Mozart: The Man Revealed Read online

  Three months earlier, in Mannheim, in an attempt to take control of the situation, Wolfgang had proposed that his mother should return to Salzburg, while he went on to Paris alone. He wrote to his father and told him she was in agreement with this plan. ‘It only remains for you to give your consent,’ he added tellingly, showing who was really in control.

  Anna Maria was certainly in favour of the plan. She wrote that she was so cold in Mannheim she could hardly hold the pen to write. ‘I myself do not like to let him go,’ she added in a postscript to his letter, ‘nor do I like to have to travel home alone, it is such an awful distance. I can’t bear to think of it. But what can we do? I am too old to undertake such a long journey to Paris and’ – no doubt hoping this would be the clincher, given how worried Leopold was about finances – ‘besides it would cost too much.’ She even points out pitifully that she cannot go out because she had not spent money on an ‘umbrella to put up when it snows or rains’.

  “Here were Leopold’s wife and son, in the greatest city on the continent of Europe, yet both were unhappy.”

  After several not very helpful suggestions as to how she might keep warm in the cold winter – ‘lie in bed, covered up’ – Leopold appeared to agree to the plan, suggesting possible routes for her return to Salzburg. It was only the realisation by both parents that if they left Wolfgang alone he would surely travel to Italy with the Webers, rather than go on to Paris, that scuppered the plan.

  Wolfgang knew this, and no doubt felt a certain amount of guilt that he had caused his mother to endure an uncomfortable and unwanted journey. That guilt was soon to increase to an almost unbearable level.

  The journey to Paris was long and uncomfortable. It took them more than nine days to cover little over three hundred miles, through the relatively featureless countryside of north-east France. We can imagine them sitting miserably in the carriage, being jostled and bumped, barely talking to each other.

  Two days before reaching Paris, they were hit by an awful storm. ‘The wind and rain almost choked and drowned us,’ Anna Maria wrote. ‘We both got soaking wet in the carriage and could scarcely breathe.’

  It was an inauspicious start, and things did not improve. Leopold, as ever directing matters from Salzburg, had arranged lodgings for them in the house of a secondhand-goods dealer from Augsburg, assuring his wife she would enjoy the German atmosphere and home cooking there.

  He could not have been more wrong. The single room was small, cramped and cold. Anna Maria was soon complaining to Leopold that her life in Paris was ‘not at all a pleasant one. I sit alone in our room the whole day long as if I were in jail, and as the room is very dark and looks out on a little courtyard, I cannot see the sun all day long and I don’t even know what the weather is like.’ It was small consolation that ‘with difficulty I manage to knit a little by the daylight that struggles in’.

  Leopold must have sunk his head in despair when he read that. Here were his wife and son, in the greatest city on the continent of Europe, a leading centre of music, a music-loving public, many music-publishing houses, a busy operatic life and plenty of concerts. Yet both were unhappy.

  Wolfgang, with the arrogance that had come over him in Mannheim still very much in evidence, took an instant dislike to Paris, Parisians and all things French.

  Everything here is too far to walk – or too muddy; for the dirt in Paris is beyond all description. And to go by cab – there you have the honour of spending about 4 to 5 livres a day, and all in vain. They give you many Compliments, but that’s it … If you are not here yourself to experience these things, you cannot possibly imagine how dreadful it is. Paris has changed quite a bit. The French are by far no longer as Polite as they were 15 years ago, their manners now border on rudeness, and they have become terribly conceited.

  There was no stopping the bile that poured from his pen:

  In truth, the devil invented the [French] language. If only damned French were not so contemptible for music. That is the misery of it. By comparison even German is divine … [I am an] honest German struggling among downright cattle and beasts.

  This was not the Wolfgang of previous years, the carefree laughing teenager who loved to joke and tease. He was now a young man of twenty-two, who deeply resented the influence of his father, wished to be free of the burden of looking after his mother, and more than anything wanted to be away from Paris in the company of the woman he loved.

  There were matters outside his control, too, that militated against success in Paris. Musical circles were consumed with a feud between two of its most prominent composers, Niccolò Piccinni and Christoph Willibald Gluck, over the direction opera should take.

  Why should they spend any time with a practically unknown young musician from Salzburg, who would not have any opinion on the matter anyway? The bald truth was that Wolfgang could not have chosen a worse time to come to Paris.

  To give Wolfgang his due, he soon realised he had to make an effort. He quickly made contact with influential names his father had furnished him with. One of these, Baron von Grimm, who had been the Mozarts’ chief patron during their earlier stay in Paris, found more comfortable lodgings for him and his mother.

  He did the rounds of aristocratic salons, but loathed every minute of it. In a long letter to his father dated 1 May 1778 – the first he had written for nearly a month, an unusually long gap for him – he gives an extraordinary and compelling account of just how painful it was performing for the aristocracy.

  Through one of his father’s contacts, he had been invited to the residence of the Duchesse de Chabot. He writes that he had to wait for half an hour in a large, ice-cold room that did not even have a fireplace. At last the Duchesse entered and asked him, ‘with the greatest politeness’, to play.

  He demurred. One can imagine the frosty smile becoming even more frozen on her face at his refusal. He explained that his hands were so cold he could not even feel his fingers. He asked if there was a room with a fire where he could warm his hands.

  “Returning to Salzburg was the last thing Wolfgang wanted. Once back under his father’s influence, there would be no escape.”

  ‘O oui, Monsieur, vous avez raison,’ he quoted her as saying. She then proceeded, without another word, to sit at a table ‘in the company of gentlemen’ and draw for a whole hour, completely ignoring him.

  It got worse:

  Windows and doors were open. Not only my hands but my whole body and my feet were freezing cold, and my head began to ache. In the room was utter silence. I didn’t know what to do for all the cold, headache, and boredom. Several times I thought I should just get up and leave like a shot. At last, to make a long story short, I did play on the miserable, Wretched Pianoforte. And what really galled me was that Mad. and her gentlemen never interrupted their drawing for one moment, they just continued, and I had to play for the chairs, tables, and walls.

  It is possible, of course, that there is an element of exaggeration in Wolfgang’s account, but to me there is truth ringing out of every word. It is an extraordinary image, the greatest natural genius that music has known, whose name will be revered for all time, sitting there shivering, uncomfortable, ignored, playing for the furniture and walls.

  This account summed up Wolfgang’s general reception in Paris – by and large, a lack of interest. Evidence of this is that his creative juices seemed to have dried up. Initially he had thrown himself into all kinds of projects. He began writing new parts for a choral work, he embarked on a sinfonia concertante for wind, and he started to plot out a new opera. None of these was brought to fruition.

  With the arrival of warmer weather, things seemed to improve a little. Wolfgang had taken on three pupils, and their lessons were bringing in a little money. His mother wrote to Leopold that she was considering renting larger rooms, even possibly buying their own furniture, in the autumn.

  She even began to venture out a little. She wrote a long letter to her husband – Wolfgang must by now have become more r
elaxed about this – in which she told him how utterly Paris had changed since they were last there together. ‘It is much bigger and is so spread out that I simply cannot describe it,’ she wrote. She walked along the ‘broad and shiny’ boulevards, and even did some sightseeing.

  A rare insight into her character comes in the same letter, asking Leopold to tell their daughter Nannerl that ‘the mode here is to wear no earrings, nothing round your neck, no jewelled pins in your hair, in fact no sparkling jewels, either real or imitation’. She makes a special mention of how the women of Paris wear their hair: ‘extraordinarily high, not a heart-shaped toupée, but the same height all round, more than a foot … behind is the plait which is worn right down low into the neck with lots of curls on either side’.

  At one time, she said, the women wore their hair so high that the roofs of the carriages had to be raised, otherwise no woman would be able to sit upright in them. But presumably fashions swiftly changed, because ‘they have now lowered them again’.

  With a feminine eye for detail, she informs Nannerl that ‘the corselets worn by spinsters are smooth round the waist in front and have no folds’, concluding that ‘Nannerl will now know enough about fashion here for some time.’

  I have quoted her observations about fashion at some length, since it is a rare insight into the character of a woman who for much of the story so far has remained in shadow. At last, now that she has begun writing to her husband, it is possible to form a slightly clearer picture of her.

  But if mother and son were beginning to contemplate prolonging their stay in Paris, Leopold, unsurprisingly, was thinking along rather different lines. His son’s letters had left him in no doubt about how the stay in Paris was going. Badly, in a word. More expense, for very little return, and an ever receding prospect of paid employment or even lucrative commissions.

  He began to write to his son about returning to Salzburg. This might have been welcome news to Anna Maria, but it was the last thing Wolfgang wanted. A return to Salzburg and his father would put paid for ever to his plan to marry Aloysia. Once back under his father’s domineering influence, there would be no escape.

  So Wolfgang began to stall, began to suggest that things might be beginning to look up a little, began to hint at possible opportunities to work. But then disaster, catastrophe. Something happened that was a mystery then, and remains a mystery to this day.

  Here is what we know. Despite her new-found semi-optimism, things were not going well for Anna Maria. Her health was troubling her again. She wrote to her husband, ‘All this long while, about three weeks, I have been plagued with toothache, sore throat and earache, but now, thank God, I am better. I don’t get out much, it is true, and the rooms are cold, even when a fire is burning. You just have to get used to it.’

  She tells Leopold she has run out of the ‘black powder’ and the ‘digestive one’, and if one of their friends is coming to Paris, she would appreciate a new supply.

  Leopold is unsympathetic. ‘My dear wife, do not forget to be bled. Remember that you are away from home … Perhaps you can get the black powder at some chemist’s shop. It is called Pulvis epilepticus niger.’

  It is as if Anna Maria knew that from now on she was going to receive no useful advice from her husband, nor was there any prospect of him sending money so she could return home to Salzburg. So she makes up her mind not to bother him any more with information.

  The letters she now writes are generally cheerful, with no mention of her declining health. In a letter dated 12 June 1778, she begins by saying in an almost offhand way that she was bled the day before, so won’t be able to write much today.

  There follow descriptions of Paris, the location of their lodgings, a walk she has taken in the Luxembourg Gardens with a visit to the picture gallery there. ‘I was frightfully tired when I got home,’ she writes in the same sentence, giving it no import at all.

  The rest of the letter concerns trivialities, the merits or otherwise of a newfangled device called a lightning conductor, how nature should be allowed to take its course, and houses should not be built next to mountains.

  She is clearly trying to steer Leopold clear of the truth, that she was seriously unwell and did not know what to do about it. Only after she has signed off the letter tenderly, with ‘I kiss you several thousand times and remain your faithful wife’, then rather formally, ‘FRAU MOZART’, does she add below the signature, ‘I must stop, for my arm and eyes are aching.’

  It was the last letter she would write.

  Anna Maria died shortly after ten o’clock on the evening of 3 July 1778. Within an hour of her death, Wolfgang would write a letter, a quite extraordinary letter, to his father. It is extraordinary because he leaves Leopold in no doubt that his mother is still alive. Right at the start, he writes: ‘My dear mother is very ill.’

  He then describes how, after she was bled, she felt quite well, but a few days later complained of shivering and feverishness, accompanied by diarrhoea and headache. She got worse and worse, and was seen by a doctor; ‘But she is still very weak and is feverish and delirious.’*

  He writes a lengthy passage about how our lives rest in God’s hand, and when He decides to take a life to him, there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it. He then writes this: ‘I do not mean to say that my mother will and must die, or that all hope is lost. She may recover health and strength, but only if God wills it.’ These words were written with his mother’s corpse on the bed close by.

  At two o’clock in the morning of 4 July, four hours after his mother’s death, he pens another letter, to a close family friend in Salzburg, telling him that his mother had died, and asking him to go and see Leopold and Nannerl and prepare them for the awful truth that will follow.

  Not until 9 July, nearly a week after his mother died and five days after she was buried in the cemetery of Saint-Eustache, did he write to his father and inform him of his mother’s death.

  He owns up to the fact that he had deceived his father, but for the best motives, and hopes he will be forgiven. He clearly deliberately uses spiritual language calculated to appeal to his devout father:

  My last letter of the 3rd will have told you that no good news could be hoped for. On that very same day, the 3rd, at twenty-one minutes past ten at night my mother fell asleep peacefully in the Lord. Indeed, when I wrote to you, she was already enjoying the blessings of Heaven – for all was then over. I wrote to you during that night and I hope that you and my dear sister will forgive me for this slight but very necessary deception. As I judged from my own grief and sorrow what yours would be, I could not bring myself suddenly to shock you with this dreadful news.

  His language becomes even more pious, before he then describes her death:

  Let us rather pray to Him, and thank Him for His goodness, for she died a very happy death. In those distressing moments, there were three things that consoled me – my entire and steadfast submission to the will of God, and the sight of her very easy and beautiful death which made me feel that in a moment she had become so happy; for how much happier is she now than we are! Indeed I wished at that moment to depart with her.

  This is not, I believe, the authentic voice of Wolfgang. He is writing in a way calculated to please his father, and lessen any wrath his father might have towards him for being deceived.

  Not only does it not sound like Wolfgang, but in the description of Anna Maria’s death it is also clearly untrue. This becomes evident in a letter Wolfgang wrote fully three weeks later, again to his father, this time giving elaborate and intricate detail of the harrowing final days his mother suffered.

  Wolfgang can only have hoped that the passage of time, however brief, would have calmed the initial impact of his father’s, and his sister’s, grief. For in this later letter, he spares them little. It is almost as if he wants them – his father especially – to understand what he has gone through, and to share some of it.

  It is also clear from the opening words that he is attempting t
o leave them in no doubt that there was nothing he could have done to prevent his mother’s death. This, to me, is clear evidence that he felt a sense of guilt. He was, after all, the only family member with her. All responsibility was on his shoulders. And yet she died.

  In one of the longest letters he would ever write to his father, dated 31 July 1778, after generalities about mutual health and pious words about prayer (for his father’s benefit again, no doubt), comes this stark sentence: ‘First of all, I must tell you that my dear departed mother had to die.’

  No doctor could have saved her, he writes. Her time had come. He promises his father he will give only a short account of how his mother died, but then proceeds to go into quite unsparing detail. In what clearly seems to be a stab at his father, he addresses the question of whether she should have been bled earlier, as Leopold had advised:

  You think she put off being bled until it was too late? – Maybe that’s true. She did put it off a little. But I share the opinion of some people here who advised her against being bled.

  This is close to open disagreement with his father, not a course of action he is used to taking. He continues in the same independent vein:

  [They] tried to persuade her to have an enema instead – but she didn’t want it – and I didn’t dare say anything, because I don’t understand these things and consequently would have had to take the blame if the procedure hadn’t been good for her.

  He then goes into the pros and cons of enemas, and the technicalities of being bled. The surgeon decided to take not quite two platefuls of blood, because it was such a dreadfully hot day, but insisted it was very necessary.