Life of Mozart

by Ludwig Nohl

He now, in his sixth year, learned to play the violin, and his father neglected nothing to give him, in every way, the best musical instruction. For he was himself an excellent composer, and had written a “violin method” which had a great reputation in its day, and was honored with translation. Mozart’s education in music continued even during the journey. Instruction in playing the organ was soon added to instruction in the use of the violin. The next scene of the marvels of the little ones was Southern Germany. This was in the summer of 1763. In Heidelberg, Mozart’s little feet flew about on the pedals with such rapidity that the clergyman in charge made a record of it in writing on the organ itself. Goethe heard him in Frankfort, and thus obtained a standard by which to measure all subsequent men of musical genius whom he chanced to meet. In his declining years, Goethe listened to a child similarly gifted, Felix Mendelssohn. In Paris, also, the court was very gracious to the children; but when little Wolfgang, with the ingenuousness of childhood, tried to put his arms about the neck of the painted Madame de Pompadour as he had about that of Maria Theresa, he was met with a rebuff, and, wounded to the quick, he cried: “Who is that person there that won’t kiss me? The empress kissed me.” He always thought a great deal of Maria Theresa, and his heart, through life, had a nook in it for her, and was ever loyal to the imperial family, as we shall see further on.

The princesses were all the more amiable in consequence, and did not trouble themselves about etiquette. Every one wondered to hear so young a child tell every note the moment he heard it; compose without the aid of a piano, and play accompaniments to songs by ear only. No wonder that he was greeted everywhere with the loudest applause, and that the receipts were so flatteringly large.

The reception extended to them in London in 1764, was still kinder; for the royal couple themselves were German, and Handel had already laid a lasting foundation there for good music; while the French music of the time seemed to our travelers to be exceedingly cold and empty—“a continual and wearisome bawling.” Their stay in England was, on this account, a very long one, and the father made use of the opportunity he found there to give an excellent Italian singer as an instructor to Wolfgang, who soon mastered the Italian style of melody, which was then the prevailing one. It was in London that Mozart wrote his first symphonies.

Their journey back in 1765, led them over Holland, where both children were taken very dangerously ill, and the father’s strength for the difficult task of preserving and educating such a boy as Wolfgang, was put to the severest test. Even during the Lenten season, he was allowed, in Amsterdam, to exhibit “for the glory of God” the wonderful gifts of his son, and he finally returned in the fall of 1766, after an absence of more than two years, to Salzburg, laden not so much with money as with the fame of his little ones.

The journey taken thus early in life was of great advantage to Mozart himself. He learned to understand men—for his father drew his attention to everything; he even made the boy keep a diary—he got rid of the shyness natural to children, and acquired a knowledge of life. He had listened to the music of the different nations, and thus discovered the manner in which each heart understands that language of the human soul called melody. The refined tone of the higher classes at this time was also of great advantage to his art. The magnificent landscape scenery of his native place had awakened his natural sense of the beautiful; its beautiful situation, its numerous churches and palaces, had further developed that same aesthetic sense; and now the varied impressions received from life and art during these travels, so extensive for one so young, were one of the principal causes why Mozart’s music acquired so early that something so directly attractive, so harmoniously beautiful and so universally intelligible, which characterizes it. But this phase of his music was fully developed only by his repeated long sojourns in that land of beauty itself, in which Mozart spent his incipient youth, in Italy.

Mozart’s father, indeed, did not remain long in Salzburg. Salzburg was no place for him. And must not the boy always have felt keenly the impulse to display his artistic power before the world? Had not the London Bach, a son of the great Leipzig cantor, Sebastian Bach, whose influence on Mozart we shall hear of further on, said of him that many a capellmeister had died without knowing what this boy knew even now? The marriage of an archduke brought the family, in 1768, to Vienna once more, the first place they lived in after leaving Salzburg. Here the father saw clearly, for the first time, that Italy and Italy alone was the proper training-school for this young genius. The Emperor Joseph had, indeed, confided to him the task of writing an Italian opera—it was the La Finta Semplice, “Simulated Simplicity”—and the twelve-year-old boy himself directed a solemn mass at the consecration of a church, a performance which made so deep an impression on his mind, that twenty years after he used to tell of the sublime effect of his church on his mind. A German operetta, Bastien and Bastienne, was honored with a private performance. But this first Italian opera was the occasion of Mozart’s experiencing the malicious envy of his fellow-musicians, which, it is said, contributed so much, later, to make his life wretched and to bring it to an early close.

His father writes:

“Thus, indeed, have people to scuffle their way through. If a man has no talent, his condition is unfortunate enough; if he has talent, he is persecuted by envy, and that in proportion to his skill.” Young Mozart’s enemies and enviers had cunning enough to prevent the performance of his work, and the father was now doubly intent on exhibiting his son’s talent where, as the latter himself admitted, he felt that he was best understood, and where he had won the highest fame in his youth.

Italy is the mother country of music and was, besides, at this time, the Eldorado of composers. The Church had nurtured music. With the Church it came into Germany. From Germany it subsequently returned enriched. It reached its first memorable and classical expression in the Roman Palestrina. After his day, a worldly and even theatrical character invaded the music of the Catholic Church, of which Palestrina is the great ideal. The cause of this change was the introduction of the opera, which was due to the revival of the study of the antique, and especially of Greek tragedy.

The pure style of vocal composition was founded on the Protestant choral, and reached its highest classical expression, in modern times, in the German Sebastian Bach. His contemporary and countryman, Handel, on the other hand, remained, by way of preference, in the region of opera; and, after he had achieved great triumphs in it in foreign countries, he rose to the summit of his greatness, in the spiritual drama, the oratorio. The world at this time loved the theatrical; and its chief seat, so far as the opera was concerned, was the country which had given birth to music. As, in its day, Italy had the greatest composers, it had now, to say the least, the greatest and most celebrated singers, and with a single victory here one entered the lists with all educated Europe. “Then up and go there,” the father must have said to himself, when he saw that his son’s talent for composition was not recognized in Germany as much as it deserved to be recognized even then, and the superior excellence of his performances denied there when it was admitted everywhere else.