The refreshing chill, suddenly contrasting with the heat outside, might have proved dangerous to the carefree traveller had his prudent companion not induced him, with some difficulty, to put on the coat which she was holding in readiness.
‘My goodness me, what a splendid sight!’ he exclaimed, gazing up at the tall tree-trunks. ‘You’d think you were in church! I don’t believe I’ve ever been in a forest before, and it never entered my head till now what sort of a thing it is, this whole tribe of trees standing together! No human hand planted them, they all arrived here by themselves, and there they stand, just because they enjoy living and keeping house together. You know, when I was young I used to travel around all over Europe, I’ve seen the Alps and the sea and all the great and beautiful things of creation: and now by chance here I am, poor simpleton, standing in a pine-wood on the Bohemian border, amazed and enraptured to find that such a thing actually exists and is not merely una finzione di poeti, like nymphs and fauns and other things they invent, and not just a stage wood either, but one that has really grown out of the ground, growing tall on moisture and the warmth and light of the sun! This is where the stag lives, with his extraordinary antlers zig-zagging out of his head, and so does the funny little squirrel and the wood-grouse and the jay.’
He stooped down and picked a toadstool, praising its splendid scarlet colour and the delicate white gills on the underside of its cap; he also pocketed an assortment of pine-cones.
‘One might think,’ remarked his wife, ‘that you had never yet taken twenty steps into the Prater, which after all also boasts these rare treasures.’
‘Prater forsooth! God bless my soul, what a place to mention here! Nothing but carriages, gentlemen with swords, ladies in all their finery with fans, music, the whole spectacle of high society – how can one ever notice anything else there? And even those trees that give themselves such airs, I don’t know – all the beechnuts and acorns that cover the ground, they’re scarcely distinguishable from all the corks that have fallen among them, discarded corks from a thousand bottles. Two hours’ walk away from the Prater woods and you can still smell waiters and sauces.’
‘Oh, hark at him!’ she exclaimed, ‘that’s how he talks now, the man whose chief pleasure’s to dine in the Prater on roast chicken!’
When they were both back in the carriage and the road, after running level for a short way, began dipping downwards into a smiling landscape which merged with the hills in the further distance, our maestro was silent for a while and then resumed his theme. ‘This earth of ours, you know, is really beautiful, and we can’t hold it against any man if he wants to stay on it as long as possible. Thank God I feel as fresh and well as ever, and there are a thousand things I could fancy doing; and sure enough, their turn will come to be done just as soon as my new work has been finished and produced. How much there is out there in the world and how much here at home, how many remarkable and beautiful things of which I still know nothing: wonders of nature, sciences, arts and crafts! That black-faced lad by his charcoal kiln, he knows exactly as much as I do about a whole lot of things, even though I too have a wish and a fancy to take a look at many matters that just don’t happen to be in my line of business.’
‘The other day,’ she replied, ‘I found your old pocket diary for the year ’85; you’d made three or four jottings at the back, things to remember. The first was “Mid-October: casting of the great bronze lions at the Imperial foundry”; the second, heavily marked: “Visit Professor Gattner!” Who is he?’
‘Oh yes, I know – that’s the dear old man at the Observatory who invites me there from time to time. I’ve been wanting to take you along some day to see the moon with me, and the man in the moon. They’ve got a vast great telescope up there now; they say you can look at the huge disc and see mountains and valleys and ravines, as clear as if you could
touch them, and the shadows cast by the mountains from the side the sun doesn’t shine on. For two years now I’ve been meaning to go, and I can’t get round to it, to my eternal shame and disgrace!’
‘Well,’ she replied, ‘the moon won’t run away. There’ll be time to catch up on what we’ve missed.’
After a pause he went on: ‘And isn’t that how it always is? Ugh! I can’t bear to think how much one misses and puts off and leaves hanging in the air – to say nothing of duties to God and man – I just mean how many of the small innocent pleasures that offer themselves every day of one’s life.’
Madame Mozart could see that her husband’s lively mood was now increasingly taking a direction from which she was neither able nor willing to divert him, and sadly she could do no more than wholeheartedly agree as with mounting emotion he continued: ‘Have I ever even had the pleasure of being with my children for as much as an hour? How half-hearted it always is with me, how fleeting! Lifting the boys up to ride on my knees, chasing about the room with them for a couple of minutes, and basta! that’s it, down they go again! I can’t recall that we’ve ever made a day of it out in the country together, at Easter or Whitsun, in a garden or a wood or in the fields, just us together, romping around with the little ones and playing with the flowers, just to be back in one’s own childhood again. And meanwhile life goes by, it runs and rushes past – Oh, God, once you start on such thoughts, what a sweat of fear you break into!’
With the utterance of these self-reproaches, the intimate and affectionate conversation now developing between the couple had unexpectedly taken a more serious turn. We prefer not to acquaint our reader with its further details, but offer instead a more general survey of the situation which in part, expressly and directly, supplied the theme of their discussion, and in part merely constituted its familiar background.
We must at the outset sadly acknowledge that Mozart, despite his passionate nature, his susceptibility to all the delights of this life and to all that is within the highest reach of the human imagination, and notwithstanding all that he had experienced, enjoyed and created in the short span allotted to him, had nevertheless all his life lacked a stable and untroubled feeling of inner contentment.
Without probing deeper than we need into the causes of this phenomenon, we may in the first instance perhaps find them simply in those habitual and apparently insuperable weaknesses which we so readily, and not without some reason, perceive as somehow necessarily associated with everything in him that we most admire.
His needs were very various, above all his passion for the pleasures of society was extraordinarily strong. Honoured and sought out as an incomparable talent by Vienna’s noblest families, he seldom or never declined invitations to dinners, parties and soirées. In addition he would entertain his own circle of friends with befitting hospitality. The Sunday musical evening, a long-established tradition in his house, or the informal luncheon at his well-furnished table with a few friends and acquaintances two or three times a week, were pleasures he refused to forgo. Sometimes, to his wife’s dismay, he would bring unannounced guests straight in off the street, a very varied assortment of people, dilettanti, artistic colleagues, singers and poets. The idle parasite whose sole merit lay in an untiring vivacity, ready wit and the coarser sort of humour was made as welcome as the learned connoisseur and the virtuoso musician. For the most part, however, Mozart sought relaxation outside his own home. As often as not he was to be seen playing billiards in a coffee-house after lunch, or passing the evening in a tavern. He was very fond of driving or riding in the country with a party of friends; being an accomplished dancer, he liked going to balls and masquerades, and he particularly enjoyed taking part in popular festivals several times a year, especially the open-air fête on St Bridget’s Day, at which he would appear in pierrot costume.
These pleasures, sometimes wild and boisterous and sometimes attuned to a more peaceful mood, served the purpose of giving his creative intellect much-needed rest after its enormous tensions and exertions; and they had the additional and incidental effect, following the mysterious unconscious play of genius, of communicating to it those subtle and fleeting impressions which sometimes quicken it to fruitful activity. But unfortunately it also happened at those times, when it was so important to drain the auspicious moment to its last drop, that no other consideration whether of prudence or of duty, of self-preservation or of good housekeeping, was able to make itself felt. In his creative work as in his pleasures, Mozart exceeded any limit he could set himself. All his nights were partly devoted to composition, which he would revise and finish early next morning, often while still in bed. Then, from ten o’clock onwards, called for on foot or by carriage, he would go the rounds of his lessons, which as a rule would take up some hours of the afternoon as well. ‘We’re working ourselves to the bone to make an honest living,’ he himself once wrote to a patron, ‘and often it’s hard not to lose patience. One happens to be a well-accredited cembalo player and music teacher, and lo and behold one has a dozen pupils on one’s back, and then another and another, no questions asked whether they’re any good or not provided they pay cash on the nail. Any old mustachioed Hungarian from the Corps of Engineers is welcome, if Satan has put an itch in him to study ground-bass and counterpoint for no reason whatever; or any conceited little countesswhoreceives me red as a turkeycock if I don’t turn up on her doorstep dead on time, as if I were Master Coquerel the coiffeur!…’ And then, when these and other professional labours, classes, rehearsals and so forth had tired him out and he needed some fresh air to breathe, he would often find that his exhausted nervous system could only be restored to a semblance of life by fresh excitement. All this imperceptibly undermined his health, at least nourishing if not actually causing his recurrent fits of melancholy, and so inevitably fulfilling that premonition of early death which dogged his footsteps to the last. Every kind of anguish, including remorse, was familiar to him like a bitter flavour on all his joys. And yet we know that these sorrows too, purified and serene, all met and mingled in that deep fountain from which they leapt again in a hundred golden streams, as his changing melodies inexhaustibly poured forth all the torment and rapture of the human heart.
The ill-effects of Mozart’s way of life were most plainly to be seen in his domestic arrangements. The reproach of foolish, irresponsible extravagance was well merited, and even went hand in hand with one of his most lovable traits of character. A caller who turned up in dire need to ask him for a loan, to beg him to stand surety, had usually calculated in advance that Mozart would not bother to negotiate any terms or guarantee of repayment; and indeed it was no more in his nature than in a child’s to do so. He liked best to make an immediate outright gift, and always with laughing generosity, especially when he felt that for the time being he had money to spare.
The expense involved in such lavishness, in addition to ordinary household needs, naturally far exceeded his income. His earnings from theatres and concerts, publishers and pupils, together with his pension from the Emperor, were quite insufficient, if only because his music was still far from commending itself decisively to public taste. The pure beauty, complexity and profundity of Mozart’s work were commonly found less palatable than the more easily digestible fare to which his hearers were accustomed. It is true that Il Seraglio, thanks to the popular elements in this piece, had in its time so delighted the Viennese that they could scarcely have enough of it. Figaro, on the other hand, competing a few years later with the charming but far slighter Cosa rara, had been an unexpected and lamentable failure, which was certainly not only due to the Director’s intrigues.3 Yet this very same Figaro had then almost at once been received with such enthusiasm by the better educated or less prejudiced audiences of Prague, that the master, touched and grateful, had decided to write his next great opera specially for them.
Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems Page 5