Life of Mozart

by Ludwig Nohl

Yet, the emperor finally ordered its performance also. It took place on the 7th of May, 1788; but the opera did not give satisfaction. Da Ponte writes: “Everybody, Mozart alone excepted, was of opinion that the piece would have to be re-written. We made additions to it, changed pieces in it, and yet, a second time, Don Giovanni did not give satisfaction.” According to Da Ponte, however, this did not keep the emperor from saying, that the “work was magnificent, more beautiful than Figaro, but no morsel for the Viennese.” Mozart, to whom this saying of the emperor had been carried, replied: “Only give them time to taste it;” and, indeed, every performance of the opera added to its success. Haydn said, in a company at the house of Count Rosenberg, which was no rendezvous for Mozart’s friends, that he could not settle their dispute about the faults of the work, but he knew that Mozart was the greatest composer which the world then had.

And yet, at this very time, Mozart was suffering from want, actual want! The first of those mournful letters to his friend Puchberg, the merchant, is dated the 17th of June of this year. These letters afford us a picture of his condition during the last years of his life. They even foreshadow the sad, premature end of our artist. He received from Don Giovanni, in Vienna, altogether two hundred and twenty-five guldens. His compositions were in contents and execution too difficult for the dilettanti, and his feeling and views on art did not allow him to write otherwise; so that the publishers were not able to pay him much. Besides, those parts of his compositions which were really popular, were everywhere republished. Concerts could not be given all the time, and his receipts from all sources were too irregular. His household expenses, spite of his simple way of living, were great. He had several children, in quick succession, and Constance was taken, repeatedly, very seriously ill—in one instance, for eight whole months. He closes one of his letters, asking for, and imploring a little “momentary assistance,” according to his friend’s pleasure, as follows: “My wife was sick again yesterday. To-day, thank God, she is better: yet I am very unhappy, always wavering between worry and hope.”

This affliction of body and mind was a constant trial of his better nature. His letters next to his music afford us the most beautiful proof of the purity of his soul and the depth of his feelings. Yet the last years of Mozart’s life disclose to us a mournful picture of the existence of a German artist; and it is only Mozart’s own spirit that can lift us high above the sadness and acrimony which we are disposed to feel here.

His mind did not grow gloomy. Like the phœnix, he always rose out of the ashes of the want that consumed him—more brilliantly arrayed and fitted for a grander flight. And it is truer of scarcely any artist than of him, that his last note was like the dying strains of the swan, an echo from another and higher world, a sound at once joyful and melancholy such as had never been heard before.

The symphony in E major which was finished in these summer days of 1788, has in fact, been called the Song of the Swan. Of it Hoffman, in his celebrated Phantasiestuecken, beautifully says: “The language of love and melancholy are heard in the sweet voices of spirits. The night breaks into a bright purple light, and, with an unspeakable longing, we follow the forms which invite us with friendly glances into their ranks as they fly through the clouds to the eternal music of the spheres.” Immediately following this came the exceedingly powerful and life-like symphony in G minor, and the Jupiter symphony. Did mortal ever before hear the quiet jubilation of all beings as it is heard in the andante of this last? The man who can write such works has higher joys than the world can give or take away. His eye full of the truest happiness, is directed towards an eternal ideal which refreshes, preserves and blesses him. The grave little adagio in H minor for the piano was also written in this same year, 1788.

At this time, Handel, with his vigorous and manly nature entered Mozart’s domain. He was preparing for a friend and patron, the former ambassador to Berlin, Baron von Swieten, Acis and Galatea and the Messias. Mozart’s opinion of Handel was, that he understood better than any one else the power of music, and that when he chose, he could use chorus and orchestra with overwhelming effect; even his airs in the Italian style always betokened the composer of the Messias. But he was destined soon to become acquainted with a greater genius, a man all imposing to him—Sebastian Bach. Handel’s freer form and his dramatic characterization were not new to him; and we may judge from the Idomeneo that Mozart possessed a power not unlike that which was peculiar to Handel. Yet Bach opened to him, both as an artist and a man, a new world, but one which he had long half suspected and half known—that ocean of polyphony governed with such sovereign power. And yet the matter lay deeper.

Some one in Leipzig itself—he probably had reference to Bach—had, in a conversation, called it a burning shame, that it was with so many great musicians as it had been with the old painters: they were compelled to employ their immense powers on the fruitless and mind-destroying subjects of the church. Mozart was highly displeased at the remark, and said in a very sad manner, that that was some more art-twaddle. And he continued in some such strain as this: “With you, enlightened Protestants, as you call yourselves, when all your religion is the religion of the head, there may be some truth in this. But with us, it is otherwise. You do not at all feel the meaning of the words, Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem. [Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world; grant us peace.] But when one has, from his earliest childhood, been introduced into the sanctuary of our religion, and attended its service with fervor, and called those happy who knelt at the touching strains of the Agnus Dei and received the communion, while the music gushing in tender joy from the hearts of the faithful, said, Benedictus qui venit, [Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,] it is very different; and, when now, these words, heard a thousand times, are placed before one to be set to music, it all returns and stirs the soul within him.” On this occasion, he recalled that first composition for the consecration of a church in his childhood, in Vienna, and the religious impressions he carried away from Italy of which we spoke above.

He was now in Leipzig and became acquainted with Sebastian Bach in his church compositions. Necessity had again started him on an artistic journey. His friend and pupil, prince Charles Lichnowsky, who was soon destined to play an important part in Beethoven’s life also, had asked Mozart to travel with him to Berlin where he might probably be of some use to him with the music-loving Frederick William II. Our information concerning this journey and one that followed it, is to be found in those letters to his wife, of which she herself subsequently wrote that these unstudied epistles were the best indication of his way of thinking, of his peculiar nature and of his culture. She says: “The rare love for me which these letters breathe is supremely characteristic of him. Those written in his later years are just as tender as those which he must have written during the first years of our married life, are they not?” In those letters, indeed, we have the man, Mozart as he really was, and what he had gone through in life, before us.

In Prague, the director of the theatre had almost so arranged it that he was to get two hundred ducats for a new opera, and fifty ducats for traveling expenses. This gave him new life. One of his old Munich friends, the hautboyist Ramm, who had come from Berlin, had also told him, in Prague, that the king had asked him “very often and very anxiously” if it was sure that Mozart was coming, and when he saw that he had not come, said: “I am afraid that he is not going to come.” “Judging from this,” says Mozart, “my affairs will not go ill.” In Dresden, he formed the acquaintance of Schiller’s friend, Koerner, the father of the poet, whose sister-in-law, Doris Stock, made a drawing of his picture. But all the affection he met with only turned his thoughts more lovingly to his wife and child at home. He writes, on the 13th of April, 1789: “My dearest wife, if I only had a letter from you.... If I could only tell you all I have to say to your dear picture!... And when I put it away I let it slide from me gradually, while I say: Well! well! well! and, at the last, good night, pet, pleasant dreams!” The same complete ingenuousness of a really child-like soul, of which his friends in Prague were wont to speak. One of them, Professor Niemetschek, to whom we are indebted for the first biography of Mozart, says of him: “Brimming over with the pleasantest humor, he would surrender himself to the drollest fancies, so that people forgot entirely that they had the wonderful artist, Mozart, before them.” Closing the letter to his wife, above referred to, he says: “Now, I think I have written something which the world at least will think very stupid; but it is not stupid to us who love one another so tenderly.” We shall yet see what a treasure for his art was this heart of his, which always loved, as it did, the day he was married. Only genius can manifest so much innocence and, at the same time, such depth of feeling.

In Dresden he played at court and was presented with “a very pretty” snuff-box. Here, too, was one Haessler, a pupil of Sebastian Bach, whose forte was the piano and the organ. This served to stimulate Mozart’s ability to a higher pitch. He had already become acquainted, through Van Swieten, with a number of Bach’s and Handel’s fugues. He also had frequently improvised such fugues himself, or noted them down at the request of his wife. The man who understands polyphony as Mozart shows he did in the ensembles of Figaro and Don Giovanni—which testify to the magnitude of his technic powers chiefly by the fact that it is only the connoisseur that notices these marvels—must really insist on perfect art in this point, also. Mozart writes: “Now, the people here think that because I come from Vienna I know nothing whatever of this kind of music or this manner of playing. I, therefore, seated myself at the organ and played. Prince Lichnowsky, who knew Haessler well, persuaded him, after a great deal of trouble, to play, too.” It then appeared that Haessler had simply learned harmony and some modulations by rote from old Sebastian Bach, and was not able to execute a harmony properly; that, as Mozart expresses himself, he was, by no means, an Albrechtsberger—a man well known as one of Beethoven’s thorough-bass teachers. But, when Haessler sat down at the piano, he fared worse yet.