Mozart

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781848317987
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.In this ebook Steen describes the packed life of one of the greatest composers who ever lived, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his short life of almost 36 years, music poured from his pen. Symphonies, concertos, masses, chamber music tumbled out of him. By the age of fourteen he had already completed a staggering four operas, although it is for the later ones that he is revered as one of the greatest operatic composers ever. Yet the beauty of his instrumental music alone would have guaranteed his place in the pantheon of great composers.Born in 1756, in Salzburg, Austria, he was, famously, the infant prodigy whose cash flow potential had to be maximised before he grew up and ceased to be a novelty. The relentless touring he undertook as a small child – Munich and Vienna, a three-and-a-half-year trip to Paris and London, and trips to Italy – gave way to an adulthood where he was endlessly seeking a job and patronage in a perpetual struggle to make ends meet. Steen traces Mozart's poignant progression through an age of back-biting courtiers when a composer could not hope to make his own way without bowing and scraping to the political elite, and his genius, incomprehensible as it may seem to us now, too often went unremarked.

THE PICTURE HAS BEEN CALLED THE MOST LIFELIKE OF ALL THE MOZART PORTRAITS

MOZART

IN 1899, ALMA MAHLER, shortly before she married Gustav, went to a concert at which Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony was performed and ‘got frightfully bored’. She added: ‘I felt it wasn’t exciting but merely long-drawn-out. Times have changed. Nowadays nobody wants such hyper-naïve themes.’¹ The young lady, a very talented musician, had fallen into a familiar trap. Because Mozart’s music is so easy to listen to, and often so light, we can easily think of him largely as a composer of background music fitted to complement champagne and strawberries at a fête cham-pêtre, or to relax one when waiting for an aeroplane to take off.

Mozart’s lightheartedness and his ‘inexhaustible capacity for love’² enabled his music to transcend the seriousness of his personal struggle. Yet, we should not think of him as a mere adjunct to powdered wigs, silk stockings, flunkeys and marzipan. Mozart could ‘look straight into the human heart’.³ In that sense, he was like Rembrandt, although the painter preceded the composer by more than a century.

It can be instructive to join Mozart and Rembrandt in the same sentence, however much it may seem odd to do so: for it can remind us that, until Mozart, probably no composer conveyed such deep perception. In his operas, for the first time we meet and hear people as they are, not as they ought to be. They express themselves from the bottom of their hearts. The conductor Bruno Walter, who recognised ‘behind a seemingly graceful playfulness, the dramatist’s inexorable seriousness and wealth of characterization’, called Mozart ‘the Shakespeare of the opera’.⁴ It was through his music that Mozart achieved this: ‘the drama is there only to give music opportunities; it is absorbed and completely recast in the music which remains supreme’.⁵

Mozart’s achievement was astonishing; we have entered a new world. If one compares his operas with Gluck’s Orfeo, performed only 24 years before, much of it suited to the plangent tones of the castrato, the contrast is almost incredible.* Possibly Mozart’s struggle to be the first freelance musician gave him a deeper insight into human behaviour than others possessed. Others too have had ‘a hard time’, but who has produced compositions of the same quality or which give such pleasure? Try to compile a list of ‘highlights’ from Figaro or Don Giovanni. What will you leave out?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s short life of almost 36 years began in Salzburg, on 27 January 1756. He was, famously, the infant prodigy whose cash flow potential had to be maximised before he grew up and ceased to be a novelty. This meant relentless touring as a small child, first to Munich and Vienna, and then away on a three-and-a-half-year trip to Paris and London. After this, he went three times to Italy. The circus act was soon played out; he was soon regarded as just another professional in the market for a job.

He was desperate to break away from the confines of the typical ‘musician in service’, but his timing was wrong, and the circumstances were particularly inhospitable. He had a disastrous attempt at finding a job in southern Germany, and also in Paris, which was more interested in arguments about different types of opera than in him. After kicking his heels for a couple of years, he went to Vienna. Although supported by Emperor Joseph, the Viennese aristocracy found his music puzzling and disliked, one guesses, his character, his bumptious, boasting manner. His position cannot have been helped by a ‘bad’ marriage. For some reason, he seems always to have been broke, despite working himself to exhaustion. There have been many rumours as to why he died so young, one of which is portrayed in the drama by Peter Shaffer, Amadeus. Here, we can only touch on this conundrum.

EARLY DAYS IN SALZBURG

Salzburg, one of the most beautiful cities of Europe, mixes German earnestness and Italian brilliance. Until Napoleonic times, its population of 16,000 was ruled by the Roman Catholic prince-archbishop. He was a prelate of considerable importance because his principality and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor were mutually dependent on each other for support. The Archbishop’s revenues, principally from the salt industry, enabled him to sustain a court with a chief minister, master of the horse, lord steward, lord chamberlain, lord marshal, cupbearer, lords of the bedchamber plus 22 canons, all counts or lords.⁶

Salzburg was then a city of contrasts. The archbishop’s palace was ‘magnificent, abounding with fine pictures, tables of inlaid marble, and superb stoves of all colours and ornamented with statues … In the menagery are to be seen some cranes, a pelican, which is in effect nothing but a kind of bittern, with a large bag at his throat, in which he can lay up a store of provision. There are also rock eagles, lynxes and two bevers.’⁷ The Getreidegasse, where Wolfgang was born, was in the narrow streets. Here a nightwatchman kept law and order and called out the hours. The house would have been pervaded with smells from the earth closet, which led into a cesspit in the courtyard; the street reeked from the sewer running down the middle, the Salzach River stank from the filth thrown in. These smells had the merit of concealing the odour of the people who never washed, but rubbed themselves clean and occasionally doused themselves with perfume. On Saturdays, garbage was removed: the canal sluices were opened and the Getreidegasse was flooded.⁸

The people of Salzburg were notable beer-drinkers, but were not particularly prosperous. The city’s resources had been depleted by the expulsion of its Protestant population in the 1730s.⁹ Crop failures and the Seven Years War had also led to inflation, which had weakened the economy.

Leopold Mozart, the son of a bookbinder, had moved to Salzburg from Augsburg, some twenty years before his son was born. He was employed first as a valet and musician to one of the canons and then in the Archbishop’s court, where he progressed to become deputy Kapellmeister. Unlike his son, he was a thrifty administrator; he might even have made a good accountant. But he was also a skilled musician.¹⁰ His most famous piece, the Toy Symphony, was long attributed to Haydn.¹¹ He was also the author of a textbook on violin playing, which remained a respected primer for almost a century.¹² He handled all the marketing of this himself: he kept a stock at home; periodically he sent copies to German booksellers.

The court music department naturally swarmed with intrigue and gossip.¹³ It was dominated by Italians, who came and went. Sometimes they left the local girls pregnant – surprisingly perhaps, since the Salzburg government determined the clothing one had to wear in bed, the bedclothes one could have, the times of getting up, and at what age one might share a bedroom with one’s children. The day-to-day work in the music department was done by Germans such as Leopold and Haydn’s brother Michael, who was despised as a tippler. Leopold wanted the top job, but there was as much chance of that as of a German being appointed head chef.

Leopold’s wife Maria Anna was a local girl, the daughter of an impecunious widow who supplemented her income by lace making, the traditional means whereby impoverished, but respectable, widows eked out an existence.¹⁴ The Mozarts had seven children. Only Maria Anna ‘junior’, known as Nannerl, and Wolfgang, who was four and a half years younger, survived.

From the age of three, Wolfgang (Wolferl, as his family called him) dabbled on the clavier. He progressed fast: when he was five, he composed a minuet and trio; by the time he was seven, he also played the violin.¹⁵ Musical prodigies were not wholly unusual. To the considerable benefit of her father’s teaching practice, Hetty Burney, the doctor’s eleven-year-old daughter, had played complex Scarlatti harpsichord pieces on the London stage only three years before the Mozarts appeared in London.¹⁶ Twenty years after Mozart, J.N. Hummel read music at four, played the violin at five, and the piano at six. There were others, now forgotten, including Nannerl herself. The poet and playwright Goethe suggested that instrumental skills could develop much earlier than literary or other artistic ability, because ‘music is something innate and internal, which needs little nourishment from without, and no experience from life’.¹⁷ The ultimate test is whether the child possessing those early mechanical and aural skills actually matures into an artist. Most do not.

ON THE ROAD

Prodigies open up all sorts of commercial possibilities for promoters. Wolfgang made his first appearance in September 1761 at Salzburg University, before he was six. In January, he was whisked off to Munich, 90 miles away, where he played before Elector Maximilian Joseph. One can imagine the family discussions during the subsequent months, as they planned an autumn visit to Vienna. On 18 September 1762, they set out, probably down river, to join the Danube at Passau.¹⁸ Wolfgang played before the prince bishop, but was only given a few florins. This stinginess disappointed Leopold. How he coped with the continual stress of waiting for flunkeys to arrive with a bag of gold, we do not know. But he was a good man genuinely devoted to his children’s best interests. Success for Wolfgang could eventually provide a good marriage for Nannerl, without which she would be doomed to an impoverished future.

Leopold wrote regularly to his landlord, Lorenz Hagenauer. Not only did he want to get news of his children back to Salzburg: Hagenauer, a successful grocer, was his banker, and ‘had connections as far as Hamburg, Rotterdam, Marseilles and Venice’.¹⁹ He provided the Mozarts with letters of credit which enabled them to draw cash in distant places. If Hagenauer had no direct trading contact at their next destination, the initial credit could be extended by a letter from the first contact to a further business acquaintance. The debts then bounced back to Hagenauer along the mercantile credit network.²⁰ It is important to impress one’s banker; and Leopold usually put a good spin on what he said.

The Mozarts travelled on down the Danube, possibly in one of those well-appointed boats, ‘having in them all the conveniences of a palace, stoves in the chambers, kitchens etc.’,²¹ rowed by twelve men, which went down the river at high speed. At Linz, the powerful Count Palffy heard the Mozarts play, and passed on news about them to Archduke Joseph (as Emperor Joseph II was then). The archduke asked his mother to invite the Mozarts to appear at the palace at Schönbrunn.

They arrived in Vienna some two and a half weeks after they had set out. Then they performed before the Imperial Vice-Chancellor: Leopold played the violin, Nannerl played the clavier and sang, while Wolfgang, with fingers spanning only five keys and feet not touching the ground, played the clavier and the violin.* Leopold wrote back, as one might expect, ‘All the ladies are in love with my boy’.²³

A few days later, they appeared at Schönbrunn, the first of two visits there, and they also played at the Hofburg, the imperial palace in Vienna. The empress, who only a week earlier had heard the first performance of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, was musical,** like her ancestors. She played the clavier and had been taught singing by Hasse, the leading opera composer of his day. When she was young, the Italian castrato Senesino was, sensibly no doubt, reduced to tears by her singing.²⁴

But she was tough. Only a couple of years before, the Prussians were winning the wars against her, there was administrative chaos, and her treasury was nearly bankrupt; her son and heir called their position ‘terrifying’. She was practical: her criterion for whether an altarpiece was good was whether it was easy to dust.²⁵ She was also matronly: in the nineteen years before Mozart’s birth she had borne sixteen children, the youngest a future Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, being about Wolfgang’s own age.

She allowed the children to romp together; Wolfgang jumped up on the empress’ lap and kissed her, fell on the floor and was picked up by Archduchess Marie Antoinette, who was about a year older than him. Wolfgang commanded the distinguished composer Wagenseil, who was in attendance on the empress, to turn the pages for him.²⁶ Poisonous child.

We may surmise that the empress felt that Wolfgang would help to keep her children entertained for that afternoon. Afterwards, she sent him one of their cast-off coats, lilac and gold, which would have been very expensive to acquire; the emperor sent Leopold 100 ducats, the equivalent of about fourteen and a half months’ salary. The coat was worn by Wolfgang when he performed; the money was deposited in Hagenauer’s bank account in Vienna.

Presumably, it was later that the empress formed her devastating dislike of the Mozarts. Eight years later, she would discourage one of her sons from taking Wolfgang into his service, saying: ‘If however it would give you pleasure, I have no wish to stop you. I just want to prevent you burden ing yourself with useless people and giving titles to people of that sort. If they are in your service, it degrades that service when these people go about the world like beggars.’ She added a telling comment in times when courts found that they could be burdened with dependants: ‘Besides he has a large family.’²⁷ ‘Thumbs down’ from Empress Maria Theresa was likely to be disastrous.

After the royal performances, Leopold experienced a serious hitch: Wolfgang was covered in spots. The cash flow stopped; but thankfully he recovered. They travelled on to Pressburg (now Bratislava) where Leopold could buy himself a four-seater coach, a sign of considerable upward momentum, even if horizontally, as we shall see, it was to be rather less effective. They left for Salzburg on New Year’s Eve, having done some more performances in Vienna. We can picture the proud Leopold, as he drew up in the tiny square in the Getreidegasse in his new coach.²⁸

MORETH...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• EARLY DAYS IN SALZBURG
• NOTES
• Other Books in the Series