But Mozart knew how to compose. Nor does his ingenuity fail him when in the last section of the piece he wishes, while repeating the essence of his idea, to reach the tonic instead of the dominant key. Simply dropping out the second A-phrase, he writes:
FIGURE XVII.
and the trick is done. It was by a steadily broader application of principles such as are here illustrated that he gradually became so marvelously skilful in composition.
Concerning the extraordinary physical delicacy of the young Mozart’s ear there are many stories, some of which are probably true. He is said to have fainted on hearing a trumpet. According to Schachtner, an intimate friend of the Mozarts, he was able to perceive an interval of pitch so small as the eighth of a tone. The story is that Wolfgang was allowed to play one day on Schachtner’s violin, which he called, on account of its full, rich tone, “Butter-fiddle.” “Herr Schachtner,” he announced a few days later, “your violin is half a quarter of a tone lower than mine; that is, if it is tuned as it was when I played it last.” The violin was brought out, and proved, Schachtner says, to be pitched as the boy had stated. As Schachtner, trained in literature by Jesuits, had the literary man’s instinct for effective statement, it is necessary to discount such tales a little; but the extraordinary delicacy of Mozart’s ear is sufficiently proved. For that matter, it needs no proof; so keen a sense of design would have been impossible to him had he lacked the requisite physical basis of accurate perception and discrimination of tones.
The first twenty-five years of Mozart’s life were spent largely in professional tours, as a piano virtuoso, with intermittent periods at home in Salzburg devoted to study and composition. Appearing as a boy-prodigy when he was only six years old, before he was twenty-five he had made five extended and uniformly successful tours. He appeared in most of the larger German and Italian cities, as well as in Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, everywhere giving new proofs of the quickness, elasticity, and certainty of his musical powers. In Paris, when eight years old, he “accompanied a lady in an Italian air without seeing the music, supplying the harmony for the passage which was to follow from that which he had just heard. This could not be done without some mistakes, but when the song was ended he begged the lady to sing it again, played the accompaniment and the melody itself with perfect correctness, and repeated it ten times, altering the character of the accompaniment for each.”[35] “On a melody being dictated to him, he supplied the bass and the parts without using the clavier at all.”[36] In Rome, when fourteen years old, after hearing Allegri’s Miserere sung in the Papal chapel by a nine-part chorus, he went home and copied out from memory the entire work. A few mistakes were corrected after a second hearing. Such feats as this bespeak a mastery of the technique of pure music even more remarkable, and far more important, than his so much talked of skill as a performer on the piano, organ, and violin. Had music not become to him in early youth a natural language, a second mother-tongue, he could never have learned, in his manhood, to manipulate it with such extraordinary freedom, ingenuity, and power.
In the intervals of his travels, Mozart had to spend his time in Salzburg, a town almost intolerably uncongenial. It was a dull, provincial place, the butt of innumerable sarcasms. There was a saying: “He who comes to Salzburg becomes in the first year stupid, in the second idiotic, and in the third a true Salzburger;” and Mozart, in whom taste and experience wrought together to make provincialism odious, was never tired of telling of a Salzburgian who complained that he could not judge Paris satisfactorily, “as the houses were too high and shut off the horizon.” “I detest Salzburg and everything that is born in it,” he wrote; “the tone and the manners of the people are utterly insupportable.” Such a place would have been distasteful enough to the gay and highly social temperament of Mozart even had he had no responsibilities there; but it was his position of music-director to the Archbishop of Salzburg, with the dependence it involved, that finally exhausted his patience. Hieronymus, who became Archbishop in 1772, was a man famed for his churlishness and arrogant, bullying ways. He made his poor music-director’s life a burden; he treated him as a hireling, made him eat with the servants, and called him contemptuous names, such as “Fex,” “Lump,” “Lausbube.” Mozart, driven to desperation, finally applied for his discharge. Receiving no attention, he went in person to press the matter, and was then actually thrown from the Archbishop’s ante-room by a petty official. This insult marked the end of his galling relation with his patron. From 1781 until his death he lived in Vienna, picking up a scanty livelihood by teaching and giving concerts.
His situation, after this open rupture with the system of patronage which was the only solid dependence of the eighteenth-century composer, was most precarious. The Viennese public was notoriously fickle towards even the most popular pianists and teachers, while the number of educated people who could be depended upon to buy serious compositions was small, and publishers were consequently unable to pay composers so well as they could in Beethoven’s day. To make matters worse, Mozart was careless in money affairs, luxurious in his tastes, and so weakly amiable that he would at any time give a friend his last kreutzer. We cannot, then, be surprised that when Leopold Mozart, who was naturally cautious, conservative, and worldly, heard that his son had taken lodgings with a certain Madame Weber, in Vienna, and fallen in love with her daughter Constanze, he summarily commanded him to break off the affair. Mozart respectfully but firmly refused to deprive Constanze, whose position in the house of her shiftless and half-drunken mother had aroused his pity, of the benefit of his friendship; and as his father had foreseen, this friendship rapidly deepened into love.