Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems

by Eduard Morike

  Notwithstanding the unpropitious times and the influence of his enemies, Mozart might still, if he had exercised a little more circumspection and prudence, have earned a very respectable income by his art. As things were, however, he fell short of success even in those ventures which won him acclamation from the great mass of the public. It seemed, in fact, that fate, his own character and his own weaknesses all conspired to prevent this unique man of genius from prospering and surviving.

  We may readily understand with what difficulties a housewife who knew her duty must have been faced in such circumstances. Although herself young and lively, the daughter of a musician and no stranger to artistic temperament, as well as having been brought up to live frugally, Constanze willingly did her utmost to stop the waste at its source, to cut short some of her husband’s excesses and make good the large-scale loss by small economies. But it was perhaps in this last respect that she lacked the right skill and experience. It was she who kept the money and the household accounts; every bill, every demand for repayment and all the unpleasantness fell only to her to deal with. Thus there were times when she almost lost heart, especially when these household worries, the privations, the painful embarrassments and the fear of public disgrace, were compounded by her husband’s moods of depression, which would overwhelm him for days on end. Idle and inconsolable, he would sit sighing and lamenting beside his wife, or brooding by himself in a corner, and as a screw follows its endless thread, so he would dwell endlessly on the single gloomy theme of his wish to die. Nevertheless her good humour seldom deserted her, and her clear common sense usually stood them in good stead, even if only for a short time. In the essentials there was little or no improvement. Even when she did, with a mixture of seriousness and cajolery, of flattery and pleading, succeed in persuading him, just this once, to take tea with her or to enjoy dinner with his family and then spend the evening at home, what good did it do? Occasionally, indeed, noticing with dismay and emotion that his wife had been shedding tears, he would sincerely abjure this or that bad habit, promise complete reform and more than she had asked – it was all in vain, for he would soon slip back into his old ways. It was tempting to believe that to do otherwise was simply not in his power, and that somehow to have forcibly imposed on him a completely different way of life, conforming to our ideas of what is proper and beneficial for mankind generally, would in his case have been the very way to destroy this unique and miraculous individual.

  Constanze nevertheless kept on hoping that a favourable turn of events might be brought about by external causes, that is to say by a radical improvement in their financial position, which in view of her husband’s growing reputation she fully expected. If only, she thought, the constant pressure could be relieved, the economic pressure which he himself directly or indirectly felt; if only he might follow his true calling undividedly, without having to sacrifice half his strength and his time merely to earn money; and if only he no longer had to chase after his pleasures, but could enjoy them with a far better conscience and with twice the profit for his body and soul! Then indeed his whole state of mind would become easier, more natural, more peaceful. She even planned that they would one day move and live elsewhere, convinced as she was that despite his absolute preference for Vienna there was no real future for him there, and that she might in the end be able to persuade him of this.

  But there was now a next, decisive step to be taken towards the realization of Madame Mozart’s thoughts and wishes: and this, she hoped, would be the success of the new opera which was the purpose of their present journey.

  Its composition was well over halfway completed. Close friends well qualified to judge, who had followed the progress of this extraordinary work and were well placed to form some idea of its character and probable reception, spoke everywhere of it in a tone of such wonderment that even among Mozart’s enemies many were prepared to see Don Giovanni, before it was six months old, stirring and taking by storm and changing the face of the entire musical world from one end of Germany to the other. Other well-wishers, speaking with greater caution and reserve, based their forecasts on the present state of musical fashion, and were less hopeful of a general and rapid success. The maestro himself privately shared their only too well-founded scepticism.

  Constanze for her part, like any woman of lively temperament and especially when her feelings are dominated by an entirely understandable wish, was much less susceptible than men to such misgivings and second thoughts of one kind or another, and held fast to her hopeful view, which indeed, now in the carriage, she yet again had occasion to defend. She did so in her most charming and high-spirited manner and with redoubled energy, for Mozart had become noticeably more depressed in the course of their foregoing talk, which of course had been quite inconclusive and had broken off in deep dissatisfaction. Still full of good humour, she explained in detail to her husband how, when they got home, she proposed to spend the hundred ducats for which they had agreed to sell the score of the opera to the Prague impresario: it would cover the most urgent items of debt as well as some other expenses, and she had good hopes of managing on her household budget through the winter and into the spring.

  ‘Your Signor Bondini,’4 she declared, ‘will be feathering his nest on your opera, you may be sure of that; and if he is even half the man of honour you keep saying he is, he’ll be paying you back a tidy percentage from the royalties he’ll get for copies of the score from one theatre after another. And if not, well then, thank God, we have other possibilities in prospect, and much sounder ones too. I can foresee quite a few things.’

  ‘Let’s hear about them.’

  ‘The other day a little bird told me that the King of Prussia5 needs a new Kapellmeister.’

  ‘Oho!’

  ‘Director-General of Music, I should say. Let me have my little daydream! It’s a weakness I inherited from my mother.’

  ‘Dream away; the crazier the better!’

  ‘No no, it’s all quite sane. First, let’s assume – in a year’s time, let us say – ’

  ‘On the Pope’s wedding-day –’

  ‘Oh do be quiet! I predict that in a year come St Giles there will no longer be any Imperial court composer answering to the name of Wolf Mozart.’

  ‘Well now, devil take you, my dear.’

  ‘I can already hear our old friends gossiping about us, telling each other all sorts of stories.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘One morning, for instance, our old admirer General Volkstett’s wife comes sailing straight across the Kohlmarkt soon after nine o’clock on a visiting expedition, all on fire after three months’ absence: she has finally made that great journey to her brother-in-law in Saxony that she’s chattered about daily ever since we first met her. She got back last night, and now her heart is full to bursting – fairly brimming over with happy travel memories and impatience to see her friends and delightful titbits of news to tell them – and off she rushes to the Colonel’s wife with it all! Up the stairs she storms and knocks on the door and doesn’t wait for a “Come in”. Just picture the jubilation and the huggings and kisses! “Well, my dearest Madame Colonel,” she begins, when she’s caught her breath again after the preliminaries, “I’ve brought you a multitude of greetings, just guess from whom! I didn’t come straight back from Stendal, we made a little detour, we took a left turn to Brandenburg.” “What! Is it possible? You went to Berlin? You’ve been visiting the Mozarts?” “For ten lovely days!” “Oh my sweet, my dear, my darling Madame General, tell me about it, describe them! How are our dear young friends? Are they still as happy there as they were at first? I find it so extraordinary, unthinkable, even now, and all the more now that you’ve just been to see him – Mozart a Berliner! How is he behaving? How does he look?” “Oh, him! You should just see him. This summer the King sent him to Carlsbad. Can you imagine his best-beloved Emperor Joseph thinking of that, eh? The two of them had only just got back when I arrived. He’s aglow with health and energy, h
e’s round and plump and lively as quicksilver, with happiness and contentment just written all over his face.”’

  And now Constanze, speaking in her assumed role, began to paint her husband’s new situation in glowing colours. From his apartment in Unter den Linden, his country house and garden, to the brilliant scenes of his public activity and the intimate Court circles where he would be invited to accompany the Queen on the piano: all this seemed to become real and vividly present in her descriptions. Whole conversations and delightful anecdotes came tumbling out of her as if by magic. She truly seemed more familiar with the Prussian capital, with Potsdam and Sanssouci, than with the Imperial palaces of Vienna and Schönbrunn. She was also roguish enough to endow the person of our hero with a good number of quite new domestic virtues which had supposedly grown and prospered on the solid Prussian soil, and among which our friend Madame Volkstett had noticed above all, as a phenomenon proving how often les extrêmes se touchent, a most wholesome parsimonious tendency which suited him wonderfully well. ‘“Yes, just think, he gets his three thousand thalers cash down, and all for what? For conducting a chamber concert once a week and the grand opera twice – oh, dearest Madame Colonel, I saw him, saw our dear little treasure of a man, with his superb orchestra all round him, the orchestra he trained and that worships him! I was sitting with his wife in their box, almost opposite the royal family! And what, I ask you, what was on the programme? – I brought one for you, I’ve wrapped up a little present in it from the Mozarts and myself – here it is, look, read it, it’s printed in letters a yard long!” “What? Heaven help us! Tarare!”6 “Yes, you see, my dear; who would have thought it! Two years ago, when Mozart wrote Don Giovanni, that accursed, poisonous Salieri, all black and yellow with envy, was already plotting in secret to repeat the triumph he had in Paris with his own opera, to repeat it without delay on home ground. There was our dear Viennese public, dining on wood-snipe and listening to nothing but Cosa rara; well, now he would show them another kind of bird too. So now he and his accomplices were whispering together, planning subtle ways of producing Don Giovanni with its feathers well plucked, bald and bare as Figaro had been and neither dead nor alive – well, do you know, I made a vow that if that man’s infamous opera reached the stage, nothing would induce me to go to it, nothing! And I kept my word. When everyone was running along to see it – you too, my dear Madame Colonel! – I sat on by my stove with my cat on my lap, eating my pastry-cake; and I did the same thing the next few times it was given. But now, just think: Tarare at the Berlin Opera, the work of his arch-enemy, conducted by Mozart! ‘You must go to it!’ he exclaimed before we’d been talking a quarter of an hour, ‘even if it’s only so that you can tell them in Vienna that I didn’t harm his precious brain-child. I wish he were here himself, the envious pig, and he’d see that I don’t need to ruin another man’s work in order to prove that I still am what I am!’”’

  ‘Brava, bravissima!’ shouted Mozart, and took his little wife by the ears, and kissed and cuddled and tickled her, until her fanciful game, the many-coloured dreams that floated from her imagination of a future that would, alas, never even begin to be realized, came to an end in high-spirited, mischievous caresses and laughter.

  Meanwhile they had been continuing their descent into the valley and were approaching a village which they had already seen from the top of the hill; just beyond it, in the charming plain, was a small country mansion of modern appearance, the residence of a certain Count von Schinzberg.7 They were planning to feed the horses, rest and have lunch in this village. The inn where they pulled up stood at the end of it by itself on the main road, from one side of which a poplar avenue not six hundred paces long led to the castle grounds.

  When they had alighted from the coach, Mozart as usual left it to his wife to order lunch. In the meantime he ordered a glass of wine for himself in the parlour downstairs, while she asked only for a drink of cold water and some quiet corner where she might sleep for an hour. She was shown upstairs, and her husband followed, merrily singing and whistling to himself. The room was whitewashed and had been quickly aired. In it, among other old furnishings of finer origin which had no doubt found their way here at one time or another from the castle, stood a clean and elegant four-poster bed with a painted canopy resting on slender green-lacquered columns. Its silk curtains had long ago been replaced with a commoner material. Constanze made herself comfortable, he promised to wake her in good time, she bolted the door behind him, and he now went to seek his own entertainment in the public parlour. There was however no one there except the landlord, and his guest, finding that neither the man’s conversation nor his wine was much to his taste, indicated that he would like to take a short walk towards the castle until lunch was ready. The park, he was told, was open to respectable visitors, and in any case the family was not at home today.

  He set off and soon covered the short distance to the open park gates, then strolled along an avenue of tall old lime-trees, at the end of which, a little way to the left, the front of the house suddenly came into view. It was built in the Italian style, its walls washed in a light colour and with a double flight of steps grandly projecting from the entrance; the slate roof was decorated with some statues of gods and goddesses in the usual manner and with a balustrade. Our maestro, passing between two large and still profusely blossoming flower beds, walked towards the shadier parts of the garden; he made his way past some groups of beautiful dark pines, along a tangle of winding paths and into the more sunlit areas again, where he followed the lively sound of leaping water and at once found himself standing by a fountain.

  The pool was imposingly wide, oval in shape and surrounded by a carefully tended display of orange-trees8 growing in tubs, which alternated with laurels and oleanders; round them ran a soft sanded pathway, and opening on to this was a little trellised summerhouse which offered a most inviting resting place. A small table stood in front of the bench, and here, near the entrance, Mozart sat down.

  As he listened contentedly to the plashing of the fountain and rested his eyes on an orange-tree of medium height, hung with splendid fruit, which stood by itself outside the circle and quite close to him, this glimpse of the warm south at once led our friend’s thoughts to a delightful recollection of his own boyhood. With a pensive smile he reached out to the nearest orange, as if to feel its magnificent rounded shape and succulent coolness in the hollow of his hand. But closely interwoven with that scene from his youth as it reappeared before his mind’s eye was a long-forgotten musical memory, and for a while his reverie followed its uncertain trace. By now his eyes were alight and straying to and fro: he was seized by an idea, which he immediately and eagerly pursued. Unthinkingly he again grasped the orange, which came away from its branch and dropped into his hand. He saw this happen and yet did not see it; indeed so far did the distraction of his creative mood take him as he sat there twirling the scented fruit from side to side under his nose, while his lips silently toyed with a melody, beginning and continuing and beginning it again, that he finally, instinctively, brought out an enamelled sheath from his side pocket, took from it a small silver-handled knife, and slowly cut through the yellow globe of the orange from top to bottom. He had perhaps been moved by an obscure impulse of thirst, yet his excited senses were content merely to breathe in the fruit’s exquisite fragrance. For some moments he gazed at its two inner surfaces, then joined them gently, very gently together, parted them and reunited them again.

  At this point he heard footsteps approaching and was startled into sudden awareness of where he was and what he had done. He was about to try to hide the orange, but stopped at once, either from pride or because it was too late anyway. Before him stood a tall broad-shouldered man in livery, the head gardener of the estate. This fellow had no doubt observed the suspicious movement Mozart had just made, and was momentarily lost for words. The composer, also speechless and evidently riveted to his seat, stared half laughingly, visibly blushing yet with a certain impudence, straig
ht up into the man’s face with his great blue eyes; and then – an onlooker would have found this very comical – he set the seemingly undamaged orange with a bold, defiant and emphatic gesture down in the centre of the table.

  ‘Excuse me,’ began the gardener with barely concealed annoyance, after taking a look at the inauspicious dress of the stranger, ‘I do not know whom I have the –’

  ‘Kapellmeister Mozart from Vienna.’

  ‘No doubt, sir, you are known to the family?’

  ‘I am a stranger here and on my way through. Is his lordship at home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Her ladyship?’

  ‘Her ladyship is busy and not receiving visitors.’

  Mozart rose to his feet and turned to go.

  ‘By your leave, sir – may I ask by what right you simply come in here and help yourself like this?’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Mozart, ‘help myself? Devil take it, man, do you think I meant to steal this thing here and eat it?’

  ‘Sir, I think what my eyes tell me. These oranges have been counted and I am responsible for them. His lordship selected this tree specially for use at an entertainment, it is just about to be taken to the house. I cannot let you go until I have reported the matter and you have given your explanation of how this happened.’

  ‘Very well. I shall wait here until you do that. You can depend on it, my good fellow!’

  The gardener looked about him with some hesitation, and Mozart, thinking that perhaps a tip might settle the matter, put his hand in his pocket, only to find that he had not a penny in his possession.

  They were in fact now joined by two under-gardeners, who loaded the tree on to a hurdle and carried it away. In the meantime the maestro had taken out his pocketbook, extracted a sheet of paper, and with the gardener still standing over him had begun to pencil the following lines: