The boy Mozart (1767-8)
Oil painting by Thaddeus Helbling
View of Salzburg at the end of the eighteenth century
Engraving by Anton Amon after Franz Naumann
It was one of his merits to have perceived at once the musical predispositions of his children, to have cultivated them, even to have grasped early the most advantageous ways of exploiting them. Nannerl was by no means slow in showing uncommon aptitude for music, and Leopold lost no time in embarking upon her training. Wolfgang in his cradle listened to his sister’s lessons in the adjoining room and we can only surmise what mystical instincts vibrated in the childish consciousness. He was hardly more than three when these impelled him to the keyboard, there to search for consonant intervals and to shout with delight when he discovered and sounded thirds. He had an abnormally refined and sensitive hearing, was distressed by impurities of pitch, and perturbed by any violence of sound (who does not remember the story of the child Mozart fainting on hearing the tone of a trumpet?). We are told that he was very soon able to play light piano pieces without any signs of effort and to memorize and perform them without notes, “cleanly and in perfect time,” in less than half an hour. Nor was the violin unfamiliar to him and, though he is not supposed to have started his studies on that instrument till his sixth year, Nissen tells that a certain Herr von Murr heard Wolfgang play the violin at four!
Leopold Mozart’s chief trouble lay not in making his son practice but in getting him away from the piano. Music occupied his waking hours almost exclusively, and for the customary games and amusements of childhood the boy showed little interest; or, if it was a question of fun, it had to be in some way associated with music. Before putting him to bed in the evening his father would stand him on a chair to give him a good-night kiss, whereupon the child would declaim Italian nonsense syllables, like “oragnia figatafa” and such, to some scrap of folk tune, as if imitating an opera singer. Then he would return his father’s caresses, kissing him on the tip of his nose and promising when he grew up “to enclose him in a capsule and carry him about at all times!” In after years Leopold reminisced in a letter to his son: “When you sat at the piano or otherwise occupied yourself with music nobody was allowed to joke with you in any way. Indeed, the expression on your face would become so serious that many, struck by what they considered your prematurely ripened talent, feared that your life might be short”—fears that were to be only too well founded. And, when barely six, he stubbornly refused to play before any audience that did not include at least one musically cultured listener.
Abraham Mendelssohn used to say that, whereas he had once been famous as the son of his father, he was now celebrated as the father of his son. Leopold Mozart was most indisputably the father of his son. His juiceless compositions, his violin method, and the rest of his dreary talents and moral virtues have a kind of museum value only as they contributed to Wolfgang’s artistic upbringing and guidance. Alfred Einstein observes that “the first signs of musical talent in Wolfgang completely changed the direction of Leopold’s life and thought.” Unquestionably it was better so, and in the long run he was far more richly rewarded for cultivating the fruitful soil committed to his tillage.
Systematic piano instruction was the first thing on which he seems to have concentrated. Composition was a by-product. Wolfgang improvised unceasingly, which meant that numberless minuets and simple pieces of various types took shape under his fingers, the father writing down industriously what his son’s fancy dictated. Nannerl extemporized no less actively. Leopold spurred his children by acquainting them with short works by himself and recognized musicians to divert them after dry technical exercises. Each had a little study book of pieces. The one that Wolfgang received from his father on October 31, 1762, has come down to us complete and contains 135 examples for study. Among them Wolfgang tried his hand at brief works of his own. In the father’s writing we can read the following: “Di Wolfgango Mozart, May 11, 1762 und July 16, 1762.” Some of the masters given the boy to study were Wagenseil, Telemann, Hasse, and Philipp Emanuel Bach. Wolfgang’s compositions include an innocent minuet and trio with very simple basses and a little Allegro in three-part song form. In these and other childish efforts the improving hand of Leopold can be repeatedly detected. It was to be so for some time to come and when the father did not have a correcting finger in the pie we become aware of it. It is evident in a sketch book Wolfgang was given in London a year or two later when Leopold fell ill and, in order not to be disturbed by the sounds of practicing, asked the boy to write something and refrain from noise. The book is filled with a great variety of minuets, contradances, rondos, gigues, sicilianos, preludes, and even an unfinished sketch for a fugue. Here one sees indisputable genius in conflict with technical lapses and other evidences of inexperience that somewhat modify the notion that Wolfgang had acquired all his skill by instinct rather than by carefully disciplined study.
First Visit to Vienna
The five-year-older Nannerl being a remarkable clavier performer and Wolfgang absorbing his father’s instructions with the utmost facility, Leopold was not long in deciding that he might profitably bring his pair of prodigies before the public and make them known in aristocratic circles, where he had a good chance of capitalizing on their talents. Besides, there were new artistic currents astir in the world to which the boy, in particular, might be exposed to his advantage. “If ever I knew how priceless time is for youth I know it now and you know that my children are used to work,” he wrote to H. Hagenauer, insisting he had no idea of permitting the youngsters to fall into habits of idleness. He seems to have given little thought to the strain of travel, especially since the children were healthy and Wolfgang, though small, appears to have been of wiry physique. So in January 1762, he took them on a three-weeks’ excursion to Munich, where they appeared before the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria with success.
The following September, however, the family began their travels in earnest. With a small clavier strapped to their vehicle the little band of wanderers set out along the Danube by way of Linz and several smaller localities to Vienna. By October 6 they had reached the capital and they drank in its wonders with the astonished eyes of small-town folk. A week later they stood in the presence of the music-loving empress, Maria Theresia, and her family and court at the Palace of Schönbrunn. The children played and were admired and duly rewarded. There have come down to us a quantity of pretty anecdotes about the pair—how Wolfgang climbed up in the lap of the Empress and was kissed by her; how he insisted on having the composer Georg Christian Wagenseil in the room when he was to play (“because he understands such things”); how, when he slipped on the polished floor and was helped to his feet by the princess, Marie Antoinette, he thanked her and then added “I shall marry you for this when I grow up!” Unquestionably the motherly tenderness of Maria Theresia went out to the child from Salzburg. Yet it is a question whether she actually saw in Wolfgang and his sister more than a pair of precocious little people in spite of Leopold’s extravagant claims. Certainly she was less agreeable several years later when she wrote her son, the archduke Ferdinand, governor-general of Lombardy, who contemplated taking Wolfgang into his service: “I do not know why you need saddle yourself with a composer or useless people.... It discredits your service when such individuals run about the world like beggars.”