by Glover, Jane
The timpani in his Requiem? We know that Mozart was working on the Lacrimosa in that final struggle, and that the last words that he set, therefore, were:
Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus
(Sorrowful that day
when from the dust will arise
the guilty man to be judged.)
What begins almost as a gentle, slow, lilting dance turns on the second line into an agonizing climb through an octave and a half, first with full-tone steps, and then, towards the peak, in more laborious semitones: the music has become a death march. The scale and its inevitable crescendo reach their summit at the devastating words ‘Judicandus homo reus’ (the guilty man to be judged). And it was here that Wolfgang instructed Süssmayr to add Sophie’s timpani, together with their constant partners the trumpets, which had so frightened him as a child. And his life ended, on an unresolved dominant chord.
Or suonin le trombe:
Solenne ecatombe
Andiam preparar.
(Sound the trumpets:
Let us prepare
Solemn sacrifices.)
Idomeneo
Mozart’s Women
ACCORDING TO Sophie, it was she who held Wolfgang in her arms as he died, shortly after midnight on 5 December 1791. And when it was all over, Constanze, completely distraught, crawled into the bed beside his body, as if to try to ‘catch his illness and die with him’.1 After the departure of the hopeless doctor, word travelled fast through the city, and by daybreak people had begun to gather in the street below. Close friends were admitted to the apartment, to view the body; and among them came the estimable Baron van Swieten, who, putting aside some shocking news of his own (he had been dismissed that very day from his Court post as president of the Education and Censorship Commission), took control of the practicalities. Van Swieten chose the most basic of funeral options, with no unnecessary adornments or extravagances. In Joseph II’s time, the whole burial system had in any case been simplified in the interests of economy and hygiene. (The Emperor’s own plain tomb, unobtrusively placed at the foot of the elaborate structure built for his parents in the Habsburg vaults of the Kapuzinerkirche, demonstrates the strength of his conviction.) Most Viennese people of the time, therefore, received an economy-class burial, and this was the obvious choice for Wolfgang. On the afternoon of 6 December, Constanze and her family, together with van Swieten and a few close friends, attended a simple ceremony in a side chapel of St Stephen’s Cathedral. Later, a rented private hearse, unaccompanied now by mourners, as was also the norm, took the coffin through the streets of the city to a cemetery in the suburban village of St Marx; and there it was deposited, in a ‘normal simple grave’.2
Generations of music-lovers have mourned the loss of Mozart’s human remains. Constanze’s apparent indifference even to knowing the precise location of her husband’s grave has brought her more charges of slovenly selfishness; and although there are now many appropriately placed monuments and shrines at which to worship, the very absence of those precious bones continues to unsettle an anxious world, and to feed it with the opportunity for recrimination, frustration and guilt.
Mozart himself would probably have been astonished at such dismay. Whether or not he shared the belief that all burials should be hygienic, economical and, above all, simple, he certainly never concerned himself with the graves of his own family. Of far greater importance to him was the notion that beyond death there was a ‘true happiness’,3 and that this perpetual light surrounding departed souls was therefore a cause for celebration. The very setting of the words ‘et lux perpetua luceat eis’ in his own Requiem – in music that is positive, affirmative, truly radiant – is testimony to this profound optimism, and, even as he approached his own end through the agonies and anxieties of sickness and regret, to his essential solemn belief in the beauty of an afterlife.
Mozart would not therefore have given a second thought to the fate of his own bones. But he did care greatly for the preservation of his true legacy, his music. Like many composers, he rather dismissed his earliest works: ‘my brother appreciated his older works less and less, the more he advanced in composition,’4 wrote Nannerl in 1799 – poignantly, for these were the pieces with which she herself was most associated. But from 1784 until just three weeks before his death, Mozart meticulously kept a thematic catalogue of all his compositions.5 This was not merely a manifestation of the family passion for lists, but a highly organized way of handing his creations down to future generations. For here, not in some dark tomb, is his immortality. In his unique and incomparable music, he lives on in the hands and hearts of his interpreters and their listeners. And so to an extent do the men and the women of his circle, for in creating his operatic roles for singers he knew, liked and sometimes even loved, he secured for them too their places in the firmament of posterity.
As in all Mozart’s music, his operatic genius resides in the miraculous combination of a unique imagination and vertiginous risk-taking in his craft, all expressed with an apparently effortless fluency. But his imagination was informed too by experience. Mozart was a close observer of human nature, who, as Constanze reported, could seem to detach himself from his surroundings, but in fact missed nothing, and was never clinical. He loved the whole world of theatre and the people who inhabited it, and his happiest conviviality came through mingling with them, whether the Cannabich company in Mannheim and Munich, or the devoted musicians in Prague, or Schikaneder’s troupe in Vienna. With all his performers his standards were extremely high, and his condemnation of musicians who did not match up to them could be absolutely withering. From his earliest years, it was reported how he even became impatient with his father when he played wrong notes; and he held the Court musicians in Salzburg in collective, undiluted contempt. He demanded much more of a performer than a brilliant technique, famously dismissing the dazzling Clementi as a ‘mere mechanicus’.6 What he constantly sought was that extra ingredient of emotion and passion, not falsely or superficially applied, but fired from within the very soul of the interpreter. When he found anyone who could convey this, he was ecstatic. Aloysia could, and so could the young Beethoven, who once played to him and completely captivated him. And for his beloved theatrical colleagues, in whose instruments (their voices) resided their passions and emotions at their most naked and vulnerable, he was especially inspired to make his most profound utterances. No character in a mature Mozart opera is therefore without interest. His creations are drawn with humanity, compassion and razor-sharp accuracy, and are some of the most multidimensional as any on the stage, Shakespearean in their variety, Chekhovian in their complexity.
As Mozart composed his operas, and created recognizable human beings for the stage, two ingredients were essential to his process. The first was the libretto. For his earliest operas he was, like all his contemporaries, given a ready-to-wear libretto (generally taken off the shelf by someone else), and made his own setting of it. The great Pietro Metastasio, Court poet in Vienna for over fifty years in the mid-eighteenth century, totally dominated opera composition in his time. He wrote over thirty texts for full-length operas, some of which were set as many as twenty-five times. There are therefore, staggeringly, over 800 different settings of Metastasio librettos. His great talent was to provide a cover-all style that was elegant, narrative and reflective, and that could accommodate all manner of compositional interpretation. The text of Mozart’s ‘Non sò d’onde viene’ for Aloysia in 1778 was from a Metastasio libretto (Alessandro nell’Indie), and Mozart himself saw it as a challenge to produce something completely different from the setting by J. C. Bach that he knew so well and admired so much. But from 1780, he himself began to have direct input into the very structure of a libretto. First he collaborated with Schachtner in Salzburg on an aborted project, Zaïde, K344 (336b). Then for Idomeneo in Munich in 1781 he was deeply involved with Giovanni Battista Varesco in the shaping of the text and the pacing of the d
rama. And in Vienna his collaborations with Johann Gottlieb Stephanie, Emanuel Schikaneder and especially Lorenzo Da Ponte were completely symbiotic. As he himself put it, ‘The best thing of all is when a good composer, who understands the stage and is talented enough to make sound suggestions, meets an able poet, that true phoenix.’7 (The image of this rare bird was to reappear in the opening scene of the Mozart/Da Ponte Così fan tutte, when Ferrando and Guglielmo parry their praises for their sweethearts.) Mozart was absolutely clear in his mind about the importance of a properly shaped text:
An opera is sure of success when the plot is well worked out, the words written solely for the music and not shoved in here and there to suit some miserable rhyme (which, God knows, never enhances the value of any theatrical performance, be it what it may, but rather detracts from it) – I mean, words or even entire verses which ruin the composer’s whole idea. Verses are indeed the most indispensable element for music – but rhymes – solely for the sake of rhyming – the most detrimental.
So Mozart’s artistic creation began before a note of music existed even in his own head.
Second, and at the other end of the creative process, Mozart was deeply concerned with his performers’ interpretation. He had very decided views on singing technique, and to an extent was able to train it himself, as demonstrated by the little exercises that he wrote for Constanze as he prepared her for their performance of his Mass in C minor. He loved good cantabile singing (at which Aloysia so excelled), but not if it became a calculated device for its own sake. In Paris in 1778 he criticized his good friend Anton Raaff for falling into mannerism (‘he overdoes it, and to me it sounds ridiculous’), though he roundly praised his bravura singing and especially his ‘excellent, clear diction, which is very beautiful’.8 All these attributes were important to him, as was the use of vibrato in a singer, which again he loved when it was natural and beautiful, but could not abide if overused. One of the Salzburg singers, Joseph Meissner, was held up as an example of how not to deploy it: ‘Meissner, as you know, has the bad habit of making his voice vibrate at times, turning a note that should be sustained into distinct crotchets, or even quavers – and this I could never endure in him. And really it is a detestable habit and one which is quite contrary to nature.’ And he continued: ‘The human voice vibrates naturally – but in its own way – and only to such a degree that the effect is beautiful. Such is the nature of the voice; and people imitate it not only on wind instruments, but on stringed instruments too and even on the clavier. But the moment the proper limit is overstepped, it is no longer beautiful – because it is contrary to nature.’9
Mozart’s passion for naturalness in interpretation was particularly strong in the performance of recitatives; and when he heard two melodramas by Georg Benda, in which the dialogue was actually spoken over instrumental accompaniment, rather than sung, he was extremely excited: ‘Do you know what I think? I think that most operatic recitatives should be treated in this way – and only sung occasionally, when the words can be perfectly expressed by the music.’10 But again he required that his singers should always ‘attend fully to the meaning and force of the words’,11 as he had instructed Aloysia, and was dismayed when, in the early rehearsals for Idomeneo, two of his singers – including, sadly, his good friend Raaff – failed to do this: ‘Raaff and Dal Prato spoil the recitative by singing without any spirit or fire, and so monotonously.’12 On the other hand, if anything was exaggerated or mannered, he was at his most forthright. Having met young Gretl Marchand on his visit with Constanze to Salzburg in 1783, he felt sufficiently strongly about her progress as a singer to offer her his own advice. And again the emphasis was entirely on naturalness and integrity:
Please give a special message to little Greta, and tell her that when she sings she must not be so arch and coy; for cajolings and kissings are not always palatable – in fact only silly asses are taken in by such devices. I for one would rather have a country lout, who does not hesitate to shit and piss in my presence, than let myself be humbugged by such false toadyings, which after all are so exaggerated that one can easily see through them.13
So Mozart was a fierce taskmaster, who would never settle for anything less than total commitment to dramatic involvement and emotional truth. To sing beautifully was simply not enough.
THE TURNING POINT in Mozart’s vocal writing was his initial and passionate encounter with Aloysia Weber in 1778; and in a not unrelated context, the opera that similarly took him to new heights of maturity, in all ways, was Idomeneo in 1781. He was then twenty-five years old. But throughout his teenage years he had been honing his craft: La finta giardiniera, for Munich in 1775 when he was nineteen, was in fact already his twelfth opera. Naturally the childhood and adolescent works do not begin to measure up to the miracles of what was to follow in his twenties and thirties. But they are all quite remarkable for their prodigious craftsmanship, their unfailing musico-dramatic instinct and their considerable beauty. They may have been written by a child, but they more than hold their own in the company of other contemporary operas. As with all Mozart’s teenage composition, he was not merely copying styles and models; he was always personalizing, deepening, and in fact improving upon what he absorbed. And the better he knew his interpreters, the better the product. His early operas were all composed to ready-to-wear librettos, but the music that he wrote to these texts was, as he himself loved to put it, ‘tailor-made’.
Mozart’s creation of musical character began in 1767, when he was merely eleven years old. The family had just returned to Salzburg from their Grand Tour, and were drawing disappointing parallels between the musical resources available at Court and those they had encountered in Vienna, Paris and London. But there were in the service of the Prince-Archbishop three high-profile young sopranos, who, a little like the young Mozarts themselves, were cause for a certain amount of excitement and pride. In 1761, Maria Magdalena Lipp, aged sixteen, and Maria Anna Brauenhofer, aged thirteen, had been sent by Archbishop Schrattenbach himself to Venice, and there they had pursued their studies for two and a half years. In January 1764 they had been joined by eighteen-year-old Maria Anna Fesemayr, who, together with the Salzburg organist Anton Cajetan Adlgasser (in his mid-thirties) had similarly spent a year there. By the end of 1765 the three young women were back in Salzburg, and, now respectively aged twenty, seventeen and twenty-two, they were all appointed as Court singers. Their salaries were 8 florins per month, and also included – rather disastrously, as it turned out – a daily litre of wine.
The social lives of these Court musicians were somewhat enclosed and claustrophobic: Brauenhofer’s father was an organist in nearby Mondsee, and Lipp’s a Court organist; and she was to marry a fellow Court musician, Michael Haydn, in 1768. Fesemayr eventually became the third wife of her Venetian companion and Court organist, Anton Adlgasser. Their world was therefore an intense little microcosm of the wider artistic community; and despite their earlier travels, the talents of many of these Salzburg musicians were to become dulled and stagnant, as they settled comfortably into their relatively undemanding routines, and enjoyed their free wine. (Both Michael Haydn and his wife Maria Magdalena would become excessive drinkers.) But in the mid-1760s, when they were all newly returned from their Italian sojourns, the skills of these ‘Three Ladies’ were considerable, and Mozart was to exploit them well.
The first glimpse of Wolfgang’s musical tailoring is in his contribution to a sacred singspiel, Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots, K35, in March 1767. This three-part work was to be performed in sections, on three successive Thursdays in the Knights’ Hall of the Archbishop’s Palace. Its text was by Josefa Duschek’s grandfather, Ignaz Weiser, and two of the Archbishop’s most accomplished composers were involved: Part Two was written by Michael Haydn, and Part Three by Adlgasser. Part One, given on that first Thursday, 12 March 1767, was by the eleven-year-old Mozart.
The singers for this serial singspiel were naturally drawn from the Archbishop’s Court roster. In the t
hree allegorical roles of Divine Mercy (Die göttliche Barmherzigkeit), Divine Justice (Die göttliche Gerechtigkeit) and Worldliness (Der Welt-Geist) were the ‘Three Ladies’, Lipp, Brauenhofer and Fesemayr. Two tenors, Joseph Meissner and Franz Anton Spitzeder, took the roles of a Christian and Christianity. In a score bubbling with ideas, both vocal and instrumental, and an astonishing command of orchestration, structural contrast and, that most challenging device, accompanied recitative, the music written for the two tenors is strong and straightforward. But the three women clearly had excellent technical agility as a result of their Venetian training, and for all of them Wolfgang wrote florid and acrobatic music. One of the three, Maria Magdalena Lipp, was especially challenged. She was widely acknowledged to be an excellent singer, but nobody much liked her, and in her later life she became difficult and obstructive. In her aria, ‘Ein ergrimmter Löwe brüllet’ (A furious lion roars), the animal-loving child in Wolfgang responded with glee both to the dramatic picture of the dangerous lion and perhaps too to the strong personality of the singer. He produced an aria of ferocious vocal leaps, balanced by threatening growling and prowling in low-lying chromatic scales. Among all his childhood output, this aria stands out as an early example of his being inspired not only by the text but also by the personality of the interpreter to produce something extraordinary.