Mozart: The Man Revealed Read online

  But the couple’s heartbreak was not yet over. A son Johann Karl, born sixteen months after Maria Anna, lived for just three months, and a daughter Maria Crescentia, born in the following year, died at seven weeks.

  Six children in a little less than six years, and only one who had lived to see a first birthday. It is impossible to know, when Anna Maria fell pregnant yet again, whether she was elated or in despair. Infant mortality was high in the mid-eighteenth century, and there will have been many families in Salzburg who lost as many, or more, children than the Mozarts. But still the toll of seven pregnancies in such a short period of time must surely have debilitated Anna Maria both physically and emotionally.

  I imagine an exhausted woman, now thirty-five years of age – middle aged, in fact – resigned to almost constant child-bearing, followed by the infinite sadness of seeing tiny coffins bearing each child away. Now a seventh child was on the way.

  Anna Maria gave birth to a son at eight o’clock on the evening of 27 January 1756. It was not an easy delivery. The placenta failed to emerge naturally and Leopold reported that it had to be removed forcibly. As a result Anna Maria became extremely weak; she was at high risk of fatal infection, and for a time it was not known if she would survive.

  A child who was more than a day old without being baptised was believed to be in danger of hellfire, and so the infant was baptised at ten thirty the following morning. He was given the names Johannes Chrisostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus. The first two names were for the saint, St John Chrysostom, on whose name day the child had been born; Wolfgangus was for his maternal grandfather; Theophilus was the Greek version of Gottlieb, ‘Beloved of God’, the name of his godfather.

  From the start he was called by his third name, Wolfgang, or more often its diminutive, Wolferl. In later life he himself preferred the Latin version of his fourth name, Amadeus, though he was more inclined to use Amadè, or Amadé, or even (when in Italy) Amadeo.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was his parents’ seventh, and final, child. He and his elder sister Nannerl were the only two to survive into adulthood. But his was not to be a long life. Nannerl would outlive her younger brother by almost thirty-eight years.

  As soon as they were married, Leopold and his wife had moved into an apartment on the third floor of a building at 9 Getreidegasse (‘Grain Lane’).* The building was owned by the Hagenauers, a family that dealt in groceries and spices on the ground floor and one imagines the infant Wolfgang and his sister growing up with the pungent aroma of these products under their noses.

  It was a fortuitous move. The Hagenauers became firm friends of their tenants, the Mozarts. Johann Lorenz Hagenauer was also a banker and music lover. Not only did he encourage Leopold to take his young son on tours of Europe, but in effect bankrolled them by issuing credit in cities along the way.

  The building was in the old town in the centre of Salzburg. The Getreidegasse was the commercial heart of the city. It was home to court offices, bakers, grocers, goldsmiths, hotels and taverns. It was the most heavily populated street in the whole of Salzburg.

  The boy Mozart thus spent his formative years in the heart of the city, surrounded by its noise and bustle. He remained a city boy all his life, and when many years later he moved to Vienna, he never lived beyond the close suburbs, preferring always to be as near to the centre of the city as possible.

  The Mozart apartment, while not large, was able to accommodate a family of four. There was also room for a clavier, a small keyboard instrument. Had more of the children survived, it’s likely the family would soon have had to move out. As it was, they remained there for twenty-six years, until the seventeen-year-old Wolfgang’s fame and resultant earnings allowed them to move to a larger home.

  The apartment in the Getreidegasse frequently echoed to the sound of music. Leopold and his professional friends would play together, and Leop-old was able to supplement his income by giving private violin lessons there.

  He was a very successful teacher. In the year Wolfgang was born he had published a book entitled Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (‘A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing’). It was reprinted twice in German, and was then translated into Dutch and French.

  Leopold Mozart was firmly established as one of Salzburg’s leading musicians, and it would not be long before he was appointed deputy kapellmeister (deputy head of music at court), a senior position second only to the kapellmeister himself.

  Given his professional reputation, it must have come as a welcome surprise to Leopold when he realised his eldest child Nannerl was showing signs of an interest in music. Maybe she sang for him; maybe she picked out notes on the clavier.

  He will no doubt have surmised that, given his own natural musical talent, supplemented by that of his father-in-law before his untimely death, his children might display some aptitude for music. Little could he have known just to what an extent that would prove to be true.

  Trusting his instincts, he began to teach Nannerl the clavier when she was around seven years of age. She took to it immediately, surprising and delighting her father. He probably did not pay much attention at first when his young son, just three years of age, began to watch these lessons intently. When they were over the boy would pick out notes, playing simple chords and smiling at the pleasing sound.

  To aid Nannerl’s progress, Leopold compiled a book of pieces for harpsichord by composers of the day, including a number of anonymous ones, almost certainly by Leopold himself. Mostly the pieces were minuets, but he arranged them in such a way that they became increasingly difficult, the rhythms more complex, ever wider jumps, tricky ornamentation, advancing to hands crossing over.

  The book, which Leopold called Notenbuch für Nannerl (‘Book of Notes for Nannerl’), was exactly what Wolfgang needed, as playing thirds up and down the keyboard began to bore him. He started playing the pieces in Nannerl’s book.

  Leopold began to pay attention. He could clearly see that Wolfgang was gifted. He started to teach his young son some minuets, then some more difficult pieces. Recalling this later in life, Nannerl said Wolfgang could learn a minuet in just half an hour, and a more difficult piece in an hour. He would then play them with the utmost delicacy, faultlessly, and in exact time, she said. This might normally be expected in a highly talented young musician at least ten years older than Wolfgang.

  Realising that his son was more than just usually talented, Leopold began to teach him the organ, and then the violin, at the age of four. The boy took to them naturally, particularly the violin. But his father was something of a taskmaster, and Wolfgang had to work hard to gain his approval.

  On one extraordinary occasion, two of Leopold’s colleagues came to the apartment in the Getreidegasse to run through some new string trios with him. Little Wolfgang, aged six, nagged his father to allow him to play second violin. Leopold was adamant he could not. He was a child, nowhere near competent enough. Wolfgang insisted he could do it. Again his father refused. Wolfgang cried tears of frustration and left the room.

  The second violinist, one Johann Andreas Schachtner, suggested to Leopold he let the boy play alongside him. It couldn’t do any harm. Leopold relented, on condition Wolfgang followed Schachtner’s lead.

  ‘I was astonished to realise,’ Schachtner recalled, ‘that I was soon entirely superfluous.’4 He put down his violin and allowed Wolfgang to continue. The boy successfully navigated all six trios, reading from sight.

  Wolfgang, emboldened, asked his father to let him play the first violin part. This meant Leopold relinquishing the lead to his young son. Schachtner related how Wolfgang, given his small hands, had to resort to ‘wrong and irregular positions’,5 but he and Leopold were stunned to admit he carried it off without any serious mistakes.

  We are indebted to Schachtner for recalling another occasion, which happened at about the same time, and was of even more significance than the string trios run-through.

  He and Leopold returned to the apartment after Thu
rsday service to find the small boy sitting at the table, pen in hand, blotches of ink on a piece of paper. They watched him dipping the pen to the bottom of the inkwell, which caused drops of ink to spill onto the paper. Wolfgang wiped the blotches away with the palm of his hand, and continued writing. They asked him what he was doing.

  ‘I am writing a clavier concerto. The first movement is nearly ready,’ the boy replied.

  Leopold laughed at his son’s bravado, pointing out that nothing could be read under the ink smears. But then he began to look more closely. Soon, according to Schachtner, he was shedding tears of wonderment and joy.

  ‘Look, Schachtner, how correctly and properly it is written. But it is too difficult. No one could play this.’

  ‘That’s why it’s a concerto,’ Wolfgang said. ‘You must practise very hard to be able to play it.’6

  Then, to the men’s utter amazement, Wolfgang demonstrated what he meant on the keyboard.

  He soon put it aside, though, as if instinctively he knew that he should start with less ambitious compositions. He composed several small pieces for clavier, which his father wrote down in Nannerl’s book. Several pages went missing in the intervening centuries. Two pieces have survived. Soon after his fifth birthday, Wolfgang composed an Andante and Allegro in C major for clavier (K. 1a and 1b).* They are his first known compositions.

  Leopold Mozart was now in no doubt. He had a son with a musical talent neither he, nor anyone, had ever encountered before. The question confronting him: how should he handle it?

  * Salzburg has had a chequered history, due largely to the shifting borders of Continental Europe during the Napoleonic wars. It was annexed to Austria after the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. It was briefly transferred to the Kingdom of Bavaria as punishment for the Austrian defeat at Wagram in 1809. In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, the city was definitively returned to Austria, the bicentenary of which was celebrated in 2015–16.

  * Mozart biographers seem evenly divided over whether his mother was Anna Maria or Maria Anna. The portrait of her that hangs in Mozart’s birth house in Salzburg is labelled Anna Maria. Also, since her daughter was christened Maria Anna, and one of the children’s cousins too, I shall refer to her throughout as Anna Maria.

  * The whole building was acquired by the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation in 1917, and is today a museum devoted to Mozart.

  * According to the numbers assigned to Mozart’s compositions by Ludwig von Köchel in his catalogue of 1862.

  The short answer: show it off and make money out of it. In early January 1762 Leopold took his two children to the capital city of Bavaria, Munich. Nannerl was ten, her brother approaching his sixth birthday.

  Leopold Mozart has, in the intervening centuries, taken much criticism from biographers of his son for setting out on travels when his children were so young, with the explicit aim of showing off their musical talent. Today we might call him a ‘tiger dad’ and accuse him of ‘hot-housing’ the children.

  On one level the criticism is justified. Neither child ever attended school. For a daughter in the mid-eighteenth century this was probably not exceptional. But Wolfgang never attended school either. His father taught him entirely at home, in subjects as wide-ranging as mathematics, reading, writing, literature, languages, history, geography, dancing, even moral and religious training. Excellent musician Leopold might have been, but one has to wonder whether he was skilled enough in these disciplines to educate his son adequately in them all.

  From Leopold’s point of view, though, his behaviour was entirely justifiable. He realised he had two young children of exceptional talent. Nannerl was well ahead of her age in musical performance. She could sight-read, improvise on a given melody, take it through several keys, and compose accompanying bass lines. As for Wolfgang, he was so much more skilled than his sister that he put her in the shade.

  This, in fact, was of some concern to Leopold. What if it was a temporary gift? Given that he had started so young, what was to say that his talent might not end as abruptly, or at least decline and wither? Wolfgang might reach a level of brilliance, but not improve from there. If he were not to progress in the next ten years, say, his prodigious talent at the age of sixteen would be a lot less impressive than at the tender age of six.

  And so, keen to make the most of his children’s talent while it lasted, Leopold left for Munich with Nannerl and Wolfgang, leaving his wife behind. It was to be a brief trip – no longer than three weeks – and it is probable that Leopold did not need to ask the archbishop for leave of absence from musical duties at court.

  Very little is known about what happened in Munich, other than the fact that Leopold must have had an impressive letter of introduction in his pocket, since he was able to gain an audience with the elector of Bavaria, Maximilian III Joseph, and present his highly gifted children before him.

  We can also be sure that the prince, himself a talented composer and player of the viola da gamba, was impressed, because the aristocracy of the city took the lead from their ruler and invited the two Mozart children to perform in their salons.

  Leopold returned home to Salzburg in early February, flushed with the success of the trip, inordinately proud of his children, and already planning his next move. Leopold was beginning to realise that his children could become a seriously successful source of income.

  He immediately began working on another trip, and lobbied at the highest level to achieve it. This time he was setting his sights high. The ultimate goal within the Habsburg empire, the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, the capital city of the empire as well as the capital city of music: Vienna. It is also more than likely word had filtered back from Munich to Salzburg that the Mozart children really were quite exceptional.

  Leopold achieved his goal, and more. The music-loving Archbishop Schrattenbach approved Leopold’s leave of absence. More than that, he agreed to sponsor the trip, at least in part, and keep Leopold on his full court salary while he was away. With that commitment in his back pocket, so to speak, Leopold was able to persuade his landlord, Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, to provide more financial assistance. Hagenauer lent Leopold money and allowed him to draw money on the Hagenauer business account while he was away. Hagenauer, as well as being Leopold’s landlord, was effectively his banker as well.

  Conditions were thus perfect for the Mozart family to try their fortune in the sophisticated capital city of Vienna, with its plethora of wealthy aristocrats and patrons of the arts.

  ‘Family’ is the operative word. Leopold was not going to do this by halves. This time he would take his wife with him as well: they all left Salzburg on 18 September 1762. Finances were secure enough to take a servant with them, though that is probably too lowly a word. Joseph Richard Eslinger was a bassoonist and copyist, but his job was to look after the family’s clothing and baggage, make sure all the music was kept in order, and generally run errands for them.

  It might be imagined that Leopold was over-brimming with confidence, secure in the knowledge that his young son – still only six years and eight months of age – would stun the musically sophisticated Viennese with his extraordinary talent.

  Quite the opposite. Leopold was a natural worrier and something of a born pessimist. Soon after arriving in the capital, he wrote to Hagenauer, ‘If only I knew how it will finally turn out.’

  The journey from Salzburg to Vienna took almost three weeks. The Mozarts were in no hurry. There were plenty of people to impress along the way, with musical performances that would act as rehearsals for the big city. There was also always the possibility that such performances would bring financial reward.

  The most direct route to Vienna would have taken them east, but instead they travelled north to Passau, on the Bavarian border with Austria. Leopold’s aim was to show off his children’s talents to the prince-bishop, Count Joseph Maria Thun-Hohenstein.

  There, on the very first stop of the trip, he was reminded that things could be anything but straightforward. A local arist
ocrat, used to issuing orders and expecting tasks to be performed at his pleasure, might issue an invitation to an itinerant musician. It could be a vague invitation, with no set date or time. The musician had no choice but to wait, running up the cost of board and lodging in the meantime.

  That was exactly what happened to the Mozart family in Passau. The count kept them waiting for five days, before summoning Wolfgang to play, but not his sister. To compound the disappointment the boy was rewarded with a measly four gulden, which Leopold complained left him with a net loss of 80 gulden.

  Leopold’s initial optimism was tempered by reality as the family boarded a boat in Passau to travel down the Danube to Linz, the bustling and busy capital of Upper Austria that straddled the mighty river. But things began to look up.

  On the boat Leopold fell into discussion with a certain Count Herberstein, who knew the city well and was soon to become the first Bishop of Linz. He told Leopold exactly who he should get in touch with when they arrived.

  This paid dividends. In Linz, under the sponsorship of a senior member of the aristocracy, Wolfgang and Nannerl gave their first public concert. Several visiting Viennese noblemen were in the audience, including one, Count Pálffy, who had the ear of Archduke Joseph, son of Empress Maria Theresa no less (and later co-ruler with her, before becoming emperor in his own right).

  Count Pálffy, a delighted Leopold reported, ‘listened with astonishment’ to the two children, and on his return to Vienna duly spoke ‘with great excitement’ to his friend the archduke, who in turn – just as Leopold had hoped – passed it on to his mother, the empress. She, without any doubt, will have mentioned it to her husband, the emperor.

  Leopold had good cause for optimism. Word of his children’s musical prowess had reached the very top. No doubt emboldened, he decided not to head straight for Vienna but instead to leave the boat at the little town of Ybbs – let word spread, let a sense of excitement and anticipation build up.