Mozart: A Life in Letters: A Life in Letters Read online

  MOZART

  A LIFE IN LETTERS

  WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART, who was born at Salzburg, Austria, on 27 January 1756, is ranked among the most famous, and the most popular, of all composers. A child prodigy, he toured western Europe between 1763 and 1771, with later trips to Vienna, Munich, Mannheim and Paris. After his break with the Archbishop of Salzburg in 1781, Mozart took up permanent residence in Vienna, where he became a successful freelance composer and performer. The author of masses, symphonies, serenades, concertos, operas, string quartets and other works in virtually every genre of the time, he died prematurely at the age of thirty-five, on 5 December 1791.

  CLIFF EISEN teaches at King’s College London. He has published widely on late eighteenth-century music and on Mozart in particular, including the Mozart article for the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001). In addition, he has edited two volumes of Mozart Studies (1991 and 1997) as well as the Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia (2005 with Simon P. Keefe). His current research projects include a monograph on Mozart and biography, an annotated translation of Hermann Abert’s classic W. A. Mozart (1919–23) and a study of the musicals of Frank Loesser.

  STEWART SPENCER was born in Yorkshire and studied Modern Languages at Oxford. He taught Medieval German Literature at the University of London and has subsequently worked as a translator. He is the editor, with Barry Millington, of Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (1987), Wagner in Performance (1992) and Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (1993). He has translated books on Wagner, Liszt, Mozart and Bach and has published numerous articles on Wagner.

  MOZART

  A Life in Letters

  Edited by CLIFF EISEN

  Translated by STEWART SPENCER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Penguin Classics 2006

  1

  Chronology, introduction and editorial material copyright © Cliff Eisen, 2006

  Translation copyright © Stewart Spencer, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor and translator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

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  ISBN: 978-0-14-190288-3

  Contents

  Chronology

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  List of Important People

  Map

  A Life in Letters

  List of Letters

  Index of Principal Correspondents

  Index of Mozart’s Works by Genre

  Index of Mozart’s Works by Köchel Number

  General Index

  Chronology

  1756 27 January Mozart is born in Salzburg.

  1761 Learns to play short keyboard pieces and composes his first work, the andante Kia.

  1762 His father Leopold Mozart takes him and his elder sister, Nannerl, to perform for Elector Maximilian III Joseph of Bavaria in Munich, and for Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna.

  1763—6 The whole family tours modern-day Germany, France, England, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland, and the children perform for King Louis XV of France and King George III of Britain, among others. Composes several sonatas for keyboard and violin, symphonies andarias.

  1767—8 Travels to Vienna where he composes symphonies, an opera buffa, La finta semplice, and a singspiel, Bastien und Bastienne.

  1769 Appointedunpaidthirdconcertmaster in the Salzburg court music establishment.

  1769—73 Travels three times to Italy with Leopold; composes the operas Mitridate, re di Ponto(1770) and Lucio Silla(1772) and two serenatas, Ascanio in Alba (1771) and Il sogno di Scipione (1772), several symphonies and his first string quartets (K80 and K155– 160). Visits Vienna between mid-July and mid-September 1773; composes six string quartets (K168–173).

  1774 Travels to Munich in December for the premiere of his opera, La finta giardiniera.

  1775—6 Remains in Salzburg; composes several serenades, four violin concertos, three piano concertos, divertimentos for strings and horns and the serenata, Il re pastore.

  1777 Composes the piano concerto K271; resigns from Salzburg court service and travels with his mother, Maria Anna, to Munich, Augsburg and Mannheim, where he falls in love with the singer Aloysia Weber.

  1778—9 Visits Paris where he composes several well-received works but fails to make significant professional headway; his mother dies on 3 July 1778. Returns unwillingly to Salzburg where he has been reappointed to court service as court and cathedral organist with increased pay. Is rejected by Aloysia. Composes the ‘Paris’ symphony K297, the concerto for flute and harp K299, the keyboard and violin sonatas K301—306 and the keyboard sonata K310.

  1779—80 In Salzburg; composes symphonies, serenades, masses and other church works. Receives commission to write an opera seria for the Munich court theatre.

  1781 Idomeneo premieredin Munich on 29 January; called to Vienna, where he has a falling out with Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo and is finally dismissed from court service on 8 June. Establishes himself as a freelance performer and composer; commissioned to write a German opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and publishes six keyboard and violin sonatas (K296, K376—380).

  1782 Die Entführung performed on 16 July; marries Constanze Weber, Aloysia’s sister, on 4 August. Compositions include three piano concertos (K413—415), the ‘Haffner’ symphony K385 and a string quartet (K387).

  1783 First child, Raimund Leopold, born but dies two months later; visits Salzburg with Constanze (July—October). Composes ‘Linz’ symphony K425, keyboardsonatas K330—332, two string quartets (K421, 428).

  1784 Gives numerous subscription and private concerts; joins Masonic lodge. Second child, Carl Thomas, is born. Composes six piano concertos (K449—459), quintet for piano and winds K452, keyboard sonatas K333 andK457, and st ring quartet K458 (‘Hunt’).

  1785 Visit of Leopold Mozart to Vienna (February—April); Mozart gives successful concert series and performs at the Burgtheater. Compositions include the serenade for winds K361, the string quartets K464 and 465, three piano concertos (K466, 467 and 482), several songs, a piano qu
artet (K478) and a violin sonata (K481).

  1786 Opera Le nozze di Figaro premieredat the Burgtheater on 1 May. Third child, Johann Thomas Leopold, is born and dies. Other compositions include three piano concertos (K488, 491 and 503); the ‘Prague’ symphony K504, the ‘Skittles’ trio K498, the ‘Hoffmeister’ quartet K499 and the concert aria Ch’io mi scordi di te K505.

  1787 Travels twice to Prague for performances of Le nozze di Figaro (January) and the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni (October). Leopold Mozart dies on 28 May. Other works include the string quintets K515 and 516, Eine kleine Nachtmusik K525, the violin sonata K526 and several songs. Fourth child, Theresia Constanzia Adelheid, is born; she survives six months.

  1788 Don Giovanni premieredin Vienna (7 May); faced with financial problems, Mozart begins to borrow money from his Masonic brother, Michael Puchberg. Composes three symphonies (K543, 550 and 551 ‘Jupiter’), three piano trios (K542, 548 and 564) and the divertimento for string trio K563.

  1789 Travels to Dresden, Leipzig, Potsdam and Berlin with artistic but not financial success. Composes two keyboardsonatas (K570, 576), a string quartet (K575) and the clarinet quintet K581. Fifth child, Anna Maria, is born and dies.

  1790 Opera Così fan tutte premieredon 26 January in Vienna; in October, Mozart attends the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in Frankfurt. Other compositions include the string quartets K589 and 590, and the string quintet K593.

  1791 Sixth child, Franz Xaver Wolfgang, is born. Mozart travels to Prague for the premiere of his opera seria, La clemenza di Tito, commissioned to celebrate the coronation of Leopold I as king of Hungary; German opera Die Zauberflöte premieres in Vienna on 30 September. During the summer begins work on a Requiem, which is left incomplete on his death. Other works include the motet Ave verum corpus (K618) and the clarinet concerto K622. Falls ill in November and dies suddenly, probably from rheumatic inflammatory fever, on 5 December at the age of thirty-five.

  Introduction

  Two hundred and fifty years on, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – child prodigy, performer par excellence, universally admired composer, tragic Romantic artist and cultural icon – continues to fascinate musicians and music lovers alike. Along with Wagner, Mozart is probably the most written about composer in history. And more than any other composer, he has been featured in documentaries, movies, novels, television commercials and pop culture generally. Everyone seems to know something about Mozart, even if it is only the story of his final illness and early death at the age of thirty-five.

  As a cultural icon, however, Mozart is also subject to the whims and fancies of any particular time and any particular place – the story that is told of his life is as much a reflection of its teller as of Mozart himself. Nevertheless, all biographies of Mozart, whatever their points of view or interpretative strategies, are based on the same documentary sources: the composer’s autographs, contemporary accounts of his life and works, and a rich family correspondence, including letters not only between Wolfgang and his father Leopold, but also between Leopold and his friends in Salzburg. In fact, the Mozart family correspondence, some twelve hundred letters written between 1756 and 1791, is more extensive than that of any earlier composer, and of many later ones as well. As such, it offers a unique insight into the family dynamics, Mozart’s relationship with his father and friends and lovers, the moving death of his mother in Paris in 1778, his compositional method(particularly with regard to the operas Idomeneo and Die Entführung aus dem Serail) and the events of his everyday life. To be sure, the letters can be read in any number of ways. Yet they remain the primary source for setting the biographical record straight and they allow Mozart and his father to speak in their own voices – or rather in a variety of voices, depending on the person they were addressing and the reason for writing.

  In a single volume of this kind, it is not possible to include all of the family’s letters. And they can never tell the complete life. Not only do they refer to people and events now lost from the historical record, but there are long stretches where no correspondence survives, chiefly when the family was all together in Salzburg. A further problem of survival concerns Leopold Mozart’s letters to his son after Wolfgang had moved to Vienna in 1781: although Leopold wrote regularly, someone – presumably Mozart’s wife Constanze – later destroyed his letters, possibly because of their inflammatory content (Leopold was happy neither with Mozart’s move to the Austrian capital nor with his marriage). And after Leopold’s death in the spring of 1787, Mozart lost his primary correspondent.

  By including only extracts from Leopold’s letters, previous editions of the correspondence render it as overly Mozart-centric and give a false account of the relationship between father and son, to say nothing of the course of Mozart’s life; Leopold’s letters are here given in full (there are four minor excisions, indicated in the notes). They represent a rich and unexpected source of information concerning eighteenth-century men and manners, music and musicians. During the family’s travels in Europe, Leopold wrote frequently, and at length, to his close friend and Salzburg landlord, Johann Lorenz Hagenauer. He boasts of his son’s musical successes and comments on everything from his meetings with the great to lightning conductors and the latest Paris fashions. As someone who knew all too well the value of patronage, Leopold would unquestionably have schooled Wolfgang in the political and cultural realities of the day – a world in which German princes held absolute power within the confines of their own sovereign states, but which was beginning to be shaken by the dangerous ideas of the Enlightenment, spreading out from Paris, and in which the old dominance of Habsburg Austria within the German-speaking world was being challenged by the rising military power of Prussia.

  Above all, however, the Mozart family correspondence straddles the line between history and the late eighteenth-century individual. And because it is incomplete, it straddles the line between fact and creative narrative – it is the reader who fills in the gaps and draws conclusions about Mozart’s motivations and relationships. That the story of his life unfolds in the context of a correspondence ties it conveniently close to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary traditions, particularly the epistolary novel (see below) – as when, for example, the twenty-one-year-old Mozart, fleeing Salzburg to make his own way in the world, and falling in love with a charming young singer, is pursued across Europe by his father’s letters, admonishing, anxious and full of (mostly) unheeded advice.

  Mozart’s life

  Salzburg, where Mozart was born on 27 January 1756, was an independent church-state, ruled by a prince-archbishop. It has been portrayed as something of a cultural and musical backwater, but this was not so – situated between Bavaria, Austria and Italy, the city headstrong political and intellectual ties both to Vienna and to Italy, and its mercantile connections extended throughout Germany. Musically it was a distinguished centre of both performance andcomposition.

  Mozart’s father, Leopold(b. 1719), originally from Augsburg, was a distinguished musician himself: a violinist, one of the directors of the Salzburg court music, and author of the most influential eighteenth-century violin tutor, the Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, published at Augsburg in 1756. Leopold and his wife, Maria Anna, née Pertl (b. 1720), had five children that died in infancy and two that survived: Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia (b. 1751), known as ‘Nannerl’, and Wolfgang Amadeus. 1 Mozart’s musical talents were apparent from an early age: trained by his father, he was able to play short, relatively easy keyboard works by the age of four and he composed his first allegros, andantes and minuets by the age of six. His sister, too, was a child prodigy, at least as far as performance was concerned, and in 1762 Leopold – genuinely convinced that his children were miracles and that it was his duty to exhibit them to the world – decided to take them on tour, first to Munich and then to Vienna.

  Nannerl and Wolfgang’s early successes were unprecedented and in 1763 Leopold conceiveda more ambitious plan. He took the entire family on an extend
ed musical tour through Germany, France, England, the Low Countries and Switzerland, showing off the children before the courts of Europe. By the time they returned to Salzburg three and a half years later, Mozart’s fame as a musical prodigy had spread. He not only performed, he also composed: his first works, including symphonies, arias and accompanied sonatas, were all written at this time. In 1767 and 1768 the Mozarts visited Vienna, where the children played at court for the Empress Maria Theresa, and Wolfgang was commissioned to write an opera, La finta semplice (‘The Pretend Simpleton’). And at the very end of 1769, Mozart and his father set out on the first of three trips they made to Italy over the next three years, during which he composed two operas – Mitridate, re di Ponto and Lucio Silla – and two serenatas – Ascanio in Alba and Il sogno di Scipione. He became a member of prestigious musical academies at Verona and Bologna, wrote down the score of Allegri’s Miserere from memory after hearing it in the Sistine Chapel and was made a Knight of the Golden Spur by Pope Clement XIV.

  From 1773 to 1777 Mozart was largely based in Salzburg. He visited Vienna in 1773, where he composed the string quartets K168–173, and Munich in 1774, where he completed the opera buffa, La finta giardiniera (‘The Pretend Gardener-girl’), but for the most part he chafed under the demands of his new employer, Hieronymus Colloredo, who in 1772 had succeeded the more congenial Siegmundvon Schrattenbach as prince-archbishop of Salzburg. Although Mozart composed prolifically at the time, including masses, smaller church works, symphonies, concertos, dances and chamber music, both he and his father actively sought opportunities elsewhere. His longing for independence came to a head in 1777, and he asked for, and was given, release from court service. In September, Wolfgang and his mother set out for Munich, Mannheim and Paris in search of employment; Leopold, thinking first and foremost of the family’s security, remained in Salzburg. The trip was a disaster: Mozart was unable to secure a permanent position; he fell in love with a young singer in Mannheim, Aloysia Weber; and his mother died in Paris in July 1778. Leopold, in the meantime, had arranged for Mozart’s return to Salzburg, with increased pay anymore responsibilities at court. Rejected by Aloysia en route, Wolfgang arrived back there, unwillingly, in early 1779.