Both circumstances and endowment fitted Mozart, in this case, for the rôle of hare. The son of a professional musician, who wisely directed his early studies, and opened to him in his impressionable years all the advantages of companionship with musicians and with people of general cultivation, he came by good fortune into immediate possession of all the favoring conditions that Haydn had to struggle up to through years of poverty, neglect, and hard labor. It would be hard to imagine more dissimilar lots in life. The contrast between the two men thus externally induced was accentuated by their opposite characters. Haydn, as we have seen, was an intensely human person, full of sympathy for the ordinary and yet always appealing emotions of common humanity, and looking at music largely as a means for their expression. Mozart, on the contrary, was an artist pure and simple. His genius was almost completely independent of his character, and it was by virtue of the former that he was great. His sensitiveness to the minutest distinctions and gradations in sound, his unerring instinct for perfection in form, in the smallest as in the largest instances, his wonderful power to shape a multitude of details into a breathing organism, his Greek serenity of temper and indifference to ranges of feeling that might perturb his art—all these things gave him an incalculable advantage over the plodding Haydn as a master of the purely artistic side of musical composition. They enabled him to assimilate instantaneously all that the older man had to teach him of design, and to become his teacher before he had done with learning from him. Haydn showed Mozart how to do things; and in return Mozart showed Haydn how to do them better.
Both men were clearly aware of their obligations to each other. In the midst of the petty jealousies and the malicious efforts to stir up ill-feeling which characterized musical Vienna in their day, they remained warm friends and mutual admirers. Mozart dedicated his six finest string quartets to Haydn, with the comment: “It was due from me, for it was from Haydn that I learned how quartets should be written.” “It was affecting,” says a contemporary observer, “to hear him speak of the two Haydns or any other of the great masters; one would have imagined him to be one of their enthusiastic pupils rather than the all-powerful Mozart.” Haydn’s respect for Mozart was equally profound, and even more creditable, in that he was older and less appreciated by the Viennese public than the man he lost no opportunity to praise. He often asserted that he never heard one of Mozart’s compositions without learning something from it; and once when “Don Giovanni” was being discussed he made a period to the argument by saying: “I cannot decide the questions in dispute, but this I know, that Mozart is the greatest composer in the world.” Mozart was thus much more than a mere successor of Haydn in the usual course of musical evolution; he gave fully as much as he received. His short though full life, moreover, came to an end eighteen years before Haydn’s more leisurely one; so that in a purely human as well as an artistic sense, we can look upon him, in relation to Haydn, as a sort of brilliant younger brother.
Johann Chrysostum Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart, generally known to the world as Wolfgang Amadeus[33] Mozart, was born at Salzburg, a small town southwest of Vienna, in Austria-Hungary, on January 27, 1756. His father was Leopold Mozart, a professional musician of excellent abilities, court-composer to the Archbishop of Salzburg, and author of a School for the Violin which in its day was known throughout Europe. He was a devoted father, and although there has been some difference of opinion as to his character, it is certain that he spared no pains in the education of his son, which he considered the chief business of his life. He has been charged with penuriousness, with narrowness and bigotry, and with having forced his son to be a prodigy for the sake of gain; but there is no evidence that he ever acted unconscientiously, and the very thoroughness and almost mechanical regularity of the training he gave Wolfgang were invaluable in laying the foundations of his remarkable technique.
Under his father’s careful tutelage the young Wolfgang, together with his sister Maria Anna, who was almost equally precocious, advanced rapidly in music. When he was but three he picked out simple chords at the piano; at four he played minuets and other short pieces; and at five he composed them. His early compositions were carefully copied out in a sketch-book, at first by his father and later by himself, and dated; so that we have documentary evidence that they were actually written by him at an almost incredibly early age. The first, dictated when he was five years old, is a Minuet and Trio.
