by Glover, Jane
‘ON 12 DECEMBER 1769, father and son went alone to Italy,’29 recalled Nannerl twenty-three years later. That first Italian journey lasted fifteen months, until March 1771; yet again Wolfgang met new composers, heard new music (an abundance of Italian opera, but church music too in Italy’s most magnificent cathedrals), and, as he absorbed all these influences, continued his own astonishing development. Nannerl’s 1792 account of that trip again demonstrated her touching sibling pride in her brother, as, two decades later, she remembered with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the teenage sister specific details which had impressed her at the time.
In Verona, an early stop, Wolfgang ‘played the organ at St Thomas’s Church, where they could not reach the organ through the church because of the crowd, and had to go through the monastery cloisters’. In Milan there were ‘many concerts at the house of Count Firmian’, who was Viceroy there and therefore the real power. (Firmian’s uncle had been Archbishop of Salzburg before the current incumbent, Schrattenbach, and therefore Leopold’s first employer at Court. Firmian was extremely supportive therefore to young Wolfgang, and commissioned an opera from him for the 1771 Carnival.) In Florence they were ‘summoned at once to the Grand Duke, with whom they spent five hours’; and it was here too that ‘the son made friends with an Englishman, Tommaso Linley, a boy of fourteen years and the same age as Mozart. A pupil of the famous Nardini, this boy played the violin quite enchantingly. This Englishman and the young Mozart performed in turn, not like boys but like men.’
In Rome, Wolfgang famously heard Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, and wrote it down from memory later that day. But it is Nannerl’s account of this which provides the most telling human detail: ‘The next day he went back again, holding his copy in his hat, to see whether he had got it right or not.’ In Naples, ‘when the son was playing in the Conservatorio alla Pietà, everyone thought that the magic was due to his ring, [so] he took the ring off and only then was everyone filled with astonishment’. In Bologna the great teacher and contrapuntist Padre Martini tested Wolfgang for entry into the elite Accademia Filarmonica. ‘He was locked up quite alone, and had to set an antiphon for four voices, with which he was ready in a good half hour.’ Nannerl also lengthily recalled a bad injury to Leopold’s foot, which necessitated suspending their travelling while he recovered (in extreme luxury) at the home of Count Pallavicino outside Bologna. For Maria Anna and Nannerl back in Salzburg, anxieties about Leopold’s health still took precedence over all other considerations. Even after twenty-two years, that injured foot was given greater space than the one-line description of what was the greatest honour of the whole trip: ‘The Pope wanted to see the son, and gave him the cross and the brief of a militiae auratae equus.’ But Nannerl did remember the great success of Wolfgang’s first Italian opera, Mitridate, re di Ponto, K87 (74a), given in Milan: ‘This opera was performed more than twenty times consecutively. That the opera was applauded can be deduced from the fact that the management at once gave him a written commission for the year 1773.’ And she added proudly, ‘When he wrote the opera he was fourteen years old.’
Nannerl’s recollections were drawn no doubt partly from conversations she had had with the travellers on their return, but also from the letters that she and her mother had regularly received from them. The first of these, written only one day after departure, carries the slight implication that Nannerl had been ill when they left (‘How is your sore throat?’30), which was often and with greater seriousness to be the case at future partings. Leopold was insistent that none of their letters should be lost or discarded. Like his earlier letters to Hagenauer, they were to be distributed around Salzburg, and were effectively newsletters for the whole community. Even on the day after their departure he wrote, ‘You must keep all our letters’;31 and again a month later, ‘I hope you are carefully collecting all our letters.’32 His style in the reporting of events therefore has a somewhat impersonal quality, conscious perhaps of the inquisitive glance of posterity. But Leopold was quite shameless about yet another instance of telling lies about himself, in order to further their cause. In Naples, as he reported proudly,
I announced everywhere that I was the steward of the Imperial Ambassador, because in these parts the stewards of such personages are very highly respected. Thus not only did I ensure a safe journey, but I was given good horses and quick service; and at Rome it was not necessary for me to go to the Customs Office for the usual examination, for at the gate I was received with a deep bow.33
There were private sections too (‘For you alone’), in which in a fierce stream of consciousness he shows a continual need to control everything, as much in Salzburg as on the road. Two days after their departure, for instance, he returned the key to a clavichord, which he had accidentally taken away with him, outrageously adding, ‘See that it is not lost.’34 A few weeks later, in a postscript, he demanded to know (in a most telling order of preference), ‘Have our two guns been cleaned? Is Nannerl practising the harpsichord regularly?’35
Just as Leopold wrote home regularly, so he instructed his wife to write back to him, frequently charging her with failing to do so (‘You are very lazy’36) when in fact she had, and never offered an apology for such hasty accusations. On 17 November 1770 he tore into his wife and daughter for not having sent him congratulations on his name-day. But they had written, on the 9th; and he only acknowledged this weeks later on 1 December. Even Wolfgang had been upset by the ferocity of his chiding (‘Wolfgang . . . became rather sad and said: “I am truly sorry for Mamma and Nannerl, because in his last letter Papa wrote such cutting remarks”’37). But there was never any regret if Leopold or Wolfgang neglected their side of things: ‘We forgot to congratulate Nannerl on her name-day,’38 he wrote casually; and again, later, ‘Wolfgang read Nannerl’s long story with great pleasure, but as he has gone out driving with the Countess, he cannot write back.’39 And on top of all this there were endless instructions and recriminations concerning the sales of the Violinschule, for which Maria Anna was evidently now responsible, and about which Leopold regularly felt it necessary to crack the whip.
All this must have been extremely hurtful to Maria Anna, as on the one hand she read of all sorts of experiences, excitements and honours from which she had been excluded, and on the other was somehow seeming to be chastised for everything she had or had not done. When, desperate for more personal information about her family, she had asked some specific questions, Leopold replied as impatiently as if he were filling out a dull questionnaire: ‘You want to know whether Wolfgang still sings and plays the fiddle? He plays the fiddle but not in public. He sings, but only when some text is put in front of him. He has grown a little. I am neither fatter nor thinner; and we have got accustomed to Italian food.’40 And meanwhile he heartlessly continued to tantalize Maria Anna and Nannerl with descriptions of their experiences, while at the same time congratulating himself on his decision to leave them behind: ‘Though I am glad that neither of you undertook this journey with us, yet I am sorry that you are not seeing all these Italian towns, and especially Rome. It is useless and quite impossible to describe it in a few words. Once more I advise you to read Keyssler’s Reisebeschriebung.’41 He exaggerated the dangers of travel, giving lurid accounts of bandits on the road between Rome and Naples, and, even when they were staying in grand houses, played down the true extent of their luxurious surroundings. Only rarely did he show genuine affection towards his wife, beyond the conventional formulae with which he closed his letters (‘We kiss you and Nannerl a thousand times and I am your old MZT’). One of the very few confidences he wrote to her revealed his extreme nervousness as the premiere of Mitridate approached: ‘On St Stephen’s day . . . picture to yourself Maestro Don Amadeo seated at the clavier in the orchestra and myself a spectator and a listener in a box up above; and do wish him a successful performance and say a few paternosters for him.’42
In contrast to his father’s essential meanness of spirit, Wolfgang was generally e
xtremely cheerful throughout this Italian trip. ‘I simply love travelling,’43 he wrote from Naples. His letters to Nannerl were exuberant, generous and positive. He loved to show off his multilingualism, on one occasion writing in no fewer than three languages (German, Italian and French) and two dialects (Salzburg and Swabian). And with his sister he continued their shared pastime of word-games and riddles, and was completely unselfconscious in expressing his fascination with basic bodily functions. None of the family, in fact, was especially reticent about these (a common affectionate exchange between them, for instance, was ‘Shit in your bed and break it’44); but Wolfgang’s improvisations on this particular theme were, like all his others, more involved and more brilliant than those of anyone else. One whole sentence took as its recurring verb tun (to do), which can also mean to relieve oneself or even to have sexual intercourse. Since Wolfgang was apparently sending greetings to one of Nannerl’s current admirers, Herr von Schiedenhofen, there is little doubt that his sniggering pun was here intentional.
. . . und thue gesund leben, und thue nit sterben, damit du mir noch hanst einen brief thuen, und ich hernach dir doch einen thun, und dan thuen wir immer so vort, bis wir was hinaus thuen, aber doch bin ich der, der will thuen bis es sich endlich nimmer thuen last, inzwischen will ich thuen bleiben.
. . . and do keep well and do not die, so that you may do another letter for me and I may do another for you and that we may keep on doing until we are done, for I am the man to go on doing until there is nothing more to do.45
Ten days after sending Nannerl this, Wolfgang was still proud of it. (‘I hope that you received my letter,’46 he chuckled.)
But beyond the smuttiness, the loving relationship between brother and sister was still touchingly evident throughout his correspondence with her. He wanted to share everything with Nannerl, as he always had, whether notated descriptions of a particular singer’s astonishingly wide range; or bad trumpet-playing in Bologna; or a new game (‘after lunch we play boccia. That is a game I have learnt in Rome. When I come home I shall teach it to you’47); or Rome itself (‘I only wish that my sister were in Rome, for this town would certainly please her’48). He did at times seem to be genuinely homesick (‘Every post day, when letters arrive from Germany, I enjoy eating and drinking far more than usual’49). But he continued to encourage and support Nannerl’s own music-making, including composition (‘You have set the bass exceedingly well and without the slightest mistake. You must try your hand at such things more often’50), and showed great interest in the attentions of her male admirers (‘Does Diebl often visit you? Does he still honour you with his entertaining conversation? And the Honourable Karl von Vogt? Does he still listen to your unbearable voice?’51).
Meanwhile Wolfgang himself, now in his early teens, was experiencing physical changes too. He was constantly sleepy and hungry, partly through continual excitement and, later, exhausting pressure, but partly also because, quite simply, he was growing. And he recognized these changes himself, and confided to Nannerl his playfulness with the Wider family in Venice, to whom the Mozarts had been introduced through Johann Baptist Hagenauer. There were four daughters, whom Wolfgang nicknamed the ‘pearls’, and with them Wolfgang had joined in all sorts of arcane Carnival activities:
Tell Johannes that Wider’s pearls, especially Mademoiselle Catarina, are always talking about him, and that he must soon come back to Venice and submit to the attacco, that is, have his bottom spanked when he is lying on the ground, so that he may become a true Venetian. They tried to do it to me – the seven women all together – and yet they could not pull me down.52
Although Leopold liked and admired the Wider family, he subsequently referred to Venice as ‘the most dangerous place in all Italy’,53 where young people needed careful supervision. It is unlikely that he approved at all of such adolescent high spirits.
Wolfgang’s references to Nannerl’s own admirers do prove that she was enjoying some social life. She was now nineteen years old, and had grown into a strikingly handsome young woman, with a keen eye for fashion, an extremely elaborate hairstyle, and a steady, intelligent gaze. Two young men who paid attention to her during 1770 were Herr von Mölk (son of the Court Chancellor) and Herr von Schiedenhofen. Both were from respectable Salzburg families, and their interest would have pleased Nannerl and her mother too. In the autumn of 1770 Schiedenhofen invited them to stay at his country estate at Triebenbach, greatly to Leopold’s approval, for even this small journey was a real treat for the women, and distracted them from their constant sadness of exclusion.
In March 1771 Leopold and Wolfgang returned to Salzburg and were reunited with Maria Anna and Nannerl. But already there were plans to go back to Italy, for they had a commission for another opera for Milan. Maria Theresa’s son, the Archduke Ferdinand (a mere two years older than Wolfgang) was to marry Beatrice d’Este in one of the most spectacular weddings in the whole of eighteenth-century Europe. It was a canny commission from the Habsburg family, who, as Nannerl’s memoir recalled, had taken care in their choice of composers: ‘As H: Majesty had appointed Hr Hasse, the oldest Kapellmeister, to write the opera, he had chosen the youngest to write the serenata.’54 Johann Adolph Hasse, then aged seventy-two, was a German composer from Hamburg who had acquired his confidence, his métier and indeed his wife (the celebrated soprano Faustina Bordoni) in Italy. He divided his time between Vienna, where he had taught Maria Theresa herself, and Venice, where he would die in 1783. He was enormously gifted and respected, and represented everything in a composer’s career and lifestyle that Leopold envied. He had met Leopold and Wolfgang in Vienna in 1767, befriended them over the debacle of La finta semplice, and then written enthusiastic letters of recommendation for them to his colleagues in Italy. And now Hasse and the Mozarts were to be working side by side in Milan.
Nannerl recalled again the exact date of the departure of her father and brother for their second Italian journey, 13 August 1771; and she no doubt also remembered the intense coded requests she received from her brother (now sixteen) with regard to his own developing infatuations. Buried among descriptions of great heat, and the seasonal fruits he and his father were consuming on the journey, he wrote, ‘What you promised me (you know what, you dear one!) you will surely do and I shall certainly be grateful to you’;55 and again, a week later, ‘I beg you to remember the other matter, if there is nothing else to be done. You know what I mean.’56 But once he had received the libretto for his serenata (Ascanio in Alba, K111) and begun setting it to music, he wrote less to his family. As ever it was Leopold who conveyed to the women the thrilling details of their crammed schedule, and of Milanese excitement as European royalty and nobility gathered for the festivities. In the event, Ascanio in Alba clearly outshone Hasse’s Ruggiero, and, try as he might, Leopold could not conceal his Schadenfreude (‘It really distresses me, but Wolfgang’s serenata has killed Hasse’s opera more than I can say in detail’57). Wolfgang was quietly generous about his elderly colleague, going repeatedly to performances of Ruggiero, which of course he knew by heart.
Again, Maria Anna and Nannerl were wretched at being excluded from all this. Although for the second year running they spent part of October at Triebenbach with Herr von Schiedenhofen, they would far rather have been in Milan. The more they heard about this second trip, its glamour and pace even more dynamic than the last, the more they knew that they were missing out. And again Leopold was tetchily defensive, especially after a Salzburg visitor brought him some pills from home (ordered through Maria Anna) and reported on the women’s longing to be in Milan too. This infuriated him. He flung it all back in their faces: ‘Chaplain Troger . . . told me that you and Nannerl would have liked to come with us. If this was your real feeling it was very wrong of you not to tell me so quite frankly, though the expense of the outward and return journeys alone would have meant a difference of at least 60 ducats’,58 and referred repeatedly to what he clearly considered to be their treachery in confiding in a third party. His s
taggering insensitivity to the women’s feelings can only have exacerbated their bitterness when, in the midst of reports of his own glittering experiences, he grudgingly gave them permission (in a postscript) to get some new clothes: ‘If you need some clothes, get what is necessary made for you, for neither you or Nannerl must do without necessities. What must be, must be. And do not buy inferior materials, since to buy shoddy stuff is no economy.’59
Wolfgang meanwhile continued to be utterly charming to his mother and sister. Occasionally they would have noticed his old homesickness (‘I often let off my whistle, but not a soul answers me,’60 he wrote to Nannerl – was there perhaps some calling-signal between the siblings?), and his exhaustion (‘I am quite well, but always sleepy’61). But in general he was in great spirits and, for all the pressure, absolutely on top of his duties. He wrote exuberantly about the community of musicians where they were staying, and how the resulting cacophony actually inspired him: ‘Upstairs we have a violinist, downstairs another one, in the next room a singing-master who gives lessons, and in the other room opposite ours an oboist. This is good fun when you are composing! It gives you plenty of ideas!’62 Although Nannerl was now a young woman of twenty, their enclosed sibling world of games and secrets persisted. Just after leaving Salzburg, he spun her an energetic series of synonyms: ‘You may trust, believe, opine, hold the opinion, cherish the constant hope, consider, imagine, think, and be confident that we are well.’63 And his own physical growth continued, as even Leopold acknowledged in a curious little sentence, ‘Thank God we are both like two deer, but, I should add, we are not on heat!’64