He welcomed an invitation from Prince Karl von Lichnowsky to ride with him to Berlin. For that trip he borrowed a hundred gulden from Franz Hofdemel. Prince and pauper left Vienna April 8, 1789. At Dresden Mozart played before Elector Frederick Augustus, and received a hundred ducats. At Leipzig he gave a public performance on Bach’s organ, and was stirred by the Thomasschule choir’s singing of Bach’s motet “Singet dem Herrn.” At Potsdam and Berlin (April 28 to May 28) he played for Frederick William II, and received a gift of seven hundred florins, with commissions for six quartets and six sonatas. But his gains were spent with mysterious celerity; an unverified rumor ascribed part of the outlet to a liaison with a Berlin singer, Henriette Baronius.88 On May 23 he wrote to Constanze: “As regards my return, you will have to look forward to me more than to the money.”89 He reached home June 4, 1789.
Constanze, pregnant again, needed doctors and medicines and an expensive trip to take the waters at Baden-bei-Wien. Mozart again turned to Puchberg:
Great God! I would not wish my worst enemy to be in my present position. If you, most beloved friend and brother [Mason] forsake me, we are altogether lost—both my unfortunate and blameless self and my poor sick wife and children . … All depends … upon whether you will lend me another five hundred gulden. Until my affairs are settled, I undertake to pay back ten gulden a month; and then I shall pay back the whole sum. … Oh, God! I can hardly bring myself to dispatch this letter, and yet I must!—For God’s sake forgive me, only forgive me!90
Puchberg sent him 150 gulden, most of which went to pay Constanze’s bills at Baden. On November 16, at home, she gave birth to a daughter, who died the same day. Joseph II helped by commissioning Mozart and Ponte to write a dramma giocoso on an old theme (used by Marivaux in Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard, 1730): two men disguise themselves to test the fidelity of their fiancées; they find them pliable, but forgive them on the ground that “così fan tutte ”—“so do all” women; thence the opera’s name. It was hardly a subject fit for Mozart’s tragic mood (except that Constanze had flirted a bit at Baden), but he provided for the clever and witty libretto music that is the very embodiment of cleverness and wit; seldom has nonsense been so glorified. It had a moderately successful première on January 26, 1790, and four repetitions in a month, bringing Mozart a hundred ducats. Then Joseph II died (February 20), and the Vienna theaters were closed till April 12.
Mozart hoped that the new Emperor would find work for him, but Leopold II ignored him. He ignored Ponte too, who went off to England and America, and ended (1838) as a teacher of Italian in what is now Columbia University in New York.91 Mozart made further appeals to Puchberg (December 29, 1789, January 20, February 20, April 1, 8, and 23, 1790), never in vain, but seldom receiving all that he asked. Early in May he pleaded for six hundred gulden to pay rent due; Puchberg sent a hundred. He confessed to Puchberg on May 17, “I am obliged to resort to moneylenders”; in that letter he numbered his pupils as only two, and asked his friend “to spread the news that I am willing to give lessons.”92 However, he was too nervous and impatient to be a good teacher. Sometimes he failed to keep appointments with his pupils; sometimes he played billiards with them instead of giving a lesson.93 But when he found a student of promising talent he gave himself unreservedly; so he gladly and successfully taught Johann Hummel, who came to him (1787) at the age of eight and became a famous pianist in the next generation.
Serious illnesses added pains to Mozart’s griefs. One physician diagnosed his ailments as “excretory pyelitis with pyonephritis, latent focal lesions of the kidneys, tending inescapably toward eventual total nephritic insufficiency”94—i.e., a disabling pus-forming inflammation of the kidneys. “I am absolutely wretched today,” he wrote to Puchberg on August 14, 1790. “I could not sleep at all last night because of pain. … Picture to yourself my condition—ill, and consumed with worries and anxieties. … Can you not help me with a trifle? The smallest sum would be very welcome.” Puchberg sent him ten gulden.
Despite his physical condition Mozart undertook a desperate expedient to support his family. Leopold II was to be crowned at Frankfurt October 9, 1790. Seventeen court musicians were in the Emperor’s retinue, but Mozart was not invited. He went nevertheless, accompanied by Franz Hofer, his violinist brother-in-law. To defray the expense he pawned the family’s silver plate. At Frankfurt on October 15 he played and conducted his Piano Concerto in D (K. 537), which he had composed three years before, but which the whim of history has named the “Coronation Concerto”—hardly among his best. “It was a splendid success,” he wrote to his wife, “from the point of view of honor and glory, but a failure as far as money was concerned.”95 He returned to Vienna having earned little more than his expenses. In November he moved to cheaper lodgings at Rauhensteingasse 70, where he was to die.
X. REQUIEM: 1791
He was kept alive for another year by three commissions coming in crowded succession. In May, 1791, Emanuel Schikaneder, who produced German operas and plays in a suburban theater, offered him the sketch of a libretto about a magic flute, and appealed to his brother Mason to provide the music. Mozart agreed. When Constanze, pregnant once more, went to Baden-bei-Wien in June, he accepted Schikaneder’s invitation to spend his days in a garden house near the theater, where he could compose Die Zauberflöte under the manager’s prodding. In the evenings he joined Schikaneder in the night life of the town. “Folly and dissipation,” Jahn tells us, “were the inevitable accompaniments of such an existence, and these soon reached the public ear, … covering his name for several months with an amount of obloquy beyond what he deserved.”96 Amid these relaxations Mozart found time to drive to Baden (eleven miles from Vienna) to visit his wife, who on July 26 gave birth to Wolfgang Mozart II.
In that month a request came from an anonymous stranger, offering a hundred ducats for a Requiem Mass to be secretly composed and to be transmitted to him without any public acknowledgment of its authorship. Mozart turned from the merriment of The Magic Flute to the theme of death, when, in August, he received a commission from Prague for an opera, La clemenza di Tito, to be performed there at the approaching coronation of Leopold II as king of Bohemia. He had barely a month to set Metastasio’s old libretto to new music. He worked at it in shaky coaches and noisy inns while journeying to Prague with his wife. The opera was sung on September 6 to mild applause. Mozart had tears in his eyes as he left the one city that had befriended him, and as he realized that the Emperor had witnessed his failure. His only consolations were the two hundred ducats’ fee and the later news that the repetition of the opera at Prague on September 30 was a complete success.
On that day he conducted from the piano the première of Die Zauberflöte. The story was in part a fairy tale, in part an exaltation of Masonic initiation ritual. Mozart gave his best art to the composition, though he kept most of the arias to a simple melodic line congenial to his middle-class audience. He lavished coloratura pyrotechnics on the Queen of the Night, but privately he laughed at coloratura singing as “cut-up noodles.”97 The March of the Priests, opening the second act, is Masonic music; the aria of the high priest, “In diesen heiligen Hallen”—“In these holy halls we know nothing of revenge, and love for their fellow men is the guiding rule of the initiated”—is the claim of Freemasonry to have restored that brotherhood of man which Christianity had once preached. (Goethe compared The Magic Flute to Part II of Faust, which also preached brotherhood; and, himself a Mason, he spoke of the opera as having “a higher meaning which will not escape the initiated.”98 The first performance had an uncertain success, and the critics were shocked by the mixture of fugues and fun;99 soon, however, The Magic Flute became the most popular of Mozart’s operas, and of all operas before Wagner and Verdi; it was repeated a hundred times within fourteen months of its première.
This last triumph came when Mozart already felt the hand of death touching him. As if to accentuate the irony, a group of Hungarian nobles now assured him an annual subscript
ion of a thousand florins, and an Amsterdam publisher offered him a still larger sum for the exclusive right to print some of his work. In September he received an invitation from Ponte to come to London; he replied: “I would gladly follow your advice, but how can I? … My condition tells me that my hour strikes; I am about to give up my life. The end has come before I could prove my talent. Yet life was beautiful.”100
In his final months he gave his failing strength to the Requiem. For several weeks he worked at it feverishly. When his wife sought to turn him to less gloomy concerns he told her, “I am writing this Requiem for myself; it will serve for my funeral service.”101 He composed the Kyrie and parts of the Dies Irae, the Tuba Mirum, the Rex Tremendae, the Recordare, the Confutatis, the Lacrimosa, the Domine, and the Hostias; these fragments were left unrevised, and reveal the disordered state of a mind facing collapse. Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed the Requiem remarkably well.
In November Mozart’s hands and feet began to swell painfully, and partial paralysis set in. He had to take to his bed. On those evenings when The Magic Flute was performed he laid his watch beside him and followed each act in imagination, sometimes humming the arias. On his last day he asked for the score of the Requiem; he sang the alto part, Mme. Schack sang the soprano, Franz Hofer the tenor, Herr Gerl the bass; when they came to the Lacrimosa, Mozart wept. He predicted that he would die that night. A priest administered the last sacrament. Toward evening Mozart lost consciousness, but shortly after midnight he opened his eyes; then he turned his face to the wall, and soon suffered no more (December 5, 1791).
Neither his wife nor his friends could give him a fitting funeral. The body was blessed in St. Stephen’s Church on December 6, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Mark’s. No grave had been bought; the corpse was lowered into a common vault made to receive fifteen or twenty paupers. No cross or stone marked the place, and when, a few days later, the widow came there to pray, no one could tell her the spot that covered Mozart’s remains.
BOOK IV
ISLAM AND THE SLAVIC EAST
1715-96
CHAPTER XVI
Islam
1715-96
I. THE TURKS
IN the eighteenth century Christianity was caught between Voltaire and Mohammed—between the Enlightenment and Islam. Though the Moslem world had lost military power since Sobieski’s repulse of the Turks from Vienna in 1683, it still dominated Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, the Crimea, South Russia, Bessarabia, Moldavia, Wallachia (Romania), Bulgaria, Serbia (Yugoslavia), Montenegro, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Greece, Crete, the Aegean Isles, and Turkey. All these except Persia were part of the immense empire of the OttomanTurks. On the Dalmatian coast they touched the Adriatic and faced the Papal States; on the Bosporus they controlled the sole naval outlet from the Black Sea, and could at will block the Russians from the Mediterranean.
Crossing from Hungarian territory into Moslem lands, one would at first note little difference between Christian and Mohammedan civilization. Here too the simple and pious poor tilled the soil under the overlordship of the clever and skeptical rich. But beyond the Bosporus the economic landscape changed: hardly fifteen per cent of the terrain had come under cultivation; the rest was desert, or mountains permitting only mining or pasturage; there the characteristic figure was the Bedouin, black and parched with the sun, and wrapping himself complexly against the sand and the heat. The coastal cities or incidental towns hummed with trade and handicrafts, but life seemed more leisurely than in Christian centers; women stayed at home, or walked in stately dignity under their burdens and behind their veils, and the men moved unhurried along the streets. Industry was nearly all manual, and the craftsman’s shop was a frontal annex to his home; he smoked and chatted as he worked, and sometimes shared his coffee (qahveh) and his pipe with a lingering customer.
By and large the common Turk was so satisfied with his civilization that he had not for centuries tolerated any significant change. As in Roman Catholic doctrine, tradition was as sacred as sacred scripture. Religion was more powerful and pervasive in Islam than in Christendom; the Koran was the law as well as the gospel, and the theologians were the official interpreters of the law. The pilgrimage to Mecca annually led its moving drama over the desert and along the dusty roads. But in the upper classes the rationalist heresies voiced by the eighth-century Mutazilites, and continued through the Age of Faith by Moslem poets and philosophers, received a wide and secret assent. From Constantinople in 1719 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reported:
The effendis (that is to say, the learned) … have no more faith in the inspiration of Mohammed than in the infallibility of the pope. They make a frank profession of deism among themselves, or to those they can trust, and never speak of their law [the dictates of the Koran and the traditions] but as a politic institution, fit now to be observed by wise men, however at first introduced by politicians and enthusiasts.1
The Sunni and Shi‘a sects divided Islam, as Catholicism and Protestantism divided Western Christianity; and in the eighteenth century a new sect was founded by Mohammad ibn-Abd-al-Wahab, a sheik of the Nejd—that central plateau which we now know as Saudi Arabia. The Wahabites were the Puritans of Islam: they condemned the worship of saints, destroyed the tombs and shrines of saints and martyrs, denounced the wearing of silk and the use of tobacco, and defended the right of each individual to interpret the Koran for himself.2 In all the sects superstitions were popular; religious impostors and bogus miracles found ready credence; and by most Moslems the realm of magic was considered as real as the world of sand and sun.3
Education was dominated by the clergy, who held that good citizens or loyal tribesthen could be more surely made by disciplining character than by liberating intellect. The clergy had won the battle against the scientists, philosophers, and historians who had prospered in medieval Islam; astronomy had relapsed into astrology, chemistry into alchemy, medicine into magic, history into myth. But in many Moslems a wordless wisdom took the place of education and erudition. As the wise and eloquent Doughty wrote: “The Arabs and Turks, whose books are men’s faces, … and whose glosses are the common saws and thousand old sapient proverbs of their oriental world, touch near the truth of human things. They are old men in policy in their youth, and have little later to unlearn.”4 Wortley Montagu, in a letter of 1717, assured Addison that “the men of consideration among the Turks appear in their conversation as civilized as any I have met with in Italy.”5 Wisdom has no nationality.
Poets have always abounded in Islam. The awesome deserts, the encompassing sky, and the infinity of stars on cloudless nights stirred the imagination, as well as religious faith, with the sense of mystery, and the blood idealized with impeded desire the charms that women wisely enhanced with concealment and modesty. In 1774 Sir William Jones, in Commentaries on Arabic Poetry, revealed to alert minds in Western Europe the popularity, elegance, and passion of poetry in Islam. Greatest of Ottoman poets in the eighteenth century was Nedim, who sang in the time of Sultan Ahmed III (1703-30):
Love distraught, my heart and soul are gone for naught, . . .
All my patience and endurance spent. . . .
Once I bared her lovely bosom, whereupon did calm and peace
Forth from my breast take flight. . . .
Paynim [pagan] mole, paynim tresses, paynim eyes, . . .
All her cruel beauty’s kingdom forms a heathenness, I swear.
Kisses on her neck and kisses on her bosom promised she.
Woe is me, for now the Paynim rues the troth she pledged while-ere.
Such the winsome grace wherewith she showed her locks from ‘neath her fez;
Whatsoever wight beheld her, gazed bewildered then and there. . . .
Ruthless, ‘tis for thee that all men weep and wail in drear despair. . . .
Sweeter than all the perfumes, brighter than all dyes, thy dainty frame;
One would deem some fragrant rose had in her bosom nurtur
ed thee. . . .
Holding in one hand a rose, in one a cup, thou comest, sweet;
Ah, I know not which of these—rose, cup, or thee—to take to me.
Lo, there springs a jetting fountain from the Stream of Life, methought,
When thou madest me that lovely lissom shape of thine to see.6
Women had to take what advantage they could of their lissom shapes, for once their lilies and roses faded they were lost in the recesses of the harim. This term was applied not only to the wives and concubines of the husband but to all the females of his household. Seclusion was still their lot in the eighteenth century; they might go out, but (after 1754) they had then to veil all but their alluring eyes, and no male but father, brother, husband and son might enter their apartment. Even after death this separation of the sexes was supposed to remain: saved women would have their own Elysium, apart from the men; saved men would go to another Paradise, where they would be entertained by houris—heavenly nymphs periodically revirginized. Adultery by women was severely punished, and was rare; Arabs swore by “the honor of my women” as their securest oath.7 Lady Mary reported that the Turkish women whom she had been allowed to meet did not resent their separation from the men. Some of them she thought as fair in face and figure, and as refined in manners, as “our most celebrated English beauties.”8 Admitted to one of the many public baths, she discovered that women could be beautiful even without clothing. She was especially charmed by the ladies in a bathing establishment at Adrianople. They invited her to undress and bathe with them; she begged to be excused. “They being all so earnest in persuading me, I was at last forced to open my shirt and show them my stays; which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my power to open it; which contrivance they attributed to my husband”; and one of them remarked, “See how cruelly the poor English ladies are used by their husbands.”9