Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  In late 1786, Mozart was not having an easy time financially (though he had made good money before) and was thinking of a concert tour in England, usually monetarily rewarding, and the invitation to Prague by a “society of connoisseurs” lightened his burdens, or so he hoped, at least for the time being. His friends in Prague were many and of different walks of life: as early as 1777 (when he was twenty-one years old) the Prague musician František Dušek and his wife, Josefa, a well-known singer, had visited his father in Salzburg and told him that Wolfgang would be welcome in Prague anytime. Among theater professionals there were Pasquale Bondini and, perhaps even closer to Mozart’s music, Domenico Guardasoni, as well as Johann Josef Strobach, long active in Prague church music, now director of the orchestra; and there was, last but not least, Count Thun, in whose town palace in the Minor Town Italian opera had been cultivated for many decades. (Where the tenors and divas once clamored for attention, the Czech parliament now holds its sessions.) Count Thun’s wife, née Wilhelmine von Uhlfeld, knew Mozart from Vienna, where he had attended her musical soirées; and he once wrote his father that she was “the most charming liebste lady whom I have ever encountered.” In the absence of the Dušeks, who were on a German concert tour, she was to be his hostess in Prague, where he duly arrived on January 11, 1787, in the late morning, accompanied by his wife, her brother Johann Hoffman, Mozart’s friend and clarinetist Anton Stadler, a servant, and the family dog Gauckerl, all claiming hospitality. Opera buffs still discuss the question whether Mozart stayed at the Thuns’ through his entire Prague sojourn or whether he moved his whole kit and caboodle to the Nová Hospoda (the New Inn) in the Old Town close to the theater; we assume that his rooms were furnished with a pianoforte.

  We know a good deal about the nearly four weeks of Mozart’s first stay in Prague, in particular the first ten or fourteen days, well documented in his correspondence, memoirs of contemporaries, and newspaper reports. (The German newspapers in Prague spelled his name “Mozard,” the consonants d and t being undifferentiated in Prague German.) After his arrival, Mozart enjoyed a late luncheon with the Thuns, the Hauskapelle fiddling away, and at six in the evening he was picked up by Count Canal, a fellow Freemason, who took him to an elegant ball in the house of Baron Bretfeld. Mozart did not dance but enjoyed the music, which echoed motifs from his Figaro; “nothing is played, sounded, sung, or whistled but … Figaro,” he said in his correspondence. On January 12 he was tired, a clear case of stagecoach lag, and spent the day with his wife and the Thun family; on the third day he behaved as any fashionable tourist would—visiting the ancient university and its library, lunching again with Count Canal, and in the evening attending a performance of Giovanni Paisiello’s Le Gare Generose (Generous Competitions ) at the Nostitz theater, talking all the time to his friends rather than listening to the (Neapolitan) music. During the second week, he was kept busy: greeted by much applause, he came to see his Figaro at the theater; on January 19 a festive concert was arranged (his new symphony in D major, Köchel 504, later called the Prague Symphony, was performed, and he improvised for a considerable time on the pianoforte); on the following night, January 20, he conducted his opera himself. This was the grand event of the season, and he had a good chance to evaluate the baritone Luigi Bassi (as Count Almaviva), the basso Felice Ponziani (Figaro), and the renowned Caterina Bondini (Susannah), all of whom were to take major parts in the future Don Giovanni production. Madame Bondini was the diva of the evening; at an earlier occasion, an Italian ode celebrating her had been distributed in the theater, “Caterina stupi” (Catherine astonished), “la Moldau ’onda[sic] oggi t′appresta il verdeggiante alloro” (the waves of the Moldau present to you today the evergreen laurel). It was her husband, the impresario, who offered Mozart a welcome contract for a new opera to be performed in the next season, and it is more than possible, as da Ponte wrote in 1819, that Guardasoni, Bondini’s executive director, suggested that it should be an opera dealing with the legend of Don Juan.

  Many stories and anecdotes relate to Mozart’s early days in Prague, and even if they may not be all exactly true, they reflect some of his habits and the admiration of his contemporaries. One of the stories belongs to the Mozart-promised-but-did-not-deliver kind. Mozart had promised a few light pieces for ballroom dancing to Johann Count Pachta, a local connoisseur, and when he did not deliver on time, the count invited him, we are told, to a dinner preceding the dance but about an hour earlier than usual. Mozart arrived to find he was the only guest; he was shown into an empty room, where, on a table, a pen, ink, and notepaper were neatly arranged. The maestro, aware of his unfulfilled promise, promptly sat down and composed a few dances in time for the entertainment (K. 509), and to these compositions another series of six German dances, all written in Prague (K. 510), may belong. Another anecdote tells about Mozart’s chance encounter with a poor harp player at the Nová Hospoda pub. When Mozart went downstairs for a drink, he heard an old man improvising from Figaro and was so pleased with his untutored art that he invited him upstairs and challenged him to elaborate on a theme which he played to him on the pianoforte. The old man wanted to hear it twice but then freely responded on his harp, and was rewarded richly by the composer. That is where the complications of the story really begin; later reports do not agree on the person of the harpist (there may have been two), but one of them was often invited by the dean of the Academy of Music to play Mozart’s “theme” for the students, and the virtuoso F. W. Pixis claimed in the later nineteenth century that he was in possession of a legitimate transcription—thirteen bars, andante and melancholy, in D minor. By 1890, street and pub harp players in Prague were all gone, or so the Czech writer Jakub Arbes writes in a moving story, but it is sweet to believe that street musicians long played a piece not recorded in Köchel’s repertoire.

  During his earliest years in Vienna, Mozart had lived in the house of the financier Adam Amsteiner, alone among Vienna Jews to live at the fashionable Graben; it is possible that he met his librettist da Ponte at the residence of the banker Raimund Wetzlar von Plankenstern, of Jewish origin but ennobled after he was baptized. When Mozart returned to Prague from Vienna in February 1787, da Ponte was much in demand (due to the Italian repertoire of Vienna’s Burgtheater) and had told the emperor, who always meddled in theatrical affairs, that he intended to write three libretti at the same time; when the emperor suggested that it was impossible, he answered that he wanted to satisfy all his customers, writing for Mozart at night, for the Spanish composer Vicente Martin y Soler in the morning, and for Antonio Salieri in the evening.

  Writing his memoirs in New York many years later, da Ponte saw himself as a character in a comic opera: he holed up in his apartment, working “at his desk twelve hours without a break” every day, a bottle of Tokay on his right, inkwell in the middle, and a reserve of Seville snuff on his left. To complete the opera buffa, there was a sixteen-year-old girl in the house who would bring him coffee and sweet biscuits when he rang a little bell (dreams of an old man in Manhattan). Da Ponte went on saying that she would sit close to him, “absolutely still, without opening her mouth or blinking an eyelid … smiling cajolingly, sighing, and now and then seemingly on the verge of tears.” As usual, his memoirs are somewhat contradictory; to the emperor he had said that he would read Dante’s Inferno while working on Mozart’s libretto, but he seems to have been more pleased with his young Calliope (later he did not ring the bell so often because her presence would have disturbed him, he said), or studying the new Don Giovanni opera by Giovanni Bertati, written for a performance in Venice just a year earlier. He may have also been thinking of his friend Casanova and his servant Costa. Miraculously, he wrote an astonishing text, which was still studied decades later by the German romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann and by Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish father of existentialism.

  When Mozart came to Prague for the second time, to put Don Giovanni on the stage of the Nostitz theater, the Dušeks had their chance to live up to their promise to h
is father that Wolfgang would always be welcome in their house, and they must have been particularly pleased that they were able to invite him to their new Villa Bertramka, with its pleasant garden. František Dušek, a poor boy from the Czech countryside who with the support of the noble Sporck family had become a master of the pianoforte and a successful music teacher with a wide following, and his wife, Josefa Dušek (her Czech friends called her, of course, Dušková as grammar required), had enjoyed their new property only since 1784, when she had inherited some money; at their villa gathered, at regular soirées and teas, a loyal group of music lovers, noble, bourgeois, and professional, and all were happy to welcome the star composer, to play games, to sing, to flirt, and as far as the members of the cast were concerned, to intrigue against each other.

  La Dušek, seventeen years younger than her husband and a former pupil of his, traveled a good deal to give concerts at the courts of Dresden, Weimar, Berlin, Vienna, and Warsaw where she was feted by the aristocrats but not always by the intellectuals; her husband, hobbled by an unfortunate fall in his youth, liked to accompany her on her trips. She was praised for her portamento (read: her statuesque figure), and a contemporary etching suggests that she had an elegant thin nose in a rather broad face, a receding chin, and strong and somewhat protruding dark eyes. Most people agree that her voice was powerful rather than lyrical; a few critics, among them Mozart’s father and the poet Friedrich von Schiller, who heard her at a Weimar concert, were close to saying that she screamed too much. She liked to be coquettish and easily offended people by her impolite remarks (a Weimar duchess called her a maîtresse in retirement); it was whispered in Prague that her favorite lover was Christian Count Gallas, who lavished a good deal of money on her and on the Bertramka. In her role as concert singer and fashionable hostess, she was a lovable or rather dutiful flirt; since Mozart addressed her with the intimate du, gave her a little ring, and composed for her (with the usual delay, or rather under duress) the aria “Bella Mia Fiamma!” (K. 528), rumors were ripe that illicit passions had flared at the Bertramka with poor Constanze, highly pregnant again, in the background. Later, the German and Austrian film industry knew a good story when it saw one, and a popular movie of 1940 shows Mozart, played by the blond Hannes Stelzer, a Hitler Youth matinee idol, deeply attracted in the Bertramka park to a young countess, played by Heli Finkenzeller, who was more Bavarian than delicate. La Dušek, being Czech, was deleted from the story. The New York Times’s film critic innocently declared on March 2, 1940, that the movie was “a joy to the eye and the ear.”

  Mozart probably arrived in Prague on October 1, 1787, and together with Constanze took lodgings at the inn U tí lv (At the Three Lions) in the Old Town near the theater, as guaranteed by his contact; da Ponte, who joined him for eight days to help with the rehearsals, was put up at the Platýz Inn, not far away—indeed the buildings were so close to each other that the composer and his librettist could talk to each other from window to window. Putting the finishing touches on the score, Mozart spent much of his time at the Bertramka, where two rooms on the garden side were reserved for him. He preferred the one with the green wallpaper, a large mirror, and the ornate chimney (the composer Louis Spohr wept in the room when he visited it decades later); we also hear that Mozart liked to walk late at night from the Old Town to the Bertramka via the stone bridge (the ferries did not work in the darkness); he usually had a cup of strong coffee at the Steinitz Café, to the left of the bridge at the Old Saxon house in the Minor Town. The lively parties at the Bertramka were the talk of the town, and many stories were told about Mozart’s cavalier attentions, possibly under the scrutinizing eyes of La Dušek, to the ladies of the cast. When Teresa Saporiti (playing Donna Anna), a fragile and elegant blonde who lived to the age of a hundred and two and died in Milan in 1869, announced that the maestro was too short to be impressive, Mozart (always trying to to appear taller than he was) forthwith concentrated his attentions on Madame Bondini (Zerlina) and Caterina Micelli (Donna Elvira). The male singers had their own problems: the twenty-two-year-old Luigi Bassi (Don Giovanni), extremely handsome but stupid, as a contemporary observer remarked, was dissatisfied with the duet “Là ci darem la mano,” and Antonio Baglioni (Don Ottavio) complained that he did not have enough material to show all his talents. There were, in the group, only a few Czech compatriots of the Dušeks, and they have come down in the history of music with their names spelled in German, which they possibly preferred: Johann Baptist Kucharz (Kucha), a noted organ player and later in charge of the opera orchestra, and Franz Xaver Niemetschek (probably born František X. Nmek, but I accept his spelling of the name because he used it when publishing his biography of Mozart), a music fan and philosophy professor, never wavering in his admiration. A contemporary Prague German novelist, usually unreliable, reported that at these parties da Ponte was seen in animated conversation with his friend Casanova, but there may have been more Dichtung than Wahrheit in the story.

  Rehearsals were not easy, Mozart wrote in a letter, because the Prague singers were not so well trained as those in Vienna, and the overture was not yet written. Madame Bondini was not dramatic enough, and the maestro had to teach her how really to scream on stage; one of the trombone players made mistakes and refused to be instructed, and the opera’s entertainments, including the few quotations from Figaro, were probably added as a last-minute improvisation. The first performance was scheduled for October 14 in celebration of the marriage of the archduchess Maria Theresa and a Saxon prince, but the cast was not yet ready, and Bondini resolutely announced that, instead of the new opera, The Marriage of Figaro would be presented, again conducted by the composer himself; the princely couple had to make an early start for Dresden and left the performance long before the end anyway.

  Experts are still discussing the question how and when Mozart completed the overture, but nowadays most of them accept Constanze’s account that he wrote it while she served strong coffee and, as a latter-day Scheherazade, told him entertaining anecdotes to keep him awake during the night of October 27-28, just in time for the copyists and for distribution to the orchestra. On the evening of Monday, October 29, Mozart, appearing somewhat late at the clavier to conduct the orchestra, was greeted by waves of applause, and the premiere of I/ dissoluto punito ossia Il Don Giovanni (The Libertine Punished, or Don Giovanni) went off without a hitch. Afterward, Mozart was reported to say, “Meine Prager verstehen mich” (My Praguers understand me), and the newspapers reported that, in the opinion of the connoisseurs and the general audience, nothing like it had ever been seen in Prague before. The Viennese were much less enchanted when Don Giovanni was presented there in May 1788; the emperor told da Ponte that while the opera was “divine,” perhaps “better than Figaro,” yet it was “not quite the right kind of food for the teeth” of his Viennese. “Give them time to chew on it” (lasciam loro tempo da masticare), Mozart allegedly told da Ponte when he heard about this conversation with the emperor; the Viennese, slowly chewing, changed their views in time.

  It is another question whether the changes da Ponte and Mozart made to the Prague version in order to have Don Giovanni more attractive to the Viennese audiences served the opera well, and on many occasions and at different times, producers and music lovers have wanted to return to the Prague “source,” the original performance. Da Ponte’s problem was that he had taken a good deal from Giovanni Bertati, his immediate predecessor, above all in the first act, and then needed to expand the plot in the second act. Hence, his uncertainty: he introduced a rather cumbersome burlesque in which Zerlina mistreats Leporello, ties up his hands with her kerchief, and binds him to a bench, forcing him to make an escape, with the help of a peasant, dragging the bench noisily behind him. Mozart, at least, took into account Don Ottavio’s Prague complaints and added (in Act I, Scene 14) two splendid lyrical stanzas to his aria, “Dalla sua pace, / la mia dipende” (On your peace mine depends). Karl Maria von Weber was the first who, in Prague in 1814, wanted to return to the o
riginal production (the management refused to pay for the musicians on stage in Act II, and Weber threatened to pay expenses from his own pocket before the management relented). Ninety years later, Ernst Possart, famous director of the Royal Opera in Munich, also wanted to reconstitute the Prague performance, and experts discussed whether the orchestra, as prescribed by Mozart, would do under modern circumstances. The performance was conducted by Richard Strauss, and it must have been a holiday for opera lovers.

  Mozart briefly visited Prague again on a concert trip to Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin in the spring of 1789, but the days were not particularly productive. On the way to Saxony and Prussia, he spent forty-eight hours at the inn called the Unicorn, in the Old Town, but it was Eastertide and most of his friends, including Count Sporck and Count Canal, were in the countryside; when he went out to the Bertramka as usual, he was told that La Dušek had just gone to sing in Dresden, and he took at least a letter from her husband and duly delivered it to her a few days later when he met her at a Dresden party of “ugly” but polite ladies, as he noted in his correspondence. He did not have a chance to meet his friend Guardasoni, who had taken on sole responsibility for managing the opera (Bondini had retired and died unexpectedly in a small South Tyrolean town on his way home to Italy). Guardasoni discussed a promising contract for a new opera, as yet unspecified, but the agreement was not signed. On his return trip from Berlin, Mozart was again in Prague for a day on June 1, Guardasoni was away, possibly in Warsaw, and the new opera contract was never finalized. If Mozart was disappointed, he did not show his feelings, and the letters he wrote to ailing Constanze from Germany and Prague were among his most loving and sprightly.