by Glover, Jane
The five-week trip to Prague was a real tonic for Wolfgang and Constanze. As they travelled with their good friends, they were all in excellent spirits, and they whiled away the journeying hours by playing games, just as Wolfgang and Nannerl had done as children: ‘We all invented names for ourselves on the journey. Here they are. I am Punkitititi. My wife is Schlaba Pumfa. Hofer is Rozka-Pumpa. Stadler is Natschibinitschibi.’78
When they arrived, Wolfgang was the toast of the town. ‘For here they talk about nothing but “Figaro”. Nothing is played, sung or whistled but “Figaro”. No opera is drawing like “Figaro”. Nothing, nothing but “Figaro”. Certainly a great honour for me!’79 Wolfgang conducted some performances of Figaro himself, and also gave a concert, which included a new symphony (the ‘Prague’ in D, K504), on 19 January. He and Constanze were royally entertained, slept a great deal, and had no time to write all the letters they had meant to write (though Constanze did manage to send one to her mother). When they left Prague, Wolfgang had a commission for a new opera, Don Giovanni, also in collaboration with Da Ponte. It was the beginning of a passionate relationship between him and the city of Prague.
But after this extremely agreeable start to 1787, things began to decline. When they returned to Vienna in mid-February, Wolfgang and Constanze did now seem financially stretched, and in April they reluctantly moved out of their splendid Domgasse apartment – those 460 florins per month were increasingly hard to find – to a much smaller one in the Landstrasse. And then Wolfgang received chilling news, probably from Nannerl. Leopold was seriously ill. In March, Nannerl herself had come in from St Gilgen to Salzburg, to take care of her father, and spent two months at his side. Wolfgang was profoundly shocked, but nevertheless wrote his father one of his very best letters, as, reacting also to the recent death of a close friend, he outlined his deeply positive views on the process, and indeed the purpose, of death:
I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank God for graciously granting me the opportunity (you know what I mean) of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that, young as I am, I may not live to see another day. Yet no one of all my acquaintance could say that in company I am morose or disgruntled. For this blessing I daily thank my Creator and wish with all my heart that each one of my fellow-creatures could enjoy it.80
Leopold died on 28 May 1787, at six o’clock in the morning. He was sixty-seven-years old. Neither Wolfgang nor Nannerl was with their father at the end: Wolfgang was of course in Vienna; and even Nannerl in St Gilgen (to which she had only just returned) could not make it back to the Tanzmeisterhaus with any speed. For the same reasons, therefore, they did not attend Leopold’s burial the following evening, beside his mother-in-law Eva Rosina, in the cemetery of the church of St Sebastian. When Wolfgang received the news, Constanze (pregnant again) was ill, and he was writing a note to his friend Gottfried von Jacquin: ‘Please tell Herr Exner to come at nine o’clock tomorrow morning to bleed my wife . . . Today I received the sad news of my beloved father’s death. You can imagine the state I am in.’81
But it had not been Nannerl who had written to Wolfgang. It was Captain d’Ippold, her old friend and admirer, who had remained extremely close to Leopold after Nannerl’s marriage and departure from Salzburg, and was also very attached to little Leopoldl. And although there was of course correspondence between brother and sister after Leopold’s death, there was little real communication, or exchange of consolation. Wolfgang’s letters to Nannerl in June 1787 are tight and formal, more concerned with the business side of Leopold’s estate than with any sharing of grief. He certainly made no effort to visit Salzburg, either to comfort his sister or to be part of the process of sorting out Leopold’s effects and the contents of the Tanzmeisterhaus. He could not afford the cost of the journey; he did not wish to leave his young family, especially in view of Constanze’s pregnancy; and he had no time: Don Giovanni was due for performance in the autumn, and in addition he had as ever many smaller commissions. So he stayed where he was.
The death of Leopold was indeed a cataclysmic event for both Wolfgang and Nannerl. This stern, gifted, autocratic bully had been absolutely at the centre of their lives, not merely in childhood but way beyond it. ‘After God comes Papa,’ they would recite as children; and indeed it is almost as if Leopold saw himself as some sort of deus ex machina in their adulthood. When Wolfgang in particular went his own way, Leopold’s frustration was intense. Nannerl had no doubt borne the brunt of this in her years at the Tanzmeisterhaus, but after her marriage, too, for he had continued to fuss over every detail of her life (her husband, her stepchildren, her servants, her health, her diet, even her bowels) in his weekly dispatches to St Gilgen; and of course he had also conveyed his judgements on the behaviour of her brother. But after the removal of this lifeline, St Gilgen must have felt even more remote. And, for all Wolfgang’s stiff protestations of brotherly love and responsibility (‘If you desire a kind brother to love and protect you, you will find one in me on every occasion’82), she knew she had effectively lost him too.
According to Leopold’s will, Nannerl was to receive her father’s money (no more than around 3,000 florins), and the property was to be divided between her and Wolfgang. She claimed certain items from the house, and put the rest up for auction. In the end, Wolfgang, in need of more immediate funds than the eventual proceeds of a long-drawn-out sale, relinquished his part in any of this, and requested instead a single payment of 1,000 florins. He only asked that his own music should be returned to him in Vienna. But he wanted no personal memento of his father, nor any of the memorabilia of the tours of his childhood, so many of which had literally furnished Leopold’s house and lifestyle. He seemed to want the cleanest of breaks with his Salzburg past. It is probably significant that the first music that he wrote after Leopold’s death was his outrageous Musikalische Spaß (Musical Joke), K522. This cruelly accurate and brilliant parody, of bad composition and bad performance, is completely hilarious. But, knowing Wolfgang’s oft-stated contempt for all musicians in Salzburg, whether composers or performers (‘rich in what is useless and superfluous, but very poor in what is necessary, and absolutely desititute of what is indispensable’), this Spaß can also be seen as his final, defiant, closing of the Salzburg gate.
IN OCTOBER 1787 WOLFGANG and Constanze duly returned to Prague for Don Giovanni, K527. The new opera was originally planned to be part of the celebrations for the marriage of the Archduchess Maria Theresa, niece of the Emperor Joseph II, to Prince Anton Clemens of Saxony. In fact this had already taken place in Florence (Maria Theresa’s father was the Archduke Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany) and then Dresden, but the Archduchess came to Prague in October. Don Giovanni was however immensely complex and difficult (its innovations included having three on-stage orchestras playing very different music at the same time, and some extremely challenging stage effects) and was not properly prepared in time for her visit, so Figaro was presented instead. Only after the Imperial departure was Don Giovanni finally ready, and Wolfgang conducted the premiere on 29 October. Even then he had had to stay up all night to write the overture, which, according to a member of the orchestra at the time, ‘had not even been sketched’. Contanze’s support in this last-minute crisis was crucial:
Mozart’s wife, however, undertook that the overture should be finished in time. She accordingly sat up with her husband, although she found it difficult to keep awake. As he wrote, the sheets of the score were passed from his desk to those of a little army of copyists who were in attendance to transcribe the instrumental parts. Again and again was the great maestro overpowered by sleep, and every time he was
aroused by his vigilant helpmate . . . The ink . . . was hardly dry on some of the pages when they were placed on the desks of the orchestra.83
And yet the Prague musicians played this demandingly difficult music at sight, and must therefore have been extremely able. No wonder Wolfgang enjoyed working with them.
This was no doubt a somewhat fraught period for Wolfgang. Da Ponte had only been with him in Prague for one week; and although Wolfgang’s good friends Josefa and Franz Xavier Duschek were also in the city (he managed to write Josefa another concert aria, ‘Bella mia fiamma’, K528), he must have appreciated the supportive and practical presence of Constanze. And she had her own support too: her aunt Adelheid (her father’s elder sister) had come to Prague, and wrote affectionately in Wolfgang’s album at the end of their visit: ‘He who knows not genuine, heartfelt, unselfish friendship does not know the best that men can give each other. This, dear Mozart, is offered to you with a full heart by your true friend and aunt Weber.’84
Wolfgang had always needed to write diary-like letters, giving regular accounts of his dramatic activities, and now these had to be directed to someone other than his father. But it was not to Nannerl that he conveyed his reports, but to his young friend and pupil Gottfried von Jacquin. Only after his return to Vienna did he remember to write to Nannerl at all, and that was really because he wanted his own scores sent from Salzburg. And he did have another piece of news. The day before he and Constanze arrived back from Prague, Gluck had died. At the beginning of December, Wolfgang was appointed in his place as Imperial Court Composer (Kammermusikus) but at a considerably smaller salary (800 florins per annum) than that of Gluck (2,000 florins per annum). Although in reality he was only required to write dances for the Court’s masked balls, he could at last sign himself ‘I[mperial] & R[oyal] Chamber Musician’. This change of status encouraged Wolfgang and Constanze to move back into the heart of Vienna, to an apartment in Unter den Tuchlauben, very near Frau Weber. Constanze was about to be delivered of her baby, and they preferred to be near the rest of the family. Their daughter, Theresia Constanzia Adelheid Fredericke Maria Anna, was born on 27 December. There is no record of Wolfgang ever informing Nannerl of the arrival of her new niece.
There were changes for Aloysia too. Also in December 1787, the German opera company was finally disbanded, and Aloysia went over to the Italian company. Early in 1788 she was again involved in her brother-in-law’s music: he wrote another concert aria for her, ‘Ah, se in ciel, benigne stelle’, K538 (very much to the successful formulae of those he had written for her earlier – when indeed this one may have been sketched – but lacking perhaps the deep emotional intensity of those first collaborations), and she also performed in Wolfgang’s arrangement of C. P. E. Bach’s Resurrection Cantata, when Wolfgang himself performed his new piano concerto in D, K537. Wolfgang would have been delighted by Aloysia’s transference to the Italian opera company, for they were to present the first Viennese performances of Don Giovanni. And, sure enough, Aloysia was cast (most appropriately, for it was exactly her sort of music) as Donna Anna. Her long-time rival Caterina Cavalieri was given the role of Donna Elvira, and insisted on having some new music written especially for her (‘Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata’), lest she be outshone by the new arrival in the Italian company. The rest of the cast included many old colleagues from the Figaro team. Don Giovanni had its Viennese premiere on 7 May 1788, and there were then fifteen more performances before the end of the year. But again, the inherent complexity of the work, quite apart from its startling subject-matter, meant that it was not the resounding success that Wolfgang had hoped it would be. According to Lorenzo Da Ponte, Joseph II had remarked coolly that it was ‘not the food for the teeth of my Viennese’. When this Imperial judgement was reported to Wolfgang, he commented rather astutely, ‘Let us give them time to chew it.’85
In that summer of 1788 there were both excitements and tragedies for the Weber sisters. Josefa, the eldest, married Wolfgang’s great friend, the violinist Franz Hofer, on 21 August. (One of the witnesses, as he had been at Constanze’s wedding, was Johann Thorwart, the Weber sisters’ legal guardian.) It was Hofer who had accompanied Wolfgang and Constanze to Prague on their first visit in January 1787: he must have met Josefa through the Mozarts. And she too was about to become spectacularly involved in her brother-in-law’s music. Her singing career had thus far been less prominent than Aloysia’s, but she was soon to join the company at the Freihaus-Theater and assume a much larger profile in the Viennese musical scene. Conversely, Aloysia herself was withdrawing temporarily from the limelight. For one thing, she was pregnant again (which must have made her performances as Donna Anna especially interesting). But Austria was now at war with Turkey, and the country’s finances were being drained, with inevitable repercussions on the cultural life of Vienna. Many companies, including the Italian opera company, were being disbanded, and Aloysia feared that her lack of employment might be more permanent after the birth of her baby. And for Constanze and Wolfgang there was another painful tragedy. Their own baby daughter Theresia died in June, aged only six months. Later that summer they moved yet again, away from the centre of Vienna to Wahringergasse in the suburbs, continuing therefore their almost gypsy-like regime of settling nowhere for longer than a few months at a time. This new lodging did have a garden, which Constanze loved very much, and was much healthier for their four-year-old son Carl as well as for themselves. And it was here, in those summer months, that Wolfgang composed his monumental last three symphonies (no. 39 in E flat, K543, no. 40 in G minor, K550, and no. 41 in C, K551). None of these was actually commissioned, so unusually there was no financial incentive, let alone reward, for writing them. And yet they represent the summit of Wolfgang’s symphonic genius. For him the creation of these unquestionable masterpieces was an escape from his personal sorrows and professional anxieties: he entered an untroubled, alternative world – his adult ‘Kingdom of Back’ – where his gifts prospered and soared. The coda to symphony no. 41 in C, for instance, with its effortlessly brilliant five-part invertible counterpoint, is truly Olympian, hence, probably, its subsequently acquired sobriquet, the ‘Jupiter’ symphony.
Among the visitors to the Mozarts in the Wahringergasse that summer was a Danish actor, Johann Daniel Preisler, who was on a theatre-visiting tour of Europe. First he had met Joseph Lange, who took him home to meet Aloysia and persuaded her to sing for him, despite her pregnancy. Preisler was captivated, not just by Aloysia’s commanding presence (‘a melancholy ecstasy was to be read at once in her eyes’86), but by the fact that she accompanied herself ‘like a Kapellmeister’. Lange then took Preisler to the Mozarts, and the scene he painted in his subsequent journal was of a blissful family idyll:
There I had the happiest hour of music that has ever fallen to my lot. This small man and great master twice extemporized on a pedal pianoforte, so wonderfully! so wonderfully! that I quite lost myself. He intertwined the most difficult passages with the most lovely themes. His wife cut quill pens for the copyist, a pupil composed, a little boy of four walked around the garden and sang recitatives – in short, everything that surrounded this splendid man was musical!87
But the reality of that summer was a long way from the lucky young Dane’s euphoric interpretation. A clue might be found in his observation of Constanze cutting quill pens for the copyist (something she had probably done since childhood, for her copyist father): was this a sign of economy? It was in this summer that Wolfgang began a long and desperate series of letters to a fellow Freemason, Michael Puchberg. He was now having literally to beg for money.
The Mozarts had in fact been living beyond their means for some time. The ruinous rent of the Domgasse apartment had bled them dry, but they had stayed there for two and a half years because, quite apart from the joy and convenience of it, they needed to keep up appearances with their colleagues. Virtually everybody else they knew had regular salaries; and although Wolfgang frequently received commissions and subscriptions f
rom his continual stream of compositions and performances in the mid-1780s, the very irregularity and unpredictability of this income only confirmed the truly precarious nature of existing outside the conventional system. All Leopold’s fears for his son, after his perilous decision to live as an independent, freelance musician, were now being realized. It is indeed ironic that the first appearance of Michael Puchberg in the Mozart correspondence is in a letter from Wolfgang to Nannerl’s husband Johann Baptist Berchtold about his share of Leopold’s estate: he asked Berchtold to send his 1,000 florins straight to Puchberg. He was probably in deep trouble already.
Michael Puchberg was a Viennese merchant and fellow Freemason, who responded kindly over the years to Wolfgang’s cries for help. From time to time he let him have small sums, varying from 10 florins to 300 florins. None of them was ever enough (on one truly desperate occasion in June 1788, Wolfgang had even wildly suggested that Puchberg lend him ‘for a year, or two, one or two thousand florins’88), but every loan brought at least temporary relief, and the two men became good friends. On Wolfgang’s next trip out of Vienna, when he and Constanze were to be apart for the first time since their marriage, she and their son Carl stayed with the Puchbergs. There was genuine affection between the two families.