Life of Mozart

by Ludwig Nohl

In May, 1791, he had solicited the position of assistant musician in the church of St. Stephen, for the reason that “he could consider himself more competent than others for the position, because of his more thorough knowledge of the church style of music.” He had long wished to find something to do in this sphere again, especially since the new emperor had removed the narrow limits put to it by the emperor, Joseph. Now he was asked to write a requiem, the most solemn music in the worship of his church; and the request came to him under the strangest, nay under mysterious circumstances. A long, lean man, dressed in gray, with a very serious expression of countenance, handed him the commission for the requiem in a very flattering letter. Mozart communicated the matter to his wife, saying, at the same time, that he longed to write some music of that kind once more, and to produce a work which friends and foes alike might study after his death. He took the commission and asked, as the entire price of the work, fifty ducats, without however, fixing the time when the work should be delivered. The messenger came once more, paid the money and promised an additional sum, the composer to write precisely as he felt, and only when he felt like writing, but to make no effort to discover the person who gave the commission, since any effort of the kind would be in vain.

We now know that it was one count Walsegg who gave the commission for the work, intending to have it performed as his own at the death of his wife. But the mysteriousness surrounding the commission took complete hold of Mozart’s mind. He looked upon it as a commandment from on high. His soul was already filled with thoughts that lead beyond the limits of this life. Added to this was the other circumstance referred to above.

The first act of the Magic Flute was finished as far as the finale when Schikaneder was informed, to his sorrow, that the same thing was being played with the greatest success by the competing theatre. But he did not despair; it was resolved to change the point of the play, to transform the wicked wizard who had stolen the princess whom Tamino was to recover, into the sage and philanthropist Sarastro, and, instead of the disconsolate mother, to put the evil-minded “queen of the night” with her Moors and the three ladies in black. These changes occasioned a noticeable disparity and much that was contradictory in the opera as a whole; but, on the other hand, Mozart could now put his whole soul into it, and to this incident we are indebted for the most earnest and beautiful effusions of his mind and heart. The whole work now centered about the idea of free-masonry. By the earnest trial of their moral power, mortals must win their higher immortal portion, and with it their happiness. The bonds that unite the two lovers are purified and sanctified, transmuted into the more powerful and lasting life-bonds of marriage, which freed from all passion by the labors of love and resignation, discloses the real object and meaning of love. And, indeed, who had ever more purely tasted the sweets of this ever-virginal, marital love than Mozart, who even now, so many years after he was married, closed a letter to his wife with these words: “Good-bye, my dear, my only one. Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine and a half kisses are flying from me through the air. Put out your hands and catch them; they are waiting for you. A thousand sweet kisses. Thy Mozart forever.”

And now as to the character of Sarastro. Of all the human shapes that Mozart had met in life, his father’s, after that of his beloved Constance, had the firmest hold upon him, and this spite of his misunderstandings of, and even want of confidence in, his son, in his declining years. And had not his personal experience with men, next to his artistic experiences, come to him, in real life and even in public life, in the guise, so to speak, of the rulers of his existence? Was not the emperor Joseph and the order of Free Masons the highest ideal of purely humanitarian aims that his imagination could conceive? All this had nothing whatever to do with his religious feelings. His Church and his own personal faith were things apart. He thought, indeed, that their abuses, as for instance the immoderate increase of the religious orders, might be attacked, but that which constituted their very core, and their truth, were sublimely beyond the reach of doubt. But while these last, in that which is imperishable in them, now found their holiest expression in the Requiem, it could not but be, that those parts of the new opera descriptive of those higher purely human aims, should participate in the solemn sacred tones that poured from Mozart’s soul. And hence we need not hesitate to say that the Requiem and the Magic Flute tell us all that Mozart’s heart knew and felt of heaven and of earth, that it transfigured the earthly in the light of heaven, and sought from heaven to bring down peace to earth. We know this both from the chorus: O goldene Ruh’ steig hernieder, Kehr in den Menschen Herzen wieder, as well as from Tamino’s painful, longing exclamation: O ew’ge Nacht, wann wirst du schwinden? Wann wird das Licht mein Auge finden? It is the expression of a homesickness divine, a craving for God, the highest good for the human soul.

Obstacle after obstacle was placed in the way of the completion of both works. The Bohemians had ordered a great opera, Titus the Mild, for Leopold’s coronation. There were only a few weeks remaining during which it could be written. Mozart started immediately on his journey. It was the middle of August. Constance again accompanied him. As they were entering the carriage, the mysterious messenger in gray stood before them. Mozart quieted him with the assurance that the Requiem was the first task that would engage him after his return. Yet this seemed to him a new warning not to postpone the last work of his life; for such he considered the Requiem to be. He felt unwell even now. He overworked himself in Prague—Titus was written and put in rehearsal within a fortnight—and thus accelerated the breaking down of his already over-taxed, vital energies. Added to this was the want of success of the opera. He had this time forgotten the rule “hasten slowly,” and the quintet in great dramatic style in the first finale, could not conceal from his Prague audience, who were certainly indulgent, the absence of the artist’s peculiar skill. Titus remained an opera seria, a bundle of arias, and the applause Mozart was wont to meet with, failed him, even in Prague. He was very much depressed in consequence. He again, indeed, recovered his native cheerfulness, but in leaving Prague the tears flowed abundantly. He had a presentiment that he would never see those friends again.

In the middle of September, he was in Vienna once more. The Magic Flute was to be put on the stage, and might serve to make up what he had lost of reputation in Prague. Besides, it was part of his great life task. King Leopold had abolished the order of Free Masons, and it, therefore, now seemed to Mozart, simply a duty he owed to his order to put its humane aims in their true light, by every means in his power. And what a refulgence streams from the choruses of the second act, from the overture which, as well as the introductory march of the same act, so suggestive of Idomeneo, was only just written! “Through night to light!”—such is the sense in which Mozart wrote and understood the entire work, the accidental garb of which did not mislead him in the least. Into one of the pieces descriptive of this earnestness of moral trial of the heart, Mozart went as far as to weave a Protestant chorale. It is the song of the Geharnischten Maenner—the “men in mail;” and its “figuration” shows that Mozart had added Bach’s artistic characteristics to his own. But he had also appropriated his spirit of deep piety and genuine virtue! Nothing exhibits more clearly how solemn and high his vocation as an artist was to him, nor proves more forcibly that, for him, there was no secluded spot where alone the ideal and the divine were to be taught. The ideal and the divine should, like the sun, shed their rays everywhere, and the stage was the place where our artist felt that he could address, from his inmost heart, his nation and his contemporaries.

And what a work we have before us here! There never was a greater contrast between an ideal work of art and the place and occasion to which it owed its origin, than between the Magic Flute, one of the starting-points of the most ideal efforts of the German nation, and the audiences of a board booth in a suburb of Vienna!

We must, indeed, leave the trivialities and absurdities of the libretto out of consideration. And even here, Mozart’s music succeeded in turning deformity into ideal beauty; and this spite of the fact that the “bird-catcher,” Schikaneder, is said to have suggested many of the melodies to him which have since come into such universal favor. There is still a note of his extant in which we read: “Dear Wolfgang! In the meantime, I return your pa-pa-pa to you. I find it about right. It will do. We shall meet this evening. Yours—Schikaneder.” A church hymn was afterwards put to the air: Bei Maennern welche Liebe fuehlen. How ideal must not those lines have been when the higher moral sentiments could be awakened by so simple an air!

That best known of all solemn songs: In diesen heil’gen Hallen, has this very tone of the dignity of a heart that has mastered itself, and wisely and lovingly thinks only of humanity. Only the fact that it is as well known and as familiar to us as light and air, allows us to forget that it is as lustrous as the one and as ethereal as the other. The character of Sarastro personifies what Mozart conceived to be the deeper meaning of life. Pamina is the most beautiful expression of pure love and tenderness. Tamino is the ideal character of a youth who restrains his own feelings under life’s stern rule—and thus insures for himself and those confided to him by fate, the happiness of life. We need only ask the attention of the reader to the exclamation in the conversation with the priest, der Lieb und Tugend Eigenthum!—“love’s and virtue’s prize!” With the fullest expression of heart-felt conviction, these few tones describe the whole moral stability of Mozart’s nature.

It is not hard to see in what relation these characters stand to the heroes and female characters of Richard Wagner, and it is not without reason that Francz List has called the Ring of the Niebelungen the Magic Flute of our day. Wagner here filled out the clear outline of the human ideals which Mozart drew in the Magic Flute from his knowledge of the German nature. All the sublime ideal powers which move and lead us, from the conscious emotions of our own hearts to the elemental, primeval forces which determine our will are here found, in the faintest outlines, it is true, but still as the first features of the surest characterization; and as Osmin points to Fafner, the “three boys” who lead Tamino point to the three daughters of the Rhine who warn Siegfried of his death. It was the first time that that which lives in every human breast as the consciousness of the most intimate knowledge of the real constitution of the world, and fills us with the feeling of the eternal, was portrayed with such Rafaelite, ideal art in opera. This it is that gives to the whole work its peculiar tone. Like the golden light of creation’s first morning, it plays about the opera of the Magic Flute.