Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was small, rachitic, poor and struggling. His music was grand, architecturally superb, rich and blissful. The contrast between Mozart the man and Mozart the musician never ceases to amaze. Says Bruno Walter, one of Mozart’s great musical interpreters: “His personality has remained strangely remote to the world.”
One book that makes it less remote is Mozart, by Marcia Davenport, first published in 1932 and now reissued (Scribner; $6). Author Davenport, daughter of famed Soprano Alma Gluck, writes honestly, if often sentimentally, and with style about “one of the world’s best-loved immortals.”
Kissable Age. Father Leopold Mozart was a musician-a violinist and court composer to the Archbishop of Salzburg. Even so, he thought it precocious that “Wolferl” at the age of three should “bawl with disappointment” when his small fingers struck a discord on the clavier. At four, Wolferl scribbled down his first clavier concerto; at five, before he had had a single violin lesson, he played second fiddle in a trio. “One need not have learnt in order to play second fiddle,” he informed the grownups.
Leopold showed off his child prodigy at the first opportunity. Wolferl was only six when he played for Empress Maria Theresa at Schönbrunn Palace. He was seven when he played before Louis XV and tried to kiss Madame de Pompadour. She pushed him away coldly, whereupon he piped, “Who is this that does not want to kiss me? The Empress kissed me.”
Not least of the boy-wonder’s wonders was his disposition. He could sit at the harpsichord astonishing strangers with his virtuosity and the mature expression of his face-then, suddenly, a favorite cat would come in, and he was off his chair chasing it like any other boy. When he slipped on the floor at Schönbrunn and was helped to his feet by a seven-year-old princess named Marie Antoinette, he thanked her thus: “You are good, and when I grow up I will marry you.”
Once Mozart grew past the cute, kissable age, nobody paid any attention to him. The charming prodigy turned into a “pale, silent, colorless young man.” Briefly under the patronage of Salzburg’s archbishop, he ate with the servants; when he protested that he was not allowed to perform his music, he was thrown out bodily. His great love, Singer Aloysia Weber, preferred to marry a nonentity. “I did not know, you see,” poor Aloysia would later mumble in her old age. “I only thought he was such a little man.”
Just Another Composer. Marcia Davenport jots down a few figures that are far more expressive than words to explain Mozart’s desperate struggle. “About $200 was all he ever received for Figaro, about $225 for Don Giovanni . . . and about $112 for the Requiem.”
To almost all of his contemporaries, Mozart was just another court composer, more unconventional and therefore worse than scores of his competitors. The elderly Haydn recognized his genius; so did the young Beethoven. Not so Emperor Joseph II, Mozart’s patron, who once said of a Mozart aria: “It has too many notes in it.” (“Sire, just as many as there ought to be,” Mozart retorted.) Nor did Mozart’s wife Constanze (younger sister of his old love, Aloysia) see his greatness. She had her own creating to do. Of their nine years of marriage, she spent all but three pregnant, delivered six sickly children. Four died in infancy; two survived.*
Yet when he had a florin in his pocket, Mozart managed to be gay. Author Davenport describes how, in 1787, Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, went walking in Prague with the famed, tottering great-lover Casanova, to ask his advice on the character of Don Giovanni.
“Prague saw the three roisterers parading the tiny cobbled streets-huge, toothless Lorenzo, with his booming laugh; senile Casanova, with sparks of old fire in his eyes; between them, Wolfgang, trotting along in a vacuum of bliss and ideas, a quiet little man, looking up at each in turn to catch the last outrageous remark and cap it with some Salzburger dreckiger Witz (dirty joke) that made them pound his slight back and bellow with joy.”
Nothing to Fear. Mozart was lively, improvident, generous, totally incapable of holding his own with publishers or managers. He could compose, correct, and complete an entire symphony in his head. But he had none of the massive stolidity that enabled Bach to create a profusion of great music while begetting 20 children-and it is partly because of this tragic frailty that today Mozart is adored and Bach merely worshiped.
In 1785 Mozart joined the Freemasons in an attempt to find comfort. His Magic Flute, based on a Masonic theme, was a success, but he was by then too sick (a “general breakdown”) to enjoy it very much. He was writing his last, heartrending begging-letters and struggling to finish the Requiem that was to be “my death-song.” “I have nothing more to fear,” he wrote to his old friend, da Ponte. “I have come to an end before having had the enjoyment of my talent. Life was indeed so beautiful, my career begun under such fortunate auspices; but one cannot change one’s destiny.”
Two months later, at 35, he was dead. As it was a stormy day, no one followed him to his pauper’s grave in Vienna, and to this day nobody knows just where it is.
* Karl and Franz Xaver both showed some minor musical talent; both died childless.
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