Symphonies in E flat, G minor, and C major
Yet from now on he was to pay for his Prague triumphs. With a kind of fateful persistence things seemed to go wrong. That an infant daughter died was a rather familiar affliction (of the children of the Mozart couple only the sons, Karl and Raymund Leopold, survived infancy). Money troubles plagued him unremittingly. Again and again he had to appeal for loans to Michael Puchberg, a merchant and brother Mason, and later to Franz Hofdemel, a jurist of his acquaintance whose wife was one of his pupils. But, by and large, these pupils were becoming scarcer and there seemed steadily less patronage for the academies he planned. To make matters worse Constanze’s management of the household appeared to go from bad to worse. The arrangements of works like Handel’s Acis and Galathea and Messiah, which he was making about this time for the parsimonious Baron van Swieten, brought in as good as nothing. Mozart’s affairs were falling into a sordid, not to say a tragic, state.
Small wonder, therefore, that he grasped at the opportunity to settle outside of Vienna proper in a house in the Waehring district, where the air was purer than in the heart of the city and where he had the added advantages of quiet and a garden. A change of residence had never been a particular hardship for the Mozarts. In the space of nine years they moved eleven times in Vienna alone.
“Their life,” says Alfred Einstein, “was like a perpetual tour, changing from one hotel room to another.... In one of the handsomer dwellings, Schulergasse 8, the ceiling of Mozart’s workroom had fine plaster ornamentation with sprites and cherubs. I am convinced that Mozart never wasted a glance on it. He was ready at any instant to exchange Vienna for another city or Austria for another country.... He was thinking of a trip to Russia, as a result of conversations with the Russian ambassador in Dresden in 1789. But he had to be satisfied with smaller journeys, and with ‘journeys’ within Vienna.”
In his Waehring surroundings, however, he boasted of being able to accomplish more work in a few days than elsewhere in a month. The finest fruit of this suburban sojourn is the glorious symphonic trilogy, the masterpieces in E flat, G minor, and C major, composed in June, July, and August, respectively—the third, the sublime “Jupiter,” the last of Mozart’s forty-one symphonies and given its deathless name no one knows exactly by whom or why. The three, which have a profound psychological connection, were written, in all probability, for a series of academies that never took place. However this may be, they are the crown of Mozart’s symphonic compositions and rank indisputably as the greatest symphonies before Beethoven.
Così fan tutte
In April 1789, a ray of hope suddenly appeared to illuminate his depressing horizon. A friend and pupil, the young prince Carl Lichnowsky, who had estates in Silesia and an important rank in the Prussian army, invited Mozart to accompany him on a trip to Berlin. Lichnowsky enjoyed influence at the court of the music-loving Prussian king, Frederick William II, and seemed ready to recommend his teacher to the good graces of the monarch. At last Mozart had reason to anticipate a well-paying post! The pleasure-loving Constanze resigned herself with the best grace possible to remain behind. The travelers stopped off in Prague, in Dresden, in Leipzig (where Mozart played the organ in St. Thomas Church in so masterly a fashion that Bach’s erstwhile pupil, the aged cantor, Johann Friedrich Doles, believed for a moment that his old master had come back to life and hastened to show his delighted guest one of the Bach motets the church possessed). On April 25 Mozart arrived at the court in Potsdam, where the King gave him 100 Friedrichsdor, ordered six string quartets and some easy clavier sonatas for his daughter, but did nothing about a Kapellmeister position or a commission for an opera! Mozart did go to the theater in Berlin where he heard his own Entführung, was applauded by the audience, and audibly scolded a blundering violinist in the orchestra!
But his fortunes had not materially changed and in May he was writing to Constanze: “My dear little wife, you will have to get more satisfaction from my return than from any money I am bringing.” When he reached home and found her suffering from a foot trouble he sent her, regardless of his depleted purse, to near-by Baden for a cure—at the same time admonishing her to beware of flirtations! Then he set to work on the quartets for the Prussian king, of which he finished three (the last he was to write), and a single “easy” sonata, instead of the promised six, for the Princess Friederike. In September 1789, he was to compose for his friend, the clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler, the celestial Clarinet Quintet (K. 581), which for sheer euphony is almost without parallel in its composer’s writings.
The success of a revival of Figaro in August 1789 appears to have moved the Emperor to approach Mozart with a commission for a new opera. The outcome was Così fan tutte, the incentive to the plot being an incident said to have taken place in Viennese society. Once again Lorenzo da Ponte was called upon to put the piece into shape. The fundamentals of the story are to be found in Boccaccio and it may well have been in the Decameron that Da Ponte discovered the real basis of his dexterous and amusing, though highly artificial, comedy. We know little about the circumstances surrounding the composition of the piece.
On January 21, 1790, Così fan tutte was performed at the Burgtheater. The reviews, if middling, were not outright unfavorable. “The music of Mozart is charming, the plot amusing enough,” wrote Count Zinzendorf in his diary; and the Journal des Luxus und der Moden remarked: “It is sufficient to say of the music that it was composed by Mozart!” Until the following autumn the work achieved only ten performances. It is not unreasonable to explain this by the fact that in 1790 Joseph II, who for some time had been ailing, died and was succeeded by a ruler of very different tendencies—his brother, Leopold II.