1781-1787.
THE ELOPEMENT FROM THE SERAGLIO—FIGARO—DON GIOVANNI.
Opinions on the Idomeneo—Tired of Salzburg—Goes to Vienna—The Archbishop Again—Mozart Treated by him with Indignity—Paternal Reproaches—Assailed by Slander—He Leaves Salzburg—Experiences in Vienna—Austrian Society—The German Stage—The Emperor Expresses a wish that Mozart might Write a New Opera—Mozart’s Love for Constance Weber—Description of Constance—Performance of the New Opera—Mozart’s Marriage—The Emperor’s Opinion of Mozart’s Music—Mozart’s Interest in the Figaro—Particulars Relating to its Composition—Its Success—Mozart’s Poverty—Mozart in Bohemia—His Popularity in Prague—Meaning of the Don Giovanni—Richard Wagner on Mozart.
WE are told that Mozart, even in his later years, prized the Idomeneo very greatly, and it is certain that connoisseurs have always entertained a very high opinion of its music. It combines the freshness of youth, great force and vitality, with a great variety in invention, and has all the characteristics of art. It is easy to conceive that the consciousness of being the possessor of so much power, especially while he was engaged on the work itself, made Mozart’s bosom swell, and that in such moments the memory of the narrowness and “chicanery” of Salzburg must have been exceedingly mortifying to him. “Out! out into the wide world and into the air of freedom!”—he must have heard now ringing in his ears as he had four years before. And had not Vienna, at that time the capital of Germany, intellectually advanced, and had not the Emperor Joseph, established a national opera there?
As early as in December 1780, he had written to inquire how it stood about his leave of absence. He told his father that he was in Salzburg only to please him, and that, most assuredly, if it depended on him, he would have scorned the place; for, he adds, “upon my honor, the prince and the proud nobility become more intolerable to me every day.” It would now, he said, be easy for him to get on in Munich without the protection of the great, and it brought the tears to his eyes when he thought of the state of things in Salzburg. Yet he could stay longer than his leave of absence allowed him; for the archbishop remained some time in Vienna on business, and thus Mozart found leisure, after the opera was completed, to rest in Munich and to participate in the pleasures of the carnival, while otherwise his greatest diversion would have been to be with his beloved Rose and the Cannabichs.
In the midst of this youthful jollity, which seems very natural after the great strain upon the minds of all during many months, he received the archbishop’s order to repair to Vienna. This was in the middle of March, 1781. Jerome was witness of the ostentation of the princes in that city; and what reason was there why his “illustrious grace” should not cut a figure also? His eight handsome roan horses were there already. The members of his household followed him, and who was there who, in the music at a feast, had a Mozart to show? Thus did our artist unexpectedly realize his wish to come to Vienna; and circumstances so had it, that he remained there.
His reception was a good one. He had indeed, as was the custom of the time, to sit at table with cooks and valets de chambre, but these he kept at a proper distance by “great gravity” and silence. Yet even now we hear that the archbishop was only giving himself airs with his attendants; for when an opportunity presented itself for Mozart to show his powers, in other noble houses, the archbishop refused him permission to do so; and still, it was only in such houses, that he could expect to meet the Emperor Joseph—a circumstance on which everything now depended. Rather did this domineering ecclesiastic do all in his power to make Mozart feel his dependence more keenly. The father did all he could to appease him, but Wolfgang felt that the archbishop used him only to tickle his own ambition; that, in all other respects, that worthy served only to hide his light. Besides he had to stand about the room like a servant. Yet Mozart tells us how, at a performance at prince Galizin’s, he had left the other musicians entirely, and how he had gone directly up to the host in the music room, and remained with him. Nothing was paid him for his compositions for the archbishop’s soirées. Mozart, indeed, helped to lend éclat to a concert for the widows of deceased musicians in the Haydn Society, because “all the nobility of Vienna had tormented the archbishop to permit him to do so.” But his grace would not allow him to give a concert for his own benefit, spite of the fact that he had been received so well. The hardest blow of all to our artist was the news that he would have to go back to Salzburg with the rest. He at first paid no attention to intimations of this nature, for he wanted to give a concert before he left. He had, besides, a prospect of a position in the imperial city itself. But his father at home would agree to nothing.
Mozart now writes “in natural German, because all the world should know it,” that the archbishop owed it entirely to his father that he did not lose him yesterday, for all time. He had been annoyed altogether too much at the concert yesterday. After a little, dissension broke out in earnest. “I am out of myself. My patience has been tried so long that it is at an end.” The archbishop had, even before this, called him “a low fellow,” and told him to go his way. Mozart bore it for his father’s sake. Then he was ordered suddenly to leave the house, and he went to old Madame Weber’s, and had to live at his own expense. He, therefore, did not want to go until this outlay at least was made up for.
“Well, fellow, when do you go?” snarlingly asked this prince spiritual, and he then proceeded, in a single breath, to tell him that he was a dissipated fellow, that no one used him so badly, and that he would stop his pay. We scarcely believe our ears when we hear a prince-bishop call our artist a scamp, a young blackguard, an idiot! Wolfgang’s blood became too hot at last, and he asked whether his illustrious grace was not satisfied with him.
“What? Threats? You idiot! There’s the door! I will have nothing more to do with such a miserable villain.”
“Nor I with you.”
“Then go!”
Such was the dialogue between a prince and an artist of the past century! It tells us something of its culture and civilization. Mozart’s account of this scene concludes: “I will hear no more of Salzburg. I hate the archbishop even to madness.”
But this was not the worst. “I did not know,” says Mozart, “that I was a valet de chambre; that overcame me entirely; and my father should be glad that he has not a man dishonored for his son.” But now sycophantic flunkies began to busy themselves with the affair. They knew that the archbishop did not like to lose an artist whom such efforts had been made, before his eyes, to retain in Vienna. The master of the household, Count Arco, therefore, did everything that in him lay to quiet the matter. He refused, “from lack of courage and a love of adulation,” to accept Mozart’s petition for dismissal. But when the latter insisted on it, with a brutality not unworthy of his master, Arco threw the noble artist out the door—with a kick!
After his personal audience with the archbishop, Mozart’s blood boiled; he trembled from head to foot and reeled on the street like a drunken man. Now he assures us that, when he meets the count, he will pay him back the compliment he received from him. In the ante-chamber he did not, like Arco himself, wish “to lose his respect for the prince’s apartments,” but then he was determined that “the hungry donkey should get an answer from him that he would feel,” even if it were twenty years before a suitable occasion presented itself to give it. And when his father recoiled at the boldness of such an attempt, our young artist gave expression to a sentiment which lifted him high above all that environed him, and stamps him one of the noblest representatives of human nature. We have chosen that sentiment as the motto of this his biography: “The heart is man’s title to nobility!”
More painful than all these insults to the manly honor of our young artist were the heart-aches caused him by the very person who should have understood him best, by his own father.
The latter had been obliged to write to him: “Do not allow yourself to be misled by flattery. Be on your guard.” Now reproach was added to mistrust, and Wolfgang was accused of endangering his father’s subsistence, in his old age. He compared Wolfgang to Aloysia, who had scarcely secured a good position in life than she joined her fortunes to those of a comedian—the celebrated Joseph Lange—and neglected her own people. He even went so far as to demand that his son should withdraw his petition, adding that he was in honor bound to do so. There was not in all of this a single trait by which Mozart could recognize his father. He could, indeed, he said, recognize “a father, but not the best, the most loving of fathers, the father solicitous for his own honor and the honor of his children,—in a word, not my father.” And he concludes: “Ask me to do anything you want, anything but that. The very thought of it makes me tremble with rage.” What he had achieved made Mozart, as an artist, manful and sure of himself; and these sufferings had a similar effect on him as a man; but, compared with the latter troubles, all that he had previously undergone was light indeed. We know how deeply and fully Wolfgang loved his father; but to understand his state of mind at this trying time, one must read the father’s own letters. He reproaches his son, even with a want of love, with being a pleasure-seeker in the great city, and with keeping company with the frivolous! The slanders of strangers and the father’s own suspicions conspired to make things worse; and in the circulation of these slanders, a pupil of the abbe Vogler, J. P. Winter, subsequently known by his Unterbrochenes Opferfest, played a leading part. The way in which Mozart repelled these slanders, lays his whole heart open before us. It was what might have been expected of one whose art was so thoroughly pure and peaceful. He says, with the utmost modesty and simplicity: “My chief fault is that, apparently, I do not act as I should act;” and in answer to all other slanders, he replies, with the most charming consciousness of self: “I need only consult my reason and my heart to do what is right and just.”
Thus was Mozart’s relations with Salzburg, which had never brought him much happiness or honor, dissolved for all time. He lost, it is true, by this dissolution, the loving confidence of his father; but painful as this loss was to him, it was not without compensation. He obtained personal freedom and conquered for himself a place in which his already highly developed individuality as an artist was at liberty to act, room for the workings of his creative genius. This and his love and marriage, which put him in possession of something which he could permanently call his own, are further decisive events in our artist’s life. We shall see their effects on his art, and, in the creation of such magnificent works as the “Elopement from the Seraglio,” “Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.” His recent personal experience had given him that insight and that inward freedom without which his towering, life-experienced style and his supreme power of depicting character are impossible.
The time and place were favorable to the production of such works. And it was not simply the oppressive feeling of the humiliating and narrowing circumstances of his position hitherto, but the joyful consciousness that, as his genius soon perceived, he was at last in the place in the world best suited to his taste, in Vienna, that this time caused him to conceive and hold fast to his desire. Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel waer!—“And though the world were full of devils!”—we may discover something of the desperate resolution which these words imply, in his struggle at this time with his dearest of fathers; a resolution generated, doubtless, by the circumstances in which he now saw himself suddenly and accidentally placed, and which were so favorable to his art, and to a becoming mode of living. He felt that he had come here to grow to his full stature; and the instinct of artistic creation, like the instinct of love, is involuntary and irresistible. The father did not understand this. He had to be won over by prospects of material success, and this success Wolfgang was able confidently to promise himself and his father. Nor was he wanting here. And if we are obliged to confess that Mozart, even in the rich city of Vienna, almost starved, and that he died before his time, the cause was, in the first place, that his genius was too great to be fully appreciated by his contemporaries and his environment, and then that he was so wrapped up in his sublime task, that the world gradually receded from him, and it became an easy matter for the envious and his enemies to rob him of the visible fruits of his success, and to limit him to the joys and sunshine of his art. His art, indeed, throve even in Vienna, far beyond what he had hoped. It was more than his contemporaries could appreciate or understand. And, indeed, where would we be to-day without Mozart? As well as Goethe, he touched the purest, the ultimate feeling of beauty in art, and opened to our view the innermost and deepest depths of the human soul. It was more than all else, Vienna and Austria that helped him to do this.
During the period, beginning with 1780, Austria had recovered from the effects of the wounds it received in the Seven Years’ War. The people were well-to-do, and the rich nobles of the eastern provinces, the Esterhazys, Schwarzenbergs, Thuns and Kinskys left immense amounts of money in the capital. The state of society was not yet disturbed. The nobility and middle class lived in harmony with one another. Above all and dearly loved by all, sat throned, the Emperor Joseph II., an ideal Austrian, whose like had not been seen since the time of Maximilian I. The emperor Joseph was, so to speak, the counterpart, both in disposition and education, of old Fritz (Frederick the Great), who was the ablest representative at that time of practical German energy and intelligence. This it was that gave the Austrian, and above all the Viennese, disposition that peculiar character from which sprang a style of art which had no predecessor and no counterpart that could be called its equal save in Raphael and the antique—German chamber music. Haydn’s, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s quartets alone sufficed to make this Viennese period, from 1775 to 1825, a stretch of fifty years, forever memorable. But besides, there was the instrumental music of this brilliant musical triad whom Gluck had preceded.
Life at this time in Vienna was overflowing with a warm sensuousness, unpolluted by the coarseness of vice. Men gave themselves up unconstrained to their emotions. This itself is the most natural and most fertile soil for productions of the mind, intended, primarily, to operate on the senses, and through the senses to speak to our heart of hearts and to our mind of minds. It is the most fitting soil for art. And hence, we find here the first and most indispensable of all conditions precedent to the full bloom of music. Life in the Austrian capital, sunk apparently in sensuousness, had, like a reflection of the ever brightening and warming sun, in its depths, that German, joyous good-nature, that deutsche Gemueth, that leveling peace, and that beautiful disposition which allow every living creature to do what pleases him best and go his own way. Added to this was the high degree of education which distinguished Vienna at the time, and which was influenced, in part, by direct contact with the period of the highest Italian culture, the renaissance. It had noble houses, wealthy and refined families of the middle class and of the learned, and above all, its emperor—if not in music, in all else the most nobly cultured! We have only to think of the other capitals at the time, Paris, London, and even Berlin, to be convinced that a Gluck, a Haydn, a Mozart, or a Beethoven, could never have thrived in any of them. They thrived in Vienna; and the last two artists asserted that it was in Vienna only that they could have thrived, that is developed that art, the germ’s of which they felt themselves to possess as a talent confided to them.
We may inquire, more particularly now, how it stood with music and the theatre in those days. Many of the great houses had music of their own; the wealthiest princes had not unfrequently their private orchestra; other families string-quartets or the piano; and the latter was, as Ph. E. Bach says, intended for music that went direct to the heart, and not simply for children to practice on. No such golden age of music had been seen since the days of the North German School for organists, which had produced that eighth wonder of the world, Sebastian Bach; and Beethoven recalled it, with a feeling of melancholy, when, with the great wars of the Revolution a desolate period began, in which men’s souls and with them music, the soul’s own art, were struck dumb. Philip Emanuel Bach, the younger son of John Sebastian Bach, it was, who had led music out of the stage which had religion for its center, and opened to it by his sonatas fuer Kenner und Liebhaber, the domain of purely human thought and feeling. “He is the parent, we the children,” said Mozart, speaking of himself, and J. Haydn. Haydn also made a similar admission.
It was these two men indeed, who, so to speak, gave expression to the whole of human life in this unrestrained language of music, and who, together with Beethoven, opened the hearts of their age and of humanity, by their sonatas, symphonies, and quartets. This explains why Mozart was able to write that the ladies detained him at the piano a whole hour after the concert, adding: “I think I should be sitting there still, if I had not stolen away!”
Again, he writes to his sister: “My only entertainment is the theater. I wish you could see a tragedy played here. I know no theater in which all kinds of plays are very well produced, unless it be here.” Shroeder no doubt contributed largely to produce this effect. Then Shakespeare’s plays had begun to attract attention in Germany, and German dramatic literature to blossom forth in Lessing and Goethe. No wonder that “Figaro” and “Don Giovanni,” now began to engage his attention. We have already spoken of a national German theater. It is not to be supposed that the Emperor Joseph II. sympathized with the Germans in music. His early impressions caused him to favor the Italian school, and, cultivated as was his talent for music, it was not great enough to enable him to overcome them. But he was compelled to assist the nation in its endeavors in this sphere, since Frederick the Great had anticipated him in almost every other. Thus Vienna, together with Mannheim and Weimar, constituted the glorious triad, the creators of German music and of a German stage; and the full significance of German endeavors, in this direction, may be inferred from the path of light beginning with Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” followed by Beethoven’s Symphonies, and ending with the “Ring of the Niebelungen” in Bayreuth in 1876. Verily a cycle of art, of which Germany may well be proud!
Mozart came just in time for the German operatic stage. Gluck had stopped composing; his victory was a decided one; he had almost reached his zenith; he was approaching his seventieth year. True, his pupil, Salieri, was the “idol of the emperor;” but he was an Italian, and the remaining Viennese composers of the time were of little or no importance. Haydn, properly speaking, did not busy himself in this sphere of the drama, and besides, he lived the greatest part of the time in Eisenstadt with prince Esterhazy. Northern Germany had no longer anything to show of those things which mark an epoch in history; and, what is more its preponderantly “learned” or formal music would not have pleased the taste of the Viennese. What then could be more natural than that they should open their arms to the young maestro who, in a new field, had just given evidence of his transcendent power? And, indeed, shortly after Mozart’s arrival in Vienna, the Emperor himself had given expression to a wish that he might write a German opera of this kind; and we are informed that after Count Rosenberg, the manager of the theatre, had heard the Idomeneo at a private rehearsal, he ordered the writing of a libretto for Mozart. This was “Belmonte and Constance,” or the “Elopement from the Seraglio.” Mozart tells how he was so cheered by this, that he hastened to his writing table with the greatest eagerness and sat at it with the greatest pleasure. He finished, at this first sitting, one of the arias of the Belmonte, and that the most beautiful of them all—the O wie aengstlich, o wie feurig!
The whole matter was postponed for a time, but to no disadvantage; for, in the meanwhile, Mozart experienced things which gave him that wonderful depth of coloring and that golden, mature sweetness which, besides himself and Raphael, scarcely another possesses—love moved him to the innermost depths of his soul. This love had as much influence on his life as on his music. It led to that most decided union of human hearts, marriage; and hence we have here to consider this important bit of the life of our artist, in his case as in all others, made up of anguish and bliss.
We have seen already that when Mozart was compelled to leave the archbishop’s palace, he hastened to the house of the Webers. Of his removal thither he wrote: “There I have my pretty room, am with obliging people ready to assist me in everything, when necessary.” After the death of her husband, Madame Weber supported herself by renting rooms, so that her daughters might remain with her. She lived in the Auge Gottes, which is still standing in the Petersplatz. The father’s suspicions were immediately awakened; and Mozart writes in answer to his expression of them: “In the case of Aloysia [Lange] I was a fool, but what may not a man become when he is in love!” For the present, Mozart was concerned only with finding comfortable lodging quarters and people who might take a personal interest in his father and in the devouring anger and sorrow which possessed him, on account of the course pursued towards him by the archbishop; and this interest he found here. And, indeed, now that he had to compose incessantly in order to eke out a livelihood, he needed a “clear head and a quiet mind.” His father, however, insisted on his leaving the Webers, and in the fall, he finally consented to quit them. But he greatly deceived himself when he said that he left them only on account of “the gossip of the people,” and wanted to know why he should be so recklessly taken to task, because he had moved into the house of the Webers, as if that meant that he was going to marry the daughter. The tender care which the third daughter Constance took of him and the disposition she manifested to do him every service in her power, generated in him the desire to care for and serve her, in like manner.
We cannot here enter into the minute details of the origin and tenacity of this beautiful affair of the heart; and we, therefore, confine ourselves to that which is most essential.
Constance Weber was born in 1764. She was now in her eighteenth year, and eight years younger than Mozart. She had been one of his pupils in Munich. He gave her lessons on the piano then, and now he was teaching her vocal music as well. Thus Mozart had, on both occasions, an inducement other than his feelings, to bring him to the house of the Webers. Music at first threw him and Constance involuntarily together; but the language of the soul was destined sooner or later to create a more intimate bond between them. In the evening they had their little chats; they were joined by friends of Constance’s own sex; and Mozart, in a letter written long after he was married, tells how they played “hide and seek” with them. Then again, a great many circumstances conspired to decide him to make choice of a partner for life. There were his years, and his temperament which inclined him to a quiet mode of life. From his earliest youth, he had never been taught economy, and as a consequence now had many unnecessary expenses. He felt lonely and desolate, when, tired by the exhausting labors of the day, he was not with the Webers. When he left their house in September, he was like a man who has left his own comfortable carriage for a stage-coach. And when, with that instinct which belongs only to our deepest feelings, he became gradually conscious that she was “the right one,” he frankly laid before his father the necessity of his marrying and his settled purpose to marry.
He writes in December, 1781: “But who is the object of my love? Do not be horrified, I pray you. Surely, not one of the Weber girls? Yes, one of the Weber girls, but not Josepha, not Sophia but Constance, the middle one.” And then he gives us a description which must have been somewhat exaggerated and colored by his feeling at the time. In no family, he tells us, had he found such inequality. The eldest daughter was lazy and coarse, and a little too knowing. Her tall sister was false and a coquette; and yet he had written in the spring that he had some liking for her. The youngest, Sophia, of whom we shall have something to say further on, was still too young to be much. She was nothing more than a good but giddy creature. He adds concerning her: “May God preserve her from temptation!” Next comes a description of his dear Constance. He says of her: “The middle daughter, my dear good Constance, is a martyr among them, and, on that very account, perhaps, the best-hearted, cleverest, in a word, the best in every way, among them. She takes care of everything in the house, and yet can please nobody.” He could if he desired, write whole pages of the ugly scenes in that house. It was these very scenes which had made the two so dear to one another. They tested their mutual affection.
And now he describes Constance herself. She was not ugly, but then she was far from being beautiful. All her beauty consisted in two small black eyes, and a fine figure. She had no wit, but common sense enough to enable her to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother. That she was not inclined to be lavish in her expenditures, was by no means true; but she was accustomed to being plain; for the mother used the little she had on the other two. She could make all her own things, understood housekeeping, and had the best heart in the world. “I love her,” he says, “and she loves me with all her heart. Tell me now, could I desire a better wife?” The best commentary to these words is furnished by the pieces which were already finished for “Belmonte and Constance,” but above all by the O wie aengstlich, o wie feurig,[6] which dates from the summer of 1781, and the aria Ach ich liebte, war so gluecklich,[7] the text of which is extant in Constance’s own handwriting.
But the painful lot of separation was destined at least to threaten him. First the father, next the daughters’ guardian, then the mother, and lastly his loved one’s own stubborn willfulness—the willfulness of youth—menaced him with the destruction of his happiness. His life’s happiness was indeed at stake here. This is very evident from Mozart’s letters written during this time of trouble; and no one can know Mozart thoroughly who does not follow him through this his heart trial.
Turn we now to the artistic results of this new existence in Vienna. Of course much piano and chamber music had been produced. The craving for something new continued great in all Viennese circles. And who was better prepared to satisfy that craving than Mozart whose fame and even support now depended on the reception he met with in the imperial city? Everything turned on the opera given him to compose, and fortunately its composition was resumed in the following spring, that of 1782. And spite of all the vexation he had to endure from his own father and the mother of his betrothed, he was ready with it, in time. To accomplish his task, he had frequently to write until one o’clock at night and to be up again at six in the morning. And although he could not devote to it all his time, all his strength, all his mind, all the powers of his fancy nor such minute labor as he had to the Idomeneo, he was able to tell his father that he felt exceedingly well pleased with his opera. He generally followed only his own feelings, but on this occasion he had as much regard as possible for the taste of the Viennese people; and their taste in such matters inclined to subdued hilarity and to the comic. These therefore, are the prevailing characteristics of the work. Of Belmonte’s O wie aengstlich he writes himself: You can see the trembling, the shaking. You can see how the swelling bosom heaves. It is expressed by a crescendo. You can hear the whispering and sobbing in the first violins with sordines and a flute in unison. The O wie der aengstlich was everybody’s favorite aria as well as his own. And yet the rondo Wenn der Freude Thraenen fliessen,[8] was still more enrapturing. It contains also that celebrated passage:
“Ach Constanze dich zu sehen
Dich voll Wonne und Entzuecken
An dies treue Herz zu druecken.”
in which German music for the first time fully learned the language of manly love and devotion, just as it first had found the musical sublimity of religious feeling in the chorale. Through Belmonte, the character of the “German youth,” was, so to speak, fixed in music for all time. Think only of Beethoven’s Florestan, and Wagner’s Walther von Stolzing.
But the character of the stupid, coarse and wicked master of the Harem, Osmin, thus comically and powerfully drawn, but with all the nobility of style as to its form, was new also. He is no other than the “starched stripling,” the son of a puffed-up Augsburg bourgeois. We have here a picture of the brutal haughtiness of the Salzburg harem, with its model steward of the kitchen. But the vengeance of the artist is noble, and produces an ennobling effect on whole generations. We must read his letters to see how fully he was conscious of the comic even in Osmin’s aria: Drum beim Barte des Propheten, and that all folly and excess are their own punishment, and become an object of derision. We find here in this sketch the entire material from which, two generations later, the “Dragon” of the Niebelungenring was built. The heavy rhythm in the very first song, the rudeness of the entire movement, the almost roaring “trallalara”—are the expression of the untamed savagery of brute nature, the grandeur of coarseness in miniature.
We now turn to the performance. This took place on the 12th of July, 1782. It seemed as if the applause of the crowded house would never cease. The audience was surprised, charmed, and carried away by the beauty and euphony of the music—music full to overflowing with life, and which did not sacrifice nobility of form to truth of portraiture, nor depend for its seductive power on glittering dialogue. Performance followed performance in quick succession, and this spite of the fact that intrigue in theatrical circles labored strenuously to prevent its repetition. The Italians, with Salieri at their head, looked with displeasure at the rise of the German operatic stage. It disturbed them, and threatened to do away with their exclusive rule. They went so far even as to entice the performers away so that the presentation of the opera became very difficult; whereupon Mozart writes: “I was in such a rage that I did not know myself.” But they could not prevent the audience’s crying bravo! and Mozart himself says: “It does one good to get such applause.” The “Elopement” is the first link in the unbroken chain of effects and triumphs which ends in the dramatic production of our days, confined to no one nation—a production destined, in a generation, to rule Europe more powerfully than did the Italian opera in those days, and which even now succeeded in impeding the success of this first German opera and banishing it from the stage.
This actually happened, and the emperor Joseph was weak enough to allow the Italian school to obtain the upperhand to such an extent that Mozart himself could not help joining in the chorus of those priests of Bacchus; but then he gave that chorus a beauty and fullness which it had not possessed before. This result was attained in the Figaro, of which we shall speak next.
The first thing that occupied his mind after the completion of his great task was, of course—and it was very natural that it should be so—his union with Constance. And, indeed, after the success he had met with, what reason was there why he should not venture to get married and to found a home of his own? Speaking of the work, Joseph II. had said: “Too pretty for our ears, and an infinity of notes, my dear Mozart!” To which the latter with noble frankness replied: “Just as many notes as are necessary, your majesty!” But Gluck, who was by far the highest authority in Vienna on theatrical matters, had the opera performed for himself specially, although it had been given only a few days before, and he complimented the composer very highly and invited him to dinner. This augured better for Mozart’s future than all else. He had, however, other patrons. Prince Kaunitz, known as the “Kutscher von Europa,” the Coachman of Europe, expressed great dissatisfaction with the emperor because he did not value men of talent more, and allowed them to leave the country. Among other things he told the archduke Maximilian, on one occasion when the conversation turned on Mozart, that men like him appeared in the world only once in a century, and that for that reason some effort should be made to keep them.
Mozart now brought every influence he could to bear on his father. The vexation already caused him by the girl’s mother brought it to such a pass, that he was forced to take her to his friend and patroness Frau von Waldstaedten. He writes about this time: “My heart is troubled, my brain is crazed! How can a man think or work under such circumstances?” But the father looked upon the marriage as a misfortune to him, and instead of his consent to it, he gave “only well-meant advice.” Mozart, therefore, made short work of it, and, with the assistance of his patroness, he acted the Elopement from the Auge Gottes, as he afterwards jocosely called his marriage. The baroness herself wrote to the father, smoothed over the difficulties in the way as best she could, even procured the money necessary to have the marriage contract drawn and dispensation from having the bans called in the church. The two who loved each other so well, were married on the 4th of August 1782. We must turn to Mozart himself for an account of it.
He tells us that, shortly after, the father’s consent was received. There was no one present at the marriage ceremony but the mother, the youngest sister, the guardian and two witnesses. And he adds: “The moment we were made one, my wife as well as myself began to weep, which touched every one, even the priest; and they all cried when they witnessed how our hearts were moved.” The marriage feast consisted of a supper at Frau von Waldstaedten’s, of which Mozart writes: “It was more like a prince’s than a baron’s.” A few days later, he writes: “For a considerable length of time, while we were yet single, we went together both to mass and communion, and I find that I never confessed and communicated as devoutly as by her side; and the same was the case with her. In a word, we are made for one another, and God who ordains all things, and who therefore has brought about all that has passed with us will not forsake us.” And He did not forsake them. Their marriage was blessed, truly blessed; for it had its foundation in love; and even leaving his music out of consideration, we shall hear this sweetest echo of life, the joyful notes of pure, tender love, echo as clearly through the world as the name of Mozart, himself a minstrel of love.
For an account of the cheering and touching tenacity of the love of our artist, we must refer the reader to our large work on Mozart, in which we have endeavored to give a picture or rather a history of a part of his life of which the world has entertained an entirely false idea. There is no reason why a single trait in Mozart’s character should be concealed. Its every feature is human, and even his weaknesses are amiable and readily excusable. If that highest of all moral precepts: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, be applicable anywhere, it is here. We shall have something more to say on this subject below. We now turn to Mozart’s subsequent achievements.
The emperor, indeed, valued Mozart’s talent decidé very highly, and one day summoned him to meet Clement, in single combat, that his majesty might enjoy his immense superiority over the more formal talent of that renowned Roman. But the emperor did not recognize the full value of the Elopement from the Seraglio, which he once characterized by saying of it: non era gran cosa—“it did not amount to a great deal.” This grieved Mozart sorely. He even thought of leaving Vienna in consequence of it, and of going first to France and then to England. In the meantime, the Italian musicians in Vienna, probably because of the steady and great success of the Elopement from the Seraglio, had induced the emperor to order a new and excellent opera buffa, which gave great satisfaction. Mozart wrote of it: “The basso buffo is remarkably good; his name is Benucci.” Lorenzo da Ponte, known to-day as the poet of the two greatest opere buffe of the world—our Figaro and Don Giovanni had been in Vienna for some time, and was there now. He had promised Mozart, who of course had an eye on this Italian opera, a new subject as soon as he had finished one for Salieri. Two years passed away, but Da Ponte’s word was kept at length. In the meantime, Mozart had, on the occasion of his visit to Salzburg, in the fall of 1783, begun a comic opera, “Die Gans von Cairo”—“The Goose of Cairo.” It was, however, never completed. The libretto was too bad and the goose-story too “stupid.”
To this epoch, ending with the Figaro, belongs a large abundance of purely instrumental music. The quartet for the piano with wind-instruments was ready on the 24th of March, 1784; the fantasy in C major, which was never surpassed even by Beethoven, and the Veilchen, in the spring of 1785; the piano quartet in G minor, which Mozart called the best he had written in his whole life, in July of the same year; and the six quartets, dedicated to Joseph Haydn, the creator of that species of music, in the fall of that year (1785), a year which must be considered among the most fertile of his life. And yet, even at this time, Mozart was engaged on the comic opera above named, and had begun another, the Il Sposo deluso, “The derided Bridegroom,” which he dropped, to work on the Figaro. Scarcely had this last subject begun to occupy his mind, than it took possession of it entirely. Not even to the Idomeneo and the Elopement from the Seraglio did he devote himself so entirely as to the Figaro. Into this last he put all his individuality. It was the first subject which occupied all his mind and soul, and, at the same time, afforded him an opportunity to show the real brilliancy of his wit and of his musical capacity. In this work, we have a perfect whole, a gem which shines with dazzling brightness. A few weaknesses due to its derivation from the Italian opera are cancelled by its excellences. It is a picture of life which seems indeed to belong to one particular period, but which, after all, shows us human nature itself with all its weaknesses, the butt of ridicule or the object of pity.
Count Almaviva, who, with the assistance of Figaro, the barber of Seville, had won his beautiful countess, is enamoured of her more charming waiting-maid, Susanna; and the latter is in love with Figaro. An effort must be made to cure the count of his folly. His jealousy is first excited against the page. To accomplish this, the help of a great many other persons becomes necessary; and thus we get a whole series of exquisite scenes ending in the total bewilderment of the count. The second part—the opera buffa has generally only two parts, having been originally nothing more than an “intermezzo,” between the three acts of the grave opera, opera seria—finds Susanna at the count’s, arranging a secret rendezvous with him for the evening, in the garden. The ladies had so arranged it that the countess herself, disguised as Susanna, should be in the garden at the time of the rendezvous, and that Susanna should play the countess and surprise the two by her sudden appearance on the scene. The page arrived too. The count gives him a box on the ear for his dainty attentions to the disguised countess. The page carries his grievance to the jealous Figaro, who, warned of the infidelity of his Susanna, had approached too near, notwithstanding the darkness. He makes a passionate declaration of love to the supposed countess, although she had given him to understand who she was, in the presence of the count. This of course, brought matters to a crisis. The count orders lights to be brought. Covered with shame at the discovery he makes, and lovingly forgiven by the countess, he is, as we may reasonably assume, cured of his wicked weakness for all time.
Such was the course of Mozart’s opera. It was attractive and cheerful, and for the time, not too daring. Mozart invested the female characters of the piece with the utmost goodness of heart and purity of soul. Even from the haughty giddiness of the count, he took the sting in such a way that we leave the presentation of this piece of human weakness entirely satisfied.
It was otherwise with the original work, the Le Mariage de Figaro ou la folle Journée, of the same Beaumarchais from whom Goethe borrowed his Clavigo. In it we find the vices and above all the high-handed violence of the nobility scourged with such a regardlessness of consequences, that the piece must be looked upon as a species of prelude to that historic night in August, 1789, on which every privilege of the nobility was wiped out with a stroke of the pen. It shows us at the same time the cordial gentleness and dignity of the man, Mozart, who had himself personally experienced the brutal pride of the privileged classes, and this in the most revolting manner. He, however, solved the whole problem in the kindest of humor, with a sympathy which may be seen shining through tears; explaining it by the limitations and weaknesses of human nature. This work was Mozart’s own even from the ordering of the libretto; and he it was that made choice of it.
The following are the particulars relating to its composition. Lorenzo da Ponte, of whom we made mention above, and who was at first so completely on the side of Salieri and the Italians, now turned to Mozart, in order to save his place, as libretto-poet, which he was in danger of losing. Paisiello, at this time a man of world-wide reputation, had come to Vienna, and achieved the greatest success with an opera—“King Theodore.” In order to supplant the poet of the opera, Casti, Da Ponte composed a libretto for Salieri, with which, however, Salieri made so complete a failure, that he swore he would rather have his fingers cut off, than set another verse written by Da Ponte to music. Salieri now turned to Casti and met with great success in his “Grotto of Trophonius.” Da Ponte who saw his position as poet for the theater in peril, in consequence of this, had recourse to Mozart. Thus it was the intrigue and jealousy of the Italians which eventually helped Mozart to the place which he was born to fill; and thus Salieri’s blow recoiled upon himself, for Mozart proposed Beaumarchais’ piece which had been given in Paris, in the spring of 1784, and had produced an immense sensation there. But the king had forbidden the piece in Vienna because of its “immoral style.” Besides, he had some doubts as to Mozart’s capacity. Mozart, he said, was a good composer of instrumental music, but had written an opera which did not amount to much. On this account, Mozart went quietly to work. He first composed a part of his opera, and Da Ponte then took occasion to have the emperor hear the part thus composed. His imperial majesty immediately ordered the completion of the work, and subsequently its performance.
Such is the story as it is to be gathered from the memoirs of the writer of the libretto and of one of the singers, O’Kelley, an Englishman. Both prove that the Italians now moved heaven and earth to shut Mozart out from the stage, and that, as a matter of fact, the emperor was obliged personally to interfere in his behalf, in the case of the Figaro. Moreover, just at this time he gave Mozart a token of his favor by commissioning him to write an opera called the Shauspieldirector, or “The Manager of the Theater,” for a garden-festival at Schœnbrunn. The subject of this opera is the competitive trial of two prima donnas before the manager—a comic piece which his enemies subsequently endeavored to interpret as a picture of scenes in his own life.
The Italians, indeed, had reason enough for fear. Salieri subsequently gave expression to their feelings when he said, it was well that Mozart was dead, since, if he had lived, it would soon have come to such a pass that not one of them would get as much as a mouthful of bread for his compositions. These compositions are, indeed, valueless to-day, while Mozart’s work is immortal, and while arias like Will der Herr Graf ein Taenzlein wagen, Neue Freuden neue Schmerzen and Ihr die ihr Triebe, will live as long as music lives.
We shall now hear what an effect the actual performance of the opera which took place on the first of May, 1786, had on him. The following account, which has in it something of a Mozart-like amiability, is by the singer Kelley:
“Of all the performers of the opera at that time, there is only one still living—myself. [He sang the parts of Basilio and the stuttering judge.] It must be granted that no opera was ever better performed. I have seen it at different times and in all countries, and well performed; and yet the very first performance of it compared with all others is like light to darkness. All the original players had the advantage of being instructed by the composer himself, who endeavored to transfer his own way of looking at it, and his own enthusiasm to their minds. I shall never forget his little, vivacious face glowing with the fire of genius. It is just as impossible to describe it as to paint the sunbeam.
“One evening, when I visited him, he said to me: ‘I have just finished a little duet for my opera, and you must hear it.’ He seated himself at the piano and sang it. I was carried away, and the musical world will understand my transport—when I say that it was the duet of the countess, Ulmaviva with Susanna: So lang hab’ ich geschmachtet. Nothing more exquisite had ever before been written by human being. It has often been a source of pleasure to me to think that I was the first who heard it. I can still see Mozart in his red fur hat trimmed with gold, standing on the stage with the orchestra, at the first rehearsal, beating time for the music. Benucci sang Figaro’s Dort vergiss leises Fleh’n, suesses Wimmern, with the greatest enthusiasm and all the power of his voice. I stood beside Mozart, who repeatedly cried ‘bravo! bravo! Benucci!’ in subdued tones. When Benucci came to the beautiful passage: Bei dem Donner der Karthaner, he allowed his stentorian voice to resound with all his might. The players on the stage and in the orchestra were electrified. Intoxicated with pleasure, they cried again and again, and each time louder than the preceding one, ‘bravo! bravo! maestro! Long live the great Mozart!’ Those in the orchestra beat the music stands incessantly with the bows of their violins, thus expressing their enthusiasm. It seemed as if this storm of applause would never cease. The little man returned thanks for the homage paid him by bowing repeatedly. The finale at the end of the first act was received with similar delight. Had Mozart written nothing but this piece of music, it alone would, in my humble opinion, have stamped him the greatest master of his art. Never was there a greater triumph than that of Mozart and his Figaro.”
This is the only detailed account which we possess. The father had heard enough of the astonishingly powerful intrigues caused by his son’s great talent and the respect in which he was held. Now he was able to write to his daughter, that five and even seven parts of the opera had been repeated, and that one duet had to be sung three times. The Italians induced the emperor to forbid these repetitions. But when he spoke to the singers of “this favor he had done them,” the person playing the part of Susanna frankly replied: “Do not believe that, your Majesty. They all wish to hear dacapo cried. I at least can assert that of myself.” Whereupon the emperor laughed.
But we may ask, was Mozart’s fortune now made? He was, indeed, at this time, in such pinching circumstances that he had to apply to his publisher, Hofmeister, for such petty advances as a few ducats.
The house was always full to overflowing, and the public never tired of applauding Mozart and calling him out. But care was now taken that the performances should not follow one another too frequently or too rapidly, the effect of which would soon have been an improvement in the taste of the public. Moreover, the success of a new opera, Una Cosa rara—it serves in the Don Giovanni as table-music—by Martin, the Spaniard, was enough to throw the Figaro into the shade both with the emperor and with the people, and then to displace it entirely. The success of that opera was incredible, and such as might have been expected from a public whose noblest representative, the emperor Joseph himself, told Dittersdorf the composer of Doctor and Apotheker, that he liked Martin’s light, pleasant melodies better than Mozart’s style, who drowned the voice of the singers with the noise of the accompaniment. “Happy man,” said Mozart to the young composer Gyrowetz, who went to Italy in the fall of 1785, “if I could only travel with you, how glad I would be! I must give a lesson now in order to earn a pittance.” He thought again of going to England, but no inducement to go there offered.
And yet the Figaro was attended by very immediate success even to its composer. It gave occasion to the writing of the Don Giovanni; and this leads us to the conclusion of a chapter in Mozart’s life descriptive of a portion of that life as important as it was replete with action.
The love of the Bohemians for music and their skill in the art are well known. After Mozart had made his first appearance in Vienna, the people of Prague appropriated him just as they have Richard Wagner in our own day, and the Figaro which followed the Elopement from the Seraglio was received with an amount of applause which can be compared only with that subsequently accorded to the Magic Flute. It was given almost without interruption during the whole of the winter 1786-87. The enthusiasm of the audiences was unparalleled. They never tired of hearing it. Arrangements for the piano, for wind-instruments, quartets, dances, etc., were made from it. Figaro was re-echoed in the streets, in gardens, and even the harper had to play its Dort Vergiss if he wished to be heard.
It was the orchestra and a society of “great” connoisseurs and amateurs that invited him to Prague. Nothing could have been more agreeable to Mozart than to be able to show his enemies in Vienna that he was not yet without friends in the world. His wife accompanied him. It was in January, 1787. Count Thun, one of the first chevaliers and musical connoisseurs of Prague, was his host. He gave every day a musical entertainment at his own home. He found great delight in the intercourse of loving friends of his art, friends who recognized his genius. The very first evening, a ball was given by a well-known society in Prague—the “elite of the beauties of Prague.” Writing of it himself, Mozart says: “I was delighted to see all these people moving about so truly happy, to the music of the Figaro transformed into counter dances and waltzes. Nothing is talked of here but the Figaro. The people visit no opera but the Figaro. It is nothing but Figaro!”
He was to direct the work in person, to the infinite delight of all. He himself paid a high compliment to the execution of the orchestra. They always played with great spirit. Two concerts followed. An eye-witness writes: “The theatre was never seen so full of human beings. Never was delight more universal. We did not, indeed, know what most to admire, the extraordinary composition or the extraordinary playing. The two together produced an impression that was sweet enchantment. But when Mozart, towards the close, played a number of fantasias alone, this condition was resolved into one of overflowing expressions of approval.” Mozart appeared, his countenance radiant with genuine satisfaction. He began with an enthusiasm that kept increasing from the first, and had accomplished greater things than had ever before been heard, when a loud voice cried out: “From Figaro!” whereupon Mozart played the favorite aria, Dort vergiss, improvised a dozen of the most interesting and artistic variations and closed this remarkable production amid thunders of applause.
This was certainly one of the brightest days in Mozart’s life. He had reached the climax of success. In the applause of the multitude, he saw a reflection of his own intellectual features which called that applause forth. Strange thoughts now possessed his soul. Feelings never felt before stirred within him. When a person has reached a height like that now obtained by Mozart, he is in a position to embrace in his horizon all that lies below and around him. It was the first time that his life-sparkling mind did this, but we shall see that it did so now. The incessant intrigues of his opponents and enemies—intrigues so violent and great, that, when he died, it was rumored he had been poisoned—devoured his life like a vulture, and ended it before his time. The consciousness of this first came to him with all its melancholy amid the infinite jubilation we have just described, in the midst of all this joy and recognition of his genius. He now, for the first time, had a perception of life’s close, of life’s tragic play, as reflected in Don Giovanni; and this was the result of his journey to Prague. For when, in the overflowing joy of his heart, Mozart said that he would like to write an opera expressly for such a public, the director of the theatre, Bondini, took him at his word, and closed the contract with him for the following autumn, at one hundred ducats.
Da Ponte relates that, on this occasion, he proposed the subject-matter himself. He had perceived that Mozart’s genius required a sublime and many-sided poem. And, indeed, this, like Faust, was a subject-matter on which writers of all nations had long labored. Don Giovanni represents the indestructible instinct of life, as Faust does the instinct of knowledge, showing how that instinct is ever annihilating and reproducing itself. The hero is given up to the fullest enjoyment of life regardless of consequences. Cheerfully and freely he surrenders himself to it. No shackles bind him. Opposition only adds to his strength. But this very wantonness is, at last, the cause of his ruin. This was the conclusion of the whole, extended, original Spanish play chosen by the poet of the libretto.
Don Giovanni rushes into the apartment of Donna Anna, who is waiting for the arrival of her beloved Don Octavio. Her cry for help calls out her father. A duel puts an end to his aged life. On the street, Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello, are met by the forsaken Elvira. She complains, gives expression to her grief and loads him with reproaches. He hastens on his way in the search after pleasure. Zerline, the bride of the young Marsetto is next snatched away from him by Elvira’s jealousy. But he has invited the whole company to the castle. He is again met, (everything even now foreshadows the catastrophe) by Donna Anna with Octavio. They seek his assistance on account of the murdered father. But Donna Anna, whose suspicions had been already awakened by Elvira, recognizes him as the murderer. They next appear masquerading in black at the banquet, and just as Don Giovanni is on the point of carrying away the rustic beauty, they come up to him; a struggle ensues, and master and servant are saved only by the most masculine boldness. This is the first act of this opera, which is also considered an opera buffa.
The second act finds Don Giovanni engaged in a quarrel with Leporello. Leporello does not want to serve so dangerous a master any longer. But money atones for the anxiety he endures. Elvira appears on the balcony. Don Giovanni changes clothes with Leporello and swears love to her anew. She comes down and at an artificial noise, made by Don Giovanni, flees with Leporello into the darkness. This is followed by a serenade to her waiting-maid, Leporello’s beloved. Marsetto and his peasants, armed with guns, now appear. But Don Giovanni, dressed as Leporello, succeeds in getting his friends away, and in coaxing the weapons from Marsetto himself. He then cudgels him soundly, whereupon Zerline consoles him with her promises. Elvira now looks in the dark for the supposed lover. The anxious Leporello endeavors to escape. Don Octavio and Donna Anna suddenly appear with torches and see that this time they have the servant instead of his master. The former escapes and according to agreement meets Don Giovanni in the churchyard. Their godless conversation is suddenly interrupted by a voice which says: “Presumptuous man, let those rest who have gone to sleep!” It is the statue of the Comthur. Don Giovanni haughtily forces Leporello to invite him to dinner. In the midst of the revels of the table—for which Martin’s Cosa rara furnished a part of the music, as, in Prague, did the Dort vergiss—in the midst of the most luxurious joys of life, which not even the warning voice of the loving Elvira could dispel, the stony guest approaches him, and announces his sentence to him:
“Down into the dust and pray!”
“Tell women to pray!”
“Be converted!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Now thy end has come!”
Yawning abysses open, and spirits of hell drag the dastard into the dismal grave, alive.
We know what the cheerful phase of the life of the past century was. It has found a more fiery expression in Don Giovanni than even in the Figaro. The Renaissance had introduced anew the free enjoyment of life of the ancient world. Think only what the Borgias were! From Italy and Spain it had made its way to France, when people there, for the first time, became conscious that they were “dancing on a volcano.” The feeling that there hangs a necessary and tragic sentence over the mere sensuousness of life, which is, after all, but a powerful picture of the transitoriness of all things earthly—a transitoriness which will always remain a dark enigma to the living themselves, and which therefore fills the proudest life with a certain melancholy—this feeling, which constitutes the poetic nucleus of the whole story of Don Giovanni, no one of all who have treated the subject, in an artistic manner, has fathomed or shown the power of, even in a remote degree, as did Mozart. The music, on the appearance of the stony guest, springs from the same fountain as Faust’s most beautiful and profound monologues. It is the consciousness, the heart-felt knowledge of the permanent duration of human life; and we have seen how life itself led Mozart, the artist and the man, to this heart-felt knowledge and to the feeling of something really eternal in the changes that surround us.
The following further details as to the origin of Don Giovanni are not devoid of interest.
Da Ponte’s boasting in his memoirs is indeed exquisite, and shows that, after all, he had no idea what the value of the material of Don Giovanni was. He had the three distinguished opera composers of Vienna at the time to write for, and he quieted the doubts of the emperor as to the success of such a task, by telling him that he would write during the night for Mozart and keep thinking of Dante’s Hell, in the morning for Martin, and read Petrarca, in the evening for Salieri, when Tasso should be his companion. With a bottle of tokai and some Spanish tobacco before him, and the sixteen-year-old daughter of his hostess, as his muse beside him, he says he began his work, and in two months the whole was finished.
And how about Mozart? When at the beginning of April, the libretto of this poetical judgment on human life had come into his hands, his soul was directed with redoubled energy to its serious meaning. He received at that time, the news of the grave illness of his father, which led him to give expression to some remarkable sayings about death as the “true goal of our life—man’s true, best friend.” We shall yet see what suggested this. Besides, he had shortly before lost his “best and dearest” friend, Count Hatzfeld, and now, on the 28th of May 1787, he lost his beloved father also. The quintet in G minor dates from this time. The depths of his soul open up before us here. This quintet is a prelude to Don Giovanni. At this time, too, it was that the court organist, Ludwig Beethoven of Bonn, now in his sixteenth year, paid him a visit. Mozart paid no attention to Beethoven beyond predicting his world-wide fame, so entirely was he pre-occupied with his new work. The following September, his friend Dr. Barisoni, who had attended him two years before, when he was very dangerously sick, died; and Mozart wrote under some of his verses in his album: “It is well with him!—but it will never be well with me, with us and with all who knew him so well, until we are happy enough to see him in a better world, never to part again!” His thoughts went beyond the grave and endeavored to fathom the eternal relations of things. This was the mood in which he wrote Don Giovanni. Even into the brightest light of life, creep at last the dark shadows of annihilation!
In the beginning of September 1787, composer and poet were in Prague. Constance also had traveled with them. She had to see that no disturbance from without interfered with the workings of our artist’s laborious mind. Personal intercourse with the singers increased his intellectual activity. The first singer who took the part of Don Giovanni was lauded to the deaf Beethoven, almost forty years later, as a “fiery Italian.” The female singers were not by any means remarkable. Yet it was said that our artist had been guilty, during this sojourn in Prague, of all kinds of gay adventures; and this while he was writing himself to a friend in Vienna: “Is there not an infinite difference between the pleasure of a fickle, whimsical love and the bliss of a really rational one?” In after years, his acquaintances remembered the happy hours they had spent with him in Prague. He played at nine-pins with them in a wine-garden, which is now adorned with his bust, while at the same time he wrote out his score at the table in the place. And in the evening before the performance he was exceedingly cheerful and full of jokes. Finally, Constance told him it was eleven o’clock, that the overture was not yet written. At his home, with his glass of punch, such as he liked, he proceeded to perform the task which was so irksome to him. He had the work long since finished in his head. He had even already played it as well as two other drafts of it for his friends. On this account, Constance, in order to keep his thoughts flowing, was obliged to tell stories to him. These were fairy tales, like Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp, and Cinderella. Mozart frequently laughed over them until the tears came. Fatigue, however, overpowered him at last, and his wife allowed him to sleep a few hours. Yet the copyists received their work in the early morning. He had, moreover, according to his own confession to the director of the orchestra, never allowed himself to be prevented from producing something excellent for Prague, and at the same time assured him, that he had not acquired his art easily. No one, he said, had been more industrious to acquire it than he, and it would be hard to find a celebrated master whom he had not diligently studied.
It is said that he set the celebrated Reich mir die Hand to music five times for Don Giovanni. He made the singers rehearse to him separately. He danced the minuet for them himself; for, strange to say, he once told Kelly that his achievements in dancing were more remarkable than his achievements in music. Hence, the players were full of good will and enthusiasm, the consequence of which was, that the performance this time, also, was a very good one. It took place on the 29th of October, 1787. The house was full to overflowing, and Mozart was received with a flourish of trumpets, repeated three times, and applause which it seemed would never cease. Such was the reception accorded the opera itself, that the director of the theatre wrote to the composer of the libretto, who, in the meantime had returned to Vienna: “Long live Da Ponte! Long live Mozart! Praise them, all ye directors and all ye singers! So long as they live theatres cannot fail to do a thriving business.” As usual, Mozart himself speaks modestly of “the loudest kind of applause,” and remarks to his friend in Vienna, mentioned above: “I could wish that my friends were here a single evening to share my pleasure. But probably the opera will not be performed in Vienna. I wish so. People are doing all in their power to prevail upon me to remain here a few months and write another opera; but, flattering as the invitation is, I cannot accept it.”
And now, as to the work itself. Schiller wrote to Goethe on the 29th of December, 1797, that he had always entertained the confidence that out of the opera as out of the choruses of the old feasts of Dionysos, tragedy would develop a nobler form. By the power of music, it attuned the heart to a finer susceptibility, and, in this way, it might happen that, at last, even the ideal might stealthily make its way to the stage. Goethe answered curtly: “You might have seen your hopes recently realized to a great extent in Don Giovanni. But in this respect, that piece stands entirely alone, and Mozart’s death has rendered all hope of anything like it, idle.” We owe it to Figaro and Don Giovanni, more than to anything else, that we are able to-day, to assert the contrary, and that we witness the real dramatic art which was attained to by Italy in the revival of antiquity in a truly flourishing condition about us. What Gluck required should be the characteristic points of dramatic composition is here complied with to the fullest extent; to an extent which, in many particulars, has not been yet surpassed. This perfection Mozart owed to his more accurate acquaintance with the exigencies of the drama and his supreme command of all the capabilities of music. The separate and distinct pieces of music, indeed, with their pitiful, recurring cadences, remind us continually that it is with a musician we have to do, and one whose style was a development from the Italian school. But then such is the poetical intuition of this musician that the poetical material helps him always to some new invention in his own art. And while this art seems to demand that it should be necessarily confined to its own sphere and possess definite forms, genius is able to so arrange it that the dramatic action may lose nothing that properly belongs to it, and yet that the music may not become simply “the obedient daughter of poetry.”
Richard Wagner, the great master, who, in this sphere, is Mozart’s only real successor, says: “Mozart in his operas demonstrated the inexhaustible resources of music most fully to meet every demand of the poet on its power of expression; and considering his completely original course, this glorious musician did a great deal more to discover this power of music, both in respect to truth of expression, and in the endless varieties of its causes, than Gluck and all his successors.” And in this dramatic respect, the Figaro, and Don Giovanni, unquestionably occupy the first place. Who is there that does not recognize in Keine Ruh’ bei Tag und Nacht, Wenn du fein artig bist, Treibt der Champagner, a new language in tones? We here again witness the noblest acquisitions of the Idomeneo and the Elopement from the Seraglio, in the highest possible perfection concentrated in all their energy. It is a miracle of strength and grace, of spirit and euphony, of buoyant force, of nobleness, and at the same time, of truest, deepest feeling.
Thus the Figaro and Don Giovanni, together with Germany’s classic poetry, occupy a place at the beginning of a great dramatic epoch which commenced one hundred years ago. They are a part of the life of modern humanity in general. In them Mozart first fully developed his inexhaustible genius. And thus it is that these works, like the antique and the art of the Renaissance, belong to the whole cultured world.
Mozart’s concluding labors are a condensation of all the impressions of his life, and of all the perceptions of his mind, in their very depths. The Magic Flute, especially by its purely human and ethico-religious tendency, became the starting point of the efforts of an art which was peculiarly German, but of which the universal art-creations of the present day were born. This leads us to the fifth and last chapter of our biography.