Mozart: The Man Revealed

by John Suchet

  Leopold was his old difficult and curmudgeonly self. Mozart and his wife had every reason to regret the day they ever invited him. So how did they handle him? With a stroke of genius, by killing him with kindness. They had allies in the form of Constanze’s mother and younger sister Sophie. They treated Leopold like a lord and he loved it.

  For a start, they took Leopold to lunch at Frau Weber’s. This was the woman Leopold had insulted time and again in his letters, accusing her of trying to trick his son into marriage. There is no question that she would have known of Leopold’s insulting attacks on her. The lunch could have been a disaster.

  Instead, this is how Leopold wrote about it to his daughter:

  I must tell you that the meal, which was neither too lavish nor too stingy, was cooked to perfection. The roast was a fine plump pheasant, and everything was excellently well prepared. We lunched on Friday … but there was no thought of a fast-day. We were offered only meat dishes. A pheasant as an additional dish was served in cabbage and the rest was fit for a prince. Finally we had oysters, most delicious glacé fruits and (I must not forget to mention this) several bottles of champagne.

  “Leopold found himself being won over by the woman he was prepared to stop at nothing to prevent his son marrying.”

  Leopold was so impressed he even let his strict Catholic adherence to fish on Fridays lapse – and confessed as much to Nannerl! You can just see the Webers running around after him, helping him to food, and more food, replenishing his glass, making sure he wanted for nothing. Leopold had never been treated like that, and he clearly relished every moment.

  It did not end there. Constanze’s sister Sophie took it upon herself to look after Leopold, as he struggled with his various ailments. She gave him lunch, and when he felt too unwell to attend any of his son’s concerts, she stayed with him until late in the evening.

  Constanze played her part also, in what was clearly a well-organised strategy. She made sure Leopold had his fill of little Karl, now five months old. Karl played his part to perfection too, bringing untold joy to his grandfather. He wrote to Nannerl:

  Little Karl is the image of [Wolfgang]. He seems very healthy, but now and then, of course, children have trouble with their teeth. On the whole the child is charming, for he is extremely healthy and laughs when spoken to. I have only seen him cry once and the next moment he started to laugh.

  The strategy was working so well that Leopold even found himself being won over by the woman he was not so long before prepared to stop at nothing to prevent his son marrying, a woman he was quite prepared to label a slut.

  Instead he remarked on what a sensible and frugal house she kept. He even – who would have thought this possible? – included her when he signed off a letter to Nannerl: ‘Your brother, your sister-in-law … and I kiss you millions of times.’

  Leopold was also, just as his son intended, impressed with the grandeur of the apartment, and particularly admired the fine furniture. It seems Mozart gave him no inkling of any money problems.

  Leopold was won over; the strategy had worked. But to Mozart, what mattered most was to show his father just what he had achieved musically in the city that was the European capital of music: the concerts he was putting on, the aristocracy that were coming to see him. He wanted his father to hear what they were saying about him.

  It is not an exaggeration to say his aims were not only fulfilled but surpassed.

  Leopold went to the Mehlgrube to hear his son perform a brand new piano concerto. When I say brand new, I mean it. With the performance just an hour, or even less, away, Leopold watched in awe as Mozart supervised a group of copyists writing out the parts. In other words, he was still composing, or at the very least orchestrating it. In fact, Leopold wrote to Nannerl, telling her that because her brother was supervising the copyists, he did not even have time to play through the rondo, the second movement.*

  Despite all this, ‘the concert was magnificent and the orchestra played splendidly’. If this had been a small piece, it would still have been remarkable. In fact it was Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor (K. 466), one of the longest and most intense of all his piano concertos.†

  Leopold always knew his son had a God-given talent, but this was beyond anything he had expected. It was a revelatory moment. And his own ego was suitably flattered when important people flocked to him afterwards to congratulate him on his son’s achievement. He confessed to being overcome with emotion.

  Even the emperor himself, ‘when your brother left the platform, waved his hat and called out “Bravo, Mozart!”’ There could be, in Leopold’s eyes, no higher accolade.

  It did not end there. The following Saturday evening, no less a musical personage than Joseph Haydn was guest at Mozart’s apartment to hear three new string quartets performed.‡

  After the performance Haydn came up to Leopold and said: ‘Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.’ We can easily imagine Leopold swelling with pride at what has gone down as one of the most prescient remarks in musical history.

  It is worth pausing for a moment to contemplate what must have gone through Leopold’s mind during that visit, perhaps as he lay awake at night alone with his thoughts.

  Everything he had dreamed of for his son during all those tours so many years ago had borne fruit. True, he had never found employment at a European court, and the only employment he had ever had, thanks to his father’s efforts, was at the court in Salzburg, and he had managed to get himself dismissed from that.

  But here he was now, in the Habsburg capital, living comfortably, dressed in finery, lauded by the highest in the land, writing and performing music better than anyone before him. And Leopold, an accomplished musician, was well qualified to be judge of that.

  Could there possibly have been an element of guilt, buried deep within? Guilt that he had held his son for so long in check, trying too hard to get him paid employment, fighting him over his desire to leave Salzburg? On the evidence he was witnessing in Vienna, his son surely could have made a comfortable living earlier in his career.

  And Constanze. She was clearly a good wife to Wolfgang. She looked after him, making it possible for him to work at the pace he needed to, protecting him where necessary. Maybe Leopold had been a little harsh in his opposition to her.

  He must have thought, too, of his own wife, and all that she was missing. How he must have longed to tell her what their son had achieved.

  And, lastly, might there not have been just a touch of envy at the back of his mind? Proud though he so obviously was of his son’s mastery of music, it must surely have been difficult to acknowledge just how far the son had eclipsed the father. Added to that, what had become of his hopes that Wolfgang would keep his ageing parents in luxury?

  Here Leopold was now, on a short visit to his son in Vienna, soon to return to an empty house in a city he loathed, earning a living as best he could with his position at court and his music pupils. Things had not turned out the way he had envisaged.

  In the light of day, though, amid the bustle of his son’s busy life, he could at least bask in reflected glory. One other thing had happened to him in Vienna, and this was perhaps the most unexpected development of all. It appears he might have fallen just very slightly in love.

  And the object of his affection? His son and daughter-in-law’s great friend Baroness Waldstätten. She, too, must have been in on the conspiracy to kill him with kindness. She invited Leopold out to her house in Klosterneuberg, sending her carriage and horses to pick him up.

  In a letter to his daughter he referred to the baroness as ‘this woman of my heart’. He will certainly have known that she was separated from her husband. But we can probably be fairly sure that even if he did lose his heart, he took away with him no more than a warm glow of appreciation.

  Leopold remained in Vienna for a li
ttle over two months, at the end of which he was physically exhausted but emotionally content. His son, permanently exhausted, shared his contentment. The relationship between father and son had finally been repaired.

  On 25 April 1785, Mozart and Constanze accompanied Leopold to the nearby village of Purkersdorf, where the road forked. They had lunch together. Afterwards they said their goodbyes, more warmly than any of them had thought possible.

  Leopold boarded a coach to Linz on his way home to Salzburg. Mozart and Constanze boarded another coach back to Vienna.

  Father and son had taken their final farewell.

  * From approximately £25,000 to £93,000.

  † The only location in Vienna now preserved to his memory.

  * Approximately £11,500.

  * Uwe Kraemer, ‘Wer had Mozart verhungern lassen?’ (‘Who let Mozart starve?’), an article published in Musica 30, June 1976.

  * Still one of the best-known movements of any of Mozart’s piano concertos.

  † Beethoven, Brahms and Clara Schumann were among those who wrote cadenzas for it.

  ‡ These – K. 458, 464 and 465 – together with three earlier ones – K. 387, 421 and 428 – would be dedicated to Haydn and are known today as Mozart’s ‘Haydn Quartets’.

  A truly colourful character now enters our story, an individual whose name would surely be lost to history were it not for his connection to Mozart. He was born Emanuele Conegliano in the small town of Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto), north of Venice.

  He was Jewish by birth, but his father converted himself and his family to Roman Catholicism so he could marry a Catholic woman. Emanuele was baptised a Catholic and, as was the custom, he took the name of the bishop who baptised him. If Monsignor Lorenzo Da Ponte could only have known of the exalted status his name would one day hold in the annals of musical history!

  At the age of twenty-four the bishop’s namesake was ordained a priest, and proceeded to lead a life not entirely compatible – at the same time not entirely unknown – to his calling. He moved to Venice, where he made the acquaintance of a certain Giacomo Casanova (yes, that one), whose behaviour in the field of sexual conquests he was keen to emulate.

  The older man clearly gave him instruction, because he then – it was alleged – took up residence in a brothel in Venice and organised entertainments for the clients there. It was further alleged he pimped the prostitutes, living off their immoral earnings, and also abducted a respectable woman. This might or might not have been his mistress, with whom he had two children.

  For these alleged crimes he was arrested and charged. He was brought to trial, found guilty on all counts and banished from Venice for fifteen years.

  He found his way to Vienna, where a letter of introduction secured him a meeting with a composer in his early thirties who was making a name for himself. No, not Wolfgang Mozart but Antonio Salieri. Da Ponte put himself forward to Salieri as a poet and writer. Salieri was sufficiently impressed to help him obtain the post of librettist to the Burgtheater, which involved overseeing all librettos for the theatre. Da Ponte was suddenly very busy. He had fallen on his feet.

  ‘Modesty’ is not a word that could ever be applied to Da Ponte. This is what he thought of the librettos that fell onto his desk:

  What trash! No plots, no characters, no movement, no scening [sic], no grace of language or style! Written to produce laughter, anyone would have judged that most were written to produce tears. There was not a line in those miserable botches that contained a flourish, an oddity, a graceful term, calculated in any sense to produce a laugh. So many agglomerations of insipidities, idiocies, tomfooleries! 35

  It would be so much better if he wrote the librettos himself. He would show them how to do it:

  In mine, one would find, at least here and there, some clever turn, some smart quip, some joke. The language would be neither barbarous nor uncouth. The songs would be read without annoyance! Finding an attractive subject, capable of supplying interesting character and fertile in incident, I would not be able, even if I tried, to compose things as wretched as those I had read! 36

  And so he wrote librettos himself, for Salieri and several other composers of opera. The resulting operas all flopped.

  A chance meeting at the home of Baron Wetzlar changed his life. For this was the same Raimund who was landlord to Mozart and had stood as godfather to his first-born. And so Mozart met the man who was to write the librettos for his greatest operas.

  Not that Mozart was immediately filled with confidence. How could you ever trust an Italian? His father, with whom he had toured Italy so many times, would know exactly what he meant:

  We have a certain Abate [Abbot] da Ponte here as a text poet; – he has an incredible number of revisions to do at the theatre – he also has to do per obligo – a whole New libretto for Salieri – which he won’t be able to finish for 2 months – He promised to write me something New after that; – but who knows whether he will keep his word – or even wants to! – You know, these Italian gentlemen, they are very nice to your face! – enough, we know all about them! – and if he is working with Salieri, I’ll never get a text from him.

  But he was wrong. It was, from every practical point of view, an unlikely collaboration. Da Ponte was seven years older than Mozart, or to put it in a more significant way, when they started working together one was well into his thirties, the other in his late twenties. When lives, on the whole, were shorter than they are today, this was a significant difference.

  One had led a thoroughly colourful life, ranging from holy orders to debauchery and a criminal trial. The other had virtually no experience of the world outside the rarefied realms of music. For one, the state of marriage was fortuitously denied to him by his priestly calling, allowing him to indulge his preferred, more libidinous, tastes. The other was happily married with a son.

  They were different nationalities, speaking a different native language. Potentially most damaging of all, each doubted the other’s abilities. We have seen Mozart’s words to his father. Da Ponte too had his misgivings. He recognised Mozart’s musical genius – ‘gifted with talents superior, perhaps, to those of any other composer in the world’, he wrote much later in his Memoirs37 – but he doubted his stagecraft.

  To put it bluntly, though, they needed each other. Mozart’s operas hitherto had not been the unconditional successes he had hoped for. By far the best received, Die Entführung, had not brought him either greatly enhanced fame or much fortune. It was his piano concertos that were responsible for that. And as for Da Ponte, he could point to nothing.

  One crucial quality, however, they shared. It was not apparent to those who knew them, and it was not immediately apparent to the two men themselves. They thought along similar lines. The fact that they were both outsiders in the imperial capital gave them a certain bond, a mutual mistrust of authority. It also allowed them to see that the rigid hierarchy of aristocratic life in Vienna meant nothing. The high born were every bit as capable of corruption, deceit, jealousy, intrigue, infidelity and mischief as the lowest on the streets.

  If they were to collaborate, it was inevitable something radically different would emerge – something ‘edgy’, as we would say today, even dangerous, taking as targets a previously untouchable layer of society.

  To say that something radical did emerge is an understatement. The genius was to make it a comedy. It seems it was a shared genius. Da Ponte, naturally, claims credit for the initial collaboration. ‘I went to Mozart … and asked him whether he would care to set to music a drama I should write to him.’38

  Then, he gives credit to the composer: ‘In conversation with me one day, he asked me whether I could easily make an opera from a comedy by Beaumarchais – Le Mariage de Figaro. I liked the suggestion very much, and promised to write him one.’39

  The result would change the face of opera. From the opening bars of the overture, a low rumble in strings and bassoons, the audience knew they were hearing something different. And in th
e very first scene, a servant is mocking his master. This might be comedy, but it is a reversal of the norm. That sort of thing did not happen in real life, and it was an insult to the aristocracy – who would make up most of the audience – to allow it to happen on stage. And Mozart’s music, note for note, perfectly captures this. Revolutionary stuff, both in music and ideas.

  Predictably the censor, under orders from the emperor, had tried to ban it. Da Ponte, naturally, claims credit for persuading the emperor to pass it as entertainment. And what entertainment! Da Ponte’s perfect verse allows Mozart to rise to exquisite musical heights. This is like nothing he has written for the stage before.

  The sophisticated audience will have been amused and beguiled, and at the same time shocked, from the first scene onwards. The two most sympathetic characters are women – Susanna and the Countess – and it is they who carry the opera.

  The Countess’s aria at the opening of Act 2, ‘Porgi, amor’ (‘Grant, love, some comfort’), in which she laments her husband’s infidelity, is heart-stop-pingly beautiful. Again, in Act 3, it is Countess Almaviva who moves in a single aria, ‘Dove, sono’ (‘Where are they, the beautiful moments’), from reflecting sadly on her lost happiness – accompanied by a doleful oboe – to renewed strength as she determines to overcome her misery.

  “Da Ponte’s perfect verse allows Mozart to rise to exquisite musical heights, like nothing he has written for the stage before.”

  Then again, it is the two women together who sing the sublime ‘Sull’ aria’ (‘On the breeze’), conspiring together in their plan to trap the Count in his infidelity.*

  This is real life, real emotions, remarkable in itself in opera up until this time, and even more remarkable for having been expressed by female characters. The mould had been broken. As Professor Jane Glover says, ‘Mozart and Da Ponte had finally held the mirror up to the audience: “This”, they were saying, “is all about you.”’40