by John Suchet
Le nozze di Figaro premiered at the Burgtheater on 1 May 1786, with Mozart leading the performance from the keyboard. It was produced nine times in all before the end of the year, with thirty-eight performances over the next five years.
That is substantial, particularly when the number of encores for particular numbers in the first year is taken into account. But it is not exceptional, not the triumph for which Mozart hoped. It also did not earn him a great deal of money.
The combination of Mozart and Da Ponte had worked better than any other collaboration either of the two men had had, however, and it was not long before a commission came in for a new opera from them, this time from Prague. Da Ponte immodestly claims credit for choosing the subject which, he says, ‘pleased Mozart mightily’.41
Da Ponte was extraordinarily busy at the time, working on two other librettos for two different composers. He set aside morning and afternoon for them, evenings for Mozart. He must have written the libretto for Mozart with a permanent smile on his face. The subject was the greatest lover in history, the Italian version of Don Juan, Don Giovanni. Da Ponte was, of course, able to draw on his own amorous experiences, in which he happily continued to indulge while in the process of writing:
I sat down at my table and did not leave it for twelve hours continuous – a bottle of Tokay to my right, a box of Seville to my left, in the middle an inkwell. A beautiful girl of sixteen – I should have preferred to love her only as a daughter, but alas …! – was living in the house with her mother, and came to my room at the sound of the bell. To tell the truth the bell rang rather frequently, especially at the moments when I felt my inspiration waning. She would bring me now a little cake, now a cup of coffee, now nothing but her pretty face … Sometimes she would sit at my side without opening her lips, or batting an eyelash, gazing at me fixedly, or blandly smiling, or now it would be a sigh, or a menace of tears.42
‘But alas …!’ Da Ponte was showing his writing skills even in his Memoirs. Just two words, some dots, and an exclamation mark. Less is more. As we would say today, he was learning on the job. Which is somewhat surprising, given that the libretto he produced was much darker than Mozart might have expected, beginning and ending as it does with violent death, and involving the truly chilling reappearance of the murdered man as a ghost.
Given Da Ponte’s predilections, Mozart might have expected another comedy replete with amorous entanglements. Maybe Da Ponte was reflecting on his own life, and considering the punishment that might lie ahead for him if he continued his libidinous ways. He gives us no indication either way in his Memoirs, merely congratulating himself on completing his three commissions on time, as if the other two – long forgotten – are in some way the equal of Don Giovanni.
Mozart once again rose to the musical challenge, depicting characters more complex than in any of his previous operas. The setting this time, despite the Italian title, is Vienna itself, and specifically the Graben, the wide central thoroughfare with many small streets radiating off it, where Mozart and his wife had first lived, and which was the haunt of most of the city’s three thousand prostitutes.
If Le nozze held up a mirror to the Viennese, Don Giovanni reflected its subjects even more explicitly, both in location and habits. Far from parody, which might allow its targets an indulgent smile, this opera was warning them that if they continued their debauched lifestyle, they risked being consumed by the flames of hell, the fate of the Don himself.
There is, though, both light and shade. In one of the most serene moments in any Mozart opera, when Giovanni seduces Zerlina, Mozart writes a duet of exquisite tranquillity and beauty, ‘Là ci darem la mano’. Giovanni uses every ounce of charm he possesses. Zerlina at first tries to resist, but then melts completely. The aria demonstrates, as Professor Glover succinctly and perfectly puts it, ‘Mozart’s own understanding of gentle conquest’.43 ‘Gentle’ is the operative word.
Then, during a party at Giovanni’s house, as Zerlina realises she is about to be seduced again, she lets out a scream. Legend has it that in rehearsals Mozart achieved the desired effect by pinching soprano Caterina Bondini’s bottom. Given what we know of the mischief lurking so close to the surface of Mozart’s character, I can well believe it.
The opera was premiered in Prague on 29 October 1787, after two postponements, the first because it was not ready, the second due to a singer’s illness. Constanze later recounted that her husband was working on the overture up until the last minute. He was writing it during the night ahead of the first performance, she keeping him awake with liberal supplies of coffee. The orchestra apparently played the overture at sight.
Mozart himself reported: ‘Some of the notes fell under the desks, it is true, but the overture went remarkably well on the whole.’
So did the entire opera. One critic noted that
Prague had never yet heard the like. Herr Mozart conducted in person. When he entered the orchestra he was received with threefold cheers, which again happened when he left it … The unusually large attendance testifies to a unanimous approbation.
Prague loved Mozart, and had for some time. His earlier opera Le nozze di Figaro had triumphed there. When he returned to the city to complete work on Don Giovanni, he wrote to a friend:
Everyone was hopping about with sheer delight to the music of my ‘Figaro’ … ‘Figaro’. Nothing is played, blown, sung, and whistled but – ‘Figaro’. No opera is seen as much as – ‘Figaro’. Again and again it is – ‘Figaro’. It’s all a great honour for me.
There were no question marks over Don Giovanni. Prague took the opera to its hearts. To this day, visit the city of Prague and you will find it still proudly boasts of having commissioned Mozart’s most perfect opera, of appreciating his worth as an operatic composer far more quickly and readily than Vienna.
It is an accurate assessment, for Vienna did not entirely take Le nozze to its heart, and the same was true of Don Giovanni. When word of its success in Prague reached the Habsburg capital, it was decided to put it on at the Burgtheater, but no slot could be found for seven months.
It finally premiered in Vienna on 7 May 1788, with some alterations. Emperor Joseph II himself wrote, without even seeing it, ‘Mozart’s music is certainly too difficult to be sung’44 (too many notes?). Da Ponte apparently told Mozart that the emperor had remarked that the opera was ‘not the food for the teeth of my Viennese’. To which Mozart replied, ‘Let us give them time to chew it.’
A countess who at least saw the opera remarked the music was ‘learned’, and ‘little suited to the voice’. An archduchess, again without seeing it, wrote to her husband, ‘In the last few days a new opera composed by Mozart has been given, but I was told that it did not have much success.’45
The critics praised the music but condemned the work as a whole. ‘Is such magnificent, majestic and powerful song really stuff for ordinary opera-lovers, who only bring their ears … but leave their hearts at home?’ wrote one. Another: ‘The beauty, greatness and nobility of the music for Don Juan [sic] will never appeal anywhere to more than a handful of the elect. It is not music to everyone’s taste, merely tickling the ear and letting the heart starve.’ And this from a later critic in Berlin: ‘Whim, caprice, pride, but not the heart created Don Juan [sic].’46
Reviews can hurt. They hurt today; they hurt then. Although Don Giovanni was performed fifteen times during 1788, Mozart’s finest, most complex, most dramatically and musically perfect opera fell out of the repertory in Vienna for the remainder of its composer’s life.
“It is not music to everyone’s taste, merely tickling the ear and letting the heart starve.”
Paradoxically, given its reception, Mozart actually earned quite good money for Don Giovanni. Maynard Solomon estimates that proceeds from both Vienna and Prague productions brought him in around 1,275 florins.* But the fact it was not an out-and-out success meant no further opera commission came to Mozart until late in 1789.
This was to be the final coll
aboration between Mozart and Da Ponte, and by general consent among musicologists, it was their least successful. The plot of Così fan tutte is frankly absurd. Even the most loyal Mozart aficionados do not attempt to relate it to real life.
Two young men are engaged to their sweethearts. An older friend challenges them to test their fiancées’ love by appearing in disguise and each attempting to seduce the other’s fiancée. Absurd, yes, and also immoral.
For this reason Vienna’s director of Italian opera and kapellmeister Antonio Salieri† had turned it down. Opera was created to portray nobler ideals than that. Much later Constanze herself confessed she did not much admire the plot, and Beethoven dismissed it as trivial and unsuited both to the high art of opera and the musical genius of Mozart.
Così is a long opera, running without cuts (which is rare) to around four hours, but it contains a moment of heart-stopping beauty. As the two young men set off to sea at the end of Act I scene 1, the two female characters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, joined by their fiancés’ friend Don Alfonso, wish them a safe journey with the trio ‘Soave sia il vento’ (‘May the winds be gentle’). The beauty of this is enhanced by the relatively unusual combination of soprano, mezzo-soprano and bass voices.
The opera premiered successfully, but further performances were abruptly interrupted by the sudden death of the emperor, Joseph II. Vienna went into official mourning, and all the theatres were closed.
Mozart and Da Ponte would not work together again. In fact the emperor’s death spelled the end of Da Ponte’s career in Vienna. Those who had been jealous of his collaborations with Mozart conspired against him, and he was dismissed from court service. His life then took some colourful turns.
He had in his pocket a valuable letter of recommendation from the late emperor to his sister in Paris, a certain Queen Marie Antoinette. Da Ponte set off for Paris where the French Revolution was taking its violent course, only to learn while travelling that the King and Queen of France had been arrested.
He diverted his journey round Paris and headed for the Normandy coast, his new target being London. There, he took what employment he could, including teaching Italian, and even setting up as a purveyor of fruit and vegetables, effectively a grocer, before landing a job more suited to his talents – librettist at the King’s Theatre.
But increasing debts and finally bankruptcy forced him to flee to the United States, where he settled (still unmarried) with his mistress and children, once again setting up a grocery store and teaching Italian.
At the age of seventy-nine he became a naturalised American citizen, and five years later founded the New York Opera Company, which would one day, after many vicissitudes, become the Metropolitan Opera.
Da Ponte had made his mark in the United States, and when he died in New York at the age of eighty-nine, an enormous funeral ceremony was held for him in the old St Patrick’s Cathedral, centre of Roman Catholicism in the city. One can imagine that would have pleased him. Even more he would have been truly gratified to know that his name – his adopted name – would forever be associated with the greatest composer who ever lived. But I doubt it would have surprised him.
Let us return to the year 1787, which began with the triumphant success of Le nozze in Prague, continued with the premiere of Don Giovanni, and also saw the composition of a substantial number of chamber works, including the String Quintet No. 3 in C (K. 515); Ein musikalische Spass (‘A Musical Joke’) (K. 522),* and his single most popular chamber piece, Eine kleine Nachtmusik (K. 525).
In April he received a visit in the Domgasse apartment from a lad of sixteen, short (like himself), thickset, unruly hair, unkempt clothes, with a guttural accent from the Rhineland. He introduced himself as Ludwig van Beethoven.
Mozart bade the boy play, and Beethoven began with a piece by Mozart, naturally. Mozart waved it away, saying he had obviously learned it for the occasion, and invited him to play something of his own.
Beethoven asked Mozart for a tune, any tune, and he would improvise on it. Mozart obliged, and Beethoven proceeded then to give the most remarkable display of improvisation Mozart had witnessed.
He walked into the adjoining room, where Constanze was entertaining friends, and said, ‘Watch out for that boy; one day he will give the world something to talk about.’47 He agreed to take Beethoven on as a pupil, but Beethoven received word from Bonn that his mother had fallen seriously ill, her life was in danger, and he should return to Bonn immediately.
Thus the two great musicians, one at the height of his fame, the other beginning to make his way, met just this once. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at that encounter! And what if Beethoven had taken lessons with Mozart? Might Mozart the perfectionist have rounded the sharp corners, smoothed the rough edges of Beethoven’s music? Possibly. We shall never know.
The year ended well for Mozart. In December Emperor Joseph finally gave him paid employment. He was appointed Imperial Royal and Chamber Composer, a position made vacant by the death of Gluck. It was only part time, requiring Mozart to compose no more than dances for the annual ball in the Redoutensaal in the imperial Hofburg Palace. It paid modestly, just 800 florins a year* – Gluck had been paid 2,000 florins – but it was employment.
In fact, being only part time and with such a huge reduction in salary, it was close to being an insult, even if he was so much younger than Gluck and working only part time. But that was not how Mozart saw it. He wrote triumphantly to his sister Nannerl, ‘You probably don’t know that His Majesty, the Emperor, has taken me into his services. I am certain that you welcome this news.’
At last he should have been able to report to his father that he had secured paid employment at court. But it was not to be. Six months earlier he had received the shocking, devastating news that his father had died.
* It is this aria that brought Mozart to a wider audience when it was used in the hugely successful film The Shawshank Redemption, playing across a prison courtyard to transfixed inmates. The narrator says: ‘I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about … I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it.’ [The Shawshank Redemption (Columbia Pictures, 1994), Frank Darabont (dir.)] A perfect encapsulation of Mozart’s art.
* Solomon, Mozart, A Life. The amount approximates to a little short of £32,000.
† He had succeeded Gluck as kapellmeister after Gluck’s death in 1787.
* At the end of which the instruments fall apart, wrong notes everywhere. It is not known what inspired Mozart to write this. We can assume he heard a musical ensemble play, they were simply not up to it, and he parodied them.
* Approximately £20,000.
Leopold had begun to complain about his health the previous autumn. He had humming noises in his head. ‘Sometimes it lasts the whole day. I never have it in the morning when I get up. Who can tell where it comes from? It isn’t in the blood. Perhaps it is wind; perhaps it comes from the digestion, or a weakness of the nerves.’
In January he wrote that his health was still not as good as it should be, and he hoped the spring weather would improve it. But his condition worsened, and Nannerl left her family in St Gilgen to come to Salzburg to care for her father. She spent two months with him, before having to return to her family at the end of April.
In early May the doctor diagnosed ‘blockage of the spleen’, and Leopold – ever the pessimist – informed a friend he was dying. Yet in what would be his final letters to both his daughter and son, he assured each of them he was rapidly recovering and would keep them informed if things became worse again.
It therefore came as a severe shock to them when they learned that on 28 May 1787 Leopold had died. Both suffered guilt from not having been with their father at the end, and both resented the fact he had not kept them informed about just how ill he was.
Mozart also had his own problems. Shortly before Leopold’s death, he had faced the
inevitable and realised he could no longer afford the rent in the Domgasse. He moved with his family into a small and much less expensive apartment in the Landstrasse suburb, on the other side of the river Wien and beyond the city wall.
This had occasioned Leopold’s last mention of his son in a letter. It was written to Nannerl, and it showed that Leopold still considered his son incapable of managing his own affairs: ‘Your brother now lives on the Landstrasse, No. 224. He writes, however, no reasons for that. Nothing! Unfortunately I can guess the reason.’
Which made it all the more wounding for his son that in his will his father left all his money to Nannerl, with proceeds from the Tanzmeisterhaus in Salzburg to be divided between them.
Or possibly not. Nannerl put the apartment and its contents up for auction, and Mozart said he wanted none of it, bar a single payment of 1,000 florins.* It was proof, if proof were needed, that Mozart was finally – finally – free of his father, the man who for so many years had dominated his life in every aspect.
One particularly sad effect of Leopold’s death was that it drove his children even further apart. Relations between brother and sister were already strained because of Nannerl’s continued disapproval of her brother’s marriage and her refusal to accept Constanze as a sister-in-law.
Letters between them following their father’s death exhibit no closeness or offering of mutual comfort. Later in the year Mozart signs off a letter to Nannerl with the words, ‘A thousand farewells’. Only two letters followed, one warning her not to expect prompt replies from him due to stress of work, the other, final one, apologising for failing to congratulate her on her name-day.