Mozart: The Man Revealed

by John Suchet

  He and Nannerl had never met, and there was an instant bond between them. Soon Wolfgang became a regular visitor to his aunt. He relished learning more about the father he had never known and who was now famous throughout Europe. He knew of his father’s childhood genius and the many tours he had undertaken. Now he was able to hear about them from the very person who had accompanied him.

  Nannerl, for her part, was overjoyed to see at first hand that the musical gift had been passed on. She wrote:

  In my seventieth year I had the great joy of meeting for the first time the son of my dearly beloved brother. What delightful memories were invoked by hearing him play just as his father had played. These memories are treasured by his aunt.65

  My dearly beloved brother. Remember, relations between brother and sister had become severely strained with, in the end, practically no communication between them. Wolfgang, by invoking such dear memories of his father, in effect helped to repair relations between brother and sister.

  Of more practical importance, Wolfgang spoke lovingly of his mother, the difficulties she had faced, the efforts she had taken to keep his father’s memory alive, to promote his music. He also told her Constanze, and her husband Nissen, were embarking on a huge project to produce the definitive biography of his father.

  The natural consequence of this was that Nannerl began to see Constanze through different eyes. Her attitude to her sister-in-law inevitably mellowed.

  With timing that could hardly have been bettered, as this transformation was occurring, Constanze and her husband arrived in Salzburg to work on the biography. There, in the same city as them, was the one person who could provide them with unique insight into their subject’s childhood.

  Thus, for the first time for forty years, the two women who were closest to Mozart met. It was as if the past, with its animosity and tensions, melted away. Nannerl was only too pleased to relate all she could of her brother’s childhood, and their tours together. Another family rift had at least to some extent been healed, even if never fully.

  When she was in her mid-seventies Nannerl’s health began to decline. Who would look after her, care for her? Constanze, naturally. Most distressingly, Nannerl slowly lost her sight. She was able to continue to play the small piano in her apartment. But then she lost the use of her left hand. This woman, such a child prodigy that in her earliest years she was considered a finer musician than her brother, would play no more.

  Nannerl died, reconciled with those closest to her, on 29 October 1829 at the age of seventy-eight.

  Constanze lived on for another twelve-and-a-half years, and they were far from lonely. She did not marry again, but two of her sisters, Aloysia and Sophie, came to live in Salzburg with her.

  There had always been a certain amount of tension between Constanze and her elder sister Aloysia. Inevitable, really, given that Aloysia was her husband’s first love. After rejecting him, Aloysia had gone on to a glittering career at the Vienna Court Opera. Mozart had maintained contact with her, writing several songs for her, and accompanying her at recitals. She also sang the role of Donna Anna at the premiere in Vienna of Don Giovanni.

  Her personal life had been less successful. Her marriage to Joseph Lange had broken down; soon her singing roles dried up and her career stuttered and finally ended. She came to live in Salzburg with Constanze because she had fallen on hard times in Vienna, and needed financial support. Constanze willingly gave it to her, even if she had been less than pleased to learn that Aloysia had earlier told a visiting English couple, Vincent and Mary Novello, founders of the music-publishing firm, that she believed Mozart had continued to love her to the day of his death. She added that she greatly regretted rebuffing his proposal of marriage, which she blamed on their two fathers.

  Her regret must surely have been compounded by the knowledge that her sister was now living comfortably on the proceeds of her husband’s musical legacy, and that it was Constanze’s name, rather than her own, that would forever be associated with the name of Mozart.

  Constanze, for her part, was prepared to let bygones be bygones. Her youngest sister Sophie came to live with her after the death of her own husband. Here were the two women who were present at the moment of Mozart’s death. What memories they shared.

  Constanze outlived Aloysia by almost three years. She died at the age of eighty, fifty-one years after her husband. Sophie died four-and-a-half years after Constanze.

  Neither of Mozart and Constanze’s two surviving sons inherited their father’s genius. The elder, Karl Thomas, attempted a career in music, but at the age of twenty-six gave it up to become a financial officer in the Austrian accounting department in Milan. He died in 1858 at the age of seventy-four.

  Franz Xaver Wolfgang, who was less than five months old when his father died, inherited a degree of musical talent. He became an accomplished pianist, performing his father’s works. He composed too, though not in great quantity or anything of notable quality. In fact he seems to have given up composing altogether in his early thirties, though he continued to make a career by performing.

  Throughout his life Wolfgang admired the father he had never known. He died just three days after his fifty-third birthday. His tombstone bore the epitaph: ‘May the name of his father be his epitaph, as his veneration for him was the essence of life.’

  Neither son married or had children, and thus the Mozart line died out. There was not before, and has not been since, another Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  * John O’Shea, in his Music and Medicine (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1990), gives probable cause of death as ‘chronic renal failure exacerbated by terminal infection, probably broncho-pneumonia with, perhaps, streptococcal throat infection’.

  * And a future patron of Beethoven.

  † Approximately £225, £2,750 and £1,000.

  ‡ By contrast, for Beethoven’s funeral thirty-five years later, twenty thousand people lined the streets of Vienna as the cortège passed through the streets.

  § Allgemeines einfaches Grab.

  ¶ A memorial to him was erected in the Musicians’ Quarter of Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof in 1859.

  * Approximately £6,625.

  The statue of Mozart in Salzburg's Mozartplatz.

  View across the Salzach river towards Salzburg, c. 1791.

  Johann Georg Leopold Mozart, c. 1765, thought to be by Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni.

  Anna Maria Pertl, c. 1770, also ascribed to Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni.

  Kitchen of the Mozarts’ home on Getreidegasse.

  The family home at 9 Getreidegasse; Mozart’s Geburtshaus (birthplace) is now a museum.

  Pianoforte in Mozart’s birth home.

  Mozart and his sister play for Empress Maria Theresa.

  Archbishop Schrattenbach, 1755, by Franz Xaver König.

  Portraits of Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart in court dress, aged six and twelve, 1763, ascribed to Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni.

  Portraits of Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart in court dress, aged six and twelve, 1763, ascribed to Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni.

  Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, the Mozarts’ landlord, c. 1800.

  The Mozart family in Paris in 1763, watercolour by Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle.

  180 Ebury Street (now Mozart Terrace), the Mozart family’s London residence during 1764. Mozart composed his first symphony in the house.

  ‘God is our Refuge’, K. 20, a motet written by Mozart in July of 1765 during the family’s stay in London.

  Miniature of Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart, located in the Mozarts Geburtshaus Museum.

  Wolfgang Mozart entertaining the court of Louis François, Prince of Conti in the Four-Mirror Salon of the Palais du Temple, 1766.

  Colour engraving of the house on Getreidegasse, Salzburg, c. 1830.

  Empress Maria Theresa in her mourning clothes, c. 1772.

  Mozart in Verona, aged fourteen, by Saverio dalla Rosa, 1770. The music in front of him is Sonata K. 27a.

  Mozart wearing the insignia of a Knight of
the Golden Spur; the portrait is a copy of the original, now lost.

  Carnival time in eighteenthcentury Venice: ‘the most dangerous place in all Italy.’

  Count Hieronymus Franz de Paula Joseph Colloredo, c. 1780.

  Salzburg Cathedral, built in the seventeenth century. The original baptismal font, in which Mozart was baptised, is still to be found inside.

  The Tanzmeisterhaus, into which the Mozart family moved in 1773. It is now a museum known as Mozart Wohnhaus (Mozart’s Residence).

  A self-portrait pencil sketch of Maria Anna Mozart (c. 1777), Wolfgang’s cousin, known as Bäsle.

  One of Mozart’s letters to Bäsle, 10 May 1779.

  Aloysia Weber as Zémire in André Grétry’s opera Zémire et Azor (c. 1784).

  Mozart at his mother’s deathbed, 3 July 1778.

  Handwritten score for Symphony in D major, known as the Paris Symphony.

  Joseph Lange, who married Aloysia Weber in 1780.

  The Mozart family with a portrait of Mozart’s mother on the wall, c. 1780, by Johann Nepomuk della Croce.

  A page from Mozart’s original score for Idomeneo.

  Church of the Teutonic Order, Vienna, where the infamous kick in the backside occurred.

  Statue of Mozart in the Imperial Palace Gardens, Vienna, erected in 1898.

  Constanze Mozart, 1782, painted by her brother-in-law Joseph Lange.

  St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, where Mozart and Constanze married.

  Anonymous drawing of Mozart’s ‘unusually formed left ear’.

  The image by which we know Mozart best, painted from memory eighteen years after his death.

  A portrait of Mozart believed to have been painted in 1783.

  Mozart’s house in the Domgasse, where he lived from 1784 to 1787, is still intact today and is now a museum, Mozarthaus Vienna.

  Joseph Haydn, Austrian composer and a friend of Mozart, who dedicated six quartets to Haydn.

  Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C Major (K.465), one of six quartetts dedicated to Haydn.

  Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote the librettos for Mozart’s most popular operas.

  Don Giovanni confronts the statue of the Commendatore in the climactic scene of the opera, as depicted in this painting by Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard.

  Beethoven playing for Mozart in the Domgasse apartment.

  Nannerl Mozart, c. 1785.

  An unfinished portrait of Mozart in 1789, by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange.

  The arrival of the Queen of the Night. Stage set for an 1815 production of Die Zauberflöte.

  The fi rst page of Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor (K. 626).

  Illustration of Papageno from Die Zauberflöte.

  Mozart’s last days. Painting by Henry O’Neill.

  The house where Mozart died on the Rauhensteingasse.

  Mozart’s two surviving sons: Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (left) and Karl Thomas (right), 1798, by Hans Hansen.

  A memorial to Mozart in Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof

  One in St Marx’s Cemetery (right), where he was buried, although the exact location of his grave is unknown.

  Constanze Mozart’s grave in St Sebastian Church, Salzburg.

  I can think of no other composer of whom we can say that we know practically everything there is to know about their life from letters. The simple reason? No other composer travelled as much as Mozart did.

  In all, as man and boy, Mozart took seventeen journeys through Europe, a total of 3,720 days, amounting to ten years, two months and two days, which (excluding his years as baby and toddler) in turn equates to nearly one-third of his life.

  From the first journey to the last, letters flew back and forth. On the earliest journeys, the letter writer was Leopold Mozart, with his son adding postscripts. Later, when he travelled on his own, he wrote home practically every week, sometimes more than once a week.

  These later letters are far from hurriedly scribbled notes; often they are several pages long, going into the minutiae of his life. For the musicologist, these provide invaluable insight into Mozart’s musical career – performances, commissions and, most importantly, his compositional process.

  The same is true of his private life. We would know practically nothing about the grim process of his mother’s death or the tortuous affair of acquiring a wife and the deterioration of his relationship with his father if he had not made time to sit down and write detailed letters to his father.

  For that reason, the most important source material for the Mozart biographer is these letters. Sadly, though, they provide us with only one half of the conversation.

  Leopold Mozart, recognising his son’s extraordinary musical gifts early on, determined one day to write his biography. For that reason he preserved all the letters his son wrote to him. Similarly his wife was under instructions to keep all letters from the early journeys. The biography never materialised, but the letters survived.

  The same cannot be said of Leopold’s letters to his son. Mozart destroyed very nearly all of them, or at least that is the presumption. Given that these letters were most often from a difficult and obstructive father – particularly where marriage plans were concerned – it is more than likely that after reading them and responding to them, the last thing Mozart wanted to do was keep them.

  But respond he did, often in a line-by-line rebuttal of his father’s accusations. From these replies we can accurately discern what Leopold had written.

  The first collected edition of the letters in English, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, was by Emily Anderson (Macmillan, 1966).* While her translations were welcomed by Mozart scholars, with deference to the sensibilities of the age she felt it necessary to sanitise much of Mozart’s crude expressions and toilet humour.

  This was fully rectified by Robert Spaethling, Bavarian-born Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. In 2000 he published an entirely new translation of Mozart’s letters (in the US, W.W. Norton; in the UK, Faber and Faber).

  A native German speaker, with a Bavarian dialect similar to that of Salzburg, he rendered Mozart’s usage of slang, and his eccentric spelling, into a comparative form of English.

  This volume, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, instantly became the standard reference work for Mozart’s letters. I acknowledge my debt to it. With very few exceptions, my direct quotations are from it, with an occasional anglicisation of American spelling and idiom.

  Spaethling includes only letters written by Mozart himself. For quotations from Leopold’s letters (those, at least, that have survived) I have used Emily Anderson’s earlier edition. A more modern edition of letters from both father and son, as well as letters from other principal correspondents, with essential notes and biographical material, is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, A Life in Letters, edited by Cliff Eisen, translated by Stewart Spencer, Penguin Classics 2006.

  Amid the welter of books on Mozart, one that I found particularly useful was Mozart’s Women by Jane Glover. Professor Glover is currently Felix Mendelssohn Emeritus Professor of Music at the Royal Academy of Music in London, having been the Academy’s Director of Opera for eight years. She is also Music Director of Chicago’s Music of the Baroque.

  Professor Glover is a renowned Mozart scholar, and has conducted his music with major orchestras and opera companies around the world. She published Mozart’s Women in 2005 (Macmillan), taking a look at the composer’s life from a novel angle. Meticulous in its research, and based on a lifetime of immersion in Mozart’s life and music, it is also a thoroughly good read. It is particularly strong on the female characters in Mozart’s operas.

  * She was also the first to publish a collected edition in English of Beethoven’s letters (Macmillan, 1961).

  Full-length biographies I consulted include Mozart: A Life by Maynard Solomon (HarperCollins, 1995), Mozart, A Cultural Biography by Robert W. Gutman (Secker and Warburg, 2000), and Mozart, The Early Years 1756–1781 by Stanley Sadie (Oxford University Press, 2006
).

  The late American musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon published 1791, Mozart’s Last Year (Thames and Hudson, 1988), Mozart, The Golden Years 1781–1791 (Thames and Hudson, 1989), Mozart and Vienna (Thames and Hudson, 1991). All were useful to me in the writing of this book.