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

by Peter Demetz

  Mozart’s fourth and last excursion to Prague, in the summer of 1791, was more rewarding than his third trip, yet he had, increasingly, to share the attention of the audience, gathered for the festive coronation of Joseph’s brother Leopold as king of Bohemia, with local and Viennese competitors of lesser talent. The Bohemian Estates, now proud owners of the National Theater, which they had bought from the heirs of Count Nostitz, had asked Guardasoni to provide a dignified opera in celebration of the grand event, and it may have been Count Thun or Guardasoni himself who suggested that Metastasio’s well-known La clemenza di Tito be set to music once again. The choice fully reflected the new emperor’s conservative tastes, returning to the Neapolitan opera seria. It may have also offered a challenge to Mozart, who certainly knew that Gluck, among others, had used Metastasio for an opera of his own, first performed in Naples in 1752. In Vienna, Mozart had been working on The Magic Flute and the Requiem, but he was willing to suspend work on these compositions and, by mid-August, he traveled to Prague, accompanied by Constanze (barely recuperating from the birth of her sixth child) and his friend Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who was to write the recitativi of the opera. The invitation to Prague had been delayed, and La clemenza di Tito had to be written and rehearsed within three weeks (the usual anecdotes about La Dušek trying to push the maestro to finish the overture once again abounded). On September 2, a special performance of Don Giovanni was presented as part of the ongoing celebrations; the imperial family attended, and a number of exiled French aristocrats, among them dukes and counts sporting the white royal cockade, were seen in the boxes; people believed they also saw the young Swedish Count Fersen, Marie Antoinette’s last lover and organizer of the desperate attempt of the French royal couple to escape the revolutionaries. There was also one Franz Alexander Kleist, an officer and civil servant (and relative of the Prussian poet) who, in a travelogue published later, gave a vivid description of the evening and noted that Mozart was “a little man in a green frock and only his eyes revealed what was hidden in his modest demeanor.” It was rumored that Empress Maria Ludovica, who was offended by da Ponte’s iocoso libretto, was heard to shout, “Una porcherìa tedesca!” (a German Schweinerei!) —others believe that it all happened when she listened to La clemenza di Tito, but Metastasio was virtue itself and there was not the slightest reason to be offended.

  Mozart had to work with a group of singers whom he did not know (only Antonio Baglioni, once Ottavio, was singing the role of Tito Vespasiano), and the opera celebrating the magnanimity of the Roman emperor who forgives his enemy was not received with the acclaim Mozart’s friends had hoped for. Newspaper reviews were sparse, and even Kleist, the faithful admirer, briefly noted that the opera was “worthy of its master, especially in the andante passages.” The official court circular did not mention the coronation performance at all (only saying that the imperial family had taken their seats in the boxes punctually), and the pro-Mozartians ascribed the Prague audience’s cool response to their being almost deafened on that occasion by spectacles, fireworks, balls, concerts, and an industrial exhibition; and in the Jewish Town, a “Turkish” band was entertaining.

  Other Mozart enthusiasts suspected intrigues by the anti-Mozart faction in Vienna, present in Prague upon the invitation of the emperor and in full force, Salieri conducting the music of the coronation mass at Hradany Cathedral, and Mozart’s Czech adversary Leopold Koželuh presenting an official coronation cantata. Koželuh, who came from a Czech village and had studied law at Prague University, had decided, after a success with a ballet composition in 1771, to change his life: in Vienna he was appointed by Joseph II to be music teacher to a princess and joined in the intrigues of the Italian group, although his colleague Salieri, usually cast as the villain of the piece, was mostly trained in Vienna and was closer to Gluck than to the Neapolitan tradition. It was believed in Prague that Koželuh was dead set against Mozart, and it remains to be explained why La Dušek sang the solo part of Koželuh’s coronation cantata. Koželuh’s famous concert at the Palais Czernin, with an orchestra of a hundred and fifty, preceding a glamorous ball, was certainly considered a distinct anti-Mozart demonstration by people in the know.

  Among Mozart’s Czech friends, F. X. Niemetschek was the most loyal and not only as the author of the earliest biography, “describing” Mozart’s life “according to the original sources.” After Mozart’s death, and when Constanze had to travel to earn a living on her own concert tours, Niemetschek was a second father to Mozart’s sons. Karl, the older one, lived in Niemetschek’s house in the Minor Town for several years (until 1797), was educated by the Niemetscheks, and together with them spent many a carefree summer at their summer house at Sadska. Only after his fifteenth birthday was he sent to Livorno in Italy to learn the principles of commerce, and even in his later years, when he was a quiet civil servant in the administration of Milan (he died in 1858), he remembered Niemetschek with feeling and gratitude. Franz Xaver Amadeus, the younger son (only two of the six children survived), was left in Niemetschek’s care when Constanze gave a concert in Prague and he did not return to Vienna for a year and a half, to be trained as a concert pianist (he died in Karlsbad in 1844). Niemetschek did not want to believe that the thirty-five-year-old Mozart died of natural causes and, unwittingly, gave rise to many stories when, in his biography, he quoted melancholy Mozart saying to Constanze in a late Vienna conversation that “he was surely given poison” and “could not let go of that thought.” Niemetschek did not suggest anything about who could have done the deed, but in the minds of many scandalmongering contemporaries it could only have been Antonio Salieri, thought to be the capo of the Vienna Italian opera mafia. Rumors quickly spread among music enthusiasts in the European cities, and denials in newspapers and in other early biographies—for instance, that of Ignaz Ferdinand Arnold of 1803—only enhanced the belief that the stories were true. Unfortunately, Salieri suffered a nervous breakdown, and it is said that in his confusion he accused himself of murdering Mozart—in other, clearer moments, he just joked about the rumor. Yet the melodramatic story was the not easily forgotten; Karl Maria von Weber believed it when he was in Vienna in 1803, Alexander Pushkin in 1830 wrote a short piece about Salieri pouring the poison, and, more than a century later, Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus and the colorful film by Miloš Forman made from it took a different version of the story back to location in Prague, where it all had begun. F. Murray Abraham, in the role of the Italian irrepressibly hating the genius of Mozart, was, of course, more demonic than Salieri had ever been.

  Prague Mozartians may owe a particular debt of gratitude to the maestro’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, one of the most gifted and adventurous characters of the later eighteenth century—Catholic priest, dissoluto, collaborator, friend of Mozart, Salieri, and Casanova, to name only a few, and later grocer, en gros et en détail, in Pennsylvania, and in New York self-appointed ambassador of Italian culture at large. He was born in 1749 Emmanuele Conegliano, son of a Jewish leather merchant in the Veneto, and accepted the name of Lorenzo da Ponte (that of the bishop of Caneda, and his benefactor) when he was baptized at the age of fourteen. As a young man, he was a successful teacher of Latin and the humanities at ecclesiastical seminaries, gambled a good deal, had a passionate affair with a patrician girl, was ordained (1773), wrote an elegant political satire, and was expelled, for adultery, from Venice for fifteen years. Undeterred, he set out on his life’s pilgrimage, which took him to Dresden, Vienna, Trieste, London, and ultimately the United States. He came to Prague for the first time to assist Mozart with rehearsals of Don Giovanni in 1787 and once again in 1792, together with his common-law wife, Nancy Grahl (from a Trieste Jewish family converted to the Anglican Church), and on that occasion he visited his friend Casanova, who lived in northern Bohemia in the castle of Count Waldstein. One of da Ponte’s Vienna enemies, an Irish tenor named Kelly, described him as vain, affected in his gait, and speaking with a heavy Venetian accent and a lisp. He was certainly resilient;
after many bankruptcies on both sides of the Atlantic, he continued to impress his American contemporaries, especially those in Manhattan, with his commitment to poetry, rare books, and opera. He convinced the García troupe to come from Europe to New York to present a full repertoire of Italian opera, including the first American performance of Don Giovanni in 1825 (somewhat of a disaster), and spent a good deal of money to pay for the passage of his grandniece Giulia, a gifted singer, or so he was told, to come to New York too—unfortunately, she was not a great success, but da Ponte may have been attracted by the thought that her music teacher was none other than Antonio Baglioni, Prague’s first Don Ottavio, who had always complained to Mozart (or Mozzart, as da Ponte spelled it). Never tiring, a little garrulous as an old man, da Ponte graciously accepted the honor of being named the first professor of Italian language and literature (unpaid) at Columbia College in 1825.

  Mozart’s visits in Prague have left their traces on many minds but most impressively in the literary imagination of Eduard Mörike, an intriguing German writer of the mid-nineteenth century, and of the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, who, at some distance from the official writing in his homeland, received the Nobel Prize in 1984. Mörike’s novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (Mozart on His Journey to Prague, 1855) exquisitely combines a dark view of the genius with many lively historical details, nearly constituting a playful little biography. The events are relatively simple (Mozart and Constanze as chance visitors at a castle on the Bohemian-Austrian border, where he plays Don Giovanni to the astonished guests) but they are shot through with Mozart’s memories of absolute beauty (a water ballet in the Bay of Naples) and anticipations of death; when the composer comes to the spectral appearance of the stony Commendatore, “the notes came … as falling through the blue night from the orbits of far distant stars … fierce trumpets, ice cold, piercing through heart and marrow.” The young countess, speaking for the narrator, distinctly feels that Mozart “would be swiftly and inevitably consumed by his own inward fires”—rococo images of the provincial nobility’s happy life contrasted, abruptly and painfully, with thoughts on the cruel burdens of being creative.

  Jaroslav Seifert, one of the most important Czech poets of our age, always loved Mozart, as he assures us in his memoirs, and when the conductor Václav Talich asked him in 1946, just after World War II, to write a sequence of poems to be read at a chamber concert, Seifert wrote thirteen rondels for him. (Unfortunately, plans were changed, and the verses were not read publicly.) Reminiscences of long-lost love are closely linked to images of a wintry season, of rare melodies of sweet flutes, of Mozart’s death and shabby funeral, while Vienna furiously dances on; a tender panorama of Prague emerges into the rosy light of an early morning “like a painted vase.” In the final lines, however, Seifert has to concede in bitter melancholy that his poems, read against the master’s music, are leaden (“mé verše však jsou z olova”). Yet there are other moments; in his memoirs, Seifert speaks of a walk through the narrow streets close to the Nostitz theater and senses the fragrant powder of Mozart’s wig still floating over the roofs of Prague. It is, and not only to him, a consolation and a joy.

  7

  1848 AND THE COUNTERREVOLUTION

  The Travelers, and What They Did Not See

  Provincial, quiet, and darkly dominated by its historical monuments, early-nineteenth-century Prague began to attract many travelers, most of them from the north rather than from the east or south. A century before, fashionable aristocrats like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had made brief appearances, but now travelers were of the gentry and the well-to-do middle classes. Writers, musicians, and diplomats began to arrive in Prague and often stayed for weeks. The hot springs in western Bohemia, long considered of restorative beneficence, also increasingly attracted travelers from abroad. Europeans always believed more than Americans in the medical virtues of taking the waters: in the later eighteenth century, the ailing, the bored, and the fashionable, among them many mothers with eligible daughters, gathered at the chic places, including Teplitz (for those afflicted by rheumatism) and Karlsbad and Marienbad (prescribed for digestive problems). Prague profited from the new “tourists” (the term was first used in English around 1800); a sober observer remarked that Prague had approximately 80,000 inhabitants but 100,000 during the spa season, when people traveled to and from western Bohemia.

  Political affairs were also of importance: when Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1809, many patriotic Prussians came to Prague to organize political and intellectual resistance to him. Among them were the diplomat and writer Varnhagen von Ense, with his lively wife, Rahel (busy going to the theater and, together with other Jewish and Czech women, helping wounded soldiers brought to the city from the battlefields); Baron Heinrich von Stein, formerly Prussian minister of finances and later to reform the Prussian state; the poet Heinrich von Kleist, sick, feverish, and hypochondriac; and the linguist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt. Foreign, Catholic, ancient, and strange, Prague was felt to be an eminently romantic place by the romantics Clemens Brentano, Ludwig Tieck, Josef von Eichendorff, and, somewhat later, young Richard Wagner, who was a shrewd observer of his own enchantments and believed that he was so overwhelmed by exotic Prague because everything there seemed to happen on a stage.

  German and Austrian travelers did not have much time to learn what was really going on in Prague’s towns (especially when they did not understand the languages), and yet a few of them found their way to pay respects to renowned Czech scholars, who still published mostly in German: the philologist Abbé Dobrovský, the historian Palacký, and—visited by the historian Leopold Ranke and a few visitors from Poland and Moscow—the librarian Václav Hanka, famous far beyond Bohemia because he had found (or rather forged, as it turned out) ancient Czech epic songs. In the early 1830s, another group of political travelers, French and monarchist, came to Prague to demonstrate their allegiance to their former king Charles X, who had been dethroned in the 1830 revolution and was living on the second floor of Hradany Castle with his family and a few servants. Among the French visitors to Prague were, above all, diplomats, generals, and the romantic poet Chateaubriand, who appropriately thought of the “concatenation of history, human fatality, the fall of empires, the intentions of providence,” when gazing from Hradany Hill down to the roofs and towers of Prague’s towns. Joachim Barrande, loyal to the exiled king (he was tutor to the king’s grandson, the duke of Chambord), stayed on in Prague, worked as engineer and paleontologist, published a monumental work about Bohemia’s Silurian formations, closely collaborated with Czech scientists, and left his manuscripts, his library, a good deal of money, and his collections of trilobites to the Bohemian Museum. (On rainy Sundays, I was among the kids who were supposed to admire his collection at the museum, and I was bored stiff.) To Praguers, the name Barrandov has a more modern ring, for it refers, above all, to Prague’s film studios, which in the 1930s were as innovative and powerful as the ones in Rome’s Cinecittà and Berlin-Neubabelsberg.

  Travelogues and reports about journeys to exotic Bohemia and fascinating Prague were a virtual literary genre of German Biedermeier writing, and most tourists from the north on the Dresden road early established a sightseeing route that is closely followed even two hundred years later. Approaching Prague from the northeast, they admired the historical panorama from the right bank of the river, crossed over the Vltava on Charles’s stone bridge (invariably compared with the bridge over the Elbe at Dresden but found more interesting), went up to see Hradany Castle and its art galleries (Hegel admired the old German paintings), spent some time in one of the many cafés on Celetná Street in the Old Town, imbibed a lot of bad punch, then in vogue, and downed a few refreshing beers; waitresses made a little cross on the wooden top of the mug, the assumption being that nobody would be satisfied with one beer alone and that it would be difficult later to account for the many consumed (the custom has endured: present-day waiters make pencil marks on the round cardboard coasters for the beer glass
es). Travel reports never missed out on the ladies; Prague women were charming and vivacious but used too much makeup, in spite of their impeccably pale skin, and they were obsessed with lottery games and dancing. Few were slim, and all travelers unanimously noticed the full curves of their seductive bodies. In an elaborate comparison with women of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, they came out first because in their eyes a flame burned that was both mystical and sensuous, insisted Heinrich Laube, a young German liberal and later director of the Vienna Burgtheater.

  Of course, romantic Prague had bad plumbing and a few other problems; the narrow streets were muddy, street lighting, if any, was dubious, and bathrooms primitive. Caroline Pichler, a Vienna society lady of note, complained about the absence of hot water for her bath; it had to be brought in from a nearby brewery. The ladies of the world’s oldest profession were usually out in force in the streets, or served beer in the little taverns around the Meat Market (Masný trh) near the Old Town Square—simple pleasant girls who plastered the walls of their little rooms with pictures of Bohemian saints and the Virgin Mary, and covered an occasional crucifix with a veil before joining their customers in bed. What the travelers did not discover easily was the harsh presence of Austria’s well-organized and oppressive police state: spies and paid informers were everywhere—at the hotels, in the cafés and inns, and especially in the university library and the bookshops, where they noted the books that people read and bought. Karl Postl, an ex-monk and later known as the American writer Charles Sealsfield, noted in his clear-eyed analysis, Austria As It Is (1828), that the police were interested not so much in the traveling foreigners as in the local people who dared to talk to them.