Life of Mozart

by Ludwig Nohl

Such was the dialogue between a prince and an artist of the past century! It tells us something of its culture and civilization. Mozart’s account of this scene concludes: “I will hear no more of Salzburg. I hate the archbishop even to madness.”

But this was not the worst. “I did not know,” says Mozart, “that I was a valet de chambre; that overcame me entirely; and my father should be glad that he has not a man dishonored for his son.” But now sycophantic flunkies began to busy themselves with the affair. They knew that the archbishop did not like to lose an artist whom such efforts had been made, before his eyes, to retain in Vienna. The master of the household, Count Arco, therefore, did everything that in him lay to quiet the matter. He refused, “from lack of courage and a love of adulation,” to accept Mozart’s petition for dismissal. But when the latter insisted on it, with a brutality not unworthy of his master, Arco threw the noble artist out the door—with a kick!

After his personal audience with the archbishop, Mozart’s blood boiled; he trembled from head to foot and reeled on the street like a drunken man. Now he assures us that, when he meets the count, he will pay him back the compliment he received from him. In the ante-chamber he did not, like Arco himself, wish “to lose his respect for the prince’s apartments,” but then he was determined that “the hungry donkey should get an answer from him that he would feel,” even if it were twenty years before a suitable occasion presented itself to give it. And when his father recoiled at the boldness of such an attempt, our young artist gave expression to a sentiment which lifted him high above all that environed him, and stamps him one of the noblest representatives of human nature. We have chosen that sentiment as the motto of this his biography: “The heart is man’s title to nobility!”

More painful than all these insults to the manly honor of our young artist were the heart-aches caused him by the very person who should have understood him best, by his own father.

The latter had been obliged to write to him: “Do not allow yourself to be misled by flattery. Be on your guard.” Now reproach was added to mistrust, and Wolfgang was accused of endangering his father’s subsistence, in his old age. He compared Wolfgang to Aloysia, who had scarcely secured a good position in life than she joined her fortunes to those of a comedian—the celebrated Joseph Lange—and neglected her own people. He even went so far as to demand that his son should withdraw his petition, adding that he was in honor bound to do so. There was not in all of this a single trait by which Mozart could recognize his father. He could, indeed, he said, recognize “a father, but not the best, the most loving of fathers, the father solicitous for his own honor and the honor of his children,—in a word, not my father.” And he concludes: “Ask me to do anything you want, anything but that. The very thought of it makes me tremble with rage.” What he had achieved made Mozart, as an artist, manful and sure of himself; and these sufferings had a similar effect on him as a man; but, compared with the latter troubles, all that he had previously undergone was light indeed. We know how deeply and fully Wolfgang loved his father; but to understand his state of mind at this trying time, one must read the father’s own letters. He reproaches his son, even with a want of love, with being a pleasure-seeker in the great city, and with keeping company with the frivolous! The slanders of strangers and the father’s own suspicions conspired to make things worse; and in the circulation of these slanders, a pupil of the abbe Vogler, J. P. Winter, subsequently known by his Unterbrochenes Opferfest, played a leading part. The way in which Mozart repelled these slanders, lays his whole heart open before us. It was what might have been expected of one whose art was so thoroughly pure and peaceful. He says, with the utmost modesty and simplicity: “My chief fault is that, apparently, I do not act as I should act;” and in answer to all other slanders, he replies, with the most charming consciousness of self: “I need only consult my reason and my heart to do what is right and just.”

Thus was Mozart’s relations with Salzburg, which had never brought him much happiness or honor, dissolved for all time. He lost, it is true, by this dissolution, the loving confidence of his father; but painful as this loss was to him, it was not without compensation. He obtained personal freedom and conquered for himself a place in which his already highly developed individuality as an artist was at liberty to act, room for the workings of his creative genius. This and his love and marriage, which put him in possession of something which he could permanently call his own, are further decisive events in our artist’s life. We shall see their effects on his art, and, in the creation of such magnificent works as the “Elopement from the Seraglio,” “Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.” His recent personal experience had given him that insight and that inward freedom without which his towering, life-experienced style and his supreme power of depicting character are impossible.

The time and place were favorable to the production of such works. And it was not simply the oppressive feeling of the humiliating and narrowing circumstances of his position hitherto, but the joyful consciousness that, as his genius soon perceived, he was at last in the place in the world best suited to his taste, in Vienna, that this time caused him to conceive and hold fast to his desire. Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel waer!—“And though the world were full of devils!”—we may discover something of the desperate resolution which these words imply, in his struggle at this time with his dearest of fathers; a resolution generated, doubtless, by the circumstances in which he now saw himself suddenly and accidentally placed, and which were so favorable to his art, and to a becoming mode of living. He felt that he had come here to grow to his full stature; and the instinct of artistic creation, like the instinct of love, is involuntary and irresistible. The father did not understand this. He had to be won over by prospects of material success, and this success Wolfgang was able confidently to promise himself and his father. Nor was he wanting here. And if we are obliged to confess that Mozart, even in the rich city of Vienna, almost starved, and that he died before his time, the cause was, in the first place, that his genius was too great to be fully appreciated by his contemporaries and his environment, and then that he was so wrapped up in his sublime task, that the world gradually receded from him, and it became an easy matter for the envious and his enemies to rob him of the visible fruits of his success, and to limit him to the joys and sunshine of his art. His art, indeed, throve even in Vienna, far beyond what he had hoped. It was more than his contemporaries could appreciate or understand. And, indeed, where would we be to-day without Mozart? As well as Goethe, he touched the purest, the ultimate feeling of beauty in art, and opened to our view the innermost and deepest depths of the human soul. It was more than all else, Vienna and Austria that helped him to do this.

During the period, beginning with 1780, Austria had recovered from the effects of the wounds it received in the Seven Years’ War. The people were well-to-do, and the rich nobles of the eastern provinces, the Esterhazys, Schwarzenbergs, Thuns and Kinskys left immense amounts of money in the capital. The state of society was not yet disturbed. The nobility and middle class lived in harmony with one another. Above all and dearly loved by all, sat throned, the Emperor Joseph II., an ideal Austrian, whose like had not been seen since the time of Maximilian I. The emperor Joseph was, so to speak, the counterpart, both in disposition and education, of old Fritz (Frederick the Great), who was the ablest representative at that time of practical German energy and intelligence. This it was that gave the Austrian, and above all the Viennese, disposition that peculiar character from which sprang a style of art which had no predecessor and no counterpart that could be called its equal save in Raphael and the antique—German chamber music. Haydn’s, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s quartets alone sufficed to make this Viennese period, from 1775 to 1825, a stretch of fifty years, forever memorable. But besides, there was the instrumental music of this brilliant musical triad whom Gluck had preceded.

Life at this time in Vienna was overflowing with a warm sensuousness, unpolluted by the coarseness of vice. Men gave themselves up unconstrained to their emotions. This itself is the most natural and most fertile soil for productions of the mind, intended, primarily, to operate on the senses, and through the senses to speak to our heart of hearts and to our mind of minds. It is the most fitting soil for art. And hence, we find here the first and most indispensable of all conditions precedent to the full bloom of music. Life in the Austrian capital, sunk apparently in sensuousness, had, like a reflection of the ever brightening and warming sun, in its depths, that German, joyous good-nature, that deutsche Gemueth, that leveling peace, and that beautiful disposition which allow every living creature to do what pleases him best and go his own way. Added to this was the high degree of education which distinguished Vienna at the time, and which was influenced, in part, by direct contact with the period of the highest Italian culture, the renaissance. It had noble houses, wealthy and refined families of the middle class and of the learned, and above all, its emperor—if not in music, in all else the most nobly cultured! We have only to think of the other capitals at the time, Paris, London, and even Berlin, to be convinced that a Gluck, a Haydn, a Mozart, or a Beethoven, could never have thrived in any of them. They thrived in Vienna; and the last two artists asserted that it was in Vienna only that they could have thrived, that is developed that art, the germ’s of which they felt themselves to possess as a talent confided to them.

We may inquire, more particularly now, how it stood with music and the theatre in those days. Many of the great houses had music of their own; the wealthiest princes had not unfrequently their private orchestra; other families string-quartets or the piano; and the latter was, as Ph. E. Bach says, intended for music that went direct to the heart, and not simply for children to practice on. No such golden age of music had been seen since the days of the North German School for organists, which had produced that eighth wonder of the world, Sebastian Bach; and Beethoven recalled it, with a feeling of melancholy, when, with the great wars of the Revolution a desolate period began, in which men’s souls and with them music, the soul’s own art, were struck dumb. Philip Emanuel Bach, the younger son of John Sebastian Bach, it was, who had led music out of the stage which had religion for its center, and opened to it by his sonatas fuer Kenner und Liebhaber, the domain of purely human thought and feeling. “He is the parent, we the children,” said Mozart, speaking of himself, and J. Haydn. Haydn also made a similar admission.