First Visit to Vienna
The five-year-older Nannerl being a remarkable clavier performer and Wolfgang absorbing his father’s instructions with the utmost facility, Leopold was not long in deciding that he might profitably bring his pair of prodigies before the public and make them known in aristocratic circles, where he had a good chance of capitalizing on their talents. Besides, there were new artistic currents astir in the world to which the boy, in particular, might be exposed to his advantage. “If ever I knew how priceless time is for youth I know it now and you know that my children are used to work,” he wrote to H. Hagenauer, insisting he had no idea of permitting the youngsters to fall into habits of idleness. He seems to have given little thought to the strain of travel, especially since the children were healthy and Wolfgang, though small, appears to have been of wiry physique. So in January 1762, he took them on a three-weeks’ excursion to Munich, where they appeared before the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria with success.
The following September, however, the family began their travels in earnest. With a small clavier strapped to their vehicle the little band of wanderers set out along the Danube by way of Linz and several smaller localities to Vienna. By October 6 they had reached the capital and they drank in its wonders with the astonished eyes of small-town folk. A week later they stood in the presence of the music-loving empress, Maria Theresia, and her family and court at the Palace of Schönbrunn. The children played and were admired and duly rewarded. There have come down to us a quantity of pretty anecdotes about the pair—how Wolfgang climbed up in the lap of the Empress and was kissed by her; how he insisted on having the composer Georg Christian Wagenseil in the room when he was to play (“because he understands such things”); how, when he slipped on the polished floor and was helped to his feet by the princess, Marie Antoinette, he thanked her and then added “I shall marry you for this when I grow up!” Unquestionably the motherly tenderness of Maria Theresia went out to the child from Salzburg. Yet it is a question whether she actually saw in Wolfgang and his sister more than a pair of precocious little people in spite of Leopold’s extravagant claims. Certainly she was less agreeable several years later when she wrote her son, the archduke Ferdinand, governor-general of Lombardy, who contemplated taking Wolfgang into his service: “I do not know why you need saddle yourself with a composer or useless people.... It discredits your service when such individuals run about the world like beggars.”
At all events Leopold was voluble in the letters he wrote to his Salzburg landlord, Hagenauer, about the wonders of the Vienna visit and the impression exercised everywhere by Wolfgang’s talents and his lively intelligence and unaffected manner. Leopold built towering air castles. Two weeks later Wolfgang came down with what was said to be scarlet fever but which was actually (according to Bernhard Paumgartner) diagnosed by a German doctor, Felix Huch, as “erythema nodosum,” which could have had serious consequences and may have planted the seeds of Mozart’s last illness. Before returning to Salzburg, Leopold accepted the invitation of a Hungarian magnate to make a flying trip to neighboring Pressburg after Wolfgang had recovered. Finally, on January 5, 1763, the Mozarts came home to Salzburg. It is uncertain how much musical stimulation Wolfgang obtained from this first Viennese visit. The one important event in Vienna at this period—the première of Gluck’s Orfeo—went unmentioned by either Wolfgang or his father.
However, the success of the trip whetted Leopold’s appetite for more of the same thing. After a brief period for recuperation, plans were laid for a much more elaborate odyssey to include nothing less than Paris and London. On June 9, 1763, consequently, the family carriage set out for the Bavarian frontier—“the same road by which Leopold Mozart, then a hopeful student, had wandered into Salzburg.” This trip was to keep the Mozarts away from home for three years.