by Glover, Jane
He took out newspaper advertisements offering the public ‘an Opportunity for all the curious to hear these two young Prodigies perform every day from 12 to 3’. This gruelling daily exposure began in March 1765, when the price of a ticket was half a guinea. By May he had reduced the children’s hours from three to two, but also halved the cost of admission to five shillings. And in July, as a final thrust, he rented a room in a pub, the Swan and Harp Tavern in Cornhill, and made Nannerl and Wolfgang play there, again on a daily basis. Humiliatingly, the price was halved again.
Eventually the Mozarts left London at the end of July, heading now for Holland. They spent a day at the races in Canterbury on their way to Dover, and this time survived the crossing to Calais with no ill effects. In Lille they learned of the death of Francis, husband of the Empress Maria Theresa. He was succeeded as co-Regent by their twenty-four-year-old son, Joseph II, who would later play his part in Wolfgang’s adult life. As the family reached Holland, Nannerl became extremely ill with intestinal typhoid. For two months Leopold and Maria Anna nursed their daughter night and day (Maria Anna always on the night shift), barely leaving their rooms, but by 21 October Nannerl was so ill that she actually received the last rites. Leopold reported gruesomely to Salzburg: ‘Whoever could have listened to the conversations which we three, my wife, myself and my daughter, had on several evenings, during which we convinced her of the vanity of this world and the happy death of children, would not have heard it without tears.’17 And then, just as Nannerl was recovering, Wolfgang succumbed as well, causing real financial anxiety on top of everything else, for he was already the family’s chief bread-winner. But he too recovered, having on this occasion got off rather more lightly than his sister. Nannerl’s own 1792 memory of this horrendous time for their parents was quite clear about which of the children had been more dangerously ill: ‘When the daughter had recovered from her very grave illness, the son fell sick of a quite grave illness.’18
Eventually the convalescent children could be put on show again, and they performed in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels. Then at last the family began the return journey to Salzburg. They spent two more months in Paris, where Baron Grimm noticed changes in both children in the two years since he had last seen them: ‘Mademoiselle Mozart, now thirteen years of age, and moreover grown much prettier, has the most beautiful and most brilliant execution on the harpsichord . . . Her brother alone is capable of robbing her of supremacy.’19 He also noticed that Wolfgang had ‘hardly grown at all’, and was altogether concerned about the general health of the child. As the family headed off to Switzerland, Madame d’Epinay wrote to her friend, the author and philosopher Voltaire, instructing him to attend any concert the children gave in Geneva – though in the event Voltaire was ill and missed them. Finally, after an extremely laborious journey, generally of one-or two-night stops en route, and one more appearance before the Elector Maximilian III in Munich, they arrived back in Salzburg on 29 November 1766. They had been away for three and a half years.
Despite their near-disasters and recurring anxieties, the Mozart family had reaped enormous benefit from this Grand Tour. Both children had developed musically, Wolfgang out of all possible recognition or even expectation, and their names were now circulating throughout the Courts of northern Europe. Although there had been alarming lapses in their takings during the periods of illness, they had made a great deal of money, more than Leopold would ever divulge even to his closest friends in Salzburg, and acquired a dazzling quantity of snuffboxes, watches and jewellery. The children’s imaginary ‘Kingdom of Back’ had been fed by their encounters with real palaces, real kings and queens, real ostentatious splendour. They could regale their wide-eyed young friends with tales of their experiences; and they chattered away to each other in several languages. But there had of course been a physical price to pay for all this: both Nannerl and Wolfgang were fundamentally quite frail, and continued to fall prey easily to infection and disease for the rest of their lives, as if somehow their resistance had never been given the chance to develop fully. This was certainly observed at the time. Grimm even feared that ‘so premature a fruit might fall before maturing’,20 while the British minister to The Hague, Baron Dover, believed both children to be ‘not long-lived’.21 Leopold too had had his own serious indisposition in London. If Maria Anna had suffered, nobody particularly remembered or mentioned it, beyond remarking that she had grown thin. But for all of them, this tour had been a momentous experience; and for Maria Anna and Nannerl, literally the experience of a lifetime.
FATHER BEDA HÜBNER, librarian to St Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, was a great chronicler, and recorded the triumphal return of the Mozarts.
Today the world-famous Herr Leopold Mozart, Vice-Kapellmeister here, with his wife and two children, a boy aged ten and his little daughter of thirteen, have arrived to the solace and joy of the whole town . . . These past two years nothing has been more frequently discussed in the newspapers than the wonderful art of the Mozart children: the two children, the boy as well as the girl, both play the harpsichord, or the clavier, the girl, it is true, with more art and fluency than her little brother, but the boy with far more refinement and with more original ideas, and with the most beautiful inspirations, so that even the most excellent organists wondered how it was humanly possible for such a boy, who was already so good an artist at the age of six, to possess such art as to astonish the whole musical world.22
The whole town was agog with how the children had changed and how Wolfgang now had the skills of a Kappellmeister; with how much money they had made, and indeed where the family might go next. Hübner himself got completely carried away, speculating that the Mozarts would ‘soon visit the whole of Scandinavia and the whole of Russia, and perhaps even travel to China’. Leopold adored this limelight, and could not stifle his instincts of vulgar exhibitionism, for he put all the trophies of their tour on display in their house, and invited the admirers in. Hübner was one of them:
I afterwards saw all the tributes and presents which the aforesaid Herr Mozart and his children had received from the great monarchs and princes during their costly journey: of gold pocket watches he has brought home 9; of gold snuff-boxes he has received 12; of gold rings set with the most handsome precious stones he has so many that he does not know himself how many; ear-rings for the girl, necklaces, knives with golden blades, bottle-holders, writing-tackle, toothpick boxes, gold objets for the girl, writing-tablets and suchlike gewgaws without number and without end; so much, that merely to see all this raptim and obiter, you would have to spend several hours doing nothing but look, and it is just like inspecting a church treasury.
When the excitement died down, some changes were made in the small Getreidegasse apartment. Maria Anna and Leopold could at last share a bed again. But Nannerl, now fifteen, was growing up in all senses (she was even considered ‘marriageable’, according to her father). It was wholly inappropriate for her to share a room with her ten year-old brother, but since there was no alternative, a special bed was built for her, with curtains around it for privacy. Leopold resumed his humble duties at Court. But he longed for more of his two intoxicating drugs, travel and universal admiration. Within nine months of their return to Salzburg an opportunity arose, and he seized it.
Vienna was preparing for the marriage of Maria Theresa’s daughter, the Archduchess Maria Josefa, to the young Ferdinand IV, King of Naples. In her fierce determination to protect her territories and forge strong links with her neighbours, Maria Theresa was ruthless in the distribution of her children. She had produced sixteen of them between 1737 and 1756, and those who survived beyond puberty, and were in good health, were soon earmarked for strategic marriage. Joseph, her eldest son and now co-Regent, had married first Isabella of Parma, and then, after Isabella’s early death, Maria Josefa of Bavaria (whom Joseph loathed and therefore cruelly ignored). Maria Theresa’s younger sons were to be similarly deployed: Leopold would marry Marie Louise of Spain, and Ferdina
nd would secure the House of Modena in the person of Maria Beatrice d’Este. The young Archduchesses were also part of this board game. Maria Christina married Albert of Saxe-Teschen, and snared Upper Silesia; Maria Amalia would bring back the House of Parma, temporarily distanced after Isabella’s death. Most spectacularly of all, the Empress’s youngest daughter, Maria Antonia, would change her name to Marie Antoinette and marry Louis XVI of France. But in these early days of political manoeuvres, it was the Bourbon King of Naples that Maria Theresa had in her sights. Originally she had planned that Maria Josefa’s older sister Johanna Gabriella would head for the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, but she had died in 1762, aged only twelve. So now it was Maria Josefa who was to be shackled to the unattractive Ferdinand. They were both sixteen years old.
In Salzburg, Leopold heard of the elaborate celebrations that would attend this royal wedding. Probably hoping that his old acquaintance with the Empress would persuade her to invite his children to take part, he got leave from his ever-indulgent and supportive employer, Archbishop Schrattenbach, and the Mozart family once more packed their bags and set off for Vienna. Leopold should perhaps have realized that Maria Theresa, still in mourning for her late husband and all but inaccessible, would not receive them as readily as she had in 1762. But even he could not have foreseen the other great problem awaiting them, an outbreak of smallpox in Vienna. At first the Mozarts were unaware of it, and while they waited in vain for a summons to the Empress, they busied themselves going to operas and plays. But then, on the very eve of her wedding, the Archduchess Maria Josefa died of smallpox, contracted, it was ghoulishly rumoured, through visiting the family vaults in the Kapuzinerkirche with her mother. (Eventually, at her third attempt, Maria Theresa would succeed in marrying her thirteenth child, Maria Carolina, to the illiterate young Ferdinand.) Far from mounting glorious wedding festivities, Vienna went into mourning all over again.
Leopold panicked when he realized the severity of what had now become an epidemic of smallpox; indeed there had been three cases of it in the very house on Weihburggasse where the family were staying. He looked for new lodgings, and, failing to find anything big enough for the four of them, just took Wolfgang away, leaving the evidently more expendable Maria Anna and Nannerl in the infected house. But he did then decide to remove the whole family from Vienna, and a week later they travelled first to Brno, where they called on Archbishop Schrattenbach’s brother, and then on to Olmütz. It was however too late: Wolfgang had already contracted smallpox. Although he and Nannerl, who also then caught it, both recovered, the family yet again found itself grounded in a strange city for two months, dealing with potentially fatal illness. They returned to Brno and the Schrattenbachs for Christmas, and were back in Vienna in early January.
And then, at last, their Imperial Highnesses agreed to see them. Nannerl recalled the occasion: ‘On 19 January the children performed before the Emperor Joseph; there was no one present but the Empress Maria Theresa, Prince Albert of Saxony and the Archduchesses.’23 Leopold’s account to Hagenauer of this highly privileged, two-hour private audience is more telling. It was only when the Empress learned that the Mozarts too, with their talented children, had been infected with the disease that was wreaking such havoc in her own family (both she and her daughter Elisabeth had caught it, and recovered) that she summoned them: ‘For hardly had the Empress been told of what had happened to us in Olmütz and that we had returned, when we were informed of the day and the hour when we should appear.’ But for Leopold, who had been building such hopes on the success of this encounter, the visit was bitterly disappointing. There was no reward beyond a medal (‘beautiful, but so worthless that I do not even care to mention its value’); and Joseph II, to whom Maria Theresa handed over the formal hosting of the occasion, merely showed ‘amazing graciousness’. Leopold concluded acidly, ‘The Emperor . . . enters it in his book of oblivion and believes, no doubt, that he has paid us by his most gracious conversations.’24
But for Maria Anna, the visit must have been one of the highlights of her life. It was she who was taken into the company of Maria Theresa while Joseph listened to her children. The two women, approximately the same age, compared notes and shared their recent experiences. As Leopold described it, ‘you cannot possibly conceive with what familiarity Her Majesty the Empress conversed with my wife, talking to her partly of my children’s smallpox and partly of the events of our grand tour; nor can you imagine how she stroked my wife’s cheeks and pressed her hands.’25 Leopold may have left their Imperial presences in a state of frustrated discontent, but Maria Anna had had a quite wonderful afternoon.
There was, though, one straw to be grasped from the content of those ‘gracious conversations’. The Emperor ‘asked the boy twice whether he would like to compose an opera and conduct it himself. Wolfgang said, Yes.’ Leopold seized on this fragment of Imperial smalltalk, and chose to interpret it as an invitation. He made contact with Giuseppe Affligio, the manager of the Burgtheater, and initiated a series of meetings, as a result of which the twelve-year-old Wolfgang was given a libretto, La finta semplice, by the theatre’s poet, Marco Coltellini. Leopold now rebuilt his hopes on this. Wolfgang’s exposure at the heart of Vienna’s operatic activity would surely bring him a permanent position, and the whole family could move from Salzburg. But although Wolfgang composed his La finta semplice, K51 (46a), it was not performed. There were intrigues and conspiracies at many levels – rumours that Leopold was trying to pass off his own composition as his son’s, and resistance among the theatre’s musicians who did not want to play music written by a child. All this took virtually a whole year, during which the Mozarts stayed in Vienna. Leopold generally made a nuisance of himself, writing a long and petulant petition to Joseph II which in fact served only to alienate the Court, and in so doing actually gambled with his own security too. He was ordered by Salzburg to return, for his salary was being paid in his absence and it was time he started earning it. But he ignored the summons, and his salary was indeed suspended. There were, at least, two musical compensations in this chaotic year. In the autumn Wolfgang’s Bastien und Bastienne, K50 (46b), was performed at the private house of the controversial Dr Franz Anton Mesmer (whose magnets would reappear some years later in Così fan tutte); and in December he conducted his Waisenhausmesse, K139 (47a), at the Orphanage Church in the presence of five members of the Imperial family. But this was a meagre tally for over a year spent away from home; and the return to Salzburg at the end of 1768 was a far cry from the triumphal re-entry the family had made two years earlier.
Nannerl’s 1792 memoir, despite its telegraphic style of reportage, is eloquent of the way in which she remembered that troubled year. ‘The Emperor told the son he should write an opera buffa.26 The Emperor informed the Impresario who leased the theatre. The Impresario arranged everything with the father. The son composed the opera. But it was not performed . . . although Kapellmeister Hasse and the poet Metastasio praised it uncommonly. The opera was called; La finta semplice.’27 Her childhood loyalty to her brother was easily retrieved, and she recalled the praise of distinguished men. If she remembered the tensions and difficulties caused by Leopold’s bungled negotiations, she remained loyal to him too, and did not betray them.
Leopold’s salary in Salzburg was eventually reinstated, but only after he had had to petition for it, and he meekly took up his duties again. Wolfgang had several of his compositions performed (church music and chamber music), and in the autumn of 1769 he was appointed, unpaid, to the post of Konzertmeister at Court. But, for all his compliance, Leopold was not idly treading water in those summer months in Salzburg. He was planning their next escape, and this time to the country he had had in his sights for years, Italy. He called on many of his recently acquired influential contacts, for instance Hasse in Vienna, and got them to write letters of introduction. He arranged for Wolfgang, like other Salzburg musicians before him, to be given a bursary of 120 ducats towards the cost of the journey. The departure date was s
et for 13 December. But this trip would be different from all the others: only Leopold and Wolfgang would travel. Maria Anna and Nannerl would have to remain in Salzburg.
THE DECISION TO leave the women behind, and so to split the family for the first time, was clearly not taken lightly, but, quite simply, Leopold was determined to keep the costs down. Maria Anna and Nannerl were miserable, not merely at being excluded from experiences which up to this point the whole family had shared equally, but, in Nannerl’s case, at now having her own gifts utterly ignored. In the mid-1760s, while the Mozarts had been on their Grand Tour, three teenage girls from Salzburg had been sent to Venice to further their musical studies. On their return, at the end of 1765, they had been appointed as Court singers. As they all shared their travelling experiences, Nannerl would have looked upon these three young women, only a few years her senior, with considerable interest. And she might naturally have assumed that a spell of study in Venice would be the next possible option for her too: she had after all been depicted as a singer in the 1763 Carmontelle portrait of Leopold, Wolfgang and herself. But it was not to be. Perhaps it was never appropriate, as her skills were decidedly pianistic rather than vocal (her cheeky brother, in a typical sibling tease, once referred to her ‘unbearable voice’.28) But it is most likely that Leopold never even countenanced the idea that Nannerl should travel abroad to pursue her own training: he had a very much greater talent to nurture.
Wolfgang and his father made three trips to Italy in the next four years and never once took the women with them. Like the rest of Salzburg, they could share in the Italian experience only secondhand. Maria Anna would now become the chief recipient of Leopold’s letters describing their activities, while Wolfgang’s added postscripts were addressed to Nannerl. Just before Wolfgang left for Italy, he and Nannerl performed together at a private party at the Hagenauers’ country house in Nonnthal, an event which effectively concluded their shared stellar childhood. For Wolfgang and his father, the Italian journeys ahead would signify some of the best of their experiences, of travel, of music, of growth, of approbation and of great achievement. For Maria Anna and Nannerl, they marked the end of their direct involvement in Wolfgang’s development, an end which though temporary for Maria Anna, was for Nannerl permanent.