1756-1777.
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY TRAVELS.
Mozart’s Parentage—Early Development of his Genius—Character as a Child—Travels at the age of Six—Received by Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette—Mozart and Goethe—Meeting with Madame de Pompadour—The London Bach’s Opinion of Young Mozart—Asked to Write an Opera by Joseph II—Assailed by Envy—Padre Martini—Notes Down the Celebrated Miserere from Ear—The Pope Confers on him the Order of the Golden Spurs—A Member of the Philharmonic Society of Bologna—First Love—Personal Appearance—Troubles with the Archbishop.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART was born in the city of Salzburg, on the 27th of January, 1756. His father, Leopold, was descended from a family of the middle class of the then free imperial city of Augsburg, and had come to Salzburg, the domicile of a prince-bishop and the seat of an excellent university, to study law. But as he had to support himself by teaching music, even while pursuing his legal studies, he was soon compelled to enter entirely into the service of others. He became valet de chambre to a canon of the Roman church, Count Thurm; afterwards court-musician and then capellmeister[1] to the archbishop. He had married in 1747 a young girl, educated in a neighboring convent. Himself and wife were considered the handsomest couple in Salzburg in their day. Of seven children born to them, they lost all but two, Maria Anna, known by the pet-name of Nannerl, and our Wolfgang, most frequently called Wolferl. Anna was about five years older than Wolfgang, and both gave evidence, from the time they were little children, of an extraordinary talent for music.
An old friend of the family tells us how, from the moment young Mozart had begun to give himself to music, he cared neither to see nor hear anything else. Even his childish games and plays did not interest him unless accompanied by music. “Whenever,” says our informant, “we carried our toys from one room to another, the one of us who had nothing to carry was always required to play, or sing a march,” ... and further: “He [Mozart] grew so extremely attached to me because I kept him company and entered into his childish humors, that he frequently asked me ten times in a day, if I loved him; and when I sometimes said no, only in fun, the tears instantly glistened his eyes, his little heart was so kind and tender.”
We learn from the same source that he manifested no pride or awe, yet he never wished to play except before great connoisseurs in music; and to induce him to do so it was sometimes necessary to deceive him as to the musical acquirements of his hearers. He learned every task that his father gave him, and put his soul so entirely into whatever he was doing that he forgot all else for the time being, not excepting even his music. Even as a child, he was full of fire and vivacity, and were it not for the excellent training he received from his father, who was very strict with him, and of a serious turn of mind, he might have become one of the wildest of youths, so sensitive was he to the allurements of pleasure of every kind, the innocence or danger of which he was not yet able to discover.
When only five years of age he wrote some music in his Uebungsbuch or Exercise-book, which is yet to be seen in the Mozarteum[2] in Salzburg; also some little minuets; and, on one occasion, his father and the friend of the family mentioned above, surprised him engaged on the composition of a concerto so difficult that no one in the world could have played it. His ear was so acute, and his memory for music so good from the time he was a child, that once when playing his little violin, he remembered that the Buttergeige, the “butter-violin,” so-called from the extreme smoothness of its tones, was tuned one-eighth of a tone lower than his own. On account of this great acuteness of hearing, he could not, at that age, bear the sound of the trumpet; and when notwithstanding his father once put his endurance of it to the test, he was taken with violent spasms.
His readiness and skill in music soon became so great that he was able to play almost everything at sight. His little sister also had made very extraordinary progress in music at a very early age, and the father in 1762, when the children were respectively six and ten years of age, began to travel with them, to show, as he said, these “wonders of God” to the world.
The first place they went to was Munich, then as now the real capital of Southern Germany, and after that to Vienna. Maria Theresa and her consort were very fond of music. They received the children with genuine German cordiality, and little Wolfgang without any more ado, leaped into the lap of the Empress and kissed her; just as he had told the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, who had helped him from the slippery floor: “You are good and I’ll marry you.” The youngest son of Maria Theresa, the handsome and amiable grand-duke, Maximilian, was of the same age as young Mozart, and always remained his friend, as he was, subsequently, the patron of Beethoven. The picture of Mozart and his little sister dressed in the clothes of the imperial children hangs on the walls of the Mozarteum; his animated eyes and her budding beauty have an incomparable charm.
He now, in his sixth year, learned to play the violin, and his father neglected nothing to give him, in every way, the best musical instruction. For he was himself an excellent composer, and had written a “violin method” which had a great reputation in its day, and was honored with translation. Mozart’s education in music continued even during the journey. Instruction in playing the organ was soon added to instruction in the use of the violin. The next scene of the marvels of the little ones was Southern Germany. This was in the summer of 1763. In Heidelberg, Mozart’s little feet flew about on the pedals with such rapidity that the clergyman in charge made a record of it in writing on the organ itself. Goethe heard him in Frankfort, and thus obtained a standard by which to measure all subsequent men of musical genius whom he chanced to meet. In his declining years, Goethe listened to a child similarly gifted, Felix Mendelssohn. In Paris, also, the court was very gracious to the children; but when little Wolfgang, with the ingenuousness of childhood, tried to put his arms about the neck of the painted Madame de Pompadour as he had about that of Maria Theresa, he was met with a rebuff, and, wounded to the quick, he cried: “Who is that person there that won’t kiss me? The empress kissed me.” He always thought a great deal of Maria Theresa, and his heart, through life, had a nook in it for her, and was ever loyal to the imperial family, as we shall see further on.
The princesses were all the more amiable in consequence, and did not trouble themselves about etiquette. Every one wondered to hear so young a child tell every note the moment he heard it; compose without the aid of a piano, and play accompaniments to songs by ear only. No wonder that he was greeted everywhere with the loudest applause, and that the receipts were so flatteringly large.
The reception extended to them in London in 1764, was still kinder; for the royal couple themselves were German, and Handel had already laid a lasting foundation there for good music; while the French music of the time seemed to our travelers to be exceedingly cold and empty—“a continual and wearisome bawling.” Their stay in England was, on this account, a very long one, and the father made use of the opportunity he found there to give an excellent Italian singer as an instructor to Wolfgang, who soon mastered the Italian style of melody, which was then the prevailing one. It was in London that Mozart wrote his first symphonies.
Their journey back in 1765, led them over Holland, where both children were taken very dangerously ill, and the father’s strength for the difficult task of preserving and educating such a boy as Wolfgang, was put to the severest test. Even during the Lenten season, he was allowed, in Amsterdam, to exhibit “for the glory of God” the wonderful gifts of his son, and he finally returned in the fall of 1766, after an absence of more than two years, to Salzburg, laden not so much with money as with the fame of his little ones.
The journey taken thus early in life was of great advantage to Mozart himself. He learned to understand men—for his father drew his attention to everything; he even made the boy keep a diary—he got rid of the shyness natural to children, and acquired a knowledge of life. He had listened to the music of the different nations, and thus discovered the manner in which each heart understands that language of the human soul called melody. The refined tone of the higher classes at this time was also of great advantage to his art. The magnificent landscape scenery of his native place had awakened his natural sense of the beautiful; its beautiful situation, its numerous churches and palaces, had further developed that same aesthetic sense; and now the varied impressions received from life and art during these travels, so extensive for one so young, were one of the principal causes why Mozart’s music acquired so early that something so directly attractive, so harmoniously beautiful and so universally intelligible, which characterizes it. But this phase of his music was fully developed only by his repeated long sojourns in that land of beauty itself, in which Mozart spent his incipient youth, in Italy.
Mozart’s father, indeed, did not remain long in Salzburg. Salzburg was no place for him. And must not the boy always have felt keenly the impulse to display his artistic power before the world? Had not the London Bach, a son of the great Leipzig cantor, Sebastian Bach, whose influence on Mozart we shall hear of further on, said of him that many a capellmeister had died without knowing what this boy knew even now? The marriage of an archduke brought the family, in 1768, to Vienna once more, the first place they lived in after leaving Salzburg. Here the father saw clearly, for the first time, that Italy and Italy alone was the proper training-school for this young genius. The Emperor Joseph had, indeed, confided to him the task of writing an Italian opera—it was the La Finta Semplice, “Simulated Simplicity”—and the twelve-year-old boy himself directed a solemn mass at the consecration of a church, a performance which made so deep an impression on his mind, that twenty years after he used to tell of the sublime effect of his church on his mind. A German operetta, Bastien and Bastienne, was honored with a private performance. But this first Italian opera was the occasion of Mozart’s experiencing the malicious envy of his fellow-musicians, which, it is said, contributed so much, later, to make his life wretched and to bring it to an early close.
His father writes:
“Thus, indeed, have people to scuffle their way through. If a man has no talent, his condition is unfortunate enough; if he has talent, he is persecuted by envy, and that in proportion to his skill.” Young Mozart’s enemies and enviers had cunning enough to prevent the performance of his work, and the father was now doubly intent on exhibiting his son’s talent where, as the latter himself admitted, he felt that he was best understood, and where he had won the highest fame in his youth.
Italy is the mother country of music and was, besides, at this time, the Eldorado of composers. The Church had nurtured music. With the Church it came into Germany. From Germany it subsequently returned enriched. It reached its first memorable and classical expression in the Roman Palestrina. After his day, a worldly and even theatrical character invaded the music of the Catholic Church, of which Palestrina is the great ideal. The cause of this change was the introduction of the opera, which was due to the revival of the study of the antique, and especially of Greek tragedy.
The pure style of vocal composition was founded on the Protestant choral, and reached its highest classical expression, in modern times, in the German Sebastian Bach. His contemporary and countryman, Handel, on the other hand, remained, by way of preference, in the region of opera; and, after he had achieved great triumphs in it in foreign countries, he rose to the summit of his greatness, in the spiritual drama, the oratorio. The world at this time loved the theatrical; and its chief seat, so far as the opera was concerned, was the country which had given birth to music. As, in its day, Italy had the greatest composers, it had now, to say the least, the greatest and most celebrated singers, and with a single victory here one entered the lists with all educated Europe. “Then up and go there,” the father must have said to himself, when he saw that his son’s talent for composition was not recognized in Germany as much as it deserved to be recognized even then, and the superior excellence of his performances denied there when it was admitted everywhere else.
We need not here enter into the details of this journey. The youthful artist continued to work wonders similar to those which we have already related. And on one occasion, in Naples, the boy was even obliged to remove a ring from his finger, because his wizard-like art was ascribed by the people to his wearing it. We must here confine ourselves to tracing the course of development of this extraordinary genius, and to showing what were the influences that made him such.
At the end of the year 1769, that is, when Mozart was nearly fourteen years of age, we find him and his father journeying through the Tyrol to the land of milder breezes and sweet melodies. Everywhere the same unbounded admiration of his talent. In Vienna, the two—who now traveled unaccompanied by the mother and sister—were obliged to elbow themselves through the crowd to the choir, so great was the concourse of people. In Milan, such was the impression made by our hero, that Wolfgang was asked to compose an opera. In Italy new operas were introduced twice a year; and he was given the first opportunity to display his talent during the season preceding Christmas. The honorarium paid him was, as usual, one hundred ducats and lodging free. He received no more at a later period for his Don Giovanni. But such an amount was a large remuneration, at that time, for the young beginner.
In the execution of his task, however, he showed himself by no means a mere beginner. For when, continuing their journey—to which they could give themselves up with all the more composure as the libretto was to be sent after them—they came to Bologna and there called upon the most learned musician of his age, Padre Martini, even he could do nothing but lose himself in wonder at the power of achievement of our young master, who, as Martini said, solved problems and overcame difficulties which gave evidence both of innate genius and of the most comprehensive knowledge. Wolfgang here became acquainted with the greatest singer of his time, the sopranist, Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, and received from him as a last legacy the Italian art of bel canto; for, said he, only he who understands the art of song in its highest sense, can, in turn, properly write for song. And yet this vocalist was already in the sixties.
Florence was still governed by the Hapsburgs, and hence the best of receptions was given to our travelers there. Of the magnificent works of art in the place, the letters to his mother and sister do not say anything. But we can scarcely suppose that the Venus Anathusia and the Madonna della Sedia remained unknown to him who was alone destined to give life to Raphael and the antique, even in tones. Mozart’s own letters from Rome do not leave us in the dark on this point. He writes to his sister: “Yesterday we were in the Capitol and saw many beautiful things, and there are, indeed, many beautiful things there and elsewhere in Rome”—Laocoon and Ariadne, the Apollo Belvedere and the head of Olympian Jove. And then the many churches, and among them a St. Peter’s! But naturally enough, the music remained the most remarkable thing of all to the two musicians; and then there was the Sistine Chapel, in which alone something of the art of the great Romans still lived and ruled. Of Palestrina we hear nothing in this connection, but Wolfgang went so far as to make a copy of Allegri. “You know,” the father writes, “that the Miserere sung here is esteemed so highly that the musicians of the chapel are forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to copy any part of it, or to give a part of it to anybody. But we have it. Wolfgang has written it down from ear. However, we do not wish this secret to come into anyone’s else possession, lest we should incur the censure of the Church directly or indirectly.” The Mozarts, indeed, attached some importance to their faith in the Catholic Church. To them it was intrinsic truth. And thus Wolfgang’s youthful soul was forever consecrated, for the reception of the highest feelings of the human breast, by the peculiarly sacred songs sung during this holy week in Rome—feelings which, even in compositions not religious, he, in the course of his life, clothed in sounds so beautiful and enrapturing. In after years, he was wont to tell of the deep impression made on him by these incidents in his religious experience. “How I felt there! how I felt there!” he exclaimed, over and over again, in speaking of them.
We have heard already of Naples. The father had written from Rome that the further they got into Italy the greater was the wonder of the people. The intoxicating beauty of nature mirrored in the Bay of Naples, could not but make a deep impression on the artist, who was himself destined one day to give expression in so magical a manner and in sounds so entrancing, to the charm and intoxication of the serenest joys of life. “Naples is beautiful,” he writes curtly but characteristically to his sister. Yet it may be that the immense solemnity of Rome was more in harmony with Mozart’s German nature. They were there soon again, and this time they had an opportunity to see what can be seen only in Rome—the Pope. Delighted with young Wolfgang’s playing, the Holy Father—it was the great Ganganelli, Clement XIV—granted him a private audience, and conferred on him the order of the Golden Spurs, that same order which afterwards gave us a chevalier Gluck. Mozart did not, at first, make much of this honor, and his father wrote: “You may imagine how I laugh to hear him called all the time Signor Cavaliere.” Later, however, they knew when a proper occasion presented itself, how to turn such a distinction to advantage.
The end now aimed at by young Mozart and his father was fame and success. A step towards the attainment of these was Wolfgang’s nomination as a member of the celebrated Philharmonic Society of Bologna, which invested him, in Italy, with the title of Cavaliere Filarmonico. And when father and son came to Milan again in 1770, he had, so far as his rank as an artist and his position in life were concerned, attained success. At fourteen, he was Signor Cavaliere—Chevalier Mozart. The journey itself had done much to bring his artistic views to maturity. His technical ability was very plainly now supplemented by the pure sense of the beautiful, the result of the highest intellectual labor. He had surmounted all difficulties, and especially those purely natural ones by which the rough, lack-lustre north, with its inhospitable climate, only too frequently keeps Germans back in art. From this time forward the divine rays of ideal beauty beam brightly from Mozart’s melody, and they never became extinct. In Mozart’s art there was now no room for perfection of form. His art could be added to only by adding to the life that was in it; and we shall soon again meet with traces of that personal contact with life which matures man’s capabilities and develops them. Let us first look at the earliest decided successes of the composer, successes which, for a long time, bound him to the “land where the citron blooms.”
The Italian opera which then ruled supreme everywhere, was far from being such a dramatic performance on the stage as rivets the attention. The taste of the Italians which revelled in beautiful songs, soon made these the chief feature in the entire opera. Interesting or thrilling incidents from history, and still more the great myths of antiquity and of the middle ages, were so adapted for the occasion that a love affair always played the principal part in them, and the whole culminated in the effusions of happy or heart-broken lovers. There was here, certainly, a rich opportunity for an art like music. As it was, almost the entire opera was made up of arias, and the person who wrote the prettiest arias, of course, carried off the palm. These arias had like a garment to be made to order, so to speak, for the several singers, and to fit them exactly, if they were to produce their full effect: the finest note of the prima donna, or a tenor, had to be at the same time the finest part of the air, and vice versa. Thus prepared, the opera was sung, and went the round of one-half of Europe. We have seen this, in this century, in the case of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and we see it in our own day, in the case of Verdi.
It was at this point that Mozart modestly entered on the musical inheritance from the past. A youth of fourteen will certainly not change or attack what more than a century and the whole educated world has approved and admired. But how he took up into his work the several features of the “fabulous history” of the old, unfortunate king of Pontus, Mithridates, and united them into glowing music, we learn from the critic of the day, after the performance of the piece on the 26th of December, 1770, in the following words: “The young Capellmeister studies the beautiful in nature, and then gives us back that beauty adorned with the rarest musical grace.” Envy and intrigue were, indeed, not wanting here, either. But Wolfgang was equal to the task of taking care of himself, and even of adapting himself to the whims of the singers. “If this duet does not give satisfaction, he can re-arrange it,” the first sopranist exclaimed; and people were very much surprised to see the tone of the home opera, its chiaroscuro, as they called the beautiful discordance of the different pieces with one another, so accurately hit by a young beginner. Cries of Evviva il maestro! Evviva il maestrino! were heard on every side; the work had to be repeated twenty times, and it was immediately ordered for five other stages, among them that of Mozart’s own beloved capital—all of which, however, according to the custom of the time, turned only to the advantage of the copyist.
The object of the first trip to Rome, in 1770, was thus attained. Wolfgang had not spared himself, and his father had to keep a watchful eye on him. Uninterrupted labor and earnest occupation had given so serious a turn to his mind—and he was always naturally reflective—that his father thought well to invite some friends to his home while Wolfgang was composing. He asked others to write him jocose letters, in order to divert him. The musical genius and the inner man were ripening side by side. At the age of fifteen he had the maturity of a full-grown youth.
Even now the chords of his nature, which lent to his melodies that most fervid of tones which we think we hear even when only Mozart’s name is mentioned, those tender feelings of the heart which made him above all the minstrel of love, are heard in the soft vibrations of his music. In his hearty attachment to his mother and sister, we see the development of what the family-friend already mentioned has told us of his innate craving for affection when only four years old. His little postscripts to his father’s letters about this journey are delightful reading. He never forgets the dear ones at home. He inquires about each one in turn; and even the “weighty and lofty thoughts of Italy,” where he was frequently “distracted by mere business,” do not keep him from doing so. He tells his mamma he kisses her hands a billion times, and Nannerl that he kisses her “cheek, nose, mouth and neck.” On post-days, he goes on, “everything tastes better,” and only the abundance of his bantering in these notes preserved in the Mozarteum can give any idea of his overflowing tenderness for his sweet sister.
But it was not long before he discovered beauty in others than his sister. His young eye caught sight of the prime donne and pretty ballet-dancers of Italy; but, with the fair ones, he had formed a more intimate personal acquaintance in Salzburg, where his sister had friends of her own sex. “I had a great deal to say to my sister, but what I had to say is known only to God and myself,” he wrote from Italy; and shortly after, still more suggestively: “What you have promised me, my dear (—— you know you are my dear one), don’t fail to do, I pray you. I shall surely be obliged to you.” This was during his second journey to Rome, when his short and restful stay in his beautiful home allowed his heart, so to speak, repose, and afforded him leisure to busy himself with other matters than music. “I implore thee, let me know about the other one, where there is no other one; you understand me, and I need say no more,” he adds, evidently desiring to cover something up, and what could there be for him to cover up but a tender feeling of the heart? Later he adds: “I hope that you have been to see the young lady; you know which one I mean. I beg of you when you see her to pay her a compliment for me.” There certainly is nothing more easy of explanation than that the young artist was attracted by the fair sex, whose admiration for him was so unbounded. Nothing so charms woman as fame and greatness, especially when fame and greatness have an intellectual foundation; and was not the young cavaliere filarmonico famed beyond all men living? His mere appearance, indeed, made no very powerful impression at the first sight. He was small of stature. According to the account given of himself, in one of his letters, he was “brought up on water.” His head seemed to be too large for his body, the result of an abundance of beautiful flaxen hair; and only his natural ease and grace of movement made him—especially in the costume of the past century—irresistibly charming, an effect which was heightened by the thoughtful expression of his beautiful greyish-blue eyes. But when this excitable young man, in his velvet coat, knee-breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes, galoon-hat and sword, was thought of as the celebrated maestro, whose fame was only beginning; or when he was heard play and seen producing his own compositions, the impression was changed, and the place of mere physical attraction was taken by the unspeakable charm of the mind and heart, by the spell-binding, mysterious force of creative genius. But woman loves the power of genius, and surrenders her entire self to it. A kiss from pretty lips when he had written a new minuet, he considered a beautiful “present,” and kisses do not come singly.
But now little time remained to him for the half-innocent, half-sensuous idyls of the eighteenth century. He was again engaged for the first season of the year, 1773, in Milan, this time for a consideration of one hundred and thirty ducats, and in the meantime, he received another commission, probably in consequence of the reputation of “Mithridates,” to help celebrate the marriage of a son of the Empress Maria Theresa, in Milan, by means of a serenata, i. e., a kind of little opera. This was in the summer of 1771, and in August both father and son were in Milan again. The subject-matter was Ascanius in Alba. But flattery for the noble couple chiefly filled this theatrical sketch, a fact which by no means kept Wolfgang from doing his best. He writes: “Over us is a violinist, under us another, next us a singing master, and in the only remaining room a hautboyist, all of which makes composing very pleasant, and suggests many ideas to one.” These ideas must have been of great consequence to him at this time, because his rival, the composer of the principal opera, was Hasse, the then most celebrated composer in Italy, the “dear Saxon,” as the Italians called him, a man who had presented them with so many hundred operas that he could not count them himself. The libretto did not reach him until the end of August, and the festivities were to take place in October. “And then my fingers pain me so from writing,” he says, in an exculpatory way, after four weeks, to Nannerl. There were now wanting only two arias. Thanks to the elasticity of his nature, he preserved his health; but the fact that he “was always sleepy” shows how very hard he had worked, nay, that he had worked too hard.
He did not fail of success. The noble couple set an example to the public by their approbation, and the father writes: “I am sorry; Wolfgang’s serenata has so badly beaten Hasse’s opera that I cannot describe it.” And it is said that the latter, with a delightful absence of envy, exclaimed: “That boy will send us all to oblivion.” How true was the prophecy, and how many, in all ages will not this same Mozart eclipse by his refulgence!
The play was, contrary to custom, repeated several times, and on this occasion a diamond snuff-box from the archduke was added to the honorarium usually paid.
In December, 1771, we find the Mozarts at home once more, but enjoying the pleasant prospect of new laurels in Italy. It was well that there was such a prospect before them; for the death of Archbishop Sigismund placed a new master over them. His successor, Jerome, whose election was received with feelings anything but joyful, was destined to leave a sad page in Mozart’s life.
The citizens of Salzburg entrusted their celebrated young fellow-townsman with the composition of the music for the occasion of their demonstration of respect to the new archbishop. It was the “Dream of Scipio.” Besides this, there was little in Salzburg to be done. In the capacity of concertmeister to the archbishop, to which position he was appointed after his success in Italy, he had to write the music for the court and for the cathedral. In those days people were ever craving for something new in their favorite art; and while Mozart’s masses, yielding to the theatrical tendency of the time, like those of Haydn, have more of a pleasant play in them than of church gravity, and are therefore of less importance to posterity, the composition of symphonies carried him into a department which, created by Haydn, was destined, through Mozart, to lead to that mighty phenomenon, Beethoven.
The form of the sonata, which is the basis of the symphony, also had originated in consequence of a more and more poetico-musical development from the suite which introduced a series of dances, the allemande being the first. And as the dance itself is a direct imitation of natural human movement and passion, the sonata and symphony, together with the quartette, became more and more, the expression of the personal experience and feelings of the composer, who, the more deeply and grandly he conceived the world, was able to give of it, in his music, a more beautiful and ravishing picture—an art which afterwards reached in Beethoven’s symphonies a height unsurpassed as yet.
What poetry and prose were for the opera, the joy and the sorrow of life felt by the composer himself were for the piano and the orchestra—the impulse and poetical bait to musical composition. We shall soon find Mozart’s life reflected in his art, and it is this that makes the biography of the man so peculiarly attractive and so full of meaning.
In November, 1772, we find our two travelers in Italy again. The opera of Silla had to be written for Milan. And now, what the father desired above all, was to see his son anchored there in a permanent position. He first made some arrangements in Florence. He could not feel at home in Salzburg after the appointment of the new archbishop. The latter was, indeed, friendly to intellectual progress, and opposed to the gloomy rule of the priesthood, but, at the same time, he was himself too much of a tyrant to be able to bless his people by diffusing prosperity among them, or to win their love. His mode of government could not be acceptable to the independent spirit of the father any more than to the liberty-loving genius of the son; and this all the more, as he had no real feeling for, or understanding of art, or of the sovereign rule of genius. And so it happened, that the father, even during his journey, found it hard to banish what he called his “Salzburg thoughts” from his mind. He was disappointed because he accomplished nothing in Florence, and this added to his trouble.
But he now met with compensation in Milan. In his letters, Wolfgang says: “It is impossible for me to write much, because, in the first place, I know nothing to write about, and in the second place, I do not know what I am writing; for all my thoughts are with my opera, and I am in danger of writing a whole aria to you instead of a letter.” The performers were very well satisfied this time too, and what an effect the work must have produced is attested by a mishap which occurred to the principal male voice. He had unwittingly provoked the prima donna to a fit of laughter, which confused him so much that he began to gesticulate himself in a most unmannerly way. The audience, whose patience had been taxed to the utmost by being obliged to wait for the archduke, who lived in the city, caught the contagion, and began to laugh likewise. Spite of this, the opera proved victoriously successful the first time it was performed, and was repeated more than twenty times.
This closed Mozart’s real work for the Italians. He would certainly have been called upon to do much more in that country, but the Archbishop of Salzburg refused him leave of absence, saying that he “did not want to see his people going begging about the country.” And yet Mozart himself said subsequently: “When I think it all over, I have nowhere received so many honors, and nowhere been so highly esteemed as in Italy. A man has good credit indeed when he has written operas in Italy.” And, in reality, it was due to his success in Italy that Mozart was, two years after this, called to Munich to write the music for another Italian opera. This was the charming opera buffa (comic opera), the La finta giardiniera; and here Jerome could not refuse his permission; his relations, personal and official with the neighboring elector’s court, did not allow him to do so.
The elector Maximilian III. was a kindly, good-hearted gentleman, and very fond of music himself. He had long before manifested a great deal of interest in Mozart, and knew as well as anybody what success the young composer had met with in the world. Mozart saw himself loved and honored, and the excellence of the opera in Munich was a great incentive to induce him to do his very best in the performance of the task now given him. In it we find early traces of those living streams of pleasant feelings which flowed from Mozart’s heart. The words of the opera had been frequently set to music; but the people said that no more beautiful music had ever been heard than that of Mozart’s opera, in which all the arias, without exception, were beautiful. “Thank God,” he wrote on the 14th of January, “my opera was put upon the stage yesterday, and came off so well that I find it impossible to describe the bustle to mamma. In the first place, the theater was so very crowded that a great many people had to go back home. Every aria was followed by a frightful hubbub and cries of viva maestro! Her highness the electoress and the electoress dowager, who were just opposite me, saluted me with a bravo! When the opera was out, there was nothing to be heard but the clapping of hands and cries of bravo! interrupted by pauses of silence, only to be taken up again, and again. After this, I went with papa into a room, through which the elector had to go, where I kissed the hands of his highness, of the electoress and of the nobility, all of whom were very gracious to me. Early this morning his grace, the prince-bishop of Chiemsee, sent a special messenger here to congratulate me on the fact that the opera had proved so unprecedently successful.” The prince-bishop, who had been a canon of the cathedral in Salzburg, and loved Mozart very much, had, it is very likely, procured for him the commission from Munich, and hence his enhanced interest in Mozart, and the peculiar satisfaction he felt in his great success.
Even the archbishop himself was an unwilling witness of the triumph of his concertmeister, to whom he showed so little respect. He had not, indeed, seen the opera himself, because it was not performed during his visit, which was a mere visit on business connected with his office; but, as the father writes, he could not help hearing Mozart’s praise, and accepting many solemn congratulations on having secured the services of so great a genius, from all the elector’s household and from the nobility. This confused him so much that he could answer only with a nod of the head and a shrug of the shoulders. We shall soon see that all this did not redound to Mozart’s welfare and advantage.
An operetta, the Il Re Pastore, “The Royal Shepherd,” written in honor of the sojourn of the Archduke Maximilian Francis in Salzburg, in the same year, 1775, must also be classed among the youthful works of our artist. He had now passed his twentieth year. He had learned all there was to be learned, and proved it in many ways by what he had achieved in practice. His feelings urged him to display his powers before the world. He felt himself a man with
“Muth sich in die Welt zu wagen,
Der Erde Weh, der Erde Glück zu tragen.”
His boyhood was over; the youth was growing into the man, and the man craves to try his strength—craves action.
This craving brought our artist, for the first time, into a personal struggle with life; and as he was compelled henceforth to carry on that struggle alone, experience quickly strengthened his moral power; and we find him no longer simply the divinely favored artist, but the strong, noble-minded man as well.