The greatest stranger to Mozart was
Mozart himself. The greatest gifts he
made were given to those who never helped him.
More than any other light in music he needed a true friend; he never
found one. His heart overflowed with the
most tender and ideal love that imagination can create, but it never was
appreciated as long as it burned. When a
boy of five or six he astounded Europe by his magnificent concert-playing;
thirty years later his coffin was piled upon others in a potter’s-field
trench. Such, in brief, is the history
of Wolfgang Mozart.
The
Boy.
Of Mozart’s early boyhood little is
known beyond the traditionary folk-lore that lurks about the early history of
most of the great musicians of a century and more ago.
His most prominent characteristics
were his best, and, for that matter, he never had any bad traits. He showed early that his delicate
sensitiveness was second only to a generous, unaffected and kind
disposition. All through life he was
thus. It might be said that he was born
a gentleman. He was an extremely
affectionate child, and was deferential to his mates and to his elders. So classically pure was his mind and so
instinctively ideal were his likes that he could not see the imperfect nor bear
to view pain or distress without experiencing an emotion so physically active
as to reflect in counterpart the pain or distress that he noticed. Such a supersensitiveness naturally reacted
unfavorably, and thus it came that, because his mind was so superior to his
body, his body suffered and was easy prey to the subsequent life of irregularity,
exposure, and deprivation.
None the less, Mozart was a boy in the
fullest sense of the word. Though he
romped and spun somersaults in laces and velvet, he was just as boyish and
whole-souled about it as Wagner in his madcap pranks with butcher’s boys, or
Schubert in his beduck pond village. As
a boy Mozart was full of humor. He liked
a good joke hugely and never failed to perpetrate one on others when chance
offered. In this, however, he was never
boisterous or untimely. His humor, like
his music was the outgrowth of an irrepressible love for the beautiful and joyous.
Mozart’s incomprehensible precocity is
elsewhere dilated upon. At the age of
three years he had composed a minuet so perfect in its simplicity that one is
in despair for words of comment At six
he was traveling with his father, giving concerts all over Europe and composing
almost constantly. At that age his
piano-playing was marvelous, besides which he was an excellent violinist. He was petted by the highest in lands and
courts into which his fame preceded him.
Far from being the inscrutable genius one would think, Mozart was fresh,
naïve, unspoiled, and full of life and spring.
Enjoy this Rondo-Allegro from Mozart's Violin and Piano Sonata in B Flat Major performed by Solenne Paidassi,
violin and Valentina Lisitsa, piano:
Middle
Stage.
The high-water mark in Mozart’s
musical career was reached during the two years he spent in Italy. He was in his thirteenth and fourteenth
years, and had been concertizing for a long time prior to that. His life had been spent in courts and
palaces, and his articles, childish affection had made him the favorite of the
court ladies wherever he appeared.
He slipped from the laps of princesses
to compose grand operas. At the age of
nine he melted the Empress Maria Theresa to tears by his beautiful
violin-playing only to mischievously paraphrase his tender music into a
grotesque “barn-yard” impromptu that began with the bray of a donkey and ended
with a terrific cat-fight three inches from the bridge on his instrument. Then he threw his arms around the good lady’s
neck and begged her pardon for the prank.
Five years later he was commissioned
to write an opera for the Christmas festivities at Milan and at the age of
fourteen conducted his opera at La Scala
before a delirious multitude of nobles and folk who swayed under the boy’s
enchantment as a field of golden grain bends beneath the breezes of summer.
“’Evviva
the Little Master—Evviva the Little Master!’ cried the audience. ‘It is music for the stars,’ and, against all
precedent, aria after aria had to be repeated.
The boy, always rather small for his age, stood on a chair to wield his
baton, and the flowers that were rained upon him nearly covered the lad from
view.” (Elbert Hubbard, in “Little Journeys.”)
As may well be imagined, Mozart’s
money came and went with a perpetual motion that increased with his years. He was an easy mark for hungry and thirsty
mendicants, and the most improbable tale of woe would as surely attract money
out of his pocket (if he had any at the time) as a lodestone a needle.
His father, Leopold Mozart, was to
blame for this improvidence. He had been
the traveling guardian of his marvelous son during all of the concert-trips and
was a man easily satisfied. “But what
must we pay you, Herr Mozart?” he was once asked. Said the elder man with delightful
abandon: “Oh, give us a special carriage
and a good hotel; that will do. And
don’t forget that I like ‘Johannesberger.’”
Is it little wonder then that Wolfgang never knew the value of
money? As was the case with many great
musicians, his first impulse was to give and give unthinkingly. He lacked, moreover, diplomacy. He would give a beggar a gold piece to dine
on and himself eat for a few kreutzers.
Rightly might he be likened to the man who, when “held up” by a midnight
prowler, said briskly: “Hello, old
scout! Say, you take everything I’ve got
and give me the rest, and I’ll be satisfied.”
Mozart’s heart was on his sleeve until
he married. His wife was the sister of
his first “great passion.” He was like
Browning’s “Last Dutchess”: he “liked
whate’er he looked on.” But if his loves
were promiscuous they were pure and always tinged with idealism. Like the music which he wrote, his heart was
a ceaseless flow of love’s melody. Like
an ethereal Aeolian harp, its strings were sensitive to every passing
breeze. His heart was ever responding to
what it believed to be its chosen mate.
Alas! that mate was never found save the ideal within it, and when
Mozart married he married himself.
The
Man.
Mozart was scarcely twenty when he met
Aloysia Weber. She was a good singer,
but a woman of whims, thoroughly selfish, and utterly heartless. Well, they made promises—Mozart was in heaven,
and Aloysia thought he “was a nice little man” (a’nettes, Kleines Kerlschen).
For once in his life old Leopold Mozart showed common sense and hurried
his son to Paris. The lovers had met in
Vienna. But Mozart’s Lochinvarian
instincts had been aroused. Back to
Vienna he would, and back to Vienna he went.
When he appeared before his mistress, however, she tapped her large foot
impatiently. She had meanwhile
transferred her affections to another.
She could not love both, she was sorry for Herr Mozart, but, well the
best thing they could do was to part.
Broken-hearted, Mozart became sick,
and a serious spell of illness followed.
Aloysia had a younger sister, Constanze Weber, who was as gentle, meek,
and sympathetic as her more accomplished sister was superciliously superior and
merciless. She wept oceans of tears over
Mozart’s bed, and nursed him back to strength.
Of course, Mozart’s affections rallied, and naturally transferred
themselves to his nurse. I say
naturally, for he would have married a charcoal burner’s grandmother if she had
begged him to, and cried a few tears.
Their housekeeping was queer; in fact,
it was scarcely to be spoken of with any degree of seriousness. To begin with Constance was as much a child
as her husband, and it is shrewdly questioned whether she ever used a broom or
a dish-rag. When money was plentiful she
would buy silk parasols and confectionery—then borrow flour and coffee from a
neighbor for their dinner, and promenade with one shoe run down at the heel.
The borrowed provisions she invariably
forgot to return, and the frequent failure to pay the rent kept what few
clothes they did have constantly packed and ready for a move.
They mostly slept on straw, and lived
on a gust of wind, with occasional flights into an expensive restaurant or a
few days’ sojourn in elegant rooms ridiculously beyond their means. Yet amidst all the irregularity of living
they loved one another devotedly, albeit Constance showed her solicitude more
by buying Mozart useless gifts than by darning his socks.
Mozart’s love for her, on the
contrary, was beautifully pathetic. If
he rose early to fasten on paper some immortal melody his dreams had inspired,
he would leave a tender love-letter by his sleeping wife’s bedside. A biographer has given us one such: “Guten
Morgen liebes Frauschen,” it runs.
Immeasurable power of genius! From a pallet a swain would scorn,
overburdened and underfed, this young man, buoyed with hope and goldened by
love, could arise to a new day and could not be discouraged. To him life was full of promise, and riches
untold beckoned him onward. But
Constance became sick and her continued illness gave him man a heart-throb of
miserable pain. He was constantly
working and slaving for the selfish and unappreciative.
His creditors hounded him, and from
those who owed him he could get no justice.
At the age of thirty-five his vitality, sapped and undermined by years
of exposure and semi-starvation, gave way suddenly, and in a short while
rapidly declined.
Enjoy the Diana Damrau’s
performance of the “Queen of the Night
Aria” in a Royal Opera House production of Mozart’s, Magic Flute:
The
Death and Burial.
A mere skeleton of his formal self,
wasted by lack of suitable nourishment, Mozart died as quietly and simply as a
brief glow from a dying sunset is succeeded by the purple shadows of
twilight. He died penniless as far as
the world goes, but in his works he left a legacy behind him that the whole
world can never consume. Through a
silent lane of costly tombs and followed only by a few friends, his body was
borne in a pine coffin to a pauper’s grave.
A bleak winter day in December, 1791, it was when the burial occurred,
and the only dirge that played for the passed musician was the blustering wind
that howled through the naked branches of the trees. And it was full of significance, this
farewell of Nature, who in the spring of his love and life and promise sent her
birds to welcome Mozart into a new day of warmth and joy, only to mourn over
his untimely descent into her bosom with the garb of death. He left nine hundred and twenty-two
compositions behind him. Each one of
them is a monument to his genius.
Enjoy Mozart’s Symphony No.
41 in C major (“Jupiter”) performed by The Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting:
No comments:
Post a Comment