Life of Mozart

by Ludwig Nohl

As if he had not been the most industrious of workers, he writes to his wife at this time: “I am now firmly resolved to do my very best here, and then I shall be heartily glad to be with you again. What a glorious life we shall live after this! I shall work—O how I shall work! that I may never again get into such a fatal state in consequence of unexpected contingencies.” He was, indeed, literally “immersed” in music. His application had so distracted him, and his mind was so unhinged in consequence, that he did not dare even to cut his own meat in eating, lest he might injure himself. His strange contortions of countenance and his strange gestures showed that his thoughts were far from being in the world about him. He had fallen into the hands of usurers, and that “un-christian class of people,” as he called them, succeeded in involving him completely in their meshes.

But, unfortunately, he was soon forced to the conviction, that, even in Frankfort, there was not much for him to do. In a letter of the 30th of September, 1790, to his wife, he says: “I am exceedingly glad to go back to you again. If people could only look into my heart I would be almost forced to blush. I am so cold, so icy cold to everything. If you were with me, perhaps I would find more pleasure in the kind treatment I receive from people; but, as it is, my heart is empty.” On his journey home, he visited Mayence where Tischbein, Goethe’s friend, painted his picture. He was going to Mannheim. “O the golden days of a heart’s first love!” What thoughts must have possessed him at this time! For, did not all Vienna know how happily he lived with his Constance, while the unhappy relations of Aloysia with her husband were matter of discussion in the public press? But why was it that the man who, at that time, gave promise of such a career of happiness, was now obliged to travel about the world in search of his daily bread? The thought of this filled his soul with bitterness, at the very time that he was invited to Munich, on account of the King of Naples, to a concert at court. He writes: “A pretty honor for the court of Vienna that the King has to hear me in a strange country!” And, indeed, the court’s neglect of him was the chief cause of the sad plight he was in.

His journey had cheered and strengthened him, but it had not improved his pecuniary condition. He could, in consequence, redeem only a portion of the silver-ware he had pledged, and the rest of it was lost entirely through his too great confidence in a Masonic friend. At this time, one of the directors of a London concert company, J. P. Salomon, had come to Vienna to take Haydn—his old patron prince Esterhazy having died—to London. Mozart was to follow after. His parting with the “old papa” was touching in the extreme. We saw above how deep his feeling of affection was for Mozart. The latter, with tears in his eyes, and at a time when he might well have thought rather of his own death, said to Haydn who was so much older: “This is probably our last good-bye, in this life.” He divined only too well. Haydn shed bitter tears of sorrow when he heard of Mozart’s premature death a year later, in London. He now wrote: “Posterity will have to wait a hundred years for another like him;” and again, many years afterwards: “Pardon me, but I must always weep when I hear my dear Mozart’s name.”

Mozart’s soul was deeply affected. But his mind soared into regions beyond this life, where compensation for its inequalities would be found. The debt that weighed upon him now was light in comparison with the wealth he had labored so industriously and devotedly to give the world, and which he was still bestowing on it. And hence it has genuine melancholy, not pain nor plaintive sighs that filled his soul. The golden light of consolation tinged all his work. A friend had once written in his album. “Love! love! love! is the soul of genius.” He now interpreted these words in the sense of eternal love and merciful goodness. A spirit of wonderful sweetness and reconciliation henceforth animates all his music. We need only remind the reader of the two “fantasias” for four hands in F minor. They were written in the winter of 1790-91 “at the urgent solicitation of a friend, a great lover of music,” for an orchestration, in which one Count Dehm produced, for the benefit of his countrymen, a number of distinguished historical characters in wax; and which was intended for the “mausoleum” of the celebrated Field-marshal Laudon. In it we reach the sunny heights of Mozart’s genius, and see how he dived down into, and was absorbed by, his own hard and chequered life, and how he was again lifted up to that eternal spring from which his own as well as Bach’s sublime religious art proceeded; the union of sanctified personal feeling to the sensible presentation of the Eternal itself, to which the human soul looks up in silent, earnest faith and resignation. It was time that another opportunity were offered to Mozart to give complete expression to this final and highest feeling of the human breast; and it was afforded him. Mere accident led to what he aimed at. We are thus brought face to face with his Magic Flute and Requiem; works ushered in by those fantasias, like bright morning stars, just as the quintet in G minor had preceded his Don Giovanni.

In order fully to appreciate the place these two works fill in Mozart’s own life, we must turn our gaze backwards, for a time.

We know what Mozart’s heart-felt religious feeling was. He disclosed it in the frankest way whenever a proper occasion offered. He was just as honestly attached to his Church. When he was starting on his great Parisian journey, in the interest of his art, his father wrote him: “May the grace of God attend you everywhere, may it never forsake you, and it never will forsake you, if you are industrious to fulfill the duties of a really good Catholic.” But at this time, the necessity of examining the great questions of life, death and immortality, and of disclosing to each other, in earnest conversation, the questions of the soul, was very generally felt, by people even outside the Church. And this all the more, because neither the Protestant nor the Catholic service seemed able to satisfy the spiritual cravings of the educated. The Protestant Church was divided into the opposing parties of orthodoxy and rationalism. The Catholic Church had grown torpid, stereotyped in dogma, and its worship had sunk almost to the level of mere theatrical mummery. Oneness of spirit soon led to leagues or unions and orders of which the order of Free Masons attained the greatest importance. Of the men who constantly bore in mind the intellectual life and elevation of the German people, Lessing, Wieland, Herder and Goethe belonged to this order. And since it was its aim to realize the highest virtues of Christianity, the purification of the mind and heart by the sacrifice of self, and the assistance of all men, it was impossible that a man like Mozart should not have felt drawn to it.

He joined the order in Vienna, and so true did the doctrine of the sanctifying nature of death as the real “object and aim of life,” and as the symbol of the self-sacrifice we should be ever ready to make of ourselves, seem to him that he did not rest until he had induced his father to join it also. They, indeed, destroyed the correspondence with one another, on this subject. But the Magic Flute bears witness to the earnestness with which Mozart held to these sublime truths of Christianity, even outside the Church. Its history is as follows:

Schikaneder who, as far back as 1780, had known how to make use of young Mozart in Salzburg, had been some years in Vienna, and had a small wooden theatre in the Stahremberg Freihaus.[9] His inexhaustible good humor made him very good company, and Mozart had long enjoyed himself in the circle of his theatrical friends. Schikaneder had frequently, when acting as theatrical director, alternately reveled in superfluity, and almost starved. Now, in consequence of the competition of the theatre in the Leopoldstadt, he was brought to the very brink of ruin. This was in the spring of 1791. He applied to Mozart for a “piece that would attract.” He said that he had a proper subject, a Magic Opera, and that Mozart was the man to write the music for it. It was an unparalleled piece of impudence, and one which discloses Schikaneder’s whole character, to ask the emperor’s composer, the author of Figaro and Don Giovanni to write a Magic Opera for a board booth in the suburbs. But Schikaneder knew the world and knew Mozart. And then he was linked to him by the ties of brotherhood in the order of Free Masons. To that brotherhood, Mozart himself owed the steady assistance he received from Puchberg. And hence his objections were soon overcome by the description the sly director gave of his extreme poverty. “If we are unfortunate in the matter, it will not be my fault,” Mozart replied; “for I never yet composed a ‘magic opera,’” and with these words, he went immediately to work.

To the clown, Schikaneder, the bird-catcher, Papageno—who understood so well how to describe the good natured, rather timid, fanciful, easy-going nature of the average Viennese—was of more consequence than the other nobler characters of the opera. But to the composer, the chosen play was a reflection of life such as he had seen it in his own soul for years, and above all, as it was in the heart of the loving pair who, separated by adverse fate, were destined to meet again in more intimate union; and in the Dies Bildniss ist bezaubernd schoen, we hear once more the first heart-felt love notes of his youth, more beautiful and more full of soul than ever. But we would call attention also to the ideal charm and transformation of all the other powers that appear in this magic play. Mozart really felt the existence of higher powers, and that they preside over our lives. The rehearsals of the first act began as early as July; for Schikaneder had the tact to win Mozart over to himself completely. He had even given up the summer house in the garden to him, and endeavored to provide him with the most cheerful society. The accounts that have come down to us representing Mozart as a frivolous pleasure-seeker originated about this time. But we need only read the letters which he wrote during this same time to his wife, who was not far away,—she was in Baden on account of sickness,—to see that his soul was not in these outer pleasures. Yet after all, what remained to him whom the great world disdained but the little world about him? He was now literally at the bottom round of the ladder, socially. The fact that he had, besides, to strain every nerve to eke out a mere existence for his wife and child, had an effect upon his entire system, which could be removed only by good-fellowship and wine. The increased action and concentration of all the powers of his mind and body, naturally called for in artistic and above all in musical invention, necessarily leads to the craving for enhanced enjoyment, if only for a few moments. And that Schikaneder knew how to procure such moments of enjoyment for Mozart, that he might own him entirely, and make the composer serve his purposes, we may infer from the story, that after Mozart’s death, which followed so soon on this, Schikaneder went about crying out: “His ghost pursues me wherever I go. He is always before my eyes!”

But more important than the question, how much of a pleasure-seeker Mozart was, is the fact that his somewhat irregular mode of life, at this time had a bad influence on him mentally. Two causes cooperated to produce this effect.