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Mozart: The Man Revealed Page 12


  This motet was given its first performance by Rauzzini in Milan’s church of the Theatines. We can be sure Wolfgang knew he had written something very special, though it is not obvious from the deliberately jumbled way he wrote to Nannerl about it: ‘I for the primo a homo motet to make had tomorrow that at the Theatines performed will be. Well be to you I ask. Farewell. addio.’ It makes sense if you put the words in the right order. But that’s Wolfgang the teenage tease. Why make it straightforward when you can raise a smile?

  The stay in Milan lasted for a little under five months, and could actually have been considerably less, but Leopold was determined to get his son paid employment at Archduke Ferdinand’s court. He kept delaying departure in the expectation of a job offer.

  The excuses he offered to the court back home in Salzburg border on the farcical. He wrote to his wife that he was suffering from searing attacks of rheumatism, so severe that he could not leave his room. The thought of crossing the Alps in bitter temperatures and thick snow before he had fully recovered made the condition even worse.

  It was all lies. He began to write in secret code, interchanging consonants with vowels – not difficult to decipher. On 30 January 1773 he wrote to his wife: ‘What I have written about my illness is all untrue. I was in bed for a few days, but I am now back in good health and am going to the opera today.’

  To compound the absurdity of it, he advised Anna Maria to cut this portion of the letter off so no one else would see it. She clearly did not, and so Leopold’s folly is fully exposed. Maybe she showed it to close friends, no doubt with a disbelieving shake of the head. Leopold must have known the censors would have seen the letter in any case, and would have had no trouble decoding it.

  When it was reported to Colloredo, the new broom, he might at first have been amused at Leopold’s deception, but then surely his attitude will have hardened and he would certainly have resolved not to make the same mistake as his late predecessor, who had been so lenient with the Mozarts. The future history of mutual antagonism between the court and the Mozarts had its beginnings here.

  Leopold finally gave up hope of any offer of employment for Wolfgang, and they left Milan on 4 March, arriving in Salzburg nine days later.

  It brought to a close their third – and final – visit to Italy. They crossed the Brenner Pass for the last time. Neither expected this to be their last visit to the land of music, but Milan never asked Wolfgang for another opera, nor did a commission come from any other Italian centre. Neither father nor son was ever to cross into Italy again.

  For Leopold, although he wrote, ‘I find it difficult to leave Italy’, it was in effect mission accomplished. He had established his son’s reputation as a serious composer who could be relied on to fulfil operatic commissions for the most prestigious opera houses, and who had beyond doubt shown himself – even at such a young age – capable of carrying out the duties of kapellmeister at a major European court.

  That remained Leopold’s principal aim. If full-time employment could be secured for his son at a royal court, the family’s income would be guaranteed for the future. He was also a good enough musician to know his son’s name would be known and extolled across Europe, and who can blame him if the thought of basking in reflected glory appealed to him?

  Wolfgang, too, was sorry to leave Italy. He had enjoyed its warmth, colour and the cacophony of different sounds he had heard and absorbed. He would remain nostalgic for Italy for the rest of his life.

  Fresh from the successes of Italy, Leopold might well have been expecting something of a hero’s return. Indeed, the thought of trying his luck once more in the imperial capital of Vienna must have already been crossing his mind. Given the rapturous reception in Milan from the archduke, surely his mother the empress herself might now be persuaded to offer Wolfgang employment.

  In fact, in both Salzburg and Vienna, the Mozarts were in for a rude shock.

  * The Italian name comes from the site of the family castle in the Friuli area of north-east Italy.

  * Now Bolzano.

  The city of Salzburg might always have been smaller, less grand, less important, more provincial than Vienna, but from before Mozart’s time to the present day, it has never been burdened with a sense of inferiority.

  There was, and is, an insularity about Salzburgers, born of pride in belonging to a beautiful city with a rich cultural heritage. A traveller, writing just a few years after Leopold and Wolfgang arrived home from Italy, describes a city sitting in the midst of ‘a vast amphitheatre, the background occupied by high rocks lifting up their heads to heaven … wooded mountains to the back and beautiful and cultivated hills to the side … the town commanded by the castle standing on a high rock’.

  He continues:

  [Salzburg] itself is very handsome – the houses are high, and built all of stone. The roofs of the houses are in the Italian style, and you may walk out upon them. The cathedral is the handsomest building I have seen since I left Paris … and is an imitation of St Peter’s at Rome … This town contains many more excellent buildings and statues, which remind you that the borders of Italy are not far distant.22

  In other words, Salzburg is closer in style and sophistication to Rome than it is to Vienna. Salzburgers much preferred to look south than east, but best of all they liked to look no further than their own city walls. Outsiders could live in Salzburg for as long as they wished, identify themselves with the city as closely as they liked, but they would forever remain outsiders.

  Leopold Mozart was an outsider. Augsburg, the city of his birth, was a hundred and fifty miles from Salzburg – beyond Munich. It might as well have been a thousand miles. Leopold would never fit in, however hard he tried.

  The truth was he had never tried particularly hard. He might not have been overly fond of his home city, but it was a Free Imperial City, responsible for its own governance. It had a wealthy aristocracy, and this attracted artists seeking patrons.

  In these respects Augsburg was the equal of Salzburg, and it is easy to imagine Leopold reminding Salzburgers of this, making no attempt to disguise his markedly different accent.

  Then along came his prodigiously talented children, and the beginning of the touring life that took him to Europe’s great capitals and into the palaces of monarchs.

  Still Leopold could have striven to make himself just a touch more popular in the city he had chosen to make home, but that was not his style. He was openly contemptuous of Salzburg, and notoriously short tempered and patronising towards its inhabitants.

  Fellow musicians employed at court were well aware of his antics – that he had been given leave of absence time after time to travel with his son; that he had extended trips sometimes with permission, sometimes without; and it is more than probable word had got around about his absurd attempt to feign illness to excuse prolonging the most recent trip.

  There was a mutual animosity, and it went to the very top. Leopold had not got off to the best possible start with Archbishop Colloredo. It is not an exaggeration to say Leopold might have found himself generally ostracised had it not been for the extraordinary talent of his son.

  Conversely, of course, had it not been for Wolfgang, Leopold himself might have settled more contentedly into the life of a court musician of above average talent, living relatively comfortably on the salary of a deputy kapellmeister.

  Wolfgang’s genius, though, had changed everything. Leopold could not wait to get out of provincial Salzburg for good. The simple way of achieving this was for his son to secure paid employment at a royal court in one of the great cities of Europe, and the family would take up residence there with him.

  The most likely place for this to happen was the capital of the Habsburg empire, where Wolfgang had first performed as a child, stunning the emperor and empress. It was an easy journey from Salzburg, language would be no problem, and Leopold had a large list of contacts, all the way to the very top.

  There was another factor that made Vienna the city of cho
ice for Leopold’s efforts. The chief kapellmeister, head of all music in the city, was terminally ill and close to death. This, coupled with the fact that Colloredo himself was planning a trip to Vienna anyway, made Leopold’s mind up.

  He petitioned the archbishop for permission to travel to Vienna with his son, to visit friends and musical colleagues, to make further contacts, and generally to disseminate word of Salzburg’s musical prowess. With his grace’s own absence, father and son would surely not be missed.

  “It was as if the spaciousness unlocked doors in Wolfgang’s brain. His creativity had never been low, but here it soared.”

  Somewhat surprisingly, Colloredo granted Leopold’s request. On 14 July 1773 Leopold and Wolfgang left once more for Vienna – to the chagrin of Anna Maria, who saw no reason why she and Nannerl should not accompany them. No, said Leopold, it would cost extra money, and might start unpalatable rumours in Salzburg.

  Those rumours were circulating anyway. It was general gossip in court musical circles that Leopold had his eye on the hofkapellmeister’s job for Wolfgang. What a coincidence that he should apply for leave of absence just at the time the prestigious appointment was about to fall vacant. ‘Fools are fools, wherever they are!’ was Leopold’s response.

  Everything seemed set fair when the Mozarts received a summons to the palace for an audience with the empress, even if it was nearly three weeks after their arrival. Undoubtedly Wolfgang performed for Maria Theresa, but nothing further was forthcoming.

  ‘Her Majesty the Empress was very gracious to us, but that was all,’ Leopold wrote candidly. The truth was probably considerably more prosaic. We can assume that Leopold put in a pitch for his son to get the top job after the sad demise of the current holder, but the empress was giving nothing away. It is probable she told him she would take advice from expert courtiers. We can be sure she offered no encouragement.

  Even more worrying, no invitations came in from the nobility. Leopold took to promenading with his son on the Bastei, the huge wall that encircled the inner city, where it was de rigueur to see and be seen. Still no invitations. It was true that many of the aristocratic families had left the city for the summer, but it was nevertheless a disappointment.

  It seems Wolfgang did not give a single recital in an aristocratic salon. This was a first, and an unwelcome one at that. Leopold was forced to confront the fact that, at the age of seventeen and a half, Wolfgang was simply not the astonishing child virtuoso any more.

  To compound his misery, Leopold noted that the hofkapellmeister had made something of a recovery (he lived on until the new year). If misery summed up Leopold’s mood, the same was most certainly not true of Wolfgang, if the postscripts to his father’s letters are anything to go by.

  He is full of mischief. Word games, languages jumbled, offering (fictional) greetings from the empress, pretending he is his father and using nicknames for himself – Wolfgangerl, Wolferl, Wolfi; and my favourite – he signs one postscript ‘gnagflow Trazom’.*

  Father and son remained in Vienna for a little over two months, returning to Salzburg empty-handed. It must have been galling for Leopold. In court musical circles it will have been no secret that the trip – with dubious motive in the first place – had yielded nothing. And he is sure to have endured harsh words from his wife, who was denied a visit to the imperial capital – some clothing purchases, ‘corselets, caps and so on’, the latest in fashion, might have mollified her somewhat.

  One of the first tasks Leopold undertook on their return was to move the family into a larger apartment. As we have seen, he complained regularly in letters about how small and cramped the apartment in the Getreidegasse was, becoming more and more unsuitable as the children grew older.

  Nannerl was now twenty-two years of age, Wolfgang nearly eighteen. It was time they all stopped sharing beds and ‘sleeping like soldiers’. Leopold had clearly been putting off a move, in the hope that a court appointment would come for Wolfgang and the family would leave Salzburg altogether. The failure to make any headway on the recent visit to Vienna must finally have persuaded him that this was a forlorn hope.

  Late in September 1773 the Mozarts left the apartment in the Getreidegasse, in which Leopold and Anna Maria had lived all their married life, and where all their children had been born, and moved across the river to the Hannibalplatz.

  There they rented a large eight-roomed apartment on the first floor of the house known as the Tanzmeisterhaus (‘Dancing Master’s House’).† It was large enough to accommodate servants, and Leopold was soon running what amounted to a music business from the house.

  Both Leopold and Nannerl took in students, and Leopold bought and sold musical instruments on the premises. Most importantly, it was as if the spaciousness unlocked doors in Wolfgang’s brain. His creativity had never been low, but here it soared.

  By the end of the year he had written seven symphonies, four diver-timentos, six string quartets, a string quintet, a piano concerto, a set of keyboard variations, sixteen minuets for orchestra, a mass and more. In the following year he composed three more symphonies, a piano sonata, two church sonatas, a set of variations, two concertos, two masses and several other sacred works.

  These were not average pieces composed to while away the time. They included the ‘Little’ Symphony in G minor (K. 183), considered a masterpiece, and the six string quartets (K. 168–73), dedicated to Haydn, are among the finest he would ever write.

  To this prodigious output, he was about to add an opera. In the late summer of 1774, a commission arrived from the court of Elector Maximilian III of Bavaria. He wanted a comic opera for the 1775 carnival season in Munich. The libretto had already been written; it was entitled La finta giardiniera (‘The pretend garden-girl’).

  Father and son were delighted – for rather different reasons. Wolfgang relished the opportunity to work on something substantial. He had learned a lot from his earlier comic opera, La finta semplice, and could hardly wait to write for the stage again.

  For Leopold, this was surely the prelude to something much bigger. It was time to resurrect his dream scenario. The opera would be a huge success, naturally, and Wolfgang would subsequently be offered a permanent position at the court in Munich. Milan and Vienna had failed to deliver; the same would most certainly not be true of Munich. Why else would the elector personally authorise the commission?

  On 6 December father and son left Salzburg for the Bavarian capital. We can assume that Colloredo did not take kindly to yet another absence, but he was powerless to argue against a summons from a personage as exalted as the elector.

  It is worth pausing for a moment to look more closely at Leopold’s behaviour at this juncture, because it gives us an insight not just into his character, but also helps us to understand why Wolfgang subsequently behaved towards his father in the way he did.

  A deep resentment was growing inside Wolfgang. Here was a young man, almost nineteen years of age, whose life – every aspect of it – was being controlled by his father. Given his diminutive size, and his predilection for undoubtedly childish behaviour – pranks, practical jokes, smutty humour – it is easy for us today to continue to think of him as an overgrown child.

  His father most certainly did. Not only did he make every arrangement for the trip to Munich, he even packed for his son. It was a bitterly cold winter, and Leopold laid out every piece of clothing and footwear that Wolf-gang should take.

  “Is it unfair to be critical of Leopold? After all, he knew Wolfgang better than anybody.”

  Is it unfair to be critical of Leopold? After all, he knew Wolfgang better than anybody. He had spent more time with him than anyone else, even his mother. Maybe Wolfgang really was incapable of taking care of himself, even to the extent of selecting the appropriate clothing for a harsh winter.

  I doubt it, particularly since Wolfgang was not alone in being treated like this. The same applied to his sister. Munich being an easy day’s journey from Salzburg – less than half the dis
tance to Vienna – Leopold agreed to allow Nannerl to come to Munich a month later for the premiere of her brother’s new opera.

  Once again he took total control. He sent explicit instructions about what clothing she should bring, just as he had done with Wolfgang. More than that, he told her how she should wrap her head and how many layers she should wear on her feet to ward off the cold. He even went so far as to tell her exactly when she should ask for a bundle of hay to be spread on the floor of the coach to help keep her warm.

  Was she also completely helpless, a young woman in her early twenties? It seems unlikely. In today’s parlance, we would have no hesitation in labelling Leopold a control freak.

  Wolfgang got straight down to work in Munich, and had soon produced enough for the singers to start learning their parts. Rehearsals, though, proved difficult and sections of the libretto had to be substantially rewritten.

  There was a lot of tension in the air when La finta giardiniera premiered on 13 January 1775. Perhaps it showed. The critics were not impressed. ‘Flames of genius quiver here and there; but it is not yet that still, calm altar-fire that mounts towards heaven in clouds of incense, a scent beloved of the gods,’ was one particularly florid assessment. ‘A motley business’, ‘nearly always difficult’, ‘in the highest degree tasteless and tedious’ were other descriptions.23

  Wolfgang had a flop on his hands. The opera was performed only twice more and no further commissions were forthcoming. Any offer of a permanent position at court was out of the question.

  Leopold’s dream had evaporated once again. He blamed it on other factors. The Munich season had ‘more entertainments than any other place known to me’. He attempted to put a brave face on it, encouraging his son and daughter to dress up in fancy costumes for the parades and masquerades.