“Yes, my dear child, but I am sorry to say that there is not a place vacant. If there was only a vacancy.”
“I assure your highness that I would certainly do honor to Munich.”
“Well, it’s of no use to talk that way, there’s not a place vacant.”
We have here given the whole dialogue. It is a typical example of the way in which princes and magnates treated Mozart through the whole of his short life. There never was “a vacancy” for him. Real genius finds no place to lay its head. It would seem as if its god-given nature were fated to find nothing earthly to cling to.
But, to continue. Spite of this positive declaration, Mozart was not deterred from trying it again at court, and this spite of the fact that his father had written to him that the elector could not create a new place without any more ado, and that, besides, there were always secret enemies in such cases, who prevented a thing of that kind out of anxiety to save their own skin. Yet friends, true and false, found means to flatter him. First of all, there was count Seeau, who had a pecuniary interest in the theater, and understood what advantage a fertile mind like that of Mozart might be to him. He knew how to amuse Mozart, whom, on the occasion of the performance of his first opera, he saw to be all fire and flame, with fair hopes: Mozart was to write a German opera of the heroic kind, and this appealed powerfully to his patriotic feelings. He himself next stirred up his own friends. A number of those interested in him, it was proposed, should club together, and enable him, by a regular monthly contribution, to remain in Munich until he had written such a work, and thus obtained a foothold. Seeau had, indeed, expressed himself to the effect that he would like to retain Mozart, if he had only “a little assistance from home.” Mozart wanted to pledge himself to write four German operas a year, partly comic and partly serious, and estimated that his profits from them would be at least eight hundred and fifty marks, or about two hundred dollars; that count Seeau would give at least five hundred, and would be always invited—and how much there was to be gained here! And he adds: “I am very much liked here even now; but how popular I should be if I could only elevate the German opera! and this I certainly would be able to do, for I felt the greatest desire to write when I heard the German vaudeville.”
“Wolfgang’s first castles in the air!” the father must have said to himself when he read these lines. The “learned host” who had taken the matter of contributions in hand with honest zeal and with a true interest in young Mozart, could not find so many as ten persons to give a trifle over a ducat a month to aid in the good cause. Yet it must be remembered that the German national taste for art was fast awakening together with the freedom of German national, intellectual life—the result of many causes, but especially of the deeds and exploits of Old Fritz (Frederick the Great); and, that a German national opera was among the ideals both of princes and artists—at least of those of them who shared in the broader and nobler thought of the period. We shall have something to say on this point further on.
Thus are we able to understand Wolfgang’s warm attachment for the German opera—and, indeed, had not the prima donna Kaiser “drawn many and many a tear from him”—as well as his arduous endeavor to obtain a firm and permanent foothold in Munich. But Wolfgang’s success as a virtuoso made the father believe in him completely, and inspired him with confidence, spite of this first want of success. The son writes: “At the very last, I played my own cassation in B major. Every one wondered. I played as if I were the greatest fiddler in Europe.” To which the father answered: “You don’t know yourself, my son, how well you play the violin when you only do yourself justice and care to play with heart and spirit, just as if you were the first violinist in Europe.” A cassation is a piece of music in the form of Beethoven’s septett, but intended for a solo-instrument, and especially for serenades.
But he was doomed to disappointment. To see how the father watched over the credit of his son who, in his first endeavors to attain success, had fallen into a condition of dependence entirely unworthy of him, and thus become a laughing-stock for the archbishop; and how the son excused his inconsiderate and inordinate zeal by pleading his passion for the opera, we must consult the letters of both. Wolfgang, with his characteristic amiability, says: “I speak from my heart, and just as I feel. If papa convinces me that I am in the wrong, I shall submit, however reluctantly; for I am out of myself the moment I even hear an opera spoken of.”
They left Munich on the 11th of October, 1777—that is, a full fortnight after their arrival. The father reminds them that neither “fair words, compliments nor bravissimos pay the postmaster or the host.” “Do all you can to earn some money, and be as careful as possible about your expenses. The object of your journey is, and must be, either to obtain employment or to earn money.” This last, however, was not their object in the rich and free imperial city of Augsburg, whither they first directed their steps, because it was their father’s birthplace. They received a warm welcome there from the father’s brother, like Wolfgang’s grandfather, a book-binder. Mozart’s playing and composition, as well as himself, here as everywhere else, met with the greatest recognition, both in public and private, but he did not succeed in giving a concert. The “patricians” were not in funds. And when the Protestant patricians invited them to their boorish academy (to the vornehmen Bauernstub Akademie), the total amount of the present made was—two ducats. “I’m very sure,” the father says, “they would scarcely have gotten me into their beggarly academy;” and, we may add: “The prophet is without honor in his own country.”
But he has erected the best possible monument to those Gothamites, so foolishly proud of their old imperial-city denizenship. In Mozart’s letters to his father, we get an exquisitely faithful picture of “free city” life and “free city” men, with the exaggerated self-consciousness and self-satisfaction of inherited possession and honor, so frequently met with in them that even mere youths seemed almost in their dotage. One cannot but grow merry at the expense of that narrow little world. “His grace,” the chamberlain to the exchequer of the town, Herr von Langenmantel the “my lords,” his sons, and his “gracious” young wife, fare all the worse under the lash of the Mozart’s well-known “wicked tongue,” because Mozart might reasonably have hoped to find a becoming welcome in his father’s birthplace. Even the golden spur given Mozart by Pope Ganganelli did more to charm these “free citizens” than it did to remind them of the honors so young an artist had already won, and that he was, in consequence, the peer of any one of them. One officer of the imperial army, especially, who ignored this fact, was very properly snubbed, and taught the lesson that Mozart was not to be made sport of. We read in one of the father’s letters, “Whenever I thought of your journey to Augsburg, I could not help thinking of Wieland’s Abderites; a man should get an opportunity to see in natura what in reading he considers a pure ideal.” But Mozart had here the best of opportunities to pursue those studies which the artist needs, in order to paint from life. We are reminded of his experiences, like those in Augsburg, by the brutal, self-destructive, ridiculous haughtiness of Osmin in the “Elopement from the Seraglio.”