The court had heard him in the very first week of his stay in Mannheim. “You play incomparably well,” said the elector to him. Shortly after Mozart spoke to the elector as “his good friend,” and the latter began: “I have heard that you wrote an opera in Munich.” “Yes, your highness,” Mozart replied, “I commend myself as your grace’s obedient servant. My highest wish is to write an opera I beg your highness not to forget me quite I know German also, and may God be praised and thanked for it.” “That is not at all impossible,” answered his most serene highness, and so Mozart made his arrangements for a longer sojourn in Mannheim. He took some pupils, and as we saw when speaking of the pretty Rosa Cannabich, he wrote sonatas, or variations for them. For this he needed a copyist But copying was, as he once complained to his father, very dear in Mannheim, and he was, therefore, overjoyed, copying being to himself a real torment, after a while—it was at the beginning of 1778—to find a man who performed that task for him, in consideration of his instructing his daughter in music.
This man was Fridolin von Weber, brother of the father of C. M. von Weber, and at that time, a prompter and a copyist in the Mannheim theater. The daughter’s name was Aloysia, later the celebrated singer, Madame Lange.
The family had seen better days, but the father’s passion for the stage had led him into these straits, where he had for years to support a family of six children on an annual salary of three hundred and fifty marks. But he made such good use of his knowledge of music that his second daughter, who was at this time—she was in her fifteenth year—an excellent singer, cooperated with him at the theater, and thus doubled her father’s salary. Mozart as a musician felt at home in the family—for the eldest daughter, Josepha became afterwards Frau Hofer, for whom the “Queen of the Night” in the Magic Flute was written—and so the sympathy of his good heart was soon awakened. “She needs nothing but action, and then she will make a good prima donna on any stage. Her father is a thoroughly honorable son of our German fatherland. He brings his children up well, and that is the very cause why the girl is persecuted here.” Thus did he sum up the chief points in this affair in the first news he sent home. Subsequently he wrote a propos of a performance at the house of the princess of Orange: “I may pass over her singing with a single word—it was superb!” And at the close of his letter: “I have the inexpressible pleasure to have formed the acquaintance of thoroughly honest and really Christian people. I only regret that I did not know them long ago.”
This tells the whole story. He henceforth devoted nearly all his leisure to the family, rehearsed with the young vocalist all her arias, procured her opportunities to have her music heard, and had the satisfaction to know that Raaff himself, the most celebrated tenor in Mannheim, and even in Germany, declared that she sang not like a pupil, but like an adept in the vocal art.
One incident here deserves to be specially mentioned, for it had a decided, far-reaching and direct influence on Mozart’s action, and on his development as an artist. He had set about writing an aria for the great tenor already mentioned, in order to win him over for his contemplated opera. “But,” he writes, with the utmost frankness, “the beginning of it seemed to me too high for Raaff, and I liked it too well to change it. I therefore resolved to write the aria for Miss Weber. I laid it aside, and resolved on other words for Raaff. But to no purpose. I found it impossible to write. The first aria haunted my mind and would not away, and then I decided to write it out to suit Miss Weber exactly.”
What was the import of those words which he selected simply because an air to the same words, composed by the London Bach, had pleased him so much and kept forever ringing in his ears, and because he wanted to try whether, spite of everything, he was not able to write an aria entirely unlike Bach’s? What were the words?
A king orders a youth who has made an attempt upon his life to be led to execution. But when he sees the young culprit, he immediately exclaims: “What is this strange power that agitates and moves me? His face, his eye, his voice! My heart palpitates; every fibre of my body quivers! Through all my feelings I look for the cause of this strange effect, and cannot find it. What is it, O God, what is it that I feel?” And hereupon follows that very aria, Non so d’onde viene: “I know not whence this tender feeling. Mere pity cannot produce a change so sudden!” Was not this the condition of Mozart’s own heart? He imagined that pity, and pity only, for the condition of the Weber family, and, at most, an interest in the “beautiful, pure voice,” and wonder at the combination of so much ability with such extreme youth, bound his heart to their home; but it was not that; it was the undivined depths which the first feeling of love opens before us; the wonder, the charm, the trembling, glowing exultation, the heart-felt, floating, exquisite bliss which with a longing foreboding discovers us to ourselves for the first time, and which, in the throes of our heart of hearts, seems to give a new birth to every drop of blood in our veins. In such a state, we may imagine, it was that he sang this: Non so d’onde viene—not as a musician, not as an artist, but urged thereto by that powerful, irresistible impulse of the heart which, in the last instance, begets in us all our truest life. And as Pygmalion, in a fit of such fiery ardor, moved the marble so Mozart melted in this first fire of the fullest and most human of feelings, the elemental substances of all music, and gave it what it hitherto had possessed only in isolated cases and accidentally, an impression full of soul, a meaning to its every tone.
It is hard to find before Mozart, except it be in national melodies, anything of this living, animated, thoroughly personal expression of feeling, such as we possess in this Non so d’onde viene. It is like Aloysia’s picture itself. Here we find a language plainer and more universally intelligible than words. It charms and enchants us; looks us in the face; speaks to us with an expression as if we alone were addressed. This is the highest, the very highest effect of art, and this the time when it becomes a second, an ideal, a transfigured life. The language which Mozart thus acquired for his art, he never forgot or dropped. He embellished it, amplified it, deepened it, until he reached that expression of the soul in which, like the melody in the Magic Flute, the soul itself stands face to face with its Creator, and in the calmness of its bliss, feels that it is “the image of God,” and His portion forever.
We here close the account of Mozart’s inner awakening. We may now compare with his first heart-trials his first intellectual exploits, the very beginning of which was this aria, Non so d’onde viene, to write which he was inspired by his love for Aloysia Weber.