by John Suchet
Anna Maria lived for just one hour.
All this personal trauma at a time when Mozart was working on his opera Così fan tutte, as well as the exquisite Clarinet Quintet in A (K. 581). His creative juices were still in no way dimmed.
Mentally, though, he was in an increasingly fragile state. It was not helped by Constanze’s health deteriorating once again. On doctor’s advice, she returned to Baden. Mozart writes yet another begging letter to Puchberg, in a tone almost of exasperation:
My wife is slightly better. She already feels some relief, but she will have to take the baths sixty times – and later in the year she will have to go there again. God grant that it may do her good.
More worryingly, relations between the couple were deteriorating. The tension was getting to them both. Health concerns following another infant death and money problems, with she in Baden, and he in Vienna.
It is clear that Constanze, who must have been in some despair down in Baden, has reproached him for not writing to her. He does not take the criticism lightly, and again turns the table on her:
DEAREST LITTLE WIFE!
I trust that you have received my letter. Well, I must scold you a little, my love! Even if it is not possible for you to get a letter from me, you could write all the same. For must all your letters be replies to mine? I was most certainly expecting a letter from my dear little wife – but unfortunately I was mistaken. Well, you must make amends and I advise you to do so, otherwise I shall never, never forgive you.
It was one of the least loving letters he had ever written to her.
Mozart is clearly dejected, anxious about his career, worried about his finances, concerned for his wife’s health. It has been suggested that at this point in his life Mozart was perilously close to a total breakdown.54
Predictably his own health began to suffer. He complains of not being able to sleep, of catching a chill from walking too much and becoming over-heated. Good enough reasons to ask Puchberg for yet another loan, even ‘the smallest amount’. It is as if he has lost all moral scruples about pleading for money. He is, possibly, at the lowest ebb in his life, and is about to descend even lower.
On 20 February 1790, Mozart’s most high-ranking patron, Emperor Joseph II, died at the age of forty-eight. It was totally unexpected and the Habsburg empire went into deep mourning.
True, Joseph had never given Mozart the full-time employment he – and his father – had wanted so much for him, but he had encouraged and even applauded him. Now Mozart would have to start from scratch in building a relationship with the emperor’s successor, his brother Leopold.
To say that it started poorly would be an over-statement. It never started at all. For the new emperor’s coronation in Frankfurt, Vienna’s leading musicians were invited, including Haydn and Salieri. Mozart was ignored, we do not know why – possibly a combination of his relative youth, his unpredictability, his scant adherence to formality and custom. Whatever the reason, he was hurt by the omission.
With little thought for Constanze he went anyway, borrowing money to finance the trip, determined to make his presence felt. He never got near to the emperor, and the few recitals he gave earned him practically nothing. He returned to Vienna even more in debt.
While he was away, though, Constanze, partially recovered from illness, took matters into her own hands. She negotiated a loan of 1,000 florins* against their furniture, which was enough to cover her husband’s debts, and leave some money to live on. It was to be paid over two years at 5 per cent interest, which was manageable.
She also decided they would move, yet again, into a first-floor apartment in the centre of the city, with a more manageable rent. There was a room large enough for Mozart to teach in, and for a small chamber ensemble to play in. With perhaps undeserved consideration, she made sure there was a courtyard below for his carriage and horse.
Mozart was overjoyed at his wife’s efforts, and determined to keep working hard, almost as if that alone would bring its own reward. There was renewed optimism in the Mozart household. Marital relationships seemed to be repaired. Within a short time Constanze was pregnant again.
The renowned London impresario, Johann Peter Salomon, invited both Haydn and Mozart to come to London, where he promised them a glittering reception. Mozart refused to go. He would not leave Constanze, and she could not accompany him because of her pregnancy.
Haydn accepted, and on the evening before his departure he had dinner with Mozart. Afterwards, Mozart walked Haydn, whom he called ‘Papa’, to his carriage. He implored the older man (Haydn was fifty-eight) to take care on the long journey, otherwise the two of them might never meet again.
Mozart was right. But it was he who would not live to see Haydn’s return.
* Approximately £25,000.
† In fact her son remedied this, shortly after his mother’s death.
* Approximately £100,000 asked for, £35,375 received. It seems that the full amount was eventually repaid by Constanze in the years following her husband’s death.
* Solomon, Mozart, A Life. The amounts approximate to between £357,000 and £502,000 in total, or between £70,000 and £100,000 a year.
† Beethoven’s future patron.
* On both occasions ‘——’ represents words crossed out in the original letter, whether by Mozart or someone else is not clear.
* Approximately £12,500.
* Approximately £25,000.
Given that he did not live to see the end of it, the year 1791 was an annus horribilis for Mozart, but an annus mirabilis for humanity. He began the year with a burst of creativity. In January he composed his first piano concerto for three years – perhaps the form that came to him most naturally, or at least the form he most enjoyed, since it united him at the keyboard with an orchestra – No. 27 in B flat (K. 595), which he performed himself in March.
He followed this with three songs celebrating spring and a collection of dances for the Redoutensaal (the concert hall in the Hofburg). He composed a string quintet (K. 614), as well as other smaller works. No matter what else was going on in his life, there simply was, for him, no alternative to creating music.
Also – and this would certainly have pleased his father – he applied to the Vienna Municipal Council for the post of assistant kapellmeister at St Stephen’s Cathedral, and on 9 May it was approved. He had employment. But his father’s joy would have been severely diluted by the fact that it was unpaid.
Mozart would have responded to that by pointing out that the job carried with it a guarantee that when the present incumbent died (he was fifty-two, but had been in ill health for some years), he was guaranteed to succeed as kapellmeister, on a salary of 2,000 florins.* In the event, the incumbent would outlive him.
Constanze’s health was still a worry, and her pregnancy was not helping. Her foot was causing her serious problems. She found it difficult to walk and could not climb stairs. Mozart arranged for her to return to the spa in Baden. She left on 4 June, and took young Karl (aged six) with her.
Over the following weeks, Mozart went down to Baden several times to join his wife and son. The visits were brief, and it was on one of these that he composed one of the shortest, yet most heart-stoppingly beautiful pieces of music he was ever to compose. It was for a local schoolteacher and choirmaster, to thank him for arranging for Constanze to have ground-floor accommodation so she would not have to climb stairs. Inspiration for Mozart did not have to be divine.
The piece of music was a motet, just a few minutes long, with the title Ave verum corpus (K. 618). Lucky schoolteacher, lucky choir. Lucky us.
For much of the time, though, Mozart was alone in Vienna, exactly what he needed to work on an exciting new project that had, as it were, come out of nowhere. For some years Mozart had known a colourful character by the name of Emanuel Schikaneder, a man of many parts. He was immersed in the world of theatre, turning his hand to a variety of roles – manager, writer, actor, singer, composer, even dancer.
&
nbsp; Since 1789 Schikaneder had managed the suburban theatre, the Freihaus-Theater an der Wieden.* In the early summer of 1791 he came to Mozart with the idea for an entirely new opera, which he would of course write himself and in which he would sing one of the leading roles.
This would be a new kind of venture for Mozart. He would not be working for one of the court theatres, beholden either to royalty or to the aristocracy. The Theater an der Wieden was entirely different from the Burgtheater and other imperial theatres. It was self-contained in a large complex of buildings, which included apartments, shops and gardens. The theatre was enormous and could seat a thousand people.
The audience, by and large, would be made up of local residents, from both inside and outside the complex. This would not be a sophisticated aristocratic audience, such as might attend the Burgtheater. They would be middle and working class, ‘ordinary’ people. They would not want anything too complex or subtly satirical. First and foremost, they would want to be entertained, to be made to gasp and laugh. And in their own language, German.
Mozart seemed never to hesitate when the offer of composing an opera came along. He relished the chance to work with both orchestra and voices, and enjoyed all the many facets of opera production and the world it created in the mind.
Schikaneder’s plan appealed to him too. He was a fellow Freemason, and had the idea of a fantasy based around the Masonic ideals of virtue, courage and clemency, all wrapped in the quest of the lead character for emotional fulfilment while undergoing trials and rituals.
“Mozart seemed never to hesitate when the offer of composing an opera came along.”
The number three, which holds a special place in Masonic ritual, permeates the opera: three ladies, three boys, three slaves, three temples, three chances. Mozart’s overture begins with three chords, which recur at important moments. He chooses as his home key E flat major, which has three flats and is used in Masonic music so frequently it is known as the Masonic key.
Schikaneder’s libretto, as far as we know, was entirely original. He gave his work the title Die Zauberflöte (‘The Magic Flute’).
Mozart threw himself into the project, and thereby – possibly – hangs a tale. Schikaneder provided Mozart with a small garden house in the complex near the theatre building. Mozart spent the days in this house, working. Did he also spend the nights in it, or nearby, and not on his own?
Certainly rumours circulated to that end, during and afterwards. It was said he became very close to two of the singers, Barbara Gerl who played Papagena and Anna Gottlieb who sang Pamina.
It was Anna Gottlieb who made that appearance at the unveiling of the statue to Mozart in Salzburg, declaiming that she was the first Pamina. In newspaper interviews occasioned by her reappearance she hinted strongly that she had been more than that, that she had been involved romantically with Mozart.
Of Barbara Gerl, Mozart’s biographer Otto Jahn stated that ‘contemporaries affirmed that this very pretty and attractive woman had completely entangled Mozart in her coils’.55
Also, at the time Mozart was working on Die Zauberflöte, it was strongly rumoured in musical circles that he was conducting an affair with Magdalena Hofdemel, the piano pupil who was the wife of the man Mozart had written to pleading for a loan.
This would end in tragedy. On the day of Mozart’s funeral, Franz Hofdemel attacked his wife with a razor, slashing her face and hands. He then cut his own throat. He died, but she survived. Magdalena was pregnant at the time. Vienna was soon awash with reports that the child was Mozart’s, even that Hofdemel had poisoned Mozart in revenge. Both stories swiftly evaporated. The fact that Mozart had died in debt to Hofdemel (among others), and that he himself had accrued huge gambling debts, may have been contributory factors.
It is clear that down in Baden Constanze had her suspicions about what Mozart might be up to. Her letters to him have not survived, but it seems he is responding to her suspicion that he might not be spending nights at home when he writes, with a wry sense of humour:
And where did I sleep? – at home, of course – in fact, I slept very well – although the mice kept me pretty good company – and I had a first-rate argument with them.
And he adds a postscript to the letter which almost goes too far in its protestations of love:
– catch – catchbis – bis – bis – bs – bs – lots of little kisses are flying through the air for you – – – bs – here is one more tottering after the others –
Only days later there is a tone almost of desperation in his letter, as if he is trying too hard to convince her of his love:
You can’t imagine how slowly time has been passing without you! – I cannot describe to you what I feel, but there’s a sort of emptiness – which hurts somehow – a certain longing that is never fulfilled and therefore never stops – it’s always there – and even grows from day to day … not even my work gives me joy any more.
No joy in his work? Yet he was composing the most joyful, optimistic, exuberant opera he ever composed. Maynard Solomon interprets these words as guilt over his infidelities. They may be. If they were, we can only be certain that feeling did not infuse his work.
He was in the midst of writing Die Zauberflöte when there occurred something truly strange, that has given rise to legend and intrigue ever since.
A stranger knocked on the door of Mozart’s apartment in the Rauhensteingasse, with a letter offering him a commission to compose a Requiem Mass. The letter was unsigned. The man refused to identify either himself or the person on whose behalf he was acting, and warned Mozart not to try to find out the identity of either of them.
In the months that followed, as Mozart struggled to complete the work with his health failing, the stranger pursued him, demanding to know – on behalf of his client – where the Requiem was, to the extent that Mozart, in despair, believed he was writing the Requiem for himself – in other words, foreseeing his own death.
It is a story that has been told powerfully and many times since.* It originated with Mozart’s early biographer Niemetschek, whose primary source was Constanze herself. Significantly, Constanze did not witness the episode at first hand, since she was in Baden. Nor, of course, did Niemetschek.
In essence the story is true, though in all probability it unfolded a little less melodramatically than Niemetschek recounts. The stranger was certainly unknown to Mozart, but it would not have taken Mozart long to establish who the writer of the letter was, not least because he was another Freemason. His name was well known in musical circles.
Count Franz Walsegg was an aristocratic landowner who lived in a castle around fifty miles south-west of Vienna. He was also a keen music lover who invited chamber ensembles to play for him in his castle.
The Count had tried his hand at composing, and found it rather more difficult than he had imagined. He then had the brilliant idea of inviting composers to write pieces for him, and then pay them to allow him to publish the compositions under his own name.*
The musicians who played for him were well aware of this arrangement, even if his friends and colleagues were not. It seems the count thought he was fooling the musicians too. One of them recounted years later that, after they had played a piece, the count would ask them to guess who had written it. They knew perfectly well it was written by someone else, but they guessed his name to flatter him.
In February 1791 Count Walsegg’s adored wife died at the age of just twenty. The count was only twenty-eight himself, and would never remarry, though he lived for another thirty-six years.
Such was his grief that he decided to commission a Requiem Mass to be composed especially for her. And, as he had become used to doing, his intention was to claim the piece as his own work. He would certainly have known of Mozart, since the tenant in one of his Vienna properties was none other than Michael Puchberg, recipient of Mozart’s begging letters. Puchberg would have known how to find Mozart, and thus the elaborate ruse began.
Once Mozart had established w
ho the anonymous benefactor was, we need not be too shocked that he entered into the ruse. Mozart would have known that Count Walsegg paid well for the privilege of passing off other composers’ work as his own. Why should Mozart complain? It would bring money in when he most needed it, and it no doubt appealed to his sense of fun. Fooling an aristocratic audience who thought they knew about music? Why not?
The biggest problem Mozart had was actually finding the time to put pen to paper. A Requiem was, by its nature, a large work. The sacred text was established, and could not be deviated from.
He set to work immediately. Hardly had he begun, than another substantial commission came in.† He was asked to write a new opera as part of the ceremonies for the new emperor in Prague in early September (compensation for not having been invited to the coronation in Frankfurt perhaps?). He was presented with a suitable libretto, already written, centring round the notion of a forgiving and benevolent emperor. The title was La clemenza di Tito.
It is tiring just to imagine the workload Mozart has taken on. He was working flat out on Die Zauberfl öte; he had accepted a commission to compose a Requiem Mass for orchestra, soloists and choir; and he had agreed to compose an entirely new opera for the emperor’s coronation, which needed to be ready in a matter of weeks.
It was not just a heavy workload, it was punishing, and Mozart, inevitably, would pay the price.
In his domestic life too, things were hardly peaceful. Constanze returned to Vienna and on 26 July she gave birth to a son. He was christened Franz Xaver Wolfgang. He was the couple’s sixth child, and a brother for Karl Thomas. The parents’ joy must have been tempered by the fear that Franz might not live for long, like his four unfortunate siblings.