Early Life in Salzburg
What brought Leopold Mozart to Salzburg in the first place? A choirsinger in the Augsburg Church of St. Ulrich and a graduate of the Augsburger Jesuit Lyceum, he seemed to be shaping for a priestly career. He did not, at all events, follow the bookbinder’s trade like his brothers. Alfred Einstein finds it difficult to grasp why he should have preferred Salzburg to Munich or Ingolstadt for an orthodox theological education. Possibly a suggestion of the canons of St. Ulrich had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, he enrolled at the University in the town on the Salzach, July 22, 1738. There he studied philosophy, logic, and music, understood Latin, composed Passion cantatas and instrumental works, acquired some proficiency on the violin, and obtained a smattering of legal knowledge. Five years later he became fourth violinist in the court orchestra of the archbishop, but he maintained his close family connections with Augsburg and later encouraged his son not to relax these ties.
It is not quite certain exactly when he met Anna Maria Pertl, whose father was superintendent of a clerical institution at St. Gilgen on the nearby Wolfgang See. In the fall of 1772 he wrote her from Milan: “It was 25 years ago, I think, that we had the sensible idea of getting married, one which we had cherished for many years. All good things take time!” Anna Maria was her husband’s junior by a year. [Jahn] questions if she rose in any way above the average woman of her type. A good provincial, she had not the suspicious, mistrustful qualities of Leopold. She lacked intellectual depth, but she was a good wife and affectionate mother, a genuinely lovable creature, a receptacle of all the community gossip and local tittle-tattle. “She judged with an eye just as friendly as her husband’s was critical and sarcastic.” And from his mother Wolfgang inherited his gayety and some of his more incorrigible Hanswurst characteristics.
Though the Mozart couple had seven children, only two of these survived infancy—Nannerl, the fourth, and her great brother, who came last. Wolfgang was born on January 27, 1756, at eight o’clock in the evening in the house belonging to Lorenz Hagenauer, on the narrow Getreide Gasse, Salzburg. The very next morning the newcomer (whose birth came near costing the mother’s life) was carried to church and baptized with the name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus, the last in honor of his godfather, Johann Theophilus Pergmayr. Subsequently the Greek Theophilus was changed to its more euphonious Latin equivalent Amadeus. Wolfgang, like the other Mozart children, was at first nourished with water instead of milk, according to a preposterous superstition of the time. We have to thank the good health of the infant that he did not succumb, as did most of the other Mozart offspring, and even withstood later illnesses.
A sensitive and affectionate lad, Wolfgang was extraordinarily devoted to his parents, especially to his father, despite Leopold’s humorless and obstinate nature. “Next to God comes papa!” was a childhood expression of the boy. To be sure, the inflexible martinet commanded a certain respect by reason of his very genuine love for his family and his determination to rear his children according to what he considered their best interests. But he seemed unable to rise above his middle-class prejudices and, when all is said, his attitude toward his son was like that of a conventional Victorian father, who guided the footsteps of his son according to his lights, yet refused to permit him any freedom whatever for explorations of his own. All the same, Leopold could be self-sacrificing in the interest of his children and therein lay one of the saving features of an unlovable character.
The boy Mozart (1767-8)
Oil painting by Thaddeus Helbling
View of Salzburg at the end of the eighteenth century
Engraving by Anton Amon after Franz Naumann
It was one of his merits to have perceived at once the musical predispositions of his children, to have cultivated them, even to have grasped early the most advantageous ways of exploiting them. Nannerl was by no means slow in showing uncommon aptitude for music, and Leopold lost no time in embarking upon her training. Wolfgang in his cradle listened to his sister’s lessons in the adjoining room and we can only surmise what mystical instincts vibrated in the childish consciousness. He was hardly more than three when these impelled him to the keyboard, there to search for consonant intervals and to shout with delight when he discovered and sounded thirds. He had an abnormally refined and sensitive hearing, was distressed by impurities of pitch, and perturbed by any violence of sound (who does not remember the story of the child Mozart fainting on hearing the tone of a trumpet?). We are told that he was very soon able to play light piano pieces without any signs of effort and to memorize and perform them without notes, “cleanly and in perfect time,” in less than half an hour. Nor was the violin unfamiliar to him and, though he is not supposed to have started his studies on that instrument till his sixth year, Nissen tells that a certain Herr von Murr heard Wolfgang play the violin at four!
Leopold Mozart’s chief trouble lay not in making his son practice but in getting him away from the piano. Music occupied his waking hours almost exclusively, and for the customary games and amusements of childhood the boy showed little interest; or, if it was a question of fun, it had to be in some way associated with music. Before putting him to bed in the evening his father would stand him on a chair to give him a good-night kiss, whereupon the child would declaim Italian nonsense syllables, like “oragnia figatafa” and such, to some scrap of folk tune, as if imitating an opera singer. Then he would return his father’s caresses, kissing him on the tip of his nose and promising when he grew up “to enclose him in a capsule and carry him about at all times!” In after years Leopold reminisced in a letter to his son: “When you sat at the piano or otherwise occupied yourself with music nobody was allowed to joke with you in any way. Indeed, the expression on your face would become so serious that many, struck by what they considered your prematurely ripened talent, feared that your life might be short”—fears that were to be only too well founded. And, when barely six, he stubbornly refused to play before any audience that did not include at least one musically cultured listener.
Abraham Mendelssohn used to say that, whereas he had once been famous as the son of his father, he was now celebrated as the father of his son. Leopold Mozart was most indisputably the father of his son. His juiceless compositions, his violin method, and the rest of his dreary talents and moral virtues have a kind of museum value only as they contributed to Wolfgang’s artistic upbringing and guidance. Alfred Einstein observes that “the first signs of musical talent in Wolfgang completely changed the direction of Leopold’s life and thought.” Unquestionably it was better so, and in the long run he was far more richly rewarded for cultivating the fruitful soil committed to his tillage.
Systematic piano instruction was the first thing on which he seems to have concentrated. Composition was a by-product. Wolfgang improvised unceasingly, which meant that numberless minuets and simple pieces of various types took shape under his fingers, the father writing down industriously what his son’s fancy dictated. Nannerl extemporized no less actively. Leopold spurred his children by acquainting them with short works by himself and recognized musicians to divert them after dry technical exercises. Each had a little study book of pieces. The one that Wolfgang received from his father on October 31, 1762, has come down to us complete and contains 135 examples for study. Among them Wolfgang tried his hand at brief works of his own. In the father’s writing we can read the following: “Di Wolfgango Mozart, May 11, 1762 und July 16, 1762.” Some of the masters given the boy to study were Wagenseil, Telemann, Hasse, and Philipp Emanuel Bach. Wolfgang’s compositions include an innocent minuet and trio with very simple basses and a little Allegro in three-part song form. In these and other childish efforts the improving hand of Leopold can be repeatedly detected. It was to be so for some time to come and when the father did not have a correcting finger in the pie we become aware of it. It is evident in a sketch book Wolfgang was given in London a year or two later when Leopold fell ill and, in order not to be disturbed by the sounds of practicing, asked the boy to write something and refrain from noise. The book is filled with a great variety of minuets, contradances, rondos, gigues, sicilianos, preludes, and even an unfinished sketch for a fugue. Here one sees indisputable genius in conflict with technical lapses and other evidences of inexperience that somewhat modify the notion that Wolfgang had acquired all his skill by instinct rather than by carefully disciplined study.