Mozart: The Man Revealed Page 18

  to set a good example.

  The only possible reason I can think of for his wanting his Bäsle in Munich with him was for moral support. Did he have a feeling deep down that a marriage proposal to Aloysia might not be totally straightforward? It is highly likely, since she certainly failed to respond to whatever advances he had made when he was with her, and her family, in Mannheim.

  In case it should all go wrong, he would have a female there who would ease his pain, massage his shoulders, breathe reassuring words, offer moral – and, if necessary, immoral – support.

  And come to Munich she did. Sadly, because the two of them are now together, we have no correspondence between them, so we cannot know if they resumed their sexual relationship. In fact, the only evidence we have of what actually happened at this crucial moment in Mozart’s life comes from someone else who was there, recalling events many decades later.

  Mozart duly turned up at the Weber family’s residence in Munich, bearing a gift for Aloysia in the form of a newly composed aria. He was formally dressed ‘in mourning for his mother in the French style, in a red jacket with black buttons’.26

  But, in what must have been an excruciating moment for Mozart, when he entered the room Aloysia appeared not to know who he was. The family was there to witness her rejection.

  “Let the wench who doesn’t want me kiss my ass.”

  How did Mozart react? According to the same witness, by defusing the situation totally. He went to the piano, and sang to his own accompaniment. This is the Mozart we know and have to love. He sang these words:

  Let the wench who doesn’t want me

  kiss my ass.* 27

  We are not told how the assembled company reacted.

  From what we know of Aloysia, her rejection of Mozart is perhaps understandable, even if her method was somewhat cruel. She was now well established as a court singer in Munich, earning as much money as her suitor and his father combined. Why would she want to marry a Salzburg court musician on a low salary and without prospects, particularly when the spark of love was not there?

  In fact Aloysia went on to marry a leading actor by the name of Joseph Lange. He was also an accomplished painter, and we owe to him the portrait of Mozart, sadly unfinished, painted just a year or two before he died, and considered to be the best likeness of any portrait (see page 233).

  The Langes were for many years a power couple in the artistic milieu of Vienna. But the marriage was to end in separation, and after Lange’s death Aloysia fell on hard times, her singing career over. She would then appeal to one of her younger sisters for financial help, and it appears this sister (the witness to Aloysia’s rejection of Mozart) was happy to oblige. Aloysia often said in later life that she regretted rejecting him, and believed he loved her until the day of his death. Her sister appears not to have taken offence at this, which she might have considering she went on to marry Mozart herself. But that is to look ahead. Constanze does not properly enter our story yet.

  Aloysia might have been deluding herself by believing Mozart continued to love her. In fact in a letter he wrote three years later, he vilifies her as ‘lazy, coarse, deceitful, not to be trusted, false, malicious, and a Coquette’.

  But it is certainly true that her rejection left him devastated. Even if he had seen it coming, he was unprepared for the effect it would have on him.

  Within days, on 29 December 1778, he wrote to his father:

  Today I can do nothing but weep – I have too sensitive a heart … in all my life I have never written anything as poorly as today. I simply can’t write – my heart is on the verge of tears all the time!

  At least he had his Bäsle to comfort him. ‘My Bäsle is here – why? – to please me, her cousin.’

  He could put it off no longer. He had to return to Salzburg, and to his father and sister. But he was dreading it, and he could not help but pour his bile into his letters to Leopold. In language reminiscent of his views on all things French, he writes:

  I swear by my honour that I can’t stand Salzburg and its inhabitants. I mean the native Salzburgians. I find their language – their manners – quite insufferable.

  Mozart arrived back in his home city around 15 January 1779, after an absence of sixteen months. They had been the most dramatic months imaginable, and at the same time the most disappointing and frustrating.

  On a musical level he had composed several big pieces, but his output had not been prolific. He had the consolation that some of the pieces – the ‘Paris’ Symphony in particular – had been well received.

  But crucially, in not a single city had he been offered paid employment. This, in his father’s eyes, was a remarkable failure, and Mozart knew he would have to account for himself.

  On a personal level, things could hardly have been worse. His mother had died in Paris, in his care. That was something else he would have to account to his father for. And then, in mourning for his mother, he had been rejected by the woman he wanted to marry.

  And now? He was returning to a city he loathed, to work for a man he loathed, in a lowly position and at a pitifully poor salary. It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that it was a broken young man who returned to Salzburg at the beginning of the year.

  As is always the case when Mozart is with his family, we have scant knowledge of his activities. We know that he stayed in Salzburg for almost two years, and that it was the most mundane existence.

  A rare entry by Mozart in a diary kept by his sister gives us an insight into this period, his use of repetition capturing perfectly the humdrum life he was now leading. The entry is dated 27 May 1780: ‘At half past seven I went to Mass, or something like that. Then I was at the Lodronpalais, or something like that. Played cards at Countess Wicka’s, or something like that.’28

  And all the time he was employed as court organist by the detested Archbishop Colloredo, with a commitment to compose new works, in addition to court and chapel duties, at a salary of 450 gulden – not 500, as his father had promised.

  At least he fulfilled that commitment to compose. He produced symphonies, concertos, and some of his most sublime church music. He wrote the Coronation Mass (K. 317), and the Vesperae solennes de confessore (K. 339), which contains the sublime ‘Laudate Dominum’. He also composed the Sinfonia concertante in E flat (K. 364) for violin, viola and orchestra, the first piece of music written by anyone that put the viola on an equal footing with the violin. In this case the likely inspiration came from the fact that Mozart himself was a highly skilled viola player. He played the violin as well, as we know, but in this piece it is as if he is trying to show that the viola, with its deeper, more sonorous tone, can be just as melodic.

  In the autumn of 1780 his sister Nannerl fell seriously ill with a severe bronchial infection. Leopold rose to the occasion, once again taking total control, supervising every meal and administering every form of medication.

  The atmosphere inside the Tanzmeisterhaus must have been tense, to say the least. It is fair to assume Mozart spent as much time out of the house as he could. But we hear nothing of friends or musical colleagues, with whom he might have spent an evening relaxing, eating and drinking.

  He must have been praying for something to turn up, something to rescue him from the banality of his existence. And it did, out of the blue.

  A commission came from Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, for a new opera to be put on in Munich. It was to be called Idomeneo, rè di Creta. As had happened before, Archbishop Colloredo had had rank pulled on him. He could not refuse the more senior elector.

  Mozart was given six weeks’ leave of absence to work in Munich on the new opera. He could not get out of Salzburg fast enough. He left on 5 November, once again waved off by his father.

  Mozart’s spirits soared the moment the carriage trundled out of Salzburg. We know this from the first letter he wrote home to his father three days later from Munich. He says himself:

  How happy and relieved I felt when I arrived here �
�� Happy because we met with no misfortune on the road, relieved because we could hardly wait to reach our destination.

  In true Mozartian style, he then gives a thoroughly comical description of just how uncomfortable the journey was:

  I can assure you, none of us was able to sleep even one minute throughout the night, – the kind of carriage we had jolts your very soul out of your body! – and the seats! – hard as a rock! – from Wasserburg on I thought that I wouldn’t get my rear end to Munich in one piece! – it was so sore – and I suspect fiery Red – between two stations I sat with my hands pressed against the seat holding my rear suspended in the air.

  This is the Mozart we have come to know and love. I have to say, of all the images we have of the sublime musician, none makes me smile more than the sight of him, being jolted this way and that by a poorly sprung carriage, his hands clasped on the front of the seat, holding his bottom in the air to avoid it being bruised black and blue – or red.

  It seems his father shared the joke. In a rare flash of humour, Leopold responded that, for his part, he would never travel by mail coach if he could avoid it, if only to spare his manhood: ‘I prefer my two plum stones.’

  In Munich the serious work began, and it was not easy. The libretto had already been written, the singers chosen. Mozart had to work with what he was given. But there was an enormous plus. The orchestra was one of the best in Europe, and most of the principal singers were known to Mozart.

  He immediately set about tightening the plot and ordering rewrites of part of the libretto, even down to changing individual words and syllables, to make them more suitable to be set to music. He swiftly turned out passages for rehearsal. He was in his element. He was once more composing an opera, and working with musicians who, for the most part, he knew and respected.

  In December the elector himself attended a rehearsal, afterwards coming out with the priceless comment (which Mozart was obviously happy to pass on to his father): ‘Who would have thought that such great things could come out of such a small head?’

  What is more, Mozart now had the measure of his father. When he complains to Leopold that he has a heavy cold that he cannot shake off, his father at first offers sound advice: keep warm, drink no wine, take a little black powder before going to bed, have some footbaths.

  But then Leopold talks about his own health, and Nannerl’s. He writes about how sad he is on the eve of what would have been his thirty-third wedding anniversary. And, with total lack of sensitivity, ‘If I had been with your Mother, I would like to believe, she would still be alive.’

  This might once have thrown Mozart into a deep depression, the guilt demon weighing heavily on his shoulder. Now, though, he is his own man. He does not need to hear such language from his father:

  I beg you, don’t send me such sad letters anymore – because – right now I need a cheerful spirit, a clear head, and good inspiration for my work, none of which is possible when one is sad.

  He knows now that the only way to deal with his father is to be direct with him.

  Nannerl was recovering from her debilitating illness, and father and daughter planned to come to the premiere of Idomeneo in Munich, along with friends from Salzburg. They arrived on 26 January 1781. The dress rehearsal took place the following day, Mozart’s twenty-fifth birthday, and on the 29th Mozart’s new opera had its premiere.

  It was a triumph. Mozart had already written a dozen or so operas, and Idomeneo is rightly considered his first truly mature effort. In the decade that was left to him, he would compose ten more, including all his greatest, but it was Idomeneo that showed he was, at the age of just twenty-five, a master of the genre. In every aspect of his writing – orchestral colour, melodic line, the fitting of the music perfectly to the characters – he had come of age as an operatic composer.

  Idomeneo was performed three times, after which Mozart could relax. He, his father and his sister did exactly that. The Munich Carnival was on, and they happily indulged in the festivities. There was partying, feasting and drinking of wine, and endless dancing.

  On one occasion it appears Mozart picked up a prostitute, dancing with her in full view of his father, in what was almost certainly a drunken act of defiance. When Leopold later remonstrated with him, he claimed he had not recognised her for what she was, and even when he did realise, he felt it only polite to continue in her company, as he explained in a letter:

  I could not simply walk away without saying why, and who would want to let such words fall to someone’s face? And in the end, did I not return her to her seat and dance with others? … Anyway no one can say I saw her at any other time, or was in her house.

  But the revelries were soon to come to an end. Two months before the premiere of Idomeneo, the entire Habsburg empire had been rocked by the death in Vienna of the Mother of the Nation, Empress Maria Theresa. In fact for a time the premiere itself was in doubt.

  Now, in late January 1781, Archbishop Colloredo decided to move his entire household – offi cials, clerks, cooks, valets, footmen – from Salzburg to Vienna, in deference to the late empress and in expectation of the full accession of her son, Emperor Joseph. There was a personal reason too. His elderly father was seriously ill and unlikely to live long.

  The prince-archbishop decided it was time his whole court was properly in place. That meant summoning the Mozarts back home. Both had seriously outstayed their leave of absence. Wolfgang had been given six weeks to mount his opera in Munich; he had been away for four months. Both father and son were on salaries, and Colloredo wanted them back where they belonged.

  Well, not quite. He sent orders to Leopold Mozart to return immediately to Salzburg and resume his duties as deputy kapellmeister. Wolfgang Mozart he ordered to travel straight to Vienna, to join his retinue there.

  Mozart bade his father and sister farewell. They set out for Salzburg, while Mozart left on a direct route for the imperial capital. The journey was no more comfortable than his last one, as he wrote to his father: ‘I had gone by mail coach … but by that time my ass and the various parts that lie around it were burning so badly I couldn’t bear it any more.’

  It would be the last flash of humour for some time. Mozart arrived in Vienna on 16 March 1781. He was to live there for the rest of his life. Over the next ten years he would produce his greatest works. But it would be a difficult decade for him, and the problems began from the day he arrived.

  * Leck mir das Mensch im Arsch, das mich nicht will.

  With a sore bottom, and ‘dog-tired’ from travelling all night, Mo-zart arrived in Vienna at nine o’clock on the morning of 16 March 1781. At four o’clock that afternoon he was performing for at least twenty persons ‘of the highest nobility’. The following day he performed again.

  Archbishop Colloredo was driving Mozart from the moment he arrived in Vienna, and Mozart resented it. In fact he resented every aspect of his new life in Vienna. The day after he arrived he wrote to his father bemoaning the fact that he had been given a room in the same building as the archbishop, unlike two other musicians who were lucky enough to be out of Colloredo’s sight.

  Being in the same building meant he was treated like one of the staff. At the lunch table there sat two valets, two cooks, a pastry chef and – ‘little me’. He was made to sit below the valets, though above the cooks at least, indicating where a musician lay in the archbishop’s esteem. Mozart’s resentment of his treatment oozes from every word of this letter.

  Using strong language, he goes on to accuse the archbishop of stealing money from his musicians, and says he has already made his mind up to do something about it:

  Today we are to perform at Prince Gallizin’s … I’ll just have to wait and see whether I will receive some payment. If I get nothing, I will go to the Archbishop and tell him straight out: if he won’t allow me to earn something on my own, he will have to give me some extra pay so I won’t have to live off my own money.

  This is fighting talk, dangerously so. One can only im
agine Leopold sinking his head in his hands when he read the letter. His son was determined to get off on the wrong foot. Leopold could see disaster ahead. If his headstrong boy was using that kind of language out loud, he could soon be in serious trouble.

  If he stopped to look at the letter carefully, though, one other factor could not fail to have struck him. The letter was a real departure from previous correspondence. No jokes, no puns, the paragraphs orderly and logical, no misspellings, the thoughts focused and organised. And that would remain true of subsequent letters. The language might be strong, but it accurately reflected Mozart’s thoughts. He really had grown up.

  Mozart had built up a head of steam the moment he arrived in Vienna, and over the ensuing days it intensified. To his father’s certain despair, he was now beginning to be deliberately disobedient, to flout flagrantly the strict rules of the archbishop’s household.

  He complained about the seating arrangements at lunch. Why should he sit beneath valets, whose duties included lighting chandeliers and opening doors? Why should he not sit at the table of the illustrious Count Arco, the archbishop’s chamberlain? (There is a name that will re-enter the story very soon.) His complaints were ignored.

  Sadly none of Leopold’s letters have survived – perhaps Mozart destroyed them in anger – but we can surmise from his replies the language Leopold used. To Leopold’s mollifying suggestion that it tickles the archbishop’s pride to have him around, he is withering:

  What you are saying about the Archbishop is pretty much true. But of what use is it to me? – I cannot live on that – and believe me he won’t let my light shine – what distinction is he really giving me?

  Within a week he took matters into his own hands. He was supposed to go to a certain nobleman’s house under escort with other musicians. Once there, a lackey would announce their arrival and escort them into the aristocrat’s presence.