Barisani was the son of the Archbishop's physician at Salzburg, an intimate friend of the Mozart family. He was MARRIED LIFE. distinguished in his profession, becoming later chief physician at the general hospital, and a warm friend and admirer of Mozart. A charming memorial of their friendship is preserved at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, in the form of some affectionate verses addressed to Mozart by Barisani, bearing date April 14, 1787. Underneath Mozart has written the following lines:—
To-day, September 3 of this same year, I was so unfortunate as to lose by death this noble-natured man, my dearest, best friend, and the saviour of my life. It is well with him! but with me—us—and all who knew him—it can never be well again, until we are so happy as to meet him in another world never to part again.
Barisani, seeing the impossibility of altogether weaning Mozart from the habit of writing far into the night, and very often as he lay in bed in the morning, endeavoured to avert the hurtful consequences in another way. He recommended him not to sit so long at the clavier, but at all events to compose standing, and to take as much bodily exercise as he could.[ 101 ] His love of billiard-playing gave the doctor a welcome pretext for turning this motive into a regular one; Mozart was equally fond of bowls, and he was the more ready to follow the doctor's directions with regard to both games since they did not interfere with his intellectual activity. It happened one day in Prague that Mozart, while he was playing billiards, hummed an air, and looked from time to time into a book which he had with him; it appeared afterwards that he had been occupied with the first quintet of the "Zauberflote."[ 102 ] When he was writing down the score of "Don Giovanni" in Duschek's garden, he took part at the same time in a game of quoits; he stood up when his turn came round, and sat down again to his writing after he had thrown.[ 103 ]
But what of Mozart's inclination for strong drink, so often talked of? There can be no doubt that he was very fond of punch; Kelly speaks of it,[ 104 ] and Sophie Haibl does not MOZART'S LOVE OF WINE. disguise that her brother-in-law loved a "punscherl," but she also asserts that he had never taken it immoderately, and that she had never seen him intoxicated.[ 105 ] That he was capable of wild excess is contradicted by his whole nature and by his conduct through life; but these make it probable that he did not disdain the poculum hilaritatis in cheerful society, and that he gave vent to his spirits in a manner more unrestrained than it should have been.[ 106 ]
But Mozart also fortified himself with a glass of wine or punch when he was in the throes of composition. In one of his apartments his immediate neighbour was Joh. Mart. Loibl, who was musical and a Freemason, consequently intimate with Mozart; he had a well-filled wine-cellar, of the contents of which he was never sparing in entertaining his friends. The partition wall between the houses was so thin, that Mozart had only to knock when he wished to attract Loibl's attention; whenever Loibl heard the clavier going and taps at his wall between the pauses, he used to send his servant into the cellar, and say to his family, "Mozart is composing again; I must send him some wine."[ 107 ] His wife made him punch, too, when he was writing the overture to "Don Giovanni" the night before its performance. Whoever casts a glance over Mozart's scores will see that they could not have been written in the excitement caused by wine, so neat and orderly are they even to the smallest details, and in spite of the most rapid execution; and those who are in a position to examine any one of his compositions will not need to be told that no intellect overstrained and excited by artificial means could possibly have produced such perfect clearness and beauty. Whether Mozart was right in providing a bodily stimulus in the form of strong drink during a continuous intellectual strain may well be doubted; experience and opinions differ widely on this point. Goethe advised that there should be no forcing an MARRIED LIFE. unproductive mood into activity by external means of any kind; but he answered Eckermann's remark that a couple of glasses of wine were often of great service in clearing the mental vision, and bringing difficult subjects to a solution, as follows: "You know my Divan so well that you will remember that I said myself—
Wenn man getrunken hat,
Weiss man das Rechte,
and that I entirely agree with you. There exist in wine inspiring forces of a very important kind; but all depends upon circumstances and times and places, and what is useful to one does harm to another."[ 108 ]
Let us now gather into one the separate traits which we have been constrained to discuss, owing to the wide dissemination of those injurious reports against which Niemetschek has already rightly protested.
We have before us the picture of a cheerful, pleasure-loving man, capable of such exertions of productive power and such intellectual industry as have seldom been surpassed in the history of art, and seeking his necessary recreation in social intercourse and the pleasures of the senses to a degree which was equalled by the majority of his contemporaries in Vienna without exciting any attention at all. He was not by any means a thoughtless, dissipated spendthrift. But a spendthrift he was, if the word be taken to signify one who fails to control his wants and luxuries, so that they may be in proportion to the actual state of his finances. His most dangerous qualities were a good-natured soft-heartedness, and a spontaneous generosity. He gave, as it were, involuntarily, from inner necessity. Rochlitz relates that he not only gave free admissions to the chorus-singers at Leipzig, to which they had no claim, but that he privately pressed a considerable present into the hands of one of the bass singers who had specially pleased him. When a poor old piano-tuner, stammering with embarrassment, begged for a thaler, Mozart pressed a couple of ducats into his hand and MOZART'S THOUGHTLESS LIBERALITY. hurried from the room.[ 109 ] When he was in a position to give help, he could not see any one in want without offering relief, even though it entailed future difficulties on himself and his family; repeated experiences made him no more prudent in this respect. That he was often imposed upon there can be no doubt. Whoever came to him at meal-time was his guest, all the more welcome if he could make or understand a joke, and Mozart was happy if only his guests enjoyed their fare. Among them were doubtless, as Sophie Haibl relates, "false friends, secret blood-suckers, and worthless people, who served only to amuse him at table, and intercourse with whom injured his reputation."[ 110 ] One of the worst of this set was Albert Stadler, who may serve as an example of the way in which Mozart was sometimes treated. He was an excellent clarinet-player, and a Freemason; he was full of jokes and nonsense, and contrived so to ingratiate himself with Mozart that the latter constantly invited him to his house and composed many things for him. Once, having learnt that Mozart had just received fifty ducats, he represented himself as undone if he could not succeed in borrowing that very sum. Mozart, who wanted the money himself, gave him two valuable repeater watches to put in pawn upon condition that he should bring him the tickets and redeem them in due time; as he did not do this, Mozart gave him fifty ducats, besides the interest, in order not to lose his watches. Stadler kept the money, and allowed the watches to remain at the pawnbroker's. Nowise profiting by this experience, Mozart, on his return from Frankfort, in
1790, commissioned Stadler to redeem from pawn a portion of the silver plate which had been pledged for the expenses of the journey and to renew the agreement for the remainder. In spite of a very strong suspicion that Stadler had purloined this pawn-ticket from Mozart's open cashbox, the latter was not deterred from assisting him in the following year towards a professional tour, both with money and recommendations, in Prague, and from presenting him with MARRIED LIFE. a concerto (622 K.), composed only a few months before Mozart's death.[ 111 ]
