by Glover, Jane
Leopold was becoming impatient with the domestic turbulence of Maria Anna’s childbearing. In the mid-1750s he had decided to publish a treatise on the fundamental principles of violin-playing, based on his by now considerable, and evidently extremely successful, teaching experiences. His Versuch einer Grundlichen Violinschule, a meticulous if somewhat uncompromising book, with its scholarly preface and authoritarian tone, was eventually printed in Augsburg by Johann Jacob Lotter. Writing to Lotter on 12 February 1756, just two weeks after Wolfgang was born, Leopold confided: ‘I can assure you I have so much to do that I sometimes do not know where my head is . . . And you know as well as I do, when the wife is in childbed, there is always someone turning up to rob you of time. Things like that cost you time and money.’3 But for all Leopold’s apparent irritability at the arrival of his latest child, his priorities were to change very quickly. He and Maria Anna soon realized that their children were extremely gifted.
Years later, it was Nannerl herself who became the chief source of information on their early childhood. She was approached after Wolfgang’s death by the German scholar Friedrich Schlichtegroll, who regularly published volumes of obituaries. For his Nekrolog auf der Jahr 1791 he sent a questionnaire to Nannerl, asking her for information on her brother’s early life, and she replied eagerly and in great detail. (She had over 400 family letters in her possession, as well as her own diaries, for she had been a great chronicler of daily events.) Encouraged by her compliance, Schlichtegroll then sent her a list of supplementary questions, at which point Nannerl enlisted the help of an old family friend, the Court trumpeter and poet Johann Andreas Schachtner. From the reminiscences and anecdotes of both Nannerl and Schachtner, the story of a remarkable family life unfolds.
Like their mother, neither Nannerl nor Wolfgang received any formal education at all. They were schooled entirely at home, at the brilliant hands of their painstaking father. With imagination and resourcefulness, he taught them to read and write, to do arithmetic, and learn some basic history and geography. Both children had good handwriting, read widely, drew well and were extremely articulate. And then, of course, there was music. The children would have absorbed it from the cradle, for Leopold’s fellow Court musicians were constantly in and out of the Getreidegasse apartment, rehearsing, playing, teaching. And when Nannerl was seven she too began piano lessons with her father. Soon the creative Leopold compiled a music book (‘Pour le clavecin’) for her, touchingly inscribed, ‘Ce livre appartient à Marie Anna Mozart, 1759’. It contained several short pieces, by himself and other contemporary composers, arranged in order of difficulty. Apparently little Wolfgang, aged only four, also began to play these pieces, and, as Nannerl recalled, ‘the boy at once showed his God-given and extraordinary talent’.4 Her music book is studded with annotations by their astonished father: ‘This piece was learned by Wolfgangerl on 24 January 1761, three days before his fifth birthday, between nine and nine-thirty in the evening.’ And, as Nannerl continued in her memoir, Wolfgang ‘made such progress that at the age of five he was already composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down’.
Schachtner similarly recalled Wolfgang’s early genius. He recounted an occasion for instance when he and Leopold returned from church duties to discover the four-year-old boy writing some music which he claimed to be a piano concerto. When the amused father took the ink-smudged, childishly written manuscript from his son, ‘he stared long at the sheet, and then tears, tears of joy and wonder, fell from his eyes’.5 He also recalled the child’s phenomenal sense of pitch (‘Herr Schachtner, your violin is tuned half a quarter-tone lower than mine, if you left it tuned as it was when I last played it’) and, most fascinatingly, his fear of Schachtner’s own instrument, the trumpet. ‘Merely to hold a trumpet in front of him was like aiming a loaded pistol at his heart. Papa wanted to cure him of this childish fear and once told me to blow [my trumpet] at him despite his reluctance, but, my God! I should not have been persuaded to do it. Wolfgangerl scarcely heard the blaring sound, than he grew pale and began to collapse, and if I had continued, he would surely have had a fit.’ In due course the child clearly overcame this phobia; but his own adult writing for the instrument often reflects this early terror.
As the captivating skills of both children developed, Leopold and Maria Anna began to contemplate showing them off to a more discerning audience than that in Salzburg. In 1762, when Nannerl was ten and Wolfgang six, they took their first tentative steps into a wider world. They travelled to Munich for three weeks in the depth of winter, and played before the Elector Maximilian III. Encouraged by the success of this trip, Leopold then took his family to Vienna the following September. The children were displayed everywhere, including the palace of Schönbrunn, no less, where they played before the Empress Maria Theresa herself, together with ‘the grown-up Archdukes and Archduchesses’,6 as Nannerl later recalled. But they met the younger generation of Archdukes and Archduchesses too, who were their own age, and even inherited some of their clothes, in which they later had their portraits painted. The Vienna visit was temporarily marred by Wolfgang’s falling ill (this was unquestionably a taste of things to come), but in general it was a triumph. Leopold relayed breathless accounts of their hectic schedule to Hagenauer (who was no doubt expected to broadcast these throughout Salzburg). He listed every member of the Viennese nobility who had attended their performances. He described the universal admiration that his children (‘the boy especially’7) had aroused. And he pocketed a considerable sum of money. By the end of the first week in Vienna he could send home more than he had earned in the last two years.
Count Zinzendorf, then a councillor at the Treasury and an energetic chronicler, was one of those who heard the children perform. On 17 October he wrote in his diary: ‘. . . the little child from Salzburg and his sister played the harpsichord. The poor little fellow plays marvellously, he is a Child of spirit, lively, charming; his sister’s playing is masterly, and he applauded her.’8 Wolfgang was clearly therefore the chief focus of attention, but, as Zinzendorf noticed, he was touchingly generous to his sister. And this Vienna trip did indeed cement for the children the foundations of what would become a pattern as they travelled in the years ahead. On their long journeys they were thrown exclusively into each other’s company, and into a shared sibling world of games and make-believe. Their appearances together before the great and the good could almost have seemed an extension of this world, their extraordinary abilities, their nonchalant perfectionism and their very delight in music-making (which neither of them ever lost) all simply being part of what they did together. They probably saw themselves as a little team.
INTOXICATED WITH THESE social and financial jackpots, Leopold began to think further afield. In one visionary sweep, backed up by formidable preparation of almost military precision, he planned to advance on three major capitals of northern Europe: Paris, London and The Hague. Lorenz Hagenauer’s trading connections would supply what were effectively banking facilities in all the major cities en route, and Leopold could call upon various members of his own network among the aristocracy to write letters of recommendation to friends and colleagues, who in turn would do the same. Thus Leopold’s trail was blazed, and his remarkable family could enter each new town and city with fanfares of publicity and attention. Although he had a general idea of the itinerary, various events would dictate changes, either of direction or of length of stay, and there would therefore be a certain amount of improvisation. But the main purpose of this large journey was to show off Nannerl and Wolfgang in the highest society in Europe, and here Leopold succeeded brilliantly.
The Mozart family set off from Salzburg on 9 June 1763. Wolfgang was seven, Nannerl nearly twelve. Spirits were high: it was early summer, and the rural highways and byways looked marvellous. ‘My wife takes the greatest pleasure in the countryside,’9 reported Leopold. They travelled in their own privately hired coach, together with their servant Sebastian Winter. They stayed mainl
y in inns (Leopold was always on the lookout for a good price), where they would take a large room with two beds, one for Leopold and Wolfgang, the other for Maria Anna and Nannerl. On long journeys of several hours in a single day, the children entered the imaginary realm they had created for themselves, which they called ‘Das Königreich Rücken’ (The Kingdom of Back): Wolfgang was its King, and Nannerl the Queen, and sometimes their servant Sebastian would join in, doing little drawings of their alternative world. Everywhere they stopped they would perform, and were well rewarded. Thirty years later, Nannerl could remember every city and town on that immense tour.
Their first stop was in Munich, where again they played to the Elector Maximilian III. Attention was focused on the seven-year-old Wolfgang, and it was only when the Elector himself asked to hear Nannerl as well that, two days after Wolfgang had first appeared, she played too, and was warmly applauded. This early experience in Munich did rather set a pattern for Nannerl, and almost certainly she began to feel somewhat sidelined. Her parents probably noticed this too. Leopold later reported to Hagenauer, ‘Nannerl no longer suffers by comparison with the boy, for she plays so beautifully that everyone is talking about her and admiring her execution.’10 But it cannot have been easy for Nannerl. Her adored brother, to whose age level she constantly descended when they created their secret worlds and games, was accelerating past her own already remarkable musical achievements, and drawing all the attention. Highly talented and hardworking though she was, she simply could not keep up.
After Munich, the family went to Leopold’s home town, Augsburg, where they stayed for two weeks. His estranged mother still considered his whole lifestyle reprehensible, and steadfastly ignored the visit. Although the children gave three concerts, their grandmother did not attend them, her dogged intolerance tragically denying her an experience of which most grandmothers can only dream. Nor did these concerts make much money: Leopold complained to Hagenauer that they had barely covered the cost of their expensive inn. Nevertheless they did buy a portable clavier from the instrument-maker J. A. Stein, with whom Wolfgang would do more business in adulthood. And they managed to renew contact with at least one member of Leopold’s family. His brother Franz Alois, who had inherited the bookbinding business, did welcome them. And so did his excitable four-year-old daughter, Maria Anna Thekla, whom they nicknamed the ‘Bäsle’ (little cousin). She too would reappear, rather spectacularly, in Wolfgang’s later life.
The first main focus of the tour was Paris. Travelling via Frankfurt (where Goethe’s father heard the children play) and Brussels, the Mozarts arrived in the French capital in mid-November, and stayed for five months. With extreme tenacity, a certain amount of self-aggrandization (Leopold did not hesitate to have himself described as ‘Kapellmeister’ to the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, when in fact he was only the Vice-Kapellmeister), and the considerable assistance of good friends, Leopold eventually secured the children appearances at the court of Louis XV, and in public. Wolfgang’s first publications appeared. Baron Grimm, critic and author of Correspondance Littéraire between 1753 and 1773, became a great source of support. He and his mistress, the glamorous Madame d’Epinay, befriended the Mozarts, introducing them to all the right people, advising them on propriety, diplomacy and publicity (Grimm wrote the flowery dedications to Wolfgang’s publications), and bestowing all manner of gifts on them. Maria Anna received a red satin dress (was this the dress in which she had her portrait painted in 1775?), a fan and an amethyst ring from Madame d’Epinay. And Grimm commissioned a painting of Leopold and the children from Carmontelle, engraved copies of which would effectively serve as their visiting card, or publicity photograph, in the months ahead.
There was some sightseeing too. Over the Christmas period the children were taken to Versailles, and Leopold, ever the inspiring teacher, fired his daughter’s imagination with his explanations of the mythological sculptures that she saw in the gardens. The twelve-year-old Nannerl’s diary for this outing includes her interpretations of the statues on the Latona fountain: ‘How latona changed the farmers into frogs, how neptune stopped the horse, diana in the bath, the rape of brosperina, very beautiful vase of white marble and alabaster.’11 (How she would have enjoyed Florence and Rome.) In a very individual way, these children were receiving the most wonderful education. They were speaking new languages. They were hearing and absorbing more new music (ballets, operas). They were learning to appreciate beauty in art and architecture, and often the historical and mythological basis for them. And they were developing discerning tastes for elegant clothes, fine fabrics, jewels and hairstyles. In future years, most of the direct communications between Nannerl and her mother, when they were apart, were about fashion and ornament; and Wolfgang too would confess to a female friend, ‘I should like all my things to be of good quality, genuine and beautiful.’12 And all the time their own skills continued to blossom. By the summer of 1764, Leopold wrote to Hagenauer, ‘What it all amounts to is this, that my little girl, although she is only twelve years old, is one of the most skilful players in Europe, and that, in a word, my boy knows in his eighth year what one would expect only from a man of forty.’13
Eventually, in April 1764, the family left Paris and set out for the central pivot of this great tour, London. For the first time in their lives they saw the sea, and the captivated Nannerl described its waves in her diary: ‘In Calais I saw how the sea runs away and comes back again.’14 The fascination probably palled quite quickly, for they were all horribly seasick on the crossing to Dover. But they evidently recovered well, for within days of their arrival in London they were already playing at the Court of George III and his young German queen, Charlotte. They stayed in London for fifteen months, a period in which, again, the skills and awareness of the children, especially Wolfgang, continued to develop astonishingly. They learned yet another language, met a new circle of people (including Johann Christian Bach, son of the great Johann Sebastian) and heard completely different music (symphonies, oratorios). Leopold continued his unorthodox but ingenious education of his children, and, initially at least, accrued goodly sums of money and many more gifts.
The London schedule was frenzied. In the first six weeks the children played twice at Court (each time coming away with the handsome sum of 24 guineas) and at various public venues, whose press announcements billed Nannerl and Wolfgang as ‘Prodigies of Nature’. There were private events too, in the drawing rooms of London’s nobility, where the children were put through their now familiar paces. In addition to performing (pieces by himself as well as others), Wolfgang was subjected to various tests. He might be given a melody but no bass, which he had to supply, or the reverse, a bass line without a melody, which he had to supply. He might be asked to identify pitches of various instruments, or even of non-instruments (bells or clocks); to read at sight, often from a full score of five or more staves; to play with a cloth over his hands so he could not see them, and no doubt other spontaneous challenges. Wolfgang sailed through all this (though none of it, in fact, would be much of a problem for a technically gifted child with perfect pitch and a pushy parent). London was initially entranced by the boy, and murmured appreciatively too about the pianistic skills of Nannerl, and more sums of money were sent by Leopold back to Hagenauer in Salzburg.
Then setbacks began. First, as summer arrived, London emptied, and opportunities for more of these private events vanished. Second, Leopold became ill. He caught a chill which, probably through a bad reaction to a prescribed medicine, developed into infections throughout his body and nervous system. It was necessary for the family to move out of the centre of London to the country (to what is now Ebury Street, in Chelsea), where they remained for two months; and, because of the dangerous state of Leopold’s condition, the children were required to maintain absolute silence within the house, not even being allowed to play a keyboard. And so, fired by having met J. C. Bach and heard his symphonies, the eight-year-old Wolfgang decided to compose some symphonies of his own. W
ith his sister beside him to write them out, Wolfgang took his first steps into full orchestral scoring. ‘While he composed and I copied,’ she remembered, ‘he said to me, “Remind me to give something good to the horn!”’15 This monumental advance, so delightfully made, was for them another exciting game shared by brother and sister.
Maria Anna must have had great anxiety throughout this difficult summer, but she clearly took responsibility for the family, organizing their move to Chelsea, nursing her sick husband, and eventually also taking over the cooking. She lost weight, but gained rare praise from her convalescent husband, who reported back to Salzburg, ‘My wife has had a great deal to do lately on account of my illness . . . In Chelsea we had our food sent to us at first from an eating-house; but as it was so poor, my wife began to do our cooking, and we are now in such good trim that when we return to town next week we shall continue to do our own housekeeping. Perhaps too my wife, who has become very thin, will get a little fatter.’16 But after a summer of medical expense and no takings, it was necessary to recover some losses, and Leopold thought hard about their winter activities. He considered presenting the children in a subscription series run by a Mrs Cornelys at Carlisle House in Soho Square. One of the great society hostesses, the Italian-born Teresa Cornelys had been a mistress of Casanova (who had fathered her daughter). Now she organized masked balls for anything up to 600 people, and Leopold cannily reckoned that her contacts were as good as any. But if the Mozart children did play for Mrs Cornelys, there is no record of it. As spring approached, and Leopold contemplated the family’s departure from London, he resorted to increasingly desperate measures.