The Webers and Paris
Early on September 23, 1777, Wolfgang and his mother (who would much rather have remained in Salzburg) drove off in a newly purchased carriage. The departure was a bitter event for Leopold, whose trouble was such that he forgot to give his son his blessing before the vehicle was out of sight! Nannerl, equally distraught, was sick and had to take to her bed. To add to the melancholy of the occasion Father Mozart darkened the house and fell asleep till roused hours later by Bimperl, the dog. The woeful day finally dragged itself to an end; it would have been far more terrible had they known that poor Maria Anna was never to return!
They went first to Munich, where Wolfgang made an ineffectual appeal to the Elector and received that answer with which he was in the course of his life to become so tragically familiar: “Yes, my dear child, but there is no position free! Now if only there were...,” etc., etc. At Augsburg, the next stop, he divided his time between Andreas Stein, the pianomaker whose instruments stirred his interest, and his cousin, the “Bäsle,” with whom he freely indulged in those ribaldries that so shocked the puritanical generations of the next century. From that ancestral seat they turned to Mannheim, which was a very different story. For here Mozart found all manner of musical interests and important personalities. And here he fell devastatingly in love!
He had made the acquaintance of the family of Fridolin and Maria Cäcilie Weber. A streak of bohemianism ran through the lot of them. The father, in straitened circumstances, eked out an existence in Mannheim as singer, musician, copyist, prompter—in short, a kind of man-of-all-work in the theater and orchestra. The mother was a sinister creature—an out-and-out adventuress. The couple had four daughters, Josefa, Aloysia, Constanze, and Sophie. Constanze was, in the fullness of time, to become Mozart’s wife. But his feelings were at first kindled by Aloysia, who was then only fifteen and with whom Maria Cäcilie at this stage set about to tempt the young man, who was quickly bowled over by the girl’s feminine charms, her lovely voice, and her musicianship. In the years to come each of these women was to play some part in the composer’s life. (A few years later there was born in a closely related branch of the Weber family that figure who made the name immortal—Carl Maria von Weber; so that through marriage the creators of Der Freischütz and of Die Zauberflöte became cousins!)
Love caused Wolfgang to build castles in the air and to concoct extravagant schemes. He composed abundantly in Mannheim, planned operas and what-not for his idolized Aloysia, and before long was writing to his father proposing to give up the Paris venture altogether and set out on a trip to Italy with the Webers. Leopold was horrified, the more so as his wife wrote telling him exactly how things stood. Father Mozart sternly laid down the law to his son and ended with the words: “Off with you to Paris! And that soon! Find your place among great people. Aut Caesar aut nihil. The mere thought of seeing Paris ought to have preserved you from all these flighty ideas!” Wolfgang did not, it is true, rebel and in the end he went to Paris. But he answered his father with some heat. He declared that he was no longer a child and had no intention of tolerating aspersions on his conduct with Aloysia. “There are some people,” he added, “who think it impossible to love a girl without evil designs and this pretty word mistress is indeed a fine one!”
But Leopold had, for the moment, won his point and in March 1778, Wolfgang and his mother were off. The Paris adventure turned out a dismal fiasco. Even Melchior Grimm, once so helpful, was not interested this time. He was willing to promote a sensation who gave promise of being a money-maker. But, as Alfred Einstein has noted,
“It was Wolfgang’s character that made Leopold wrong in his estimate of Paris and the Parisian nobility. For Wolfgang was no conqueror and he could not have conquered Paris even if he had wanted to.... How carefully Gluck’s conquest of Paris had been prepared! Not only ambassadors and queens but the entire public took part in these preparations.... Mozart slipped into Paris quietly and unobserved, accompanied by his mother, who had come along to keep an eye on him.”
He detested Paris, thought continually of Aloysia, had no use for the now-surly Grimm, turned down the offer of an organist post in Versailles (feeling that the place was no more than a suburb), had some unsatisfactory dealings with Le Gros, director of the Concert Spirituel, composed for the Parisian stage no more than the ballet Les Petits Riens, easily succumbed to some of Le Gros’ intrigues, and was demoralized generally. Only one work of his—the D major Symphony (K. 297)—was outspokenly successful. To climax his woes his mother fell ill and died on July 3, 1778. He had to ask the old Salzburg family friend, Abbé Bullinger, to break the news to his father and sister. And he wrote, “You have no idea what a dreadful time I have been having here ... until one is well known nothing can be done in the matter of composition.... From my description of the music here you may have gathered that I am not very happy and that I am trying to get away as quickly as possible.”
“As quickly as possible” was not till September 1778. He decided reluctantly to return to Salzburg, to the Archbishop’s service, where he would conduct and accompany, but not play violin. Even so, he was momentarily tempted to stay on in Paris and might even have done so if Grimm had not been obviously eager to be rid of him. He did not hurry back to the hated Salzburg but stopped off in Strassburg, Mannheim, and Munich, where he found the flighty Aloysia already the wife of Joseph Lange (the itinerant actor to whom posterity owes the familiar unfinished portrait of Mozart). When he finally did submit to the inevitable trip home he lacked the courage to meet his bereaved father alone and so took his “dear little Bäsle” with him.