Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Mozart at the age of seven, accompanied by his father, Leopold Mozart, and his sister, Nannerl. Engraving by De La Fosse after Carmontelle (1764)
By HERBERT F. PEYSER
NEW YORK Grosset & Dunlap PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1951 by The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York
Mozart’s earthly career was so poignantly short yet so filled with incalculable achievement that the author of this booklet finds himself confronted with an impossible task. He has, consequently, preferred to outline as best he could in the space at his disposal a few successive details of a life that was amazingly crowded with incident, early triumphs, and subsequent crushing tragedies, rather than to consider (let alone evaluate) the staggering creative abundances the master bequeathed mankind.
It is scarcely necessary to disclaim for this thumbnail sketch any new slant or original illumination. If it moves any reader to renew his acquaintance with the standard biographies of the composer or, better still, to deepen his artistic enrichment by a study of modern interpretations of contemporary Mozart scholars like Alfred Einstein, and Bernhard Paumgartner, its object will be more than achieved.
Printed in the United States of America
If the Mozartean family tree was nothing like the prodigious trunk of the Bachs it was still not without striking features. There were Mozarts in South Germany as far back as the end of the sixteenth century; and as remotely as the thirteenth the name stood on a document in Cologne. To be sure, various spellings of Mozart existed in those distant times. It appeared as “Mosshard,” “Motzhart,” “Mozert,” and in still other variants. Bernhard Paumgartner, Director of the Salzburg Mozarteum, thinks it derived from the old German root mod , or muot , from which came the word Mut (courage). Be this as it may, German “Mozarts” were anything but exceptional a couple of hundred years before Leopold Mozart or his son, Wolfgang, came into the picture. In Augsburg there was an Anton Mozart who painted landscapes “in the manner of Breughel.” Another Mozart from the same town, one Johann Michael, was a sculptor, who in 1687 moved to Vienna and became an Austrian citizen.