by John Suchet
Mozart was having none of it. He left late, arrived late, went straight upstairs, brushed past the lackey, entered the salon and walked straight up to the nobleman. The other two musicians, he reports, were cowering against a wall.
His letter went on to list a number of counts and countesses with whom he has dined – without the archbishop’s permission – before bluntly informing his father of his ultimate aim, which must have seemed to Leopold to be not just unrealistic, but arrogant: ‘My main goal right now is to meet the emperor in some agreeable fashion. I am absolutely determined that he should get to know me.’
Mozart was treading a dangerous path, alienating all those around him. Word was certain to reach the archbishop, his employer and paymaster. Back in Salzburg, Leopold fretted that his son’s impetuous behaviour would cost him his job – a job that he, Leopold, had strived so hard to get for him. And if he lost his income, what then? How would he make enough money to live on?
Over the following weeks Mozart’s anger and frustration simmered. Knowing the argument would hit home with his father, he detailed how the archbishop was actually causing him to lose money:
How much do you suppose I would get if I were to give a concert of my own? – The Archbishop is a great hindrance to me here, for he has done me out of at least a hundred ducats, which I would certainly have made by giving a concert in the theatre … But this arch-booby of ours will not allow it.
And it is not long before Leopold read the words he must have dreaded his son would write, sooner or later:
Were I to leave the archbishop’s service, I would give a grand concert, take four pupils, and in a year I should have got on so well in Vienna that I could make a least a thousand thalers a year.
Leopold could not have been surprised. Leaving the archbishop’s service had been on his son’s mind since they were together in Munich. He must have heard it many times, brushing it off each time. Now he feared – dreaded – his son meant it.
Mean it he certainly did. Matters came to a head on Wednesday, 9 May. Mozart had a face-to-face meeting with the man he detested: ‘I hate the Archbishop to the point of madness.’ Insults were thrown in both directions.
Archbishop Colloredo shouted at Mozart that he was a knave, a slovenly fellow, a scoundrel, a lousy rogue, a cretin. Mozart – and we can only imagine the look of utter horror on Colloredo’s face – gave back as good as he got.
Colloredo asked Mozart if he was threatening him, and if he was, there was the door, right over there: ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with such miserable scum any more – get out!’
At last, I said – and I don’t want to have anything to do with you either … I’ll give it to you in writing tomorrow.
Knowing his father would be shocked and appalled, he appealed rather touchingly to his sensitivity:
Now, dearest father, tell me whether I didn’t say all these things rather too late than too early? – Listen, my Honour is worth more to me than anything else, and I know the same is true of you.
It is the culmination of weeks of insults and mistreatment. Mozart had taken so much, and had decided he would take no more. Without doubt it was the first time a subordinate had spoken to the archbishop in such a way. It was simply inconceivable that a mere musician – ‘I didn’t know I was a valet’* was how Mozart put it to his father – would stand face to face with a prince-archbishop and exchange insults.
But Mozart had done it. He had well and truly burned his boats. Or more accurately, he hadn’t quite done so, but he was very soon about to.
The afore-mentioned Count Arco tried to mediate, initially refusing to accept Mozart’s letter of resignation. He told Mozart he could not resign without first obtaining his father’s consent. This must have infuriated Mozart, who was making his own decisions as a fully-grown man, but he reported the count’s words to Leopold, as well as his riposte that he knew his duty towards his father better than the count.
He pleaded with his father to understand why he had resigned, at the same time making it clear – in understated and conciliatory language – that whatever his father’s view, the resignation would stand.
The trauma of all this was taking its toll on Mozart’s health. He spared his father no detail:
“Mozart had taken so much, and had decided he would take no more.”
All the things this splendid servant of god dished out, had such a terrific effect on my body that in the evening I had to leave the opera in the middle of the first Act and go home so I could lie down – I felt quite hot and feverish – my body was trembling all over – and I staggered about in the street like a drunkard.
Leopold, predictably, was furious and unmoved. He sent his son what must have been a long and stinging letter – his letters have not survived, but we know from Mozart’s reply the general tone of what his father had said.
Now we see just how far Mozart had come emotionally. He was not standing for his father’s intransigence. He had stood up to the prince-archbishop, so he could most certainly stand up to his own father. He uses language to his father he has never used before:
I don’t know what to write first, my dearest father, because I have not recovered from my Bewilderment and, in fact, will not be able to do so ever, if you continue to think and write as you just did – I must confess that there was not a single sign in your letter by which I can recognise my father! – A father perhaps, but not the Best, the most loving father who would be concerned for his honour and the honour of his children – in other words, not my father.
Not my father. Leopold must have blanched when he read this. With these few short sentences he must have realised he had lost control over his son. Until now he had guided every aspect of his son’s life. But that boy was now a man of twenty-five, alone in the imperial capital, and making his own decisions about his future.
There was more. Leopold had insisted that if Mozart went through with his threat to leave the archbishop’s employ, he should return to Salzburg immediately, where he would be able to find work. And, although it was unspoken, Leopold would again be able to control his son’s activities.
Once again Mozart was having none of it:
In Salzburg – at least for me – there isn’t a penny’s worth of stimulation. There are many with whom I don’t wish to associate – and most of the others, well, they do not think that I am good enough for them; not exactly an inspiration for my talent! … In Salzburg I long for 100 different forms of entertainment, but here – not a single one – for just to be in Vienna is entertainment enough.
Mozart was his own man in every respect. No one but he would decide his future, and his father had no choice but to accept that.
But then Leopold did something really underhand. He wrote to Count Arco behind his son’s back to find out what was going on, and the count summoned Mozart to tell him. Mozart wrote to his father with details of that meeting. He did not actually castigate his father for what he had done – though he might reasonably have done so – but he left his father in no doubt that he stood up for himself, against both of them.
Mozart quotes Count Arco’s words, which, knowing what we know now, have relegated the count’s reputation to that of pompous shallow fool:
He told me then: believe me, you allow yourself to be dazzled too easily; – a person’s fame is of short duration here – in the beginning one is given a lot of accolades, and one earns good money, that’s true – but for how long? – after a few Months the Viennese will want something new.
The count decided to spare Mozart nothing, but again – as Mozart reports to his father – he was not taking the insults lightly:
The Archbishop thinks you are a thoroughly Conceited person. I believe it, I said, because that is how I behave towards him. I treat people the way they treat me – When I see that someone is contemptuous of me and puts me down, I can be as proud as a Baboon –
Another distinguished figure who most certainly had never been spoken to like that, certainly not b
y a lowly musician.
We get the impression that Mozart was enjoying himself. He really no longer cared whom he insulted. If he had made an enemy of the top man, the prince-archbishop, what did it matter if he upset his underling?
Mozart knew he was different from everyone else, even from his own father. He was blessed with genius. He had heard his father use that word since his earliest years, and he had come to accept it. He knew it was true. He had only to sit at the keyboard, and anybody, everybody, from kings and emperors down, would marvel.
There now occurred one of the most famous – notorious – moments in Mozart’s entire life, one that has entered mythology. It is all based on a single sentence he wrote to his father in a letter of 9 June 1781.
A week after that meeting, Count Arco again summoned Mozart to come and see him, on the pretext of wanting to show him a letter from his father. Mozart came to the meeting armed with a formal letter of resignation, and asked to be allowed to present it to Archbishop Colloredo himself. Count Arco refused. And then this, with Mozart referring to himself in the third person, as if even he cannot quite believe it happened to him:
Finally, as this fellow is forced to hand in his petition himself, instead of at least granting him access, you throw him out of the door and give him a kick in his Backside.
We know it was not just a form of words, because later in the letter Mozart writes:
If he really thinks well of me, then let him persuade me with reason, but not throw words such as ‘lout’ and ‘knave’ at me, and then throw me out of the door with a kick in the ass.
And in another letter four days later:
He could have advised me to forward my petition to the archbishop … he could have suggested any number of things – No – he throws me out of the door and gives me a kick in the backside – Well, that means in straightforward German that Salzburg no longer exists for me; except to find a good opportunity to administer to the Herr Count a kick in the ass in return, even if it should happen on a public street.
It has been called the most infamous kick in the backside in the history of art. Wolfgang Amadé Mozart was finally, once and for all, dismissed from Archbishop Colloredo’s service with a kick in the backside from his chamberlain.
Leopold’s son had, in effect, dismissed himself from service at court, in the process insulting to their faces the most important and influential people in his life.
Any hope of re-employment was out of the question. Not only that, he was refusing direct orders to return to Salzburg. Leopold was in despair. We know it from Mozart’s letters to him, which are well written, thoughtful and rational. Leopold was dealing with a young man now, and a young man who knew his mind.
A point which his son was about to reiterate. Could things get any worse for Leopold? Yes, they could.
Mozart, by leaving the employ of the court, had to relinquish his room in the archbishop’s residence. He was out on the street with nowhere to go.
Well, not exactly. Mozart knew exactly what he was doing. In fact he had taken action some weeks before. Buried deep in one of his letters was the sentence:
I quickly gathered my belongings into my trunk – and old Mad. Weber was kind enough to offer me her home – where I now have a pretty room and am among helpful people who lend a hand with things one might need in a hurry, the sort of thing one just doesn’t have when one lives alone.
Leopold was on to it immediately. He knew exactly what was going on. The life of the Weber family had changed dramatically since Aloysia rejected Mozart’s proposal of marriage so coldly in Munich.
Fridolin Weber, the father, had died suddenly. Aloysia, as we know, had moved to Vienna where she was in demand as an operatic soprano and was now married to the actor and artist Joseph Lange. Frau Weber and her three unmarried daughters had followed Aloysia to Vienna, where they took an apartment on the second floor of the exotically named Zum Augen Gottes (‘God’s Eye’) building, earning income by taking in lodgers.
Mozart had now moved in with them, and Leopold was nothing short of apoplectic. He had already lost control of every aspect of his son’s professional life as a musician; he had failed to persuade him to return to Salzburg; now he was getting involved with young women again, and who could tell where that might lead?
To marriage, obviously, and a disastrous marriage at that. So thought Leopold. We know it, because it caused Mozart to respond to him, with a touch of facetiousness:
What you’re saying about the Weber family, I can assure you it’s not what you think – I know I was a fool about Frau Lange, that is true, but that’s the way it is when you are in love! – I really loved her, and even now she is not indifferent to me – it’s lucky for me that her husband is a jealous Fool and won’t let her go anywhere, so I see her very rarely – trust me when I say that old Mad. Weber is a very helpful woman and that I cannot return her helpfulness proportionately, because I just don’t have the time.
Leopold was not convinced, causing Mozart to write again:
Just because I am living with them, people assume I’m marrying the daughter; no one said anything about us being in love, they conveniently skipped that part. Their logic is: I take a room in this house, I get married – If I’ve ever thought about not getting married, it’s definitely now! – The last thing I wish for is a rich wife, but even if I could make my fortune by marriage right now, I could not oblige, because I have too many other things on my mind – God has not given me my Talent so that I should hitch it to a woman and waste my Young life in idleness – I am just beginning to live; am I to bring bitterness into my life through my own doing? I have nothing against the state of matrimony, but at the moment it would be a disaster for me.
And he goes on, and on, and on, protesting too much. For he is being disingenuous: to say he has fallen in love might be putting it a touch too strongly. But he has developed a strong attachment to his former love Aloysia’s younger sister, Constanze.
Leopold must have thrown his hands up in despair.
* Ich wusste nicht dass ich Kammerdiener wäre.
When I say that ‘love’ might be too strong a word, I am basing that on what Mozart himself wrote. He does use the word, true, but it comes in a short and rather pat sentence at the very end of a lengthy description which suggests affection rather than love.
It is possible he was deliberately downplaying Constanze’s virtues, lest his father think he had once again become infatuated. But his description of her, I believe, sounds as though he meant it:
I must make you better acquainted with the character of my beloved Konstanze* – she is not ugly, but also not really beautiful; – her whole beauty consists of two little black eyes and a graceful figure. She has no great wit but enough common sense to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother …
And to nip in the bud any adverse reports that might have reached Leopold:
She is not extravagant in her appearance, rumours to that effect are totally false; – to the contrary, she is in the habit of dressing very simply … It’s perfectly true that she would like to dress attractively and cleanly but not necessarily in the latest fashion – And most of the things a woman needs, she can make herself; indeed, she does her own hair every day; – she knows all about housekeeping and has the kindest heart in the world –
And finally:
I love her and she loves me with all her heart – now tell me whether I could wish for a better wife?
Leopold must have been tempted to answer that. He could no doubt have named several young Salzburg women he would rather his son marry.
Mozart had been corresponding with his father for several months before he finally came out with that last sentence. He knew of the rumours reaching Salzburg. References to his amorous pursuits were buried in long letters about other matters – musical activities, aristocratic contacts – and always consisted of evasion and denial. This, written on 25 July 1781 and replete with double negatives, is a perfect example:
I am not say
ing that I am unsociable with the mademoiselle in the house, I mean the one I’m supposed to be married to already, I’m not saying I never speak to her – but I am not in love with her – Yes, I joke around with her and have fun whenever time allows, and that’s only in the evening when I’m taking supper at home … If I had to marry every lady with whom I’ve been joking around, I would easily have collected 200 wives by now –
It seems likely his father accused him directly of truly unsavoury behaviour. Mozart was not afraid to confront the allegation head on:
I have too great a horror and disgust, dread and fear of diseases, in fact I like my health too much to play around with whores. I swear that I never had anything to do with a woman of that sort – If it happened, I would not have kept it from you.*
He leaves his father in no doubt, though, in a man-to-man sort of way, that he has physical needs which need to be sated:
The voice of nature speaks in me as loud as in any man, louder perhaps than in some big, robust brute of a fellow … I cannot think of anything more essential to me than a wife.
By December 1781 he had made up his mind to marry Constanze. He knew his father would take some convincing, but he was in no hurry. Suddenly he had become very busy.
In the first place, word had inevitably got out about how this young man from provincial Salzburg had stood up to the prince-archbishop – who was in any case not a popular man – hurling insults back at him, and how he had then done much the same thing to his chamberlain.
He was already well known in certain aristocratic quarters as a remarkable young musician, something of a dandy, hair always immaculately dressed, clothes rather fine, very small of stature, with an instant grin and infectious laugh.