Mozart's Women
Page 7
But she was still reticent about supplying her own news, and when she did, literally copied out her drily recorded schedule from her diary.
The chief pleasure for Nannerl and her father remained music-making, which they continued to do every evening, for hours at a time. And they took especial pleasure when something new arrived from Wolfgang. On 15 October they received the pieces Nannerl had asked for, and Leopold wrote to his son: ‘The preludes you sent Nannerl are superlatively beautiful and she kisses you a million times for them. She plays them very well already.’100 And three days later, after another delivery, this time of duets, he reported, ‘We lit our candles at once, and to my delight Nannerl played them off . . . without the slightest hesitation and . . . with taste and expression.’101 At the end of the month, Leopold was still singing Nannerl’s praises: ‘she plays as much as she can and is an excellent accompanist. Every evening we practise for two or two and a half hours at least.’102 Perhaps Nannerl, like many musicians, was only really happy when she was immersed in her music.
In Munich, meanwhile, the travellers were enjoying themselves with friends and music, but living was costly and there was no actual financial gain. Wolfgang discovered that it was no longer easy to arrive somewhere and simply put on a concert, as they had done when he and Nannerl were children: a child prodigy (or, even better, two) was of interest, but a grown-up one was not. There were some old friends in Munich to whom they could turn for advice, and among these was the Bohemian composer Joseph Mysliveček, whom Leopold and Wolfgang had repeatedly met on their Italian travels. Mysliveček had then agreed to try to get Wolfgang an opera commission for Naples. Sadly, he was now suffering from syphilis, and was in Munich to receive medical treatment, with hideously disfiguring facial results. On hearing all this, Leopold’s claim that ‘everyone must be shunning and loathing him’103 – on both physical and moral grounds, presumably – no doubt reflected his own thoughts, and he ludicrously tried to dissuade his son from seeing him: ‘If . . . Mysliveček hears or has heard that you are in Munich, your excuse . . . will have to be that your Mamma forbids you to do so.’104 But Wolfgang would have none of it: ‘Was I to know that Mysliveček, so good a friend of mine, was in a town, even in a corner of the world where I was and was I not to see him, to speak to him? Impossible! So I resolved to go and see him.’105 He was indeed dreadfully shocked by Mysliveček’s appearance, which lingered in his mind’s eye for days and kept him awake at night. But on the day before he left Munich, he went back to see him again, and this time, perhaps even in defiance of Leopold’s suggestion, he asked his mother to come with him. And Maria Anna, ever practical and compassionate, took it completely in her stride. She wrote to Leopold, ‘He is indeed to be pitied. I talked to him as if I had known him all my life. He is a true friend to Wolfgang, and has said the kindest things about him everywhere.’106
There is perhaps the slightest hint, in these early days in Munich, that Maria Anna, left to her own devices as Wolfgang scurried about the city, countered the beginnings of deep loneliness by resorting to drink. On 6 October Wolfgang referred to his mother being unable to write because she had a headache; five days later (after the Mysliveček visit) he reported that they had been to a coffee party, where however she ‘drank no coffee, but two bottles of Tyrolese wine instead’.107 And indeed, as she struggled to pack up all their belongings for their journey on to Augsburg (Wolfgang meanwhile being at the theatre) her little insertion into Wolfgang’s unfinished letter home did not exactly suggest total sobriety:
I am sweating so that the water is pouring down my face, simply from the fag of packing. The devil take all travelling. I feel that I could shove my feet into my mug, I am so exhausted. I hope that you and Nannerl are well. I send most cordial greetings to my dear Sallerl and Monsieur Bullinger. Please tell Nannerl not to give Bimperl too much to eat, lest she should get too fat. I send greetings to Thresel. I kiss you both millions of times. MARIA ANNA MOZART
Munich, 11, at eight o’clock in the evening, 1777.108
She was of course accustomed to alcohol in Salzburg, where everyone drank copiously, largely because Court employees were generously supplied with wine as part of their earnings. Inebriation was even known to be the cause of embarrassment among the musicians as they carried out their duties (Michael Haydn was a regular offender, as was his wife, the Court singer Maria Magdalena Lipp), and had perhaps been partly responsible for the fall in standards that Colloredo was so keen to arrest.
From Munich, Maria Anna and Wolfgang travelled on to Augsburg, where they stayed for two weeks. Wolfgang gave two concerts, though they brought little reward. But the Augsburg visit was extremely significant for the change wrought in the chemistry of the Mozart family. Wolfgang was reunited with his bookbinder uncle, Franz Alois, and therefore with his young cousin Maria Anna Thekla (the ‘Bäsle’). Up until this point, Wolfgang’s interest in girls had been cheerful, adolescent and spasmodic. The Wider ‘pearls’ in Venice had excited him, and later he had sent greetings and possibly little gifts through Nannerl to a number of their Salzburg friends. But no single girl had made serious inroads into his emotional attention. His best friend, and his closest confidante, was still his sister.
All that changed when Wolfgang caught up with the ‘Bäsle’. They had met twice as children, in June 1763 at the very beginning of the family’s Grand Tour, when Wolfgang was seven and the ‘Bäsle’ four, and then again at the end of the same tour three years later. Now, at twenty-one, Wolfgang was bowled over by his nineteen-year-old cousin. He wrote to his father: ‘I declare that our little cousin is beautiful, intelligent, charming, clever and gay; and that is because she has mixed with people a great deal, and has also spent some time in Munich. Indeed we two get on extremely well, for, like myself, she is a bit of a scamp. We both laugh at everyone and have great fun.’109
Despite Wolfgang’s customary hyperactivity in Augsburg, meeting family friends and fellow musicians, and especially trying out new Stein pianos, which he was to admire so much for the rest of his life, he and his cousin delighted in each other’s company. They spent enormous amounts of time together, becoming mutually infatuated on many levels, not least physically. The family habit of expressing affection through analogy with basic bodily functions was naturally extended to include the ‘Bäsle’, and they seem to have become almost inseparable. She accompanied him to lunches and visits and concerts – and, significantly perhaps, to a wine shop with Maria Anna.
Wolfgang’s infatuation with his cousin was observed and received cautiously by the rest of the family. The ebullient optimism that Maria Anna had shown at the start of her trip seems already to have become muted in Augsburg, just a few weeks after departure. She entered much less into the exchange of lengthy letters between Leopold and Wolfgang, adding just one cover-all line, for instance, on 14 October, ‘All sorts of messages from me to all my good friends.’110 She made no reference at all to the ‘Bäsle’, nor therefore to any changes in Wolfgang’s behaviour, but began to take less and less part in daily activities, refusing invitations because ‘the cold has given me pains in the belly’.111 Nannerl, however, did seem to notice the change in her brother. Her letters to him became a little more agitated, even exasperated (‘Not a single letter!’112 on 27 October) as she perhaps began to feel that she was losing him. As for Leopold, the ‘Bäsle’ herself had written to him, probably at Wolfgang’s suggestion (he was later also to encourage his future wife, Constanze Weber, to write to his father in the early stages of their relationship); and despite its idiosyncratic spelling and style, her letter expressed all the right sentiments.
MY PARTICULARLY LOVABLE UNCLE,
It is impossible for me to express the great pleasure which we have felt at the safe arrival of my aunt and of such a dear cousin and indeed we regret that we are losing so soon such excellent friends, who show us so much kindness. We are only sorry that we have not had the good fortune to see you here with my aunt. My parents send their humble greetings to
you both, my uncle and my cousin Nannerl, and they hope that you are well. Please give my greetings to my cousin Nannerl and ask her to keep me in her friendship, since I flatter myself that I shall one day win her affection. I have the honour to send you my greetings and I remain with much respect
Your devoted servant and niece
M.A. MOZART
Augsburg, 16 October 1777
My father cannot remember whether he informed you that on 31 May 1777, he gave Herr Lotter four copies of your ‘Violinschule’, and two more on 13 August 1777.113
Leopold responded with reserve, bizarrely warning his son that his cousin had ‘too many friends among the priests’.114 (This actually proved to be prophetic, for a few years later his niece gave birth to an illegitimate child, fathered by a local canon.) Wolfgang hotly denied this. In his eyes, the ‘Bäsle’ could do no wrong.
But in fact Leopold was more worried about the bigger picture, his son’s total failure to achieve either good money or, better still, permanent employment. His immense letters – unedited streams of consciousness, with little care any longer for that eye of posterity – became increasingly domineering. He issued instructions, worried about minutiae, reprimanded his son for not writing and therefore not answering his questions; and he began a line of guilt-inducing challenge. Often he stooped to exploiting his wife and daughter in his arguments. ‘Honour and care for your mother, who in her old age is having much anxiety,’115 he wrote on 23 October. (Maria Anna was fifty-seven.) Nor did he have qualms about emotional blackmail: ‘Nannerl and I, alive and dead, are the old faithful, abandoned orphan and grass widower and everything that is sad.’116 And yet, even as he urged Wolfgang to move on to Mannheim, he foresaw the down side:
Now you must be well on your guard, for Mannheim is a dangerous spot as far as money is concerned. Everything is very dear. You will have to move heaven and earth to obtain a hearing, then wait interminably for a present and in the end receive at most ten carolins – or 100 gulden, a sum which by that time you will have probably spent. The Court is packed with people who look on strangers with suspicion and who put spokes in the wheels of the very ablest. Economy is most necessary.’117
And so on. Such negative prediction cannot have been helpful to the travellers.
On 26 October 1777 Wolfgang and Maria Anna did leave for Mannheim, where they were to spend the next four months. The Electoral seat of the Palatinate had a long reputation as one of the most brilliant Courts in all Europe. The Elector since 1742 was Carl Theodor, a keen music-lover who had continually expanded his orchestra: by 1778 it numbered ninety. The players were excellent, and the orchestra was universally admired for its sound and its virtuosity. The Mozart children had played at the Elector’s summer residence, Schwetzingen, in 1763, and Wolfgang and Maria Anna must have been eager to return, hoping now for permanent employment in this haven of musical excellence and opportunity.
As soon as he possibly could, Wolfgang engineered a meeting with the Elector. Carl Theodor was gracious, but distant and ultimately dismissive. (He did have other things on his mind: he was awaiting news from Bavaria, where indeed the Elector was about to die, passing his inheritance to Carl Theodor. In the following summer, Carl Theodor would move his entire Court from Mannheim to Munich.) Quite simply, there was no need for another musician, however brilliant, in his Court: he already had a clutch of Europe’s finest in his possession. And Wolfgang greatly enjoyed the company of those very composers and instrumentalists, especially the Konzertmeister, Christian Cannabich, and the flautist Johann Baptist Wendling, whose families were extremely welcoming to Wolfgang and his mother, and whose friendship endured beyond the Mannheim stay. But Wolfgang’s frustration at not landing the job he sought occasionally manifested itself in arrogance and defiance, and, except within his immediate circle of friends, he began, like his father, to get a reputation as a nuisance. As early as the day after his arrival, he was taken by Cannabich to a rehearsal. Some musicians were ‘very polite and fearfully respectful’118 to him, while those who had not the least idea who he was ‘stared wild-eyed, and certainly in rather a sneering manner’. In this, Wolfgang’s first Mannheim letter home (on 31 October), he added crossly, ‘They probably think that because I am small and young, nothing great or mature can come out of me; but they will soon see.’ And most significantly, for it became a pattern, he assuaged his feelings of tension and discouragement by writing the first of his now-famous letters to the ‘Bäsle’. Though not yet of the profoundly scatological nature of his later letters to her, this first has a nonsensical date, and is full of light-hearted tomfoolery – the sort of letter, in fact, that he used to write to Nannerl. His sister, it seems, had been deposed.
Wolfgang’s situation soon became precarious, as hope for any permanent employment evaporated. Leopold was increasingly exasperated by his son’s lack of success, and again his letters multiplied in length, recrimination, instruction and emotional blackmail. He continued to make references to Maria Anna and Nannerl, deploying them as ballast for his arguments. On 13 November, for instance, when lengthily expounding on the advisability of staying in Mannheim to try to secure the elusive post, and the tactics Wolfgang might adopt, he suggested, ‘you could give as a good excuse to the Electress your mother’s age and the strain of a winter journey, which would be very uncomfortable indeed for an elderly woman,’119 adding later, ‘Women sympathize with one another, and Her Highness knows what old age means.’ The general tone of this massive letter is overbearingly dictatorial. And for all that Wolfgang was still breezily pretending that all was well, his father’s letters were beginning to upset him. They must have caused misery too both to Nannerl, who endured Leopold’s moods even as he wrote them, and to Maria Anna, who received and read them as well. The contest of wills between father and son was growing in intensity, and the unhappy spectators were powerless to stop it.
Between themselves, Maria Anna and Nannerl communicated little, and when they did, their concerns were mainly practical and domestic. (Wolfgang wrote on 4 November, ‘Mamma asks me to tell Nannerl that the lining for the coat is at the very bottom of the large box on the right hand side. She will find all sorts of bits for patching, black, white, yellow, brown, red, green, blue and so forth.’120) Only when Nannerl began to feel shoved aside in Wolfgang’s affections did she turn more to her mother, discussing their shared interest in fashion and hairstyles – ‘women’s chat’,121 as she put it rather pointedly.
But Maria Anna was increasingly homesick. She longed for news of all her Salzburg friends, and of Bimperl, her beloved dog. On 23 November she issued what amounted to another of her questionnaires:
You do not tell us very much about Salzburg. Are there no players [Maria Anna meant actors] there? Are no operas being performed? Is Dr Barisani still out of favour? Does our Chief Purveyor still pay attention to Fräulein Tonerl? I should like to know all these things in detail . . . This very moment Nannerl will lay aside whatever she is doing and give Bimperl a kiss on her little paws and make it smack so loudly I can hear it in Mannheim. Remember me to the Hagenauers, Robinigs, Frau von Gerlichs, the Barisanis, Jungfer Mitzerl, Katherl Gilowsky, to whom we send congratulations on her coming name-day. Remember us too to Theresa [the maid]. Now I think I have sent greetings to all and our compliments and thanks.122
But as Leopold’s salvos became ever more furious, Maria Anna too began to resent his accusations, and to retaliate. When Leopold suggested it was all a waste of time and money to stay on in Mannheim, she coolly and factually defended their remaining, and in fact showed herself to be extremely lucid on financial matters. By December she had found out everyone’s salary in Mannheim (‘Rather different from Salzburg: it makes your mouth water’123). And after she had received frenzied complaints from Leopold that nobody had told him how much anything had cost, she did so, firmly and in great detail. Countering his accusations of their inefficiency and lack of trust in his considerable experience in these matters, she retorted, ‘Travelling e
xpenses have gone up a lot since everything became so dear. It is not like it used to be, you would be surprised.’124 And, as they all considered the next move, that Wolfgang should travel on to Paris with two Mannheim musicians and she should return alone to Salzburg, she agreed to go along with the plan, however much she dreaded the journey in the middle of winter (‘I can’t bear to think of it’125). Although she was cold and miserable, she was always loyal and selfless and brave. (And perhaps she continued to seek consolation in alcohol. Congratulating Leopold on his name-day, she wrote, ‘We shall now drink your health in a good Rhine wine.’126) But she was not just longing to get home; she was desperately lonely. After another of her questionnaires about all her Salzburg friends, she added, ‘Wolfgang has not come home yet . . . He has to go to one place for his meals, to another to compose and give lessons, and to yet another when he wants to sleep.’127 In other words, she had been virtually abandoned.
Wolfgang was indeed doing all those things. But the constant haranguing from his father was distressing him, and after composing lengthy and determinedly optimistic replies, he let off steam by writing to his cousin. His three ‘Bäsle’ letters from the end of 1777 (5 and 13 November, 3 December) were all written immediately after he had dealt with his father. And for him the release into his cousin’s earthy, childlike world, into their shared obsession with all matters lavatorial and physical, became a theme upon which he extemporized with huge energy, glee and boundless imagination. He was clearly still infatuated with his cousin, from whom he had only recently been parted. And his heading to the second of these three letters even suggested that for him she was the embodiment of all women: ‘Ma très chère Nièce! Cousine! Fille! mère, soeur et épouse!’128 These explosions of fantastical verbal gymnastics and word-games include sexual innuendo (‘one has the purse and the other has the gold’ – the implication being that you put one into the other; and then, ‘And what do you hold it with? With your hand, don’t you?!’129) Their exploration of each other’s bodies in Augsburg seems to have been entirely thorough. And Maria Anna probably knew all about this. Wolfgang’s letter to the ‘Bäsle’ on 13 November apparently quotes what his mother had just said to him: ‘Now do send her a sensible letter for once.’130 So she was quite aware of the sort of language he normally used with his cousin, and everything that it entailed, and she remained unshocked.