Later Works
With the accession of the new emperor, Mozart briefly imagined the “gates of his good luck were about to open.” He was quickly disillusioned. Leopold II was hard, cold, unmusical. He instantly dismissed some of his predecessor’s most faithful artistic servitors. Da Ponte, for one, was dropped. Mozart’s opponent, Salieri, cautiously withdrew into obscurity and waited behind the scenes for a new opportunity. Van Swieten tried to obtain for Mozart a position as teacher of the Archduke Franz, but nothing came of the well-meant effort, and presently the composer found his pupils reduced to two. His health began to trouble him alarmingly, with headaches and tooth troubles. He had the mortification of being ignored when the King of Naples visited Vienna, while Salieri and Haydn enjoyed special honors.
He was not even asked to participate in the musical festivities in connection with the Emperor’s coronation in October 1790, or to travel to Frankfurt, where the ceremony was to take place. So he decided to make the journey at his own expense, hoping against hope for some distinction or reward. Though he did not obtain either, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that his Don Giovanni, Figaro, Entführung, and even the early Finta giardiniera, were relished in neighboring Mainz. The opera chosen for the actual coronation was Wranitzky’s Oberon. However, the Frankfurt town council “graciously” allowed Mozart to give a concert “on his own responsibility” at a local theater, October 13 at 11 in the morning! “Plenty of honor, but little money,” he wrote. He played two concertos (probably the F major, K. 459, and the D major, K. 537) and a rondo. As ever, his improvisation impressed deeply—only a royal luncheon party and a maneuver of Hessian troops were counter attractions that cut down the attendance. On the way home he stopped off in Mannheim and Munich, saw his old friends Cannabich and Ramm, played at an academy the Elector Carl Theodor gave for the returning King of Naples, and went home to Vienna, where Constanze had moved their effects into a new apartment in the Rauhensteingasse—destined to be his last home on earth!
In his new dwelling the composer completed by December two superb works—the String Quintet in D (K. 593) and the stunning Adagio and Allegro in F minor (K. 594) “for an organ cylinder in a clock.” About that same time the director of the Italian Opera in London, one O’Reilly, suggested that he come for half a year to England, to write two operas for that theater and give concerts, and promised him 300 pounds sterling. Nothing stood in the way of O’Reilly’s suggestion, except operas that the master was soon to provide for Vienna and Prague. Soon afterwards, Haydn on his way to London took leave of his younger friend who bade him farewell with the heart-shaking words: “I fear, Papa, this is the last time we shall see each other!” Salomon, Haydn’s manager, had planned to bring Mozart to England on the older composer’s return to the Continent.
To be sure, there was other work to be done, if in large part trifling. But early in January 1791, Mozart completed his last clavier concerto, the singularly affecting one in B flat (K. 595), which harks back to earlier models and lacks some of the more original and dramatic elements of the incomparable ones in D minor, E flat, A major, C major, and C minor. And in June 1791, on a visit to Constanze in Baden (where she had gone for another cure!), he wrote for a local choirmaster, Anton Stoll, that short Ave Verum motet, than which nothing of Mozart’s is more unutterably seraphic.
The Magic Flute
He was ill and despondent but his activity was untiring. It is an infinite pity that he did not take the hint of Da Ponte and others who were urging him to come to England, where he might easily have made a fortune and become a British idol like Handel before him and Haydn and Mendelssohn after him. He went on writing because, as he was soon to say, “composition tires me less than resting.” In the spring of 1791 he was commissioned to compose another opera, which was to be his last and, in a number of respects, his most epoch-making—The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte). And with it he was to write one of the most extraordinary works of operatic history, to create German opera in accordance with a long-cherished ambition of his but, like Moses, never to do more than cross the frontier of the promised land he had beheld in vision.
Emanuel Schikaneder, who had known Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart in Salzburg, was a wandering actor and a playwright of sorts. The head of a traveling company, which gave Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and, for better or worse, operas by Gluck and Singspiele by Haydn and Mozart, he had like numberless barnstormers a keen knowledge of the tastes of audiences, particularly of the plebeian ones to which his players catered. In his own way as adventurous a person as Da Ponte, Schikaneder took over in 1789 the direction of a playhouse on the Starhemberg estates, the Freihaus-Theater, in the Wieden district. There he produced comic shows, Singspiele, and operettas. With his grasp of suburban tastes he combined a thorough understanding of what could be done with his brother Mason and old acquaintance, Mozart. A business rival of the impresario Marinelli, who ran a theater in the Leopoldstadt quarter and made a specialty of “magic plays,” he now approached the composer with his own Singspiel.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1789
Drawing in silver on ivory by Dora Stock
Mozart’s wife, Constanze, about 1783
Lithograph from a drawing by Joseph Lange, Constanze’s brother-in-law
We cannot here examine the sources from which he assembled his libretto. There ran through it a powerful strain of Masonic influence, love interest, low comedy in abundance (Schikaneder took care to tailor to his own measure the role of the wandering bird-catcher Papageno), and other surefire theatrical ingredients. He asked Mozart to supply the music, and the latter, after warning him that since he had never yet written a “magic opera” he hesitated to court failure in this sphere, at length complied. Between March and the end of September 1791, The Magic Flute was written. Schikaneder, aware of the glorious bargain he had struck, strove to be the soul of complaisance. He supplied the composer with every comfort at his disposal—a charming summerhouse on the grounds of the theater where he could work at the score, with food, wine, and pretty actresses to divert him—in short, whatever promised to humor the musician and promote the flow of inspiration. He even hummed or sang the sort of tunes he considered appropriate to the role he designed for himself.
Let us at this stage dispose of a few legends that, in the course of 160 years, have accumulated about the work. One is that the play is a farrago of childish nonsense, made tolerable only by the variety and grandeur of Mozart’s music; another, that the plot was altered at a late hour because another manager was about to produce a work similar in its story; a third, that the piece was a failure. As a matter of fact, the book of The Magic Flute happens to be one of the best librettos in existence from the point of view of good theater. The imagined “revision” never took place, for considerations of “parallels,” let alone plagiarisms, never bothered theater directors at this epoch. On the contrary, if a play or opera had one feature that pleased its public, a rival manager was quick to copy this very point on an even broader scale. Although at the first performance The Magic Flute did not achieve such an overwhelming triumph as its composer had hoped, before many months had passed it was attracting throngs; and not many years later Schikaneder was able to build out of the wealth it brought him that famous Theater an der Wien which still stands and was to become the cradle of various storied masterworks. As for the much-maligned book, it appealed so powerfully to none other than Goethe that he set out to write a sequel!
While the sick and harried Mozart worked with still inexhaustible fertility at the score of his magic opera he was interrupted by a sufficiently distasteful order from Prague for an opera to be produced there at the coronation of Leopold II as “King of Bohemia.” With no more than eighteen days to compose the music and assist in the production of this “occasional piece,” he was ordered to set an old text of Metastasio’s (retouched, it is true, by one Caterino Mazzolà)—La Clemenza di Tito, an antiquated specimen of opera seria, such as the composer had not bothered with since the period of Idomeneo. The available time being so short, Mozart took along with him his pupil Süssmayr, who was asked to perform the almost secretarial job of writing the secco recitatives, leaving the more important parts of the music to the master. His good friend, the impresario Guardasoni, mounted the opera in sumptuous fashion. But good will did not supplant genuine inspiration and, for all its craftsmanship, La Clemenza di Tito did not strike fire. The Empress dismissed it as porcheria tedesca (German rubbish). A correspondent of Studien für Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde reported that the “beloved Kapellmeister Mozard” did not obtain this time the applause he had a right to expect! For once, clearly, “his Praguers did not understand him.” Doubtless, Tito is not a Figaro or a Don Giovanni, but those unfamiliar with the work may well ask themselves if it is as bad as history paints it. Anyway its reception did not raise the master’s spirit. And he took leave of his friends with tears.
He was now seriously ill. He had fainting fits and accesses of exhaustion. On September 28, 1791, he finished The Magic Flute—the March of the Priests and the overture being the last numbers set down. The Masonic symbols and meanings with which the opera is filled (comprehensible, however, only to initiates) are heard in the thrice-reiterated three chords at the opening of the superb tone piece. This overture is a fully developed sonata movement built on a fugal plan, the mercurial subject having been borrowed from a clavier sonata of his old friend and rival, Clementi. At the first performance the composer Johann Schenk (later, one of Beethoven’s teachers) crept through the orchestra to Mozart, who was conducting, and reverently kissed his hand, while the composer, continuing to conduct with his right hand, affectionately patted Schenk’s head with his left. He took pleasure in playing the glockenspiel during Papageno’s air “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” and once, in fun, introduced an unexpected arpeggio which threw Schikaneder completely out for a few minutes.
The Requiem
As he was boarding his coach on the trip to Prague, Mozart was startled on being accosted by a gaunt, gray-clad stranger of mysterious mien who asked him if he were willing to undertake, for a certain sum, the composition of a requiem mass to be delivered at a specified time. He agreed but from this moment the weird visitor, whose identity he was admonished not to try to discover, gave him no rest. He became convinced that a messenger from the Beyond had sought him out, that the incident had a supernatural aspect, that he was, indeed, ordered by a higher power to compose a death mass for himself! And the certainty that his time was at hand grew steadily upon him.
The incident, in reality, had nothing macabre or mysterious about it. The “gray messenger” was a certain Leutgeb, steward of the Count Walsegg zu Stuppach who had lately lost his wife and who, aspiring to be known as a composer, planned to perform the requiem as his own work. But Mozart knew nothing of this. He had a letter from his old friend, Da Ponte, entreating him to join him in England. But it was too late and Mozart’s tragedy had to be played out to the bitter close that was now swiftly approaching. To Da Ponte he dispatched this pathetic missive:
“I wish I could follow your advice, but how can I do so? I feel stunned, I reason with difficulty, and cannot rid myself of the vision of this unknown man. I see him perpetually; he entreats me, he presses me, he impatiently demands the work. I go on writing.... Otherwise I have nothing more to fear. I know from what I suffer that the hour is come; I am at the point of death; I have come to the end before having had the enjoyment of my talent. Life was so beautiful, my career stood at first under so auspicious a star! But one cannot change one’s destiny!”
What tortured him more than anything was the thought that, as furiously as he worked, the Requiem might remain unfinished at the death he knew was imminent. He had numberless discussions with his pupil, Xaver Süssmayr, but it was daily becoming clearer to him that he had small chance of completing the mass himself. On a walk in the Prater with Constanze in the early autumn he exclaimed: “It cannot last much longer ... Certainly, I have been given poison; that is a feeling I cannot shake off!” And this, presumably, is the basis of the age-old slander that Salieri had been his murderer! At all events growing weakness forced him to take to his bed on November 20. He was never to leave it. “I know,” he had said shortly before, “that my music-making is about at an end. I feel a constant chill which I cannot explain. I now have no more to do save with doctors and apothecaries!”
His hands and feet were beginning to swell. Yet he struggled desperately to get on with the composition of the mass. The visits of a few friends seemed to comfort the sick man, and he asked them to try over in his presence certain completed pages of the score. At the beginning of December he himself struggled to sing some of the alto part of the work. When the Lacrymosa was reached he gave up the attempt after a few measures and, overcome by the certainty that he was doomed never to finish the music, he broke down in a fit of weeping. And in these days, with tragic irony, there dawned a promise of better things! The rapidly growing popularity of The Magic Flute augured a carefree future; a group of Hungarian nobles began to raise a subscription that would have assured Mozart an annual income of 1000 Gulden; and from Holland there came, almost at the twelfth hour, news of an even more gratifying project.