Mozart’s Break with Salzburg
Mozart had reason to suppose that the work might gain him a permanent and rewarding position. Once more he was disappointed; and a short time after the production he received a summons from Salzburg to join the Archbishop in Vienna, whither Colloredo had gone with a part of his musical staff. Leopold, it should be added, was left at home. Wolfgang boiled inwardly at the prospect of “having the honor once more of sitting above the cooks at table.” His father begged him to be patient, but to no avail. In a way he welcomed the present call to Vienna and seemed to sense his impending liberation, if without knowing exactly how it was to come. “It seems as if good fortune is about to welcome me here,” he wrote his parent not long afterwards from the capital, “and now I feel that I must stay. Indeed, I felt when I left Munich, that, without knowing why, I looked forward most eagerly to Vienna.” He was seeking an opportunity to break forever with his detested chief, to whom he alluded as an “Erzlümmel” (“Archbooby”).
He soon found his chance. The archbishop at first refused Mozart permission to appear at the Tonkünstler-Societät, about which he wrathfully wrote to his father (yet a postscript added that, in the end, he got it). That his place at table was between the valets and the cooks is, Alfred Einstein says, rightly shocking both to the composer and to us. But Mozart’s rank as court organist was actually that of personal servant, and according to eighteenth century etiquette, which knew nothing of special treatment for genius, this seating at table was formally correct. In the end the threatened explosion did occur. Colloredo ordered him back to Salzburg on a certain day. Alleging some “important engagement” in Vienna, he refused and, when the archbishop told him he could “go to the devil,” he applied for his dismissal from the cleric’s service. Three times he presented applications. Finally, when he made an effort to enter Colloredo’s apartment to hand him the paper personally, Count Arco, son of the court chamberlain, kicked him out of the room. But Mozart did get the discharge he had demanded.
The tale of the kick is familiar even to people who have not the vaguest familiarity with eighteenth-century codes. We might be well advised, however, to suspend our judgment till we know both sides of the celebrated story.
“No more Salzburg for me!” Wolfgang gaily wrote his father. Barring repeated journeys to different cities, Vienna was to be his home for the rest of his days. He was not to find the material rewards and the secure position he had sought for so long, but he had that freedom his spirit craved. And in Vienna he was to absorb those creative impulses that Haydn had known before him and Beethoven was to know after him. In a mood of elation he begged his father to leave Salzburg and join him in Vienna. But Leopold was no longer young and, besides, he was made of other clay.