Mozart: The Man Revealed Page 13

  The bitter truth was that the Mozarts had outstayed their welcome in Munich. The opera had failed; no invitations to perform in aristocratic salons came their way; Leopold’s forlorn hope of a commission for the following season did not materialise, let alone a job offer for Wolfgang.

  It was, we can surmise, a dejected father, son and daughter, who left Munich on 1 March to return to the new apartment in the Hannibalplatz in Salzburg. Neither could know it, but Wolfgang had just completed his final tour with his father.

  For the next two and half years Wolfgang remained in Salzburg – the longest unbroken period he had spent in his native city since his infancy. It was a difficult time. Archbishop Colloredo and the court were now openly contemptuous of Leopold Mozart, their deputy kapellmeister, who himself made no secret of his desire to leave the city, or his dislike of Salzburgers.

  Wolfgang was accorded more respect, since his musical talents were so astounding. But it was not all sweetness and light for him. Had he not been turned down for employment time after time in other cities – a fact that was well known in musical circles? And had not his latest commission resulted in a thorough flop? Salzburg really had had enough of the boastful father and his undoubtedly talented – but not altogether reliable – son.

  Wolfgang’s talents, as we have seen, had secured him a position at the court in Salzburg. He retained his position as konzertmeister on a meagre salary of 150 gulden a year.* For the foreseeable future the Mozart family would have to live on that, plus Leopold’s salary as deputy kapellmeister, and whatever he and his son and daughter could bring in from teaching. It had been made clear to father and son that neither could expect any further advancement at court.

  Leopold may have lapsed into a grumpy sullenness, refusing to put himself out for the archbishop, doing only what was formally required of him and no more. The same was most certainly not true of his son.

  If Wolfgang was able to be productive while on the road constantly travelling, how much more productive could he be in his own home and in his home city, with no immediate travel plans in the offing?

  The following months and years saw a wealth of compositions. In the remaining six months of 1775 alone, he composed no fewer than five violin concertos. Each one is utterly perfect in its own way, and all five are among the best-loved concertos for violin ever written. They remain a staple of every violin virtuoso’s repertoire to this day.

  He composed six piano sonatas, as well as the Haffner Serenade (K. 250), an eight-movement piece commissioned by one of the most prominent families in Salzburg.* He also wrote several religious pieces and a divertimento.

  In 1777 he composed his most important piano concerto to date, No. 9 in E flat major (K. 271). The name it has become known by, ‘Jeunehomme’, is actually a misnomer, a corruption of the name ‘Jenamy’, the married name of a French woman for whom he composed it. It was unlike any previous piano concerto, by Wolfgang or anyone else, in both style and scope. I have seen it described as his most important composition to date, in any form.

  We have little concrete information on the activities of the Mozarts during this period, for the simple reason that, since they were living under the same roof, no letters were being written.

  We do know, though, from future correspondence that Leopold’s contempt for Salzburg, the court, as well as the city’s inhabitants, was being subconsciously absorbed by his son. Wolfgang, in clear imitation of his father, began to despise the city that, as a child on his travels, he had written fondly of, frequently expressing a desire to return to its familiar surroundings as soon as possible.

  The atmosphere inside the Tanzmeisterhaus must have been tense. An increasingly discontent and dissatisfied father and husband, a son quite prepared to parrot his father’s misgivings. We can assume the women of the house either went along with their men, or kept their opinions to themselves.

  Things were, inevitably, coming to a head, and come to a head they were soon to do. The Mozart family was about to be split apart for ever.

  * His name backwards.

  † The building stood until the Second World War, when large parts of it were destroyed in bombing raids. After the war it was sold to an insurance company. The International Mozart Foundation acquired it in 1989, rebuilt it to resemble as closely as possible the building the Mozarts knew, and opened it to the public. Today it is an important repository of manuscripts and letters.

  * Less than £4,000 in today’s money.

  * Seven years later the family would commission the symphony known as the Haffner Symphony, No. 35 in D major (K. 385).

  Leopold Mozart was about to make a disastrous miscalculation. It was as if he really could not see how unpopular he had already made himself with the all-important Archbishop Colloredo, how he had used up any reservoir of goodwill a long time ago.

  His self-confidence can have been founded on only two factors: his own status as deputy kapellmeister, and the inordinate ability of his son – these combined of course with a character which can only politely be described as self-assured.

  There can be no excuse for his failure to read the runes. It had already been made clear to him that no further promotion at court would ever be forthcoming, and his son, at the age now of twenty-one, was far from being a child genius. Wolfgang was now just one young professional musician among many, albeit with an ability to compose as well as perform.

  What then possessed Leopold to petition Colloredo for yet another leave of absence for himself and his son, in order to seek employment outside Salzburg, we can only guess. Perhaps it was based on the flimsy logic that, three years earlier, Colloredo had advised that Wolfgang should seek employment elsewhere.

  But times had changed. The court was busy with visits by important personages, including the emperor, and Colloredo needed his full complement of musicians. To make matters worse, the petition Leopold wrote was arrogant, lecturing the archbishop on the teaching of the Gospels, and ironic, stating that the forthcoming winter and the cold temperatures it would bring would be deleterious to his health. Whose health? Wolfgang’s health. Yes, in an extraordinarily ill-judged decision, Leopold decided to write the petition in his son’s name. Every word of it is pure Leopold, lacking any element of Wolfgang’s humour and banter. Colloredo was not fooled for a minute. It is impossible to imagine how Leopold thought he would be.

  “Leopold now understood that he had brought his family to the brink of ruin.”

  Colloredo had the measure of Leopold, and he knew exactly what course of action to take – one that would seem to be positive but that would hit Leopold where it hurt most. Of course father and son should be allowed to travel, he replied on 1 September, to seek their fortune elsewhere, and to that end they were both dismissed from court service.

  Any suspicion we might have that Leopold had calculated in some devious way that this was the outcome he wanted, and that he had been successful in engineering it, can quickly be dispelled. A family friend visiting the Mozarts reported that Leopold was so stunned by the archbishop’s response that he was physically ill with shock.

  It was as if Leopold had finally come to realise the truth: that he, his son and in effect the whole Mozart family were out of favour with the court, and could expect nothing more from it. Literally nothing. No employment, nothing.

  Leopold now understood, from one brutal missive from Archbishop Colloredo, that he had brought his family to the brink of ruin. He was, truly, a humbled man. All was lost, and it was his doing.

  Well, not quite. Colloredo knew the character of the man he was dealing with. He left a small chink of light. Colloredo never actually stopped Leopold’s salary, ordering it should only be stopped ‘in the event of his leaving service’. Could reinstatement be a possibility?

  Leopold petitioned Colloredo, assuring him he would not travel and pleading with him to be reinstated. Colloredo let Leopold twist in the wind for several weeks, suffering anguish and also public disgrace. He then announced, in language calculat
ed to demean him, that Leopold would be reinstated, provided he conduct himself ‘calmly and peacefully’ with other court musicians, and that he ‘take pains to render good service to the Church as well as to His Grace’s Person’. Wolfgang remained dismissed.

  Leopold’s public humiliation was complete. Colloredo had broken him. Leopold was approaching his fifty-ninth birthday. Friends noted that his notorious self-confidence, his audacity and bluster, had gone. In a matter of months he went from middle age to old age.

  Leopold was truly caught on the horns of a dilemma. He knew the only hope for the family’s welfare, and reputation, was for Wolfgang to secure paid employment somewhere outside Salzburg. Given that he had lost his job at court, Wolfgang needed to embark on a lengthy trip as soon as possible.

  At the same time, Leopold knew that he could no longer accompany him. If he did, he would certainly lose his job at court. But Wolfgang had never been on any trip, anywhere, without his father. It was Leopold who had planned every aspect of every trip – plotting the routes, choosing the mode of travel, booking coaches, finding inns or monasteries to stay in, making contact with local musicians, organising the music they would play, establishing contact with members of the local nobility to arrange salon recitals, even contacting royalty.

  It was a measure of just how controlling Leopold had been, that even at twenty-one years of age, a grown man, Wolfgang had no experience whatsoever of the practical side of travelling. His sole task was to perform, to stun with his talent wherever he played. Leopold had protected him from every other annoying little detail.

  And now? If Wolfgang travelled, he would be on his own. How could he possibly handle all these other matters? Leopold knew he was not capable of it. But the only alternative was for Wolfgang not to travel and reapply for his job at the Salzburg court. To give up trying to get a job abroad, give up playing for aristocratic audiences across Europe, earning good fees and furthering his already well-established reputation.

  It was unthinkable. He had to travel. Leopold knew that, and fight it as he might, he also knew there was a very simple solution to the problem, and it was staring him in the face.

  We cannot know how Anna Maria reacted when he told her, since neither of them wrote about it. We can be certain Leopold lectured her, told her exactly what was expected of her. He will, no doubt, have stressed the domestic issues, such as clothes and food. He will also certainly have given her strict instructions regarding expenditure, expecting her to keep a careful eye on costs, to rent only reasonably priced rooms, and so on.

  And from Anna Maria’s point of view? We might imagine her relishing the opportunity to get to know her talented son better. Most of his teenage years had been spent away from her, and a distance would surely have grown up between them.

  As for Nannerl, just when she was beginning to get to know her brother again after so many prolonged absences, he was about to leave once more. Can we assume she was not overjoyed at being in the house alone with a domineering and demanding father, and no one close to her own age to share things? Probably.

  The Mozarts were to split again, though for the first time in this way. New relationships, new dynamics. The family had never been normal; it was about to become even less so.

  Anna Maria and Wolfgang set out from Salzburg at six o’clock on the morning of 23 September 1777. It is easy to imagine Leopold issuing last-minute instructions, possibly even shouting after the coach as it drew away.

  Leopold was still unwell, suffering from catarrh, and had been up until two in the morning giving orders about what clothes to pack. Shouting hurt his chest, and it is likely he stood there uncomfortably in the early-morning air, perhaps pounding his chest with his fist to release the phlegm.

  Suddenly he realised he had forgotten to give his son a fatherly blessing. He ran upstairs, stood at the window, and sent his blessings after both wife and son. But the carriage had already passed out of sight, through the Klausentor gate on the first leg of its journey to Munich. It is a moving image, a sick and elderly man, frantically waving after his wife and son and mumbling blessings.

  His prayers would remain unanswered. The family of four had parted for the last time.

  Leopold and Nannerl were devastated at the separation. They both took to their beds and slept from emotional exhaustion. Nannerl wrote that she was ‘sick to the stomach’.

  That was not the case with the travellers. This might have been the first time Wolfgang had ever been on the road without his father, but at the age of twenty-one he relished the freedom.

  Wolfgang had now truly come of age. He saw it as his filial duty to look after his mother – ‘the secondt Papa’ (‘der anderte Papa’), as he wrote in his first letter to his father. As far as he could, given that Leopold had meticulously planned every detail of the trip, he took control.

  Within just a couple of days of leaving home, letters began to wing their way to and from Salzburg. In the ensuing sixteen months, no fewer than 131 letters would be written, roughly half in each direction.

  For any biographer of Mozart, indeed for anyone interested in his remarkable life, it is ironic that we have more information about his younger years than his later ones, simply because letters were flying to and fro with all sorts of useful information, musical of course, but also about the minutiae of travel and being away from home, which gives a wonderful insight into his character.

  Hardly had Wolfgang departed than his father began lecturing him. On the dangers of too much alcohol: ‘Avoid strong wines, and too much of them,’ he admonishes. On his behaviour to courtiers: ‘Be inordinately polite.’ This, to a twenty-one-year-old!

  And now, for the first time, we can get an idea of the personality of Wolfgang’s mother, Anna Maria. Until now she has been a shadowy figure, by virtue of her virtual exclusion from letters by Leopold on earlier travels.

  Given that her voice is so rarely heard, we have to assume Leopold required her subservience, and she acquiesced. Roles were now reversed. Leopold was relying on her to ensure Wolfgang worked hard and tried with all his might to land permanent employment, and to prevent him from being distracted.

  Leopold was well aware of the greatest temptation facing his son, and that was interest in the opposite sex. We can be in no doubt that Leopold gave his wife a strong talking-to about how she must not allow their son to be distracted in any way. It was up to her to keep him on the straight and narrow, and keep him focused.

  He must have known it was a forlorn hope. Anna Maria was weak willed. Any opinions of her own, if she ever had any, were long since suppressed in the face of a dominant and domineering husband. This was unlikely to change.

  He must have known too that she had a slightly strange sense of humour, and now for the first time we are able to see where Wolfgang might have got his own similarly bizarre flights of fancy. Consider this postscript, written with a little Italian and the rest in Salzburg dialect, that Anna Maria appended to the first letter Wolfgang wrote home, two days after arriving in Munich:

  Farewell, stay well and healthy,

  and try to kiss your own behind,

  I wish you a very good night,

  shit in your bed with all your might.*

  These are the words of a fifty-six year old mother of two, one of whom has clearly inherited her predilection for toilet humour, of which we are very soon to hear much, much more.

  Munich was, to all intents and purposes, a waste of time. Humiliating too. All the more surprising since Leopold had always assumed this was the most likely place for Wolfgang to find permanent employment.

  It was the first place he had taken Wolfgang, as a child of just six (with Nannerl). Twice more Wolfgang had been to Munich and performed for Elector Maximilian III. On the most recent visit, the elector had hummed a tune and Wolfgang had composed a piece based on it.

  It is probably not too far-fetched to suppose that Leopold considered it possible the journey he had sent his wife and son on would begin and end in Munich, and he
and Nannerl would soon be leaving Salzburg to join them.

  Far from it, although it did not at first seem like that. Count Seeau, whom Mozart knew from earlier visits, was optimistic. A good composer was needed at court, he said, and he should seek an immediate audience with the elector.

  Before he could manage this, the elector himself intervened. He sent Wolfgang a message, via Count Zeil, Bishop of Chiemsee, that it was too soon to consider employment. Wolfgang should travel to Italy and make his name there first.

  This was particularly galling. Had he not already toured the entire country, writing three operas in the process? He decided he needed to meet the elector face to face, put his case to him, man to man. He described in detail in a letter to his father how this then happened. It must have made Leop-old’s blood boil.

  At nine o’clock on 30 September Wolfgang went to the court, where he met a contact who had promised to take him to where he would be sure to meet the elector. At just after ten o’clock, Maximilian was due to pass through a ‘narrow little room’ on his way to hear Mass before the hunt.

  At ten o’clock Wolfgang was taken to the small room, where he positioned himself in the elector’s path. Sure enough Maximilian walked into the room on schedule, to be confronted by an eager twenty-one-year-old composer, well known to him, who was looking for full-time employment at court.

  It could hardly have been auspicious. Maximilian was likely to be in a hurry, excited with the prospect of a day’s hunting ahead. Not ideal conditions for what amounted to a job interview. But it was the best chance Wolfgang was likely to have.

  As Wolfgang described it in his letter, the elector walked up to him, and Wolfgang began immediately, ‘With your Highness’s permission, may I humbly lay myself at your feet and offer you my services?’

  Maximilian had obviously been briefed. We can assume he had been warned that he would encounter Wolfgang, and he had either been made aware, or knew anyway, of the troubles the Mozarts had encountered in Salzburg.