In Salzburg work was a burden to me, and I could hardly ever settle down to it. Why? Because I was never happy.... In Salzburg—for me at least—there is not a farthing’s worth of entertainment. I refuse to associate with a good many people there—and most of the others do not think me good enough. Besides, there is no stimulus for my talent. When I play, or when any of my compositions is performed, it is just as if the audience were all tables and chairs. If only there were even a tolerably good theater in Salzburg!28
He longed to write operas, and gladly accepted the request of Elector Karl Theodor to compose one for the next Munich festival. He began work on Idomeneo, re di Creta, in October, 1780; in November he went to Munich for rehearsals; on January 29, 1781, the opera was produced with success, despite its unusual length. Mozart remained six weeks more in Munich, relishing its social life, until a summons came from Archbishop Colloredo to join him in Vienna. There he had the pleasure of living in the same palace with his employer, but he ate with the servants. “The two valets sit at the head of the table, and I have the honor to be placed above the cooks.”29 This was the custom of the time in the homes of the nobility; Haydn bore it with silent resentment, Mozart rebelled against it ever more audibly. He was pleased to have his music and his talent displayed in the homes of the Archbishop’s friends, but he fumed when Colloredo refused most of his requests to let him accept outside engagements that might have brought him added income and wider fame. “When I think of leaving Vienna without at least a thousand florins in my pocket, my heart sinks within me.”30
He made up his mind to quit Colloredo’s service. On May 2, 1781, he went to live as a lodger with the Webers, who had moved to Vienna. When the Archbishop sent him instructions to return to Salzburg, he replied that he could not leave till May 12. An interview followed, in which the Archbishop (as Mozart reported to his father)
called me the most opprobrious names—oh, I really cannot bring myself to write you all! At last, when my blood was boiling, I could hold out no longer, and said, “Then your Serene Highness is not satisfied with me?” “What! do you mean to threaten me, you rascal, you villain? There is the door; I will have nothing more to do with such a wretched fellow!” At last I said, “Neither will I with you.” “Then be off!” As I went I said, “Let it be so, then; tomorrow you shall hear from me by letter.” Tell me, dear father, should I not have had to say this sooner or later? . . .
Write to me privately that you are pleased—for indeed you may be so—and find fault with me heartily in public, so that no blame may attach to you. But if the Archbishop offers you the least impertinence, come to me at once in Vienna. We can all three live on my earnings.31
Leopold was plunged into another crisis. His own position seemed imperiled, and it was not for some time yet that he would receive reassurances from Colloredo. He was alarmed at the news that his son was rooming with the Webers. The father of that family was now dead; Aloysia had married the actor Joseph Lange; but the widow had another daughter, Constanze, waiting for a husband. Was this another blind alley for Wolfgang? Leopold begged him to apologize to the Archbishop, and come home. Mozart now for the first time refused to obey his father. “To please you, my dear father, I would renounce my happiness, my health, and life itself, but my honor comes before all with me, and so it must be with you. My dearest, best of fathers, demand of me what you will, only not that.”32 On June 2 he sent Leopold thirty ducats as an earnest of future aid.
Three times he went to the Archbishop’s Vienna residence to submit his formal resignation. Colloredo’s chamberlain refused to transmit it, and on the third occasion he “threw him [Mozart] out of the antechamber and gave him a kick in the behind”—so Mozart described the scene in his letter of June 9.33 To appease his father he left the Weber home and took other lodgings. He assured Leopold that he had only “had fun” with Constanze: “if I had to marry all those with whom I have jested, I should have two hundred wives at least.”34 However, on December 15 he informed his father that Constanze was so sweet, so simple and domestic, that he wished to marry her.
You are horrified at the idea? But I entreat you, dearest, most beloved father, to listen to me. … The voice of nature speaks as loud in me as in others-louder, perhaps, than in many a big, strong lout of a fellow. I simply cannot live as most young men do in these days. In the first place, I have too much religion; in the second place I have too much love of my neighbor and too high a feeling of honor to seduce an innocent girl; and in the third place I have too much horror and disgust, too much dread and fear of diseases, and too much care for my health, to fool about with whores. So I can swear that I have never had relations of that sort with any woman.... I stake my life on the truth of what I have told you. . . .
But who is the object of my love? … Surely not one of the Webers? Yes, … Constanze, … the kindest-hearted, the cleverest, the best of them all. … Tell me whether I could wish myself a better wife. … All that I desire is to have a small assured income (of which, thank God, I have good hopes), and then I shall never cease entreating you to allow me to save this poor girl and to make myself and her—and, if I may say so, all of us—very happy. For surely you are happy when I am? And you are to enjoy one half of my fixed income. … Please take pity on your son!35
Leopold did not know what to believe. He used every effort to dissuade his almost penniless son from marriage, but Mozart felt that after twenty-six years of filial obedience it was time for him to have his own way, to lead his own life. Through seven months he pleaded in vain for parental consent; finally, on August 4, 1782, he married without it. On August 5 it came. Now Mozart was free to discover how far one could support a family by composing the most varied assemblage of superb music in man’s history.
VI. THE COMPOSER
He had reason for confidence, for he had already won reputation as a pianist, had acquired some paying pupils, and had produced successful operas. Just a month after leaving the Archbishop’s service he received from Count Orsini-Rosenberg, director of court theaters for Joseph II, a commission to compose a Singspiel—a spoken drama interspersed with songs. The result was presented on July 16, 1782, in the presence of the Emperor, as Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). A hostile clique condemned it, but nearly all the audience was won over by the vivacious arias that adorned an aged theme: a Christian beauty captured by pirates, sold to a Turkish harem, and rescued by her Christian lover after incredible intrigues. Joseph II commented on the music, “Too beautiful for our ears, my dear Mozart, and far too many notes”; to which the reckless composer answered, “Exactly as many, your Majesty, as are needed.”36 The operetta was repeated thirty-three times in Vienna in its first six years. Gluck praised it, though he perceived that it quite ignored his “reform” of the opera; he admired the instrumental compositions of the impetuous youth, and invited him to dinner.
Mozart took inspiration rather from Italy than from Germany; he preferred melody and simple harmony to complex and erudite polyphony. Only in his final decade did he feel strong influences from Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1782 he joined the musicians who, under the aegis of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, gave concerts, chiefly of Handel and Bach, in the National Library or in van Swieten’s home. In 1774 the Baron had brought from Berlin to Vienna The Art of the Fugue, The Well-tempered Clavichord, and other works of J. S. Bach. He deprecated Italian music as amateurish; real music, he thought, required strict attention to fugue, polyphony, and counterpoint. Mozart, though he never allowed structure, rule, or form to be an end in itself, profited from van Swieten’s counsel and concerts, and carefully studied Handel and the major Bachs. After 1787 he conducted Handel concerts in Vienna, and took some liberties in adjusting Handel’s scores to Viennese orchestras. In his later instrumental music he wedded Italian melody and German polyphony in a harmonious union.
A glance at Köchel’s catalogue of Mozart’s compositions is an impressive experience. Here are listed 626 works—the lar
gest body of music left by any composer except Haydn, all produced in a life of thirty-six years, and including masterpieces in every form: 77 sonatas, 8 trios, 29 quartets, 5 quintets, 51 concertos, 96 divertimenti, dances or serenades, 52 symphonies, 90 arias or songs, 60 religious compositions, 22 operas. If some of those near Mozart thought him indolent, it may have been because they did not quite realize that the labor of the spirit can exhaust the flesh, and that without intervals of lethargy genius would slip into insanity. His father told him, “Procrastination is your besetting sin,”37 and in many cases Mozart waited till almost the last hour before putting to paper the music that had been taking form in his head. “I am, so to speak, steeped in music,” he said; “it is in my mind the whole day, and I love to dream, to study, to reflect on it.”38 His wife reported, “He was always strumming upon something—his hat, his watch fob, the table, the chair, as if they were the keyboard.”39 Sometimes he carried on this silent composition even while apparently listening to an opera. He kept scraps of music paper in his pockets, or, when traveling, in the side pocket of the carriage; on these he made fragmentary notes; usually he carried a leather case to receive such obiter scripta. When he was ready to compose he sat not at a keyboard but at a table; he “wrote music like letters,” said Constanze, “and never tried a movement until it was finished.” Or he would sit at the piano for hours on end, improvising, leaving his musical fancy seemingly free, but half unconsciously subjecting it to some recognizable structure—sonata form, aria, fugue … Musicians enjoyed Mozart’s improvisations because they could detect, with esoteric delight, the order hidden behind the apparently whimsical strains. Niemetschek said in old age, “If I dared to pray for one more earthly joy it would be that I might hear Mozart improvise.”40
Mozart could play almost any music at sight, because he had seen certain combinations and sequences of notes so often that he could read them as one note, and his habituated fingers played them as one musical phrase or idea, just as a practiced reader takes in a line as if it were a word, or a paragraph as if it were a line. Mozart’s trained memory was allied with this capacity to perceive aggregates, to feel the logic that compelled the part to indicate the whole. In later years he could play almost any one of his concertos by heart. At Prague he wrote the drum and trumpet parts of the second finale in Don Giovanni without having at hand the score for the other instruments; he had kept that complex music in his memory. Once he wrote down only the violin part of a sonata for piano and violin; the next day, without a rehearsal, Regina Strinasacchi played the violin part at a concert, and Mozart played the piano part purely from the memory of his conception, without having had time to set it down upon paper.41 Probably no other man in history was ever so absorbed in music.
We think of Mozart’s sonatas as rather slight and playful, hardly in a class with Beethoven’s passionate and powerful pronouncements in the same genre; this may be because they were written for pupils of limited legerdemain, or for harpsichords of minor resonance, or for a piano that had no means of continuing a note.42 The favorite of our childhood, the Sonata in A (K. 331), with its engaging “Minuetto” and its “Rondo alla Turca,” is still (1778) in harpsichord style.
Mozart did not at first care for chamber music, but in 1773 he came upon Haydn’s early quartets, envied their contrapuntal excellence, and imitated them with something short of success in the six quartets that he composed in that year. In 1781 Haydn published another series; Mozart was again stirred to rivalry, and issued (1782-85) six quartets (K. 387, 421, 428, 458, 464-65) that are now universally recognized as among the supreme examples of their kind. Performers complained that they were abominably difficult; critics especially condemned the sixth for its clashing dissonances and its turbulent mixture of major and minor keys. An Italian musician returned the score to the publisher as obviously full of gross mistakes, and one purchaser, when he found that the discords were deliberate, tore up the sheets in a rage. Yet it was after playing the fourth, fifth, and sixth of these quartets with Mozart, Dittersdorf, and others that Haydn said to Leopold Mozart, “Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”43 When the six quartets were published (1785) Mozart dedicated them to Haydn with a letter that shines out even in a brilliant correspondence:
A father who had decided to send his sons out into the great world thought it his duty to entrust them to the protection and guidance of a man who was very celebrated at the time, and who, moreover, happened to be his best friend. In like manner I send my six sons to you, most celebrated and very dear friend. They are indeed the fruit of a long and laborious study; but the hope which many friends have given me that their toil will be in some degree rewarded, … flatters me with the thought that these children may one day prove a source of consolation to me.
During your last stay in this capital you … expressed to me your approval of these compositions. Your good opinion encourages me to offer them to you, and leads me to hope that you will not consider them unworthy of your favor. Please then receive them kindly, and be to them a father, guide, and friend. From this moment I surrender to you all my rights over them. I entreat you, however, to be indulgent to those faults which may have escaped their composer’s partial eye, and, in spite of them, to continue your generous friendship towards one who so highly appreciates it.44
Mozart had a particular fondness for his quintets. He thought his Quintet in E Flat for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon (K. 452) “the best work I have ever composed,”45 but that was before he had written his major operas. “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” was originally (1787) composed as a quintet, but it was soon taken up by small orchestras, and is now classed among Mozart’s serenades. He valued, as “rather carefully” written, the Serenade in E Flat (K. 375), with which he himself was serenaded one evening in 1781, but musicians rank above it the Serenade in C Minor (K. 388)—which is as somber as the Pathétiques of Beethoven and Tchaikowsky.
Having discovered the orchestra, Mozart turned it to a hundred experiments: overtures, nocturnes, suites, cassations (variants of the suite), dances, divertimenti. The last were usually intended to serve a passing purpose rather than to echo in the halls of history; they are not to be weighed but enjoyed. Even so, Divertimenti No. 15 (K. 287) and No. 17 (K. 334) are substantial works, more delightful than most of the symphonies.
For his symphonies Mozart, like Haydn, used a “band” of thirty-five pieces; hence they fail to convey their full worth to ears accustomed to the multiplied sonority of twentieth-century orchestras. Pundits praise No. 25 (K. 183) as “impassioned”46 and “a miracle of impetuous expression,”47 but the earliest Mozart symphony of note is the Paris (No. 31, K. 297), which Mozart adapted to the French taste for refinement and charm. The Haffner Symphony (No. 35, K. 385) was originally composed in haste to grace the festivities planned by Sigismund Haffner, former burgomaster of Salzburg, for the wedding of his daughter (1782); Mozart later added parts for flute and clarinet, and presented it at Vienna (March 3, 1783) at a concert attended by Joseph II. The Emperor “gave me great applause,” and twenty-five ducats.48 In this and No. 36, written at Linz in November, 1783, Mozart still kept to the form and stamp—always pleasant, seldom profound—that Haydn had laid upon the symphony; in both cases the slow movement comes most gratefully to aging ears. We must speak more respectfully of No. 38, which Mozart composed for Prague in 1786; here the first movement pleases the musician with its structural logic and contrapuntal skill, and the andante, adding contemplation to melody, has stirred experts to speak of its “undying perfection”49 and its “enchanted world.”50
By common consent the greatest of Mozart’s symphonies are the three that he poured forth in a torrent of inspiration in the summer of 1788—at a time of depressing poverty and mounting debts. The first is dated June 26, the second July 25, the third August 10—three births in three months. So
far as we know, none of them was ever played in his lifetime; he never heard them; they remained in that mysterious realm in which black spots on a sheet were for the composer “ditties of no sound”—notes and harmonies heard only by the mind. The third, misnamed the Jupiter (No. 41 in C, K. 551), is usually accounted the best; Schumann equated it with Shakespeare and Beethoven,51 but it does not lend itself to amateur appreciation. No. 40 in G Minor (K. 550) begins with a vigor that presages the Eroica, and it proceeds to a development that has led commentators—struggling in vain to express music in words—to read into it a Lear or Macbeth of personal tragedy;52 yet to simpler ears it seems almost naively joyous. To the same ears the most satisfying of the symphonies is No. 39 in E Flat (K. 543). It is not burdened with woe, nor is it tortured with technique; it is melody and harmony flowing in a placid stream; it is such music as might please the gods on a rural holiday from celestial chores.
The sinfonia concertante is a cross between the symphony and the concerto; it grew out of the concerto grosso by opposing two or more instruments to the orchestra in a dialogue between melody and accompaniment. Mozart raised the form to its apex in the Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat (K. 364) for flute, violin, and viola (1779); this is as fine as any of his symphonies.
All the concertos are delightful, for in them the solo passages help the untrained ear to follow themes and strains that in the symphonies may be obscured by technical elaboration or contrapuntal play. Debate is interesting, and all the more so when, as in the form of the concerto as proposed by Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach and developed by Mozart, the contest is of one against all—solo contra tutti. Since Mozart relished such harmonious confrontations, he wrote most of his concertos for the piano, for in these he played the solo part himself, usually adding, toward the end of the first movement, a cadenza that allowed him to frolic and shine as a virtuoso.