by John Suchet
Well, those words come almost at the end. They are followed by a paragraph on how the new symphony, the ‘Haffner’, should be played – the outer movements ‘as fast as possible’ – as if, for all the world, the letter was nothing out of the ordinary.
Final proof, if it were needed, that Mozart has finally, at last, once and for all, broken away from his father. He was already his own musician; he is truly now his own man too.
Not that that is going to make things any easier, as far as relations with his father are concerned.
* Mozart varied his spelling of Constanze. To begin with she was Constanze; later he increasingly wrote her name as Konstanze.
* Which gives credence to the supposition that he did no more than dance with the prostitute in his father’s presence at the Munich Carnival.
* The Habsburg empire’s largest trading partner was the Ottoman empire. Turkish customs – clothes, coffee, spices – permeated Vienna, as did the rhythms and sound of Turkish music. One of Mozart’s most famous pieces for piano would be the Rondo alla turca, the third movement of his Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major (K. 331), written soon after the opera.
† It is likely that this is the opera that caused the emperor to say to Mozart, ‘Too many notes, Herr Mozart’, bringing Mozart’s famous reply, ‘Just as many notes as are required, Your Majesty, no more, no less’, although I have seen it attributed to at least two other Mozart operas. Cited in Die Mozart-Autographe der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Exhibition notes, Berlin 2006, by Roland Dieter Schmidt-Hensel, State Library Berlin, it has been subject to many slightly varied translations.
‡ Approximately £30,000.
* Approximately £7,500.
† Yes, a forerunner of the Hollywood pre-nup.
* The ‘Haffner’ Symphony (K. 385) is today one of Mozart’s best-known symphonies.
As the year 1783 began, Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (as he most often called himself) could reflect with considerable satisfaction on his situation. There was no question about it; he was Vienna’s most popular composer. The likes of Gluck and Salieri, both far senior to him in the Viennese musical hierarchy, could only watch. He was in heavy demand to perform in the salons of the highest nobility, and it was only a matter of time before new commissions – surely, soon, another opera – came in.
And he was a married man, living with his wife Constanze in a spacious apartment in the fashionable Hohe Brücke. He was approaching his twenty-seventh birthday. There seemed no reason why he could not look forward to a long and successful career.
Mozart, from the time of his arrival in Vienna, had cut an elegant figure, having first acquired a taste for smart clothes when he was presented as a child with formal court clothes by Empress Maria Theresa. He was a frequent guest in the highest salons, and he knew how to dress appropriately. Perhaps it was partly in compensation for his lack of height. He stood around five feet four inches in adulthood.
Perhaps, too, in compensation for his looks. There are no contemporary accounts remarking on his fine features. In fact the reverse is more often true. He was variously described as small, pock-marked, with a large nose, a head that was larger than would be expected on such a small body, protruding yet bright eyes. He did, though, have nice hair and refined hands.
He also seems to have had an unusually formed left ear. I say ‘seems’, because some thirty years after his death an anonymous artist drew an abnormally shaped ear, with a normal one alongside it. Under the normal one is written ‘A normal ear’ (ein gewöhnliches Ohr). Under the abnormal one the words ‘My ear’ (‘Mein Ohr’) are written, but the word ‘Mein’ has been crossed out, and ‘Mozart’s’ written in.
The Mozart is almost certainly Franz Xaver Wolfgang, youngest son of the composer, who inherited considerable music talent. In the first substantial biography of his father, written nearly forty years after his death, the drawing of the abnormally shaped ear is reproduced, saying that it belonged to Franz Xaver, and that he inherited it from his father.
Given how rapidly the young Wolfgang Mozart’s fame spread across Europe, it is surprising how few portraits of him there are done from life. I have reproduced the ones we know to be authentic (as far as that is possible) in this book, and they seem so varied one has to wonder if the artists were looking at the same individual.
By far the best-known portrait, and the one that is ubiquitous in Salzburg, on everything from chocolate and mugs to books and programmes of his music, shows him facing to the right, head half turned towards us, in neat wig, bright red jacket, and coloured ruff. (See overleaf.)
It is the single image by which we know Mozart best today. Yet it was painted from memory eighteen years after his death.
In 2008 an exciting discovery was made. A painting was unearthed, showing a similar-looking figure, facing to the left this time, in a red jacket with white ruff. He wears an elegant grey wig, and the large nose has a marked bridge.
All the evidence points to this being a portrait of Mozart painted in 1783, given what we know of his love for fine clothes. In September 1782 he wrote to one of his patrons expressing a desire for a beautiful red coat he has seen, which is worth it ‘just for the buttons that I’ve been hankering after for some time … They’re mother-of-pearl with some white stones around the edge and a beautiful yellow stone in the centre.’ The patron promised to acquire it for him.
The description broadly matches the one in this portrait, and might well be the one that was painted from memory nearly twenty years later.
Perhaps to clinch it, this newly discovered portrait was owned by a descendant of Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, the Mozarts’ landlord in Salzburg. It is painted in oils, measures nineteen inches by fourteen, and is now owned by an American collector who has insured it for £2 million.
Proof of the care Mozart took over his appearance comes in a letter he wrote to his sister Nannerl the previous year. His day begins early, with considerable time spent on dressing properly. It gives a fascinating insight into his composing habits too:
At 6 o’clock in the morning I’m already done with my hair; at 7 I’m fully dressed; – then I compose until 9 o’clock; from 9 to 1 o’clock I give lessons – Then I Eat, unless I’m invited by someone who doesn’t eat lunch until 2 or 3 o’clock as, for instance, today and tomorrow at the Countess Zizi and Countess Thun – I cannot get back to work before 5 or 6 o’clock – and quite often I can’t get back at all, because I have to be at a performance; if I can, I write until 9 o’clock.
On nights when he has to attend a performance, he tries to do a little composing before going to bed: ‘Often enough I go on writing until 1 o’clock – and then, of course, up again at 6 o’clock –’
It is a long working day. But then, for Mozart, this is not work. He is doing what to him is as natural as breathing. How else, with all the trauma and tension of an on-off courtship, would he have been able to compose no fewer than three piano concertos, Nos. 11–13 (K. 413–15) during the winter of 1782–3?
The spur to this was the realisation that performing his own concertos at the piano, and directing the orchestra, was becoming increasingly popular with audiences, making theatre managements eager to book him. Over the coming years that would become one of the main sources of his income.
And what of the city in which he would now live out the remaining years of his life? At the crossroads of Europe, Vienna attracted travellers from the four corners of the continent. With them they brought their national customs, costumes, language and, most importantly for our story, music.
When words were not safe in a Europe soon to witness revolution and regicide in Paris, what was safe? Music. Who can say that music is seditious? And so different rhythms, exotic sounds, were to be heard on street corners in Vienna, as well as in theatres and salons.
A Bavarian by the name of Johann Pezzl, born in the same year as Mozart, gives us a vivid description of the Habsburg capital in the years 1786 to 1790 – exactly the years Mozart lived in the city – in his S
kizze von Wien (‘Sketch of Vienna’). No city, not even London, could rival its diversity:
Here you can often meet the Hungarian, striding swiftly, with his furlined dolman, his close-fitting trousers reaching almost to his ankles, and his long pigtail; or the round-headed Pole with his monkish haircut and flowing sleeves; both nations die their boots – Armenians, Wallachians and Moldavians, with their half-Oriental costumes, are not uncommon – The Serbians with their twisted moustaches occupy a whole street – The Greeks in their wide heavy dress can be seen in hordes, smoking their long-stemmed pipes in the coffee-houses on the Leopoldstädter Bridge – And bearded Muslims in yellow mules, with their broad, murderous knives in their belts, lurch heavily through the muddy streets – The Polish Jews, all swathed in black, their faces bearded and their hair all twisted in knots, resemble scarecrows – Bohemian peasants with their long boots; Hungarian and Transylvanian waggoners with sheepskin greatcoats; Croats with black tubs balanced on their heads – they all provide entertaining accents in the general throng.29
And as for languages, Vienna was a veritable Tower of Babel. Pezzl notes that the ‘native’ languages of the Austrian Crown Lands are German, Latin, French, Italian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish, Flemish, Greek, Turkish, Illyrian, Croatian, Wendic, Wallachian and Romany.
As for music, well, it is as natural to foreigners as it is to the Viennese themselves:
One cannot enter any fashionable house without hearing a duet, or trio, or finale from one of the Italian operas currently the rage being sung and played at the keyboard. Even shopkeepers and cellar-hands whistle the popular arias … No place of refreshment, from the highest to the lowest, is without music. Bassoonists and clarinettists are as plentiful as blackberries, and in the suburbs at every turn one alights upon fresh carousing, fresh fiddling, fresh illuminations.30
Mozart was in the right place at the right time. He represented a new musical generation. Gluck, kapellmeister of Vienna – the most senior musical post – was sixty-six years of age when Mozart came to Vienna.
Salieri, who would succeed him as kapellmeister, was only five and a half years older than Mozart, but it was if he belonged to an older generation. He had none of the wit and sparkle of his young competitor, who could out-play and out-compose him too.
Neither of these illustrious musical names posed a threat to Mozart when it came to receiving invitations to perform in the salons of the nobility. And as far as improvisation contests – a popular form of salon entertainment whereby two pianists would compete to ascertain who was the more accomplished at improvising on a given tune – were concerned, Mozart had already seen off the competition.*
Mozart could charm and impress the aristocracy, and he soon proved he could fill a theatre. Pezzl does not name the ‘Italian operas currently the rage’ that he refers to in his Skizze, but it is more than likely that these are the great operas that Mozart would go on to write with Lorenzo Da Ponte as librettist.
But that is to look ahead. In the immediate future he had to address the problem of his continuing alienation from his father, and his promise to bring his new bride to Salzburg to meet his father and sister.
Constanze became pregnant within weeks of their marriage. This provided Mozart with a convenient excuse not to follow through immediately with that promise. In fact he came up with a number of excuses, one following another as each was rejected in turn by his father.
First, in October, it was the fact that the most profitable season for musicians was about to begin. The nobility were due to return to the city from their summer residences, and would be resuming music lessons. Even if he and Constanze came to Salzburg in November, they would have to be back in Vienna by December, and how hard it would be for them to leave Leopold after such a short time(!).
Then it was the cold weather and the adverse effect that would have on his pregnant wife. Everyone, he said, was urging him to wait until spring.
More important than anything was the sheer volume of work he had, which he clearly thought would impress his father:
I’m so busy these days that at times I don’t know whether I’m coming or going any more – the entire morning, until 2 o’clock, is taken up with music lessons; – then we eat; – and after lunch I have to grant my poor stomach a short hour of digestion; only the evening is left for composing – and not even that is sure, because I am often asked to take part in a concert.
Finally, with spring soon to give way to summer, he uses an excuse so unlikely that we have to wonder how he ever thought his father would fall for it:
Now we wish for nothing more than to be fortunate enough to embrace you both very soon – but can that be in Salzburg? – I think not, unfortunately! – For some time now certain thoughts have been running through my head … and that is whether the archbishop will have me arrested when I come back to Salzburg.
He is seriously suggesting to his father that he fears being arrested if he sets foot in Salzburg, and his reasoning is that although the archbishop dismissed him from service, he never received the dismissal in writing. Maybe that was deliberate, he suggests, so they could arrest him later.
Leopold wasn’t taken in by any of this, and must have felt his son was setting out to goad him still further by ending practically every letter he now writes with both his and his wife’s names, and sometimes more:
most obedient children
W.A. Mozart,
Man and wife
are one life.
most obedient children
Konstanze and Mozart
My wife is now entering her 91st year.*
M.C. et W.A. Mozart
your most obedient children
W. et C. Mozart
W. et C. Mzt
Then, on 17 June 1783, at last a genuine reason not to leave Vienna immediately for Salzburg. A son was born to Mozart and his wife, and thereby hangs a legend.
Decades later Constanze recounted how her husband was working on his String Quartet in D minor (K. 421) on the night of his son’s birth, and was actually composing the Minuet and Trio at the moment of birth. We have no reason to doubt it. Composing was Mozart’s way of breathing.
In writing to Leopold and congratulating him that he had now become a grandfather, Mozart first provides some totally superfluous information about how his wife’s breasts have become very swollen, he fears she will develop milk fever, and without consulting him a wet nurse was brought in.
More rambling about the merits of feeding a newborn water rather than milk, as if he is delaying getting to the point. Then he drops a bombshell. He and Constanze have named the boy Raimund Leopold after his godfather. Not Leopold Raimund. In other words, Mozart has not asked his father to be godfather.
Mozart goes into a tortuous – and frankly unbelievable – explanation of how this happened. The first person he informed of the safe delivery of his child was his landlord, a certain baron by the name of Raimund Wetzlar, ‘who is a good and true friend’.
Wetzlar came straight to the apartment and offered himself as godfather.
I couldn’t refuse him – and so I thought to myself, well, I can still call the boy Leopold – and just as I was thinking it – the Baron said with the greatest delight – Ah well, now you have a little Raymund – and he kissed the child – so what was I to do – well, I had the boy baptised Raymund Leopold.*
What was he to do? Leopold must have thought there was an easy answer to that. Just tell this baron that the child’s grandfather would be godfather, as was customary for a newborn, and his first name would, naturally, be Leopold. By all means give him Raimund as a second name.
But the deed was done. Mozart was presenting his father with a fait accompli, and a most hurtful one at that. It did not look good for a future reconciliation.
Mozart keeps his father informed of the baby’s progress, stating that he is the spitting image of himself, which everyone remarks on, and that pleases Constanze because that is what she has always wanted.
He also reverts to classic Mozart language, albeit this time sparing his father’s blushes: ‘The baby is quite lively and healthy, he has a tremendous amount of things to do such as drinking, sleeping, crying, p------, sh------, and spitting up etc.’
As the weeks pass, the baby becomes stronger and Constanze’s recovery is on track, and it becomes harder for Mozart to delay the promised trip to Salzburg. Leopold’s letters are lost, but it is obvious from his son’s replies that Leopold is becoming more and more exasperated with the excuses and delays.
Still Mozart persists with the most absurd excuse of all, and he blames it on friends who are filling his head with fear. ‘If you so much as set foot in Salzburg, you’ll never get out again’; ‘you cannot know what this evil malicious prince[-archbishop Colloredo] is capable of’; ‘you don’t know what kind of tricks they have up their sleeve’.
Mozart writes out these fears in a letter, together with the advice he has been given that they should all meet up in some third place – not in Salzburg or Vienna.
Another furious and sceptical reply from his father, and Mozart has one last attempt to put the whole thing off, or at least arrange a meeting somewhere completely different, such as Munich. There is a decided tone of authority to his letter, dated 12 July 1783:
Have I ever given you the impression that I have no desire or eagerness to see you? – certainly not! – what is true is that I have no desire to see Salzburg or the archbishop – so pray, tell me who would be the one who gets fooled if we met at a third place? the archbishop and not you – I hope I don’t need to tell you that I care little about Salzburg and nothing at all about the archbishop and that I shit on both of them.
This time his father must have fired off a real broadside, because before the month was out he and Constanze were on the road to Salzburg – without Raimund. They left their six-week-old baby in the care of a foster mother.