Leopold Mozart for a long time stubbornly withheld his consent to the marriage; but at last, overborne by his son’s persistence and by the intercession of friends, he gave the pair a reluctant blessing. They were married August 4, 1782. The sequel proved that both father and son were justified in their opinions. The Mozart ménage was truly most erratic. Husband and wife were equally improvident and unmethodical. They were always poor, frequently in actual want. On the other hand, as Wolfgang had hoped, Constanze’s virtues as a comrade compensated for her deficiencies as a housekeeper, and their congeniality of temperament made them contented in the midst of disorder, poverty, and care. There is a story that a friend, calling on them one cold winter morning, found them waltzing together, and was told that, as they had no fuel, they were keeping warm in that way. The incident is typical of their existence—irresponsible, haphazard, and yet on the whole happy.
The remaining events of Mozart’s short life, from his marriage in 1782 to his death in 1791, were all artistic events—works composed—standing out luminous against a dark background of poverty, struggle, and pain. His three great operas were written during this time. “The Marriage of Figaro” was first produced at Vienna in 1786; “Don Giovanni” at Prague, in 1787; and “The Magic Flute” at Vienna, in the year of Mozart’s death. In the realm of absolute music Mozart was equally productive all through this period. The six great string quartets dedicated to Haydn date from 1782, 1783, and 1784. The three quartets written for Frederick William II of Prussia were composed in the spring of 1790. The four greatest string quintets were written in 1787, 1790, and 1791. Finally, the three finest and maturest symphonies, works which will endure as long as music does, were all written within two months in the summer of 1788. His last work was the famous Requiem, begun in July, 1791. His strong constitution was now beginning to give way under the long strain of poverty and unceasing mental labor, and he gradually became haunted by the idea that he was writing this Requiem for himself. He grew morbid and gloomy, but continued to work with feverish energy. The last evening of his life he looked at his unfinished score with tears in his eyes, saying, “Did I not say I was writing the Requiem for myself?” And later, when he became delirious, he was still busy with the Requiem, imagining it played, and blowing out his cheeks to imitate the trumpets. He died quietly on the evening of December 5, 1791, having accomplished an enduring work in thirty-five laborious, brilliant, and painful years.
This story of Mozart’s last ten years is undoubtedly one of the strangest pages of musical biography. The contrast between his external and his internal life is so violent, so startling, that we rub our eyes involuntarily, wondering if the facts as we know them can be true. And indeed we can believe in them only when we assume that his mind was independent of its environment to a degree uncommon even with genius. Mozart seems to have been a dual person, to have lived two lives at once; outwardly hounded by creditors, worn with the most prostrating and debasing anxiety, forgetting his cares only in a dissipation that was as squalid as they, he was all the time pursuing his artistic ideals with the highest success, and with the serenity of complete mastership. In his nature it was not even a step from the ridiculous to the sublime—the two extremes coexisted and interlaced.
The case of Mozart is in fact an eloquent human proof of the truth of Schopenhauer’s theory that pure music is a world by itself, parallel with the actual world of ordinary experience but independent of it. The plastic artist works in materials familiar to his ordinary experience; he puts in his pictures or statues the men, women, animals, trees, and other physical objects that he sees about him daily. Not so the musician. He deals with ideas that have no existence outside of his art; and he therefore constantly keeps up in his mind two independent trains of thought, coexistent but unrelated. That Mozart, whose purely musical genius was perhaps the brightest and most complete that ever existed, habitually lived this double mental life, there are many evidences. His sister-in-law described him as follows: “He was always good-humored, but thoughtful even in his best moods, looking one straight in the face, and always speaking with reflection, whether the talk was grave or gay; and yet he seemed always to be carrying on a deeper train of thought. Even when he was washing his hands in the morning, he never stood still, but walked up and down the room humming, and buried in thought. At table he would often twist up a corner of the table-cloth, and rub his upper lip with it, without appearing in the least to know what he was doing, and he sometimes made extraordinary grimaces with his mouth. His hands and feet were in continual motion, and he was always strumming on something—his hat, his watch-fob, the table, the chairs, as if they were the clavier.” Other contemporaries have recorded that he carried on this musical thought while having his hair dressed, while bowling or playing billiards, while talking or joking, and even, wonderful to say, while listening to other music that did not especially interest him. “The greater industry of his later years,” said his wife, “was merely apparent, because he wrote down more. He was always working in his head, his mind was in constant motion, and one may say that he never ceased composing.” Lange, his brother-in-law, observed that “when he was engaged on his most important works he took more than his usual share in any light or jesting talk that was going on.” When his wife was confined of her first child he was working on the second of the quartets dedicated to Haydn; he brought his table to her room, and frequently rose to cheer or comfort her in her pain, without apparently interrupting his train of thought. On the evening before the day set for the first performance of “Don Giovanni,” the overture was still unwritten, though Mozart doubtless had it perfectly clear in his mind. He sat up most of the night copying it out, his wife meantime plying him with punch and with stories to keep him awake; and by seven in the morning it was complete. When he sends his sister a prelude and fugue he apologizes for the prelude being copied after the fugue instead of before it. “The reason was,” he adds, “that I had already composed the fugue, and wrote it down while I was thinking out the prelude.”
It is necessary to bear constantly in mind this independence, activity, and self-sufficiency of Mozart’s musical thought-processes, if we would at all understand the paradox of his personality. Mozart the man, and Mozart the musician, were two beings. The man, when all is said, and in spite of many endearing traits, was disappointingly commonplace. Although he was a good linguist, and fond, as a boy, of mathematics, he was intellectually undistinguished. His letters are rather conventional, he kept no journal, he read little, and though he said a sharp or clever thing now and then his conversation was not remarkable. Emotionally he was also not unusual. Amiable, generous, and honorable, he was rather lacking in will-power, rather immature and unformed.
His mental attitude and his conduct in the world were curiously childlike. He was even unable to care for his own person; his wife attended to his clothes and cut up his meat at table. In money matters he was not a child, but a baby. Only six months after his marriage he began a long course of borrowing, in small sums, from friends and relatives, and he became later a familiar figure to the Viennese pawnbrokers and usurers. To make matters worse, he was so kind-hearted that he could not endure the sight of suffering when he had money to relieve it. The result was that he gave away freely what he had borrowed with difficulty, and sunk daily deeper in the morass of hopeless debt. His dealings with Albert Stadler, an excellent clarinetist and a wholly unreliable man, will serve as a specimen of his guilelessness. Being asked by Stadler for a loan of fifty ducats, he gave him instead two valuable watches to place in pawn, on the understanding that he should redeem them in due time. Of course Stadler did nothing about it; whereupon Mozart gave him the fifty ducats, together with interest, so that he might redeem the watches. Stadler kept the money. And what is more remarkable, Mozart seems to have cordially forgiven him, and later to have made him further loans.
Mozart’s high spirits were unquenchable. A tireless jester, a graceful dancer, a good hand at billiards, clever as an impromptu poet of doggerel verses and as a deviser of practical jokes, he found in society the relaxation he needed from the severe mental concentration of composing; and there is no doubt that he gave himself up to conviviality and to frivolous amours more than would to-day be considered becoming. His fondness for wine and punch were generally known, and he himself confessed to his wife that he was not always faithful to her. But it must be remembered that in pleasure-loving Vienna, in the eighteenth century, manners were lax, and that Mozart, although by his very sensitiveness peculiarly subject to temptation, was never grossly or habitually vicious. His failings were those of a high-spirited, vivacious, ardent temperament, combined with an amiable, but not a profound character. There was no depravity in him, but there was at the same time little moral or mental elevation. His humor, which bubbled forth unceasingly, was of the flavor of the comic papers and of tavern horse-play. He used to make his friend Leutgeb, a horn-player, submit to mock penances as the price of concertos for his instrument. Once the penalty was to collect all the orchestral parts from the floor, where Mozart threw them as they were copied; another time it was to sit behind the stove until the piece was written. The score of one of these concertos bears the inscription: “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart takes pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox, and simpleton, at Vienna, March 27, 1783.” Another is written in black, red, blue, and green ink. Mozart was fond of writing, to original doggerel words, for performance by gatherings of his friends, comic canons, in which the curious duality of his nature is strikingly illustrated. The words were colloquial, full of slang, and often coarse; the music, written in one of the most severe of contrapuntal forms, was always gracious and consummately wrought as only Mozart knew how to make it. His musical humor reaches its acme in the “Musikalische Spass,” or, as he himself called it, the “Peasants’ Symphony,” for string quartet and two horns. This is nothing less than a parody of the kind of work that Mozart was constantly producing in all seriousness—a Divertimento in regular form, but supposed to be written by a tyro and played by amateurs. The horns come in pompously with wrong notes; the first violin, ascending a long scale, goes half a tone too high; at the end, in the midst of a fanfare in F-major by the horns, the string instruments strike in each in a different key. “The attempt after thematic elaboration,” says Jahn, “is very ludicrous; it is as though the composer had heard of such a thing, and strove to imitate it in a few phrases, greatly to his own satisfaction. The art is most remarkable whereby the pretended ignorance never becomes wearisome, and the audience is kept in suspense throughout.”
Thus at every turn are we impressed with that wondrous inspiration and skill as an artist which were so curiously combined in Mozart with lack of distinction as a man. Even Haydn, for all his normality and usualness of emotion, had a certain human quaintness and sweetness for which we miss any analogue in Mozart. Yet when we shift the point of view, and study the artists rather than the men, it is Mozart who stands out as the more interesting figure. As we saw in the last chapter, Haydn’s power as an artist depended chiefly on the trenchancy and practical grasp of his mind, by which he was enabled to crystallize into forms of salient unity the motifs, phrases, and sections of his music. System is the key-note of his work; he was an organizer, both by natural faculty, and in obedience to the needs of his time. And he had the defects of his merits, in a certain monotony, angularity, and cut-and-dried precision. Mozart, on the contrary, even in his earliest pieces, already cited, showed a more flexible artistic technique; and beginning where Haydn left off, he was able to carry the same sort of organization into a higher stage, combining with the unity of the whole a much greater diversity in the parts. Variety is as notable in Mozart’s work as unity in Haydn’s. His art is more subtle, and not a whit less solid.
In the first place as regards the themes themselves, Mozart’s are longer and more complex than Haydn’s. It is hard to imagine Haydn disposing his phrases with the ingenuity and mental grasp shown by the melody in Figure XV., written when Mozart was only six years old. The characteristic of this melody is that the phrases are not immediately repeated, thereby balancing in the most obvious way, but alternated with apparent whimsicality, which, however, eventually issues in order. This is even more conspicuously shown by the following theme from Mozart’s great G-minor Quintet: