Life of Mozart

by Ludwig Nohl

The reception accorded to the work, the popularity of which is unequalled in any nation, was in keeping with its merits. The first representation of it took place on the 30th of September, under Mozart’s own direction. After the overture, the audience was perfectly motionless: for who could have expected such solemn, thrilling notes in a Magic opera? Schenk, who afterwards composed the Dorfbarbier, the teacher of Beethoven, who still occupied a place in the orchestra, crept up to the director’s chair, and kissed Mozart’s hand, who, continuing to beat time with the other, gave him a friendly look of recognition and gently stroked his cheek. Our artist felt that, even here, in this board booth, he was in his own dear Vienna, in his own beloved Austria. But, even after the close of the first act, the applause was not great, and it is said that Mozart went pale and perplexed to Schikaneder, who quieted and consoled him. During the second act, however, this motley multitude discovered the message that this music conveyed to the soul. It was, indeed, with difficulty that Mozart could now be moved to appear on the stage. It wounded him to the quick to think that the best he could do was so little appreciated. But he was soon able to write to his “best and dearest wife” at Baden, that, spite of the fact that it was mail day, the “opera was played before a very full house and met with the usual applause.” His feeling for the work is expressed at the close of the letter, in the words of the incomparable terzetto, when Sarastro dismisses the two lovers to make proof of their love: “The hour is striking farewell! we shall meet again.” With the unconcern of his own magnanimity he himself ushered in his mortal enemy, Salieri, and the latter found the work “worthy of being produced before the greatest monarch at the greatest festivities.” And how frequently this very thing has happened since! But the people continue Mozart’s real sovereign, the people in the most ingenuous innocence of their every impulse and emotion and of the most ideal view of life’s ultimate nature. And Mozart belongs to the people. To them, he is not dead.

But the hour of our parting ourselves with this phenomenal artist and phenomenal man will soon strike.

He now worked uninterruptedly on his Requiem, and the theatre was left to a younger Capellmeister. He frequently wrote until two o’clock in the morning. He even refused to give lessons in music to a lady for a very dear Vienna friend. He had, he said, a piece of work in hand which was very urgent and which he had very much at heart; and, until it was finished, he could do nothing else. Even while engaged on the last pieces of the Magic Flute, such as the march and the chorus, “O Isis and Osiris,” he sometimes sank exhausted in his chair, and had short fits of fainting; for his whole heart and soul were wrapped up in his work. But he cared less than ever now about physical exhaustion, since he was directly concerned with the erection of a worthy monument to his sentiment and feeling of the Eternal in the holy sanctuary itself. He had an earnest feeling of the terror of guilt, even if the feeling seemed to him no more than a weakness. But he felt also, and infinitely more deeply, the power of forgiving love which was the life of his own soul. That mighty mediæval, Christian poem, the Dies irae, inspired and stimulated his fancy. He wished to show the world its own painfully tragic meaning and its blessed reconciliation. Certain it is that no composer ever went to work with a more honest intention to give a true artistic form to religious expression in the mass for the dead. True, it is only certain parts that are in complete keeping with this deep, religious feeling; while his secular compositions are throughout appropriate to the subject treated. The explanation of this difference is the fact, that Mozart was too long and too exclusively engaged in writing operatic music, and that the operatic character had, as we have already seen, crept into the music which was now in favor in the service of the Catholic Church. But these parts, especially the thrilling accords descriptive of man’s consciousness of guilt, the Gedenke gnaedig meines Endes, and the close of the Confutatis, the touching prayer for loving mercy in the Lacrimosa—these parts were in entire harmony with the religious feeling of their author and with his unsurpassed artistic power. And this it was that made the work so very dear to himself. It was his favorite, his dying song. Art had subsequently to take another and very different direction in this department of music, but the language of the heart overflowing with the feelings of its God and of the purest confidence in his undying love, will always be heard in this Requiem. That language is its very soul.

We are rapidly approaching the end. The funeral bell is already tolling. Melancholy is the last picture in the life of an artist who never had an equal.

Constance observed the growing infirmity and melancholy of her beloved husband with increasing alarm. She did all in her power to take him away from his work and to brighten him up by cheerful society. But Mozart, who was wont to be so social, was turned in upon himself, depressed, and could give only wandering answers to the questions put to him. She rode out into the open air with him. Nature had always had the effect of relieving and cheering him, so that he worked best traveling, when he insisted on having his “portefeuille,” as he called his leather case filled with music paper, in the side-fob of the carriage, at hand. They rode out in this manner, one beautiful November day, into the Prater. The aspect of dying nature and the falling of the leaves suggested to him thoughts of the end of all things. He now began to speak of death, and said, with tears in his eyes: “I know very well I am writing the Requiem for myself. I am too conscious of myself. Some one must have poisoned me; I cannot rid myself of that thought.” His utter debility without any noticeable external cause readily suggested that suspicion. He could not imagine that his strength had been exhausted by sheer intellectual labor. And then, had not care and sorrow gnawed at his vitals for years?

Constance was exceedingly alarmed, and succeeded in getting the score of the Requiem from him. She consulted a physician, who recommended complete rest. This had so favorable an effect, in a short time, that Mozart was able to write the cantate Das Lob der Freundschaft—“the praise of friendship”—for a newly established lodge, and, shortly afterwards, to direct its production himself. The success of the work,—which itself bears internal evidence to a feeling of greater calmness and cheerfulness in its author—had a refreshing and comforting effect upon him. He now declared his suspicions that he had been poisoned, the effect of his ill-health, and demanded the Requiem back. But a few days later, he again fell a victim to his melancholy feelings, and his strength left him. “I feel that I shall soon have done with music,” he said one morning to the faithful person who had once surprised him waltzing about his room with Constance, gave him back his wine and made an appointment to meet him next morning on some matters of business. When the latter reached the threshold of Mozart’s house, on the following day, he was met by the servant maid with the news that her master had been taken seriously sick during the night. Mozart himself looked at him fixedly from his bed, and said: “Nothing to-day, Joseph. To-day we have to do with doctors and apothecaries.”

He did not leave his bed any more after this. It was not long before worse symptoms appeared. His consciousness did not leave him for a moment. Neither did his loving sweetness and kindness. But the thought of his wife and children filled his heart with melancholy. New and better prospects were now before him. The Hungarian nobility and some rich Amsterdam gentlemen, lovers of music, asked him to write compositions for them, in consideration of a large annual honorarium. And then there was the success of the Magic Flute, in which he was deeply interested. “Now the first act is over! Now they have come to the place Dir, grosse Koenigin der Nacht”—he was wont to say in the evening with the watch at hand. The day before his death, he exclaimed: “Constance, if I could only hear my dear Magic Flute once more!” And he hummed away the air of the “bird-catcher,” in a voice that was scarcely audible.

But he had the Requiem still more at heart, and he had so far sketched its principal features, that his pupil, Suessmayer who had also written the recitative for Titus was subsequently able to complete it. During the afternoon that preceded the last night of his life, he had the score of the Requiem brought to him in bed. The Tamino of Schikaneder’s troop took the soprano, Sarastro the bass, his brother-in-law, Hofer the tenor, and Mozart, as usual, the alto. They sang until they reached the Lacrimosa when Mozart burst into tears and put the score aside. The thought of his approaching end and of God’s all-merciful, eternal love, filled his heart with an unspeakable feeling which made it overflow with a melancholy joy. This is plainly evident from the infinitely mild, conciliating tones in which Mozart has described that day of tears on which eternal grace and goodness are to make compensation for the eternal guilt of men.

His sister-in-law, Sophie, came in the evening. He said to her: “Ah, my dear, good Sophie, how glad I am you are here! You must stay to-night, and see me die. I have the death-taste on my tongue. I have the odor of death in my nostrils. And who will then help my dear Constance?” Constance hereupon asked her sister to go for a clergyman, but it was no easy matter to induce one to come. The patient was a Free Mason, and the order of Free Masons was opposed to many of the institutions of the Church.

When she returned she found Suessmayer at his bedside. Mozart was explaining to him how to finish the Requiem, remarking as he did so: “Did I not say that I was writing it for myself?” In the evening, the crisis came. Cold applications to his burning head so shattered him that he did not regain consciousness any more. Thirty-five years after his death, his sister-in-law Sophie wrote: “The last thing he did was to endeavor to imitate the kettle-drums in the Requiem. I can hear him still.” About midnight he raised himself up. His eyes had a fixed gaze. He then turned his head towards the wall and seemed to drop asleep. He died at one o’clock in the morning, on the 5th day of December, 1791.