Life of Mozart

by Ludwig Nohl

“Now thy end has come!”

Yawning abysses open, and spirits of hell drag the dastard into the dismal grave, alive.

We know what the cheerful phase of the life of the past century was. It has found a more fiery expression in Don Giovanni than even in the Figaro. The Renaissance had introduced anew the free enjoyment of life of the ancient world. Think only what the Borgias were! From Italy and Spain it had made its way to France, when people there, for the first time, became conscious that they were “dancing on a volcano.” The feeling that there hangs a necessary and tragic sentence over the mere sensuousness of life, which is, after all, but a powerful picture of the transitoriness of all things earthly—a transitoriness which will always remain a dark enigma to the living themselves, and which therefore fills the proudest life with a certain melancholy—this feeling, which constitutes the poetic nucleus of the whole story of Don Giovanni, no one of all who have treated the subject, in an artistic manner, has fathomed or shown the power of, even in a remote degree, as did Mozart. The music, on the appearance of the stony guest, springs from the same fountain as Faust’s most beautiful and profound monologues. It is the consciousness, the heart-felt knowledge of the permanent duration of human life; and we have seen how life itself led Mozart, the artist and the man, to this heart-felt knowledge and to the feeling of something really eternal in the changes that surround us.

The following further details as to the origin of Don Giovanni are not devoid of interest.

Da Ponte’s boasting in his memoirs is indeed exquisite, and shows that, after all, he had no idea what the value of the material of Don Giovanni was. He had the three distinguished opera composers of Vienna at the time to write for, and he quieted the doubts of the emperor as to the success of such a task, by telling him that he would write during the night for Mozart and keep thinking of Dante’s Hell, in the morning for Martin, and read Petrarca, in the evening for Salieri, when Tasso should be his companion. With a bottle of tokai and some Spanish tobacco before him, and the sixteen-year-old daughter of his hostess, as his muse beside him, he says he began his work, and in two months the whole was finished.

And how about Mozart? When at the beginning of April, the libretto of this poetical judgment on human life had come into his hands, his soul was directed with redoubled energy to its serious meaning. He received at that time, the news of the grave illness of his father, which led him to give expression to some remarkable sayings about death as the “true goal of our life—man’s true, best friend.” We shall yet see what suggested this. Besides, he had shortly before lost his “best and dearest” friend, Count Hatzfeld, and now, on the 28th of May 1787, he lost his beloved father also. The quintet in G minor dates from this time. The depths of his soul open up before us here. This quintet is a prelude to Don Giovanni. At this time, too, it was that the court organist, Ludwig Beethoven of Bonn, now in his sixteenth year, paid him a visit. Mozart paid no attention to Beethoven beyond predicting his world-wide fame, so entirely was he pre-occupied with his new work. The following September, his friend Dr. Barisoni, who had attended him two years before, when he was very dangerously sick, died; and Mozart wrote under some of his verses in his album: “It is well with him!—but it will never be well with me, with us and with all who knew him so well, until we are happy enough to see him in a better world, never to part again!” His thoughts went beyond the grave and endeavored to fathom the eternal relations of things. This was the mood in which he wrote Don Giovanni. Even into the brightest light of life, creep at last the dark shadows of annihilation!

In the beginning of September 1787, composer and poet were in Prague. Constance also had traveled with them. She had to see that no disturbance from without interfered with the workings of our artist’s laborious mind. Personal intercourse with the singers increased his intellectual activity. The first singer who took the part of Don Giovanni was lauded to the deaf Beethoven, almost forty years later, as a “fiery Italian.” The female singers were not by any means remarkable. Yet it was said that our artist had been guilty, during this sojourn in Prague, of all kinds of gay adventures; and this while he was writing himself to a friend in Vienna: “Is there not an infinite difference between the pleasure of a fickle, whimsical love and the bliss of a really rational one?” In after years, his acquaintances remembered the happy hours they had spent with him in Prague. He played at nine-pins with them in a wine-garden, which is now adorned with his bust, while at the same time he wrote out his score at the table in the place. And in the evening before the performance he was exceedingly cheerful and full of jokes. Finally, Constance told him it was eleven o’clock, that the overture was not yet written. At his home, with his glass of punch, such as he liked, he proceeded to perform the task which was so irksome to him. He had the work long since finished in his head. He had even already played it as well as two other drafts of it for his friends. On this account, Constance, in order to keep his thoughts flowing, was obliged to tell stories to him. These were fairy tales, like Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp, and Cinderella. Mozart frequently laughed over them until the tears came. Fatigue, however, overpowered him at last, and his wife allowed him to sleep a few hours. Yet the copyists received their work in the early morning. He had, moreover, according to his own confession to the director of the orchestra, never allowed himself to be prevented from producing something excellent for Prague, and at the same time assured him, that he had not acquired his art easily. No one, he said, had been more industrious to acquire it than he, and it would be hard to find a celebrated master whom he had not diligently studied.

It is said that he set the celebrated Reich mir die Hand to music five times for Don Giovanni. He made the singers rehearse to him separately. He danced the minuet for them himself; for, strange to say, he once told Kelly that his achievements in dancing were more remarkable than his achievements in music. Hence, the players were full of good will and enthusiasm, the consequence of which was, that the performance this time, also, was a very good one. It took place on the 29th of October, 1787. The house was full to overflowing, and Mozart was received with a flourish of trumpets, repeated three times, and applause which it seemed would never cease. Such was the reception accorded the opera itself, that the director of the theatre wrote to the composer of the libretto, who, in the meantime had returned to Vienna: “Long live Da Ponte! Long live Mozart! Praise them, all ye directors and all ye singers! So long as they live theatres cannot fail to do a thriving business.” As usual, Mozart himself speaks modestly of “the loudest kind of applause,” and remarks to his friend in Vienna, mentioned above: “I could wish that my friends were here a single evening to share my pleasure. But probably the opera will not be performed in Vienna. I wish so. People are doing all in their power to prevail upon me to remain here a few months and write another opera; but, flattering as the invitation is, I cannot accept it.”

And now, as to the work itself. Schiller wrote to Goethe on the 29th of December, 1797, that he had always entertained the confidence that out of the opera as out of the choruses of the old feasts of Dionysos, tragedy would develop a nobler form. By the power of music, it attuned the heart to a finer susceptibility, and, in this way, it might happen that, at last, even the ideal might stealthily make its way to the stage. Goethe answered curtly: “You might have seen your hopes recently realized to a great extent in Don Giovanni. But in this respect, that piece stands entirely alone, and Mozart’s death has rendered all hope of anything like it, idle.” We owe it to Figaro and Don Giovanni, more than to anything else, that we are able to-day, to assert the contrary, and that we witness the real dramatic art which was attained to by Italy in the revival of antiquity in a truly flourishing condition about us. What Gluck required should be the characteristic points of dramatic composition is here complied with to the fullest extent; to an extent which, in many particulars, has not been yet surpassed. This perfection Mozart owed to his more accurate acquaintance with the exigencies of the drama and his supreme command of all the capabilities of music. The separate and distinct pieces of music, indeed, with their pitiful, recurring cadences, remind us continually that it is with a musician we have to do, and one whose style was a development from the Italian school. But then such is the poetical intuition of this musician that the poetical material helps him always to some new invention in his own art. And while this art seems to demand that it should be necessarily confined to its own sphere and possess definite forms, genius is able to so arrange it that the dramatic action may lose nothing that properly belongs to it, and yet that the music may not become simply “the obedient daughter of poetry.”

Richard Wagner, the great master, who, in this sphere, is Mozart’s only real successor, says: “Mozart in his operas demonstrated the inexhaustible resources of music most fully to meet every demand of the poet on its power of expression; and considering his completely original course, this glorious musician did a great deal more to discover this power of music, both in respect to truth of expression, and in the endless varieties of its causes, than Gluck and all his successors.” And in this dramatic respect, the Figaro, and Don Giovanni, unquestionably occupy the first place. Who is there that does not recognize in Keine Ruh’ bei Tag und Nacht, Wenn du fein artig bist, Treibt der Champagner, a new language in tones? We here again witness the noblest acquisitions of the Idomeneo and the Elopement from the Seraglio, in the highest possible perfection concentrated in all their energy. It is a miracle of strength and grace, of spirit and euphony, of buoyant force, of nobleness, and at the same time, of truest, deepest feeling.