Mozart: The Man Revealed Read online

  This book is dedicated to the memory of James Black.

  Lover of Mozart’s music and chronicler of his life.

  Preface

  Prologue

  1

  The Handsomest Couple in Salzburg

  2

  The Little Wizard

  3

  The Grand Tour

  4

  Prodigies of Nature

  5

  He Is Skin and Bone

  6

  Wolfgangganggangerl

  7

  Chevalier de Mozart

  8

  Ass-Bumping in Venice

  9

  Bravissimo Maestro!

  10

  Gnagflow Trazom

  11

  There Is No Vacancy

  12

  Wolfgang Amadé Rosenkranz

  13

  Off with You to Paris!

  14

  My Dear Departed Mother

  15

  Unlucky in Love

  16

  A Kick in the Backside

  17

  An Honest and Virtuous Wife

  18

  Return to Salzburg

  19

  Paternal Pride

  20

  Womaniser, Criminal and Genius with Words

  21

  The Final, and Greatest, Symphonies

  22

  A Stranger Knocks

  23

  The Taste of Death on My Tongue

  Afterword

  Postscript

  Notes

  Index

  Mozart the man is easy to understand. Mozart the genius is impossible to comprehend.

  The story of his life is well known. Austrian-born, with a tyrant of a father who drove him relentlessly, an unhappy marriage to a spendthrift woman, a childlike character ill at ease amid the pomp and aristocratic splendour of the Viennese court, poisoned by his great rival Salieri, which led to an early death that robbed the world of its most instinctive musical genius.

  Only the last is true. In this era of mass entertainment, it is possible the most prevalent image we have of Mozart is that portrayed in the hugely successful film Amadeus. Like the plot of the film, and the play from which it was adapted, the character is largely fictitious, or at least grossly exaggerated.

  One element, though, rings totally true. That smile stretching from ear to ear, that uncontrollable laugh, that permanent sense of happiness, of being comfortable with himself and at ease with his genius – all that permeated his being.

  Musical history is replete with tortured souls, tormented geniuses. Among them is one who can lay claim to be the greatest of them all, given how much he achieved in such a short life. And even if that is disputed, one fact cannot be: despite repeated disappointment at his failure to gain regular paid employment, despite money problems in the final three years of his life, Mozart is surely the happiest composer who ever lived.

  Listening to Mozart’s music induces a sense of well-being, a feeling that all is well with the world. Whatever is happening outside the concert hall or opera house, if a human being can create such beauty, then there will always be hope for humanity.

  Mozart was giving us the benefits of a gift with which he was imbued. He knew it. He did not know where it came from, or why he alone possessed it, but he knew it and he continued to use it. We owe him a limitless debt of gratitude, as will our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and every generation that follows them.

  Everything Mozart created exists for us to enjoy. It was a brief life, but we should be eternally grateful that he lived at all.

  On 5 September 1842, a year behind schedule – something of an embarrassment – a monument to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was unveiled in the centre of the city of his birth, Salzburg. It had been planned for the year before, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, but had been postponed when a Roman mosaic floor was uncovered during excavation work.

  As well as a lasting memorial to Salzburg’s most famous son, the monument was also intended as an act of reconciliation. Mozart, like his father Leopold, had come to loathe Salzburg, the archbishop-prince who ruled over it, and indeed its people.

  The feeling was entirely mutual, and when Wolfgang left Salzburg for Vienna, never to return, there was something of a collective sigh of relief that this difficult, disobedient – although admittedly highly talented – musician had finally left.

  The monument was a form of belated apology. Mozart should have been better treated by his home town, as people from far and wide had been saying ever since his death. Now Salzburg would be able to point to the huge, imposing monument by a celebrated German sculptor.

  The site had been carefully chosen. Mozart’s wife Constanze had recently moved to a new apartment in the Michaelsplatz. It was decided the statue would be erected there, and the square renamed Mozartplatz. Constanze would be able to gaze out of her apartment window onto the statue of her husband.

  She would not have recognised the larger-than-life-size figure: handsome and serious face, cloak over the shoulder gathered at the waist like a toga, pen in hand. This was not a representation, but a deification.*

  Two thousand people gathered for the unveiling, many coming from distant parts of the world. Mozart’s two sons, Karl and Wolfgang, were there. But their mother was not. During that year’s delay, she had died at 3.45 a.m. on 6 March 1842, at the age of eighty. She had outlived her husband by more than fifty years.

  The other centrally important woman in Mozart’s life was not there either. Like Constanze, she would not have recognised the Mozart she knew, her laughing, mischievous brother, in the dignified and imposing figure staring into the distance.

  But even if she had been there, Nannerl would not have been able to see the statue. In her final years she slowly became blind. The attractive young girl, ‘a regular beauty’1 whose musical abilities – along with those of her younger brother – had stunned Europe and who had been labelled ‘a prodigy of nature’, was described in her final years as ‘a decay of nature’.

  Maria Anna Mozart, known throughout her life as Nannerl, had outlived her famous brother by almost forty years, dying thirteen years before the unveiling of the statue at the age of seventy-eight.

  One woman was at the unveiling, and she was a totally unexpected guest. In the midst of the ceremony, a very tall, thin and eccentric-looking woman interrupted proceedings by declaiming, ‘Ich bin die erste Pamina!’ (‘I am the first Pamina!’)

  The woman was the celebrated Austrian soprano Anna Gottlieb. More than half a century earlier, when she was just twelve years of age, Mozart had cast her in the role of Barbarina, the gardener’s daughter, in The Marriage of Figaro.

  Five years later, when she was still only seventeen, her voice was so beautiful that Mozart gave her the all-important role of the steadfastly loyal Pamina, the embodiment of innocence and beauty, in the great creation of his final year, The Magic Flute.

  At the time of the unveiling of the statue, Anna was the last singer still alive who had known Mozart.

  * There were marked similarities to the statue of Beethoven unveiled in his home city of Bonn three years later. Albeit by a different sculptor, it showed a godlike figure, toga thrown over the shoulder, and a pen in the right hand.

  Mozart was born on 27 January 1756 in the city of Salzburg. At the time of his birth it was a wealthy city state sitting between Bavaria and Austria, and independent of both. It had grown rich and important on the back of its abundant natural product, salt, which gave it its name, Salz-Burg – ‘Salt Castle’.

  Technically it was part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and so loosely speaking was part of Germany.* Mozart himself was in no dou
bt. Throughout his life he referred to himself as German by birth and a German composer.

  From its earliest years Salzburg had an abbey, and by the eighteenth century a cathedral had stood there for a thousand years. The most powerful man in Salzburg was the archbishop, who was not only the most senior religious figure but also a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, answerable only to the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna.

  The prince-archbishop, and the canons under him, ran the city of Salzburg, and they ran it according to strict Roman Catholic principles. A Law on Morals, issued by the archbishop in 1736, a mere twenty years before Mozart was born, decreed:

  Men are not to leave their beds without wearing shirt and trousers, nor women without wearing shirt and petticoat. Trousers must be waist high, fastened in front. Women’s skirts must cover half the calf; shirts and bodices must be made wide enough as to overlap and lace properly. Absolutely forbidden is the irritating, bestial and fiendish habit occurring in the public baths, where men and women bathe together almost naked and then dry each other off.

  The prince-archbishop’s court was by far the biggest employer, controlling the lives of a huge number of people, from lawyers, soldiers and local industrialists, down to secretaries, valets and maidservants.

  And musicians. Salzburg was a cultured city, maintaining a large court orchestra and choir, and giving employment to a number of composers. In all, around a hundred musicians were employed by the court.

  Traditionally the archbishop of Salzburg held himself aloof from the people of the city, allowing his canons to extort money from them. For centuries there had been palpable resentment directed from the city, and from outlying villages in the diocese, towards the wealth that existed within the cathedral.

  There was thus quiet satisfaction when, in 1753, a new archbishop was appointed – a cultured man, with affection towards his people, and a great love of music. Archbishop Siegmund Schrattenbach made it his aim to put Salzburg at the forefront of music within the states of the Holy Roman Empire.

  This was an enormous stroke of good fortune for one man in particular, who some years earlier had left his home in Augsburg in Bavaria to escape a career in the priesthood, and headed for Salzburg to pursue his vocation in music. After attending university in Salzburg he secured a position at court as a violinist and violin teacher.

  With prodigious musical talent, and a regular income, it was not long before he married. Following the appointment of the new archbishop, he became a court composer, and soon after that deputy kapellmeister. He was rising fast in his chosen profession and the future looked rosy. He and his wife were in a position to start a family.

  His name was Johann Georg Leopold Mozart.

  History has not been kind to the father of the boy genius, and it is not hard to see why. Contemporaries described him variously as acerbic and difficult, aloof and domineering. He controlled the lives of those closest to him in every detail. His wife was barely allowed to make a decision for herself, and his children would find that their every move was decided for them well into adulthood.

  It seems that Leopold Mozart’s contrary character was formed early in life. Born in Augsburg, he was the eldest of nine children, and found himself left increasingly to his own devices by a mother who had too many demands on her time to pay him much attention.

  At the age of seventeen, just four months after his father’s sudden death, he took himself out of school. If this upset his mother, he was to make matters much worse by announcing he had no desire to take up the family business of bookbinding, or to follow his mother’s second wish by entering the Jesuit priesthood.

  An estrangement became a rift when Leopold decided to leave Augsburg altogether and head for Salzburg, intending to turn his natural talent for music into a career. He enrolled at Salzburg university, where his headstrong character really showed itself.

  In September 1739, at the age of nineteen, he was expelled for ‘want of application and poor attendance’; in effect, for truancy. But what really shocked the university authorities was his calm acceptance of his fate. The rector reported:

  A few days before the examination he was called before the Dean and informed that henceforth he would no longer be numbered among the students. Having heard this sentence, he offered no appeals, accepted the sentence, and departed as if indifferent: therefore he was not called for further examination.2

  ‘As if indifferent …’ You can just picture the look on his youthful face that caused the rector to write these words. Maybe it was a slight curl of the lip, the beginnings of a sardonic smile. There must have been something in his expression that struck the academic panel, and made it worth noting. If one is tempted to admire Leopold’s independent spirit, such admiration must surely be tempered by his display of youthful arrogance.

  It was a quality that stayed with him in later life. Those academics would not be the last to feel the force of Leopold’s character. But there was method behind Leopold’s seeming indifference to the end of his student career. He immediately obtained employment as a musician, and as early as the following year published his first compositions, a set of six trio sonatas.

  Meanwhile Leopold’s relationship with his mother only got worse. He informed her that he had met a young woman in Salzburg and intended to marry her. This was, as it were, the final straw. If Leopold married a Salzburg girl, it was unlikely he would ever return to live in Augsburg. His mother disapproved so totally that she disinherited him.

  The rift was never healed. As far as we know, Leopold’s mother never met her daughter-in-law. Even more extraordinary, when her two highly talented grandchildren were brought by their parents to Augsburg, where they gave three public concerts, she did not come to see them perform.

  Consider this. Wolfgang Mozart, boy genius, comes to Augsburg at the age of six to demonstrate his extraordinary musical skills – which are already known and marvelled at – and his own grandmother refuses to leave her house to come and see him.

  When a break occurs between mother and child, whatever brave words the son may choose to put on it, however successfully he may suppress it, the guilt can linger and fester. I believe this is what happened with Leopold. He was in any case a difficult character. The fact that the schism was never healed is likely to have made him an even more irascible and unpredictable individual.

  Unlike Leopold, the woman he chose to marry, the woman who would give birth to the greatest of musical geniuses, remains a somewhat shadowy figure. As we shall see, in the many letters that Leopold would write to her during travels with their son, she rarely rates a mention.

  Anna Maria Pertl* was born in the village of St Gilgen, on the banks of the Wolfgangsee in the Salzkammergut mountains, one of the most beautiful regions of Austria.

  What could have been an idyllic childhood was anything but. Anna Maria’s father, who was forty-five when he married, had suffered a near-fatal illness five years before she was born. His health continued to decline and she was only three years old when he died.

  He left the family destitute. As his health worsened he had borrowed more and more money, and at his death his debts totalled more than four times his annual salary as a minor local official. His effects were confiscated and Anna Maria, together with her mother and elder sister, had to move from the calm of a lakeside village to the bustle of Salzburg, where they lived on charity.

  It seems that both his daughters had inherited his ill health. Anna Maria’s elder sister died soon after the move, and Anna Maria herself was described in charity records as ‘constantly ailing’ and ‘the constantly ill bedridden daughter’.

  Her fragile health was clearly not helped by having to look after her widowed mother. What she could not yet know was that her father had possibly passed on one truly great gift. Although he had not pursued music as a profession, he was a highly gifted musician. It might not have manifested itself in his daughter, but it most certainly would in her own children.

  It is not known how Anna
Maria came to meet a young violinist at court by the name of Leopold Mozart, but after what appears to have been a fairly lengthy engagement – ‘All good things take time!’3 Leopold wrote to his wife on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary – they married on 21 November 1747. Leopold had just turned twenty-eight; his wife was thirteen months younger.

  Leopold had, as he wrote later in the same letter, and with a rare touch of humour, ‘joined the Order of Patched Trousers’. He had reason to celebrate his marriage. His wife was, by all accounts, docile and obedient which, given Leopold’s natural proclivity for decision-making and brooking no disagreement, made for a contented union.

  Leopold and his wife Anna Maria were soon considered the handsomest couple in Salzburg. Their portraits, painted when they were in middle age, show fine sensitive faces. There appears to be a touch of self-assurance, arrogance even, in the portrait of Leopold, with his half-lidded eyes and slightly curled lip, and Anna Maria’s pose perhaps presents a stronger character than we suspect to be the case.

  Yet if those faces had been shown etched in some pain, it would have been understandable. Exactly nine months after their marriage a son was born, named Leopold after his father. The infant lived for less than six months.

  Anna Maria was already pregnant again when he died, and gave birth to a daughter, Maria Anna, four months later. The child lived for just six days. Anna Maria was soon pregnant once more, and less than a year later gave birth to another daughter, again named Maria Anna. This infant lived for a little over two months.

  Three children lost in the space of seventeen months, and the couple had not yet been married three years.

  It is hardly surprising that when another daughter was born exactly a year after they had lost their third child, Leopold and Anna Maria lived in a state of high anxiety, celebrating each day that the child survived as a miracle.

  Once again – and one can imagine this decision being made only after much soul-searching – they named their daughter Maria Anna, like her two deceased sisters. The third Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, was to live for seventy-eight years and three months.