Mozart: A Life

By Maynard Solomon

On the occasion of Mozart's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, read Maynard Solomon's Mozart: A Life, universally hailed as the Mozart biography of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061856198

Maynard Solomon

Maynard Solomon's books on Beethoven and his renowned writings on Mozart, Schubert, and Ives led a contributor to Music & Letters to name him "the leading musicologist-biographer of our time." His classic biography, Beethoven, has been translated into seven languages and his Beethoven Essays received the Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for best book of the year in 1989. Mr. Solomon, who lives in New York, has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Universities.

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MOZART

A   LIFE

Maynard Solomon

For Eva, Nathaniel, and Alexander, with love,

Joseph Kerman, in friendship,

and

Marianne Goldberger, with deep regard

Consider well. He is a Prince!

More! He is a Man!

—Die Zauberflöte

CONTENTS

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Table of Money Values

A Note on Köchel Numbers

Introduction

PROLOGUE

The Myth of the Eternal Child

BEGINNINGS

1. Leopold Mozart

2. Early Days

3. The Grand Journey

4. The Family Treasure

5. A Vienna Sojourn

6. The Italian Journeys

SALZBURG

7. The Favorite Son

8. A Composer’s Voice

9. A Fool’s Errand

10. Mozart in Love

11. A Mother’s Death

12. Trouble in Paradise

13. Parallel Lives

14. Farewell to Salzburg

VIENNA

15. Arrival

16. Constanze

17. Two Families

18. Adam

19. The Impresario

20. Portrait of a Composer

21. Freemasonry

22. The Zoroastran Riddles

23. The Carnivalesque Dimension

24. Fearful Symmetries

ENDINGS

25. Little Leopold

26. Carissima sorella mia

27. Prague and Beyond

28. The Journey to Berlin

29. A Constant Sadness

30. The Last Year

31. The Final Journey

32. The Power of Music

Appendix: Mozart’s Vienna Earnings

Abbreviations

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index of Compositions

Classified List of Compositions, with Köchel Numbers

Operas and Other Stage Works, Listed Alphabetically

Other Titled and Nicknamed Works, Listed Alphabetically

Index of Compositions, Listed by Köchel Number

General Index

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of this book formed the basis for the Messenger Lectures that I gave at Cornell University in the spring of 1992. Other sections were presented as lectures at Brandeis University, the University of California at Berkeley, Peabody Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Smith College, Stanford University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center, the Biography Seminar of the Department of English at New York University, the New York Institute for the Humanities, the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities at Yale University, and the Royal Musical Association in London. The Myth of the Eternal Child was initially presented as an Albert Schweitzer Lecture in the Humanities at New York University at the invitation of Aileen Ward, now Schweitzer Professor Emeritus, and was subsequently published in 19th-century Music 15 (1991). Chapter 18, here entitled Adam, appeared in the Festschrift for Georg Knepler, Zwischen Aufklärung and Kulturindustrie, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister et al. (Hamburg, 1993). A version of chapter 28, The Journey to Berlin, appeared in the Journal of Musicology (1994). Chapter 22, The Zoroastran Riddles, was written for a Mozart symposium at Rutgers University organized by Ellen Rosand and Douglas Johnson; it was published in American Imago 12 (1985) and is reprinted here, in revised form, by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

My thanks to the unfailingly helpful staff members of the music division of the New York Public Library, the libraries of Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton universities, and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Also to the Berlin Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, the British Library, the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna, the Hunterian Art Gallery of the University of Glasgow, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Museen der Stadt Wien, and the Mozart-Archiv of the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg. Quotations from Emily Anderson, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, are used by permission of Macmillan Press Ltd. Photographs are by Maury Solomon. The reductions of the music examples were done by Scott Griffin and prepared for publication by Carl Johnson of Music Publishing Services, New York.

For materials, suggestions, collegial responses to queries, and exchanges of ideas, I am grateful to Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rudolph Angermüller, Karol Berger, Bruce Cooper Clarke, Cliff Eisen, Joseph Kerman, William Kinderman, Richard Kramer, Lewis Lockwood, Robert L. Marshall, Josef Mančal, Max Rudolf, the late Gert Schiff, Elaine Sisman, Leo Treitler, Alan Tyson, James Webster, Robert S. Winter, and Neal Zaslaw. I owe a great deal to the members of my Mozart seminars at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Columbia University, and Harvard University, where many of the chief ideas of this book were first elaborated. Professors Eisen, Kerman, Lockwood, Marshall, and Zaslaw all read the manuscript and made innumerable valuable suggestions for its improvement, sacrificing time from their own projects to assist a friend and colleague who now cannot find appropriate words to express his deep appreciation. I can only say that wherever possible I have gladly availed myself of their corrections, accepted their advice, and taken serious account of their objections. Perhaps a future edition will enable me to remedy any remaining errors of fact or infelicities of interpretation.

I am indebted to Aaron Asher for his enthusiasm for this project and for reading the manuscript with a keen musicians eye and an editor’s tact; to my agent, Georges Borchardt, for his patience and sound advice; and to executive editor Hugh Van Dusen of HarperCollins, who deftly guided the book through its final stages with the able cooperation of Stephanie Gunning, Pamela LaBarbiera, Maureen Clark, and Elyse Dubin. Katherine Scott was the resourceful copy editor.

As always, my wife Eva has been my best critic, editor, and endlessly patient listener. My old teacher Harry Slochower died before he could see this book, but I hope that I have managed to remain faithful to his warning that all absolutist explanations are bound to fail.

—New York, 1994

TABLE OF MONEY VALUES

1 florin [or gulden] = 60 kreuzer

1 ducat = 4 1/2 florins

1 Reichsthaler = 1 1/2 florins

1 friedrich d’or = 7 to 8 florins

1 sequin = 2.8 florins

1 English shillings = 1 florin

1 English pound =10 florins

1 louis d’or = 9 to 10 florins

Rates vary somewhat owing to currency fluctuations.

A NOTE ON KÖCHEL NUMBERS

Mozart’s compositions are identified by the numbers assigned to them in the first edition of the chronological thematic list of his works by Ludwig von Köchel, followed by the revised numbers (if any) assigned to them in the sixth edition of Köchel’s catalog (thus, Sonata in A minor, K. 310/300d). This procedure is followed as well for works that formerly were listed in an appendix (Anhang) to the first three editions of Köchel but now appear in the main catalog (thus, Les Petits Riens, K. Anh. 10/299b). K. deest designates a work that is not to be found in Köchel.

INTRODUCTION

Browsing in the stacks of a major university library, I come upon a two-volume guidebook to Salzburg and environs, published in 1792 and 1793, shortly after Mozart’s death. It was written by Lorenz Hübner (1753—1807), a Munich editor who was called to Salzburg in 1783 by Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo to run the city’s main newspapers, the Staats-Zeitung and the Salzburger Intelligenzblatt, which he did until his departure from Salzburg in 1799. Hübner was on cordial terms with Leopold Mozart and was fully aware of Mozart’s genius, his fame, and his stature as Salzburg’s greatest son.

I leaf through Hübner’s chapters on Salzburg’s cultural life, its musical establishment and public institutions, churches, leading living citizens. I study the statistics on population, births and deaths, shops and industries, land ownership and agricultural output. And then, out of curiosity, and perhaps hoping to locate a previously overlooked reference to Mozart, I turn to the street listings, specifically to the two pages devoted to the Getreidegasse, where Mozart was born in 1756, where the Mozarts lived for the quarter century from 1747 to 1773, and where his birth house still stands.¹ Hübner gives measurements for the width and length of the street, lists the main houses and their architectural features, and mentions past and present inhabitants, among them several familiar figures, including the merchant Lorenz Hagenauer, the Mozart family’s friend and landlord. The name Mozart, however, does not appear. Presuming a simple error of omission, I skim the pages and locate Hübner’s brief description of the Tanzmeisterhaus (dance-master house); here again there is no mention of the Mozart family, which occupied that house from 1773 until the death of Leopold Mozart in 1787.²

Now somewhat puzzled, but having formed a working hypothesis, I turn to Otto Erich Deutsch’s comprehensive Mozart: A Documentary Biography and its supplements, including Cliff Eisen’s recent New Mozart Documents, in search of references to Mozart in Salzburg during his Vienna years and after his death. It is not long before my vague surmises are confirmed by an array of facts and, more poignantly, by the absence of other, expected facts. When Mozart died, memorial gatherings and concerts were held in his honor in Vienna, Prague, Kassel, and Berlin, but not in Salzburg, although his friends, patrons, fellow musicians, and admirers there had once numbered in the hundreds.³ Between 1792 and 1797, Mozart’s widow, Constanze Mozart, held benefit concerts featuring his music in Vienna, Prague, Graz, Linz, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin, but no such concert took place in Salzburg. Beginning in May 1792, Mozart monuments were erected in various cities of Europe, but it was not until 1842 that Schwanthaler’s bronze Mozart statue was unveiled in Salzburg.⁴ In nearby Graz, where the first such monument was erected, an academy devoted to Mozart’s music was founded as early as February 1793, and about seventy of his works were performed there between 1791 and 1797.⁵ But in Salzburg no Mozart society came into being until 1841 (and no effective one until 1870), and few performances of his works took place in the decades after his death. Indeed, although there may have been others, we know of only one performance in Salzburg of a work by Mozart between 1784 and his death—a performance by Leopold Mozart’s pupil Heinrich Marchand of the Piano Concerto in D minor, K. 466, at a concert on 22 March 1786.⁶

Apparently, a makeshift curtain of silence had begun to descend in, Salzburg well before Mozart’s death, beginning in the wake of his flight to Vienna in 1781, and intensifying as the years wore on. From the time of his defection until his death, there is only one recorded mention of his name in any Salzburg newspaper, a passing reference in the course of a review of an edition of a Dittersdorf opera.⁷ When Hübner published Mozart’s Zoroastran Fragments and one of his riddles in the Staats-Zeitung on 23 March 1786, he omitted Mozart’s name and stressed that he was publishing the material only because the paper was short of more important matters.⁸ And although Mozart was one of the most frequently published composers in Europe during the 1780s, none of his publications was reviewed in Salzburg, and few (if any) were even announced there. Nor did news of his later activities and appointments reach the citizens of Salzburg through their own press.⁹ They did, however, learn of his death: on 12 December 1791, an eleven-line obituary that had appeared in the Wiener Zeitung on December 7 was reprinted on the front page of Hübner’s Staats-Zeitung.

During the night of the 4th and 5th of this month Imperial Court Chamber Composer Wolfgang Mozart died here. Known from his childhood on as the possessor of the finest musical talent in all Europe, through the fortunate development of his exceptional natural gifts and through persistent application he rose to the level of the greatest masters; his works, loved and admired by all, bear witness to this, and are the measure of the irreplaceable loss that the noble art of music has suffered by his death.¹⁰

Four weeks later, on 7 January 1792, the Salzburger Intelligenzblatt published an anecdote about the anonymous commission Mozart received for the Requiem: Some months before his death he received an unsigned letter, asking him to write a Requiem.¹¹

The process of forgetting Mozart began in the aftermath of his rancorous quarrel with Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, who thereafter may have preferred not to be reminded of his former employee’s continuing existence. The notorious kick in the rear by which the archbishop’s chamberlain Count Arco sealed Mozart’s resignation from His Grace’s service in 1781 was a blunt way of saying, And don’t come back! Of course, the forgetting of Mozart’s name and memory was not a calculated policy of the archbishop, the Salzburg citizenry, or the local aristocracy, among whom were many people who were friendly to him or who loved him and his music. Indeed, Archbishop Colloredo displayed his magnanimity by attending the Marchand concert in 1786, just as, earlier, he had lent his presence at the 1784 performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail and commented, graciously, "Really, it wasn’t bad at all."¹² But there were few Salzburgers who put friendship or love above accommodation to the community’s displeasure with an unruly subject who had repudiated their native town in favor of the big city: It seems, read the Mozart entry in a 1790 dictionary of composers, as if his sphere of activity at Salzburg had become too narrow for this young man; for he again left his birthplace about 1780 and betook himself to Vienna.¹³

Voluntary migration had resulted in informal exclusion: Mozart had brought about his own exile. He was punished for leaving home, for preferring a different place, for dissatisfaction with a city that was good enough for everyone else. His departure seems to have been experienced as a mortification and a betrayal, his every triumph as one more reproach to those who remained behind. Thus, when Mozart left Salzburg, he was given up for dead, but he was not the only one who was mortally wounded. Blaming and grieving, those he had abandoned closed ranks, continued their orderly routines, and pretended that the void had been filled. Life in the old country goes on without the expatriate, and a kind of amnesia eventually engulfs the traces of his existence. If he returns home, as Mozart did in the summer of 1783, it is as a phantom visiting a place where he no longer really belongs. Indeed, Mozart dreaded to make that journey, fearing that he would be arrested by the authorities for having broken his employment agreement; and thereafter he avoided visiting Salzburg—even when his father died, even for his sister’s marriage or the birth of her children.

A beloved son—a favorite son—was disinherited by his own city. And this same beloved son was effectively disinherited by his father as well—in more than a metaphoric sense—when he was no longer willing to play the part that had been scripted for him as a child. As in his conflict with Colloredo, Mozart was faced with extreme alternatives: submission to injustice or expulsion from his family. The issues were the same, capitulation or exile, a state of perpetual childhood or the anguish of enforced isolation: on the one hand, Mozart’s yearning to continue as a dutiful member of a symbiotic family and hometown that offered the gifts of approval, love, and the validation of his identity; on the other, a sense of homelessness, a profound melancholy rising from the renunciation of responsibilities and the sundering of his closest human connections. After years of inner and outer conflict, Mozart at last made his choice and thereby became almost a non-person in his birthplace—estranged from his sister, rejected by his father, and uncelebrated by his compatriots. We will want to know what were the compensations for these losses. In what follows we may come to see the disinheriting of Mozart as a source of his empowerment, as the emblem of a recalcitrant bravery, and even, perhaps, as a precondition of his creativity.

PROLOGUE

THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL CHILD

The child Mozart was examined by several eminent observers, who authenticated his gifts and issued glowing scientific reports describing his prodigious talents. The English magistrate and scholar Daines Barrington visited nine-year-old Mozart in London and put him to several tests, offering his conclusions to the Royal Society in London, which published them in its Philosophical Transactions of 1770.¹ After much initial skepticism, he confirmed that the child possessed what the music historian Charles Burney called premature and almost supernatural talents.² Suppose then, suggested Barrington in attempting to describe Mozart’s sight-reading abilities, a capital speech in Shakespeare never seen before, and yet read by a child of eight years old, with all the pathetic energy of a Garrick. Let it be conceived likewise, that the same child is reading, with a glance of his eye, three different comments on this speech tending to its illustration; and that one comment is written in Greek, the second in Hebrew, and the third in Etruscan characters…. When all this is conceived, it will convey some idea of what this boy was capable of.³ In Paris, Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, a close associate of the Encyclopedists, exclaimed in amazement that the child was such an extraordinary phenomenon that one is hard put to it to believe what one sees with one’s eyes and hears with one’s ears…. I am no longer surprised that Saint Paul should have lost his head after his strange vision.⁴

A Swiss philosophe and educator, Auguste Tissot, who observed Mozart in Lausanne in 1766, set down his astonishment at the superiority of Mozart’s performances, at the character of force which is the stamp of genius, that variety which proclaims the fire of imagination, and that charm which proves an assured taste. But the phenomenon of young Mozart, he avowed, transcended issues of genius or precocious virtuosity, rising instead from a harmonious union

…between moral man and physical man. A well-ordered mind appears to be made for a virtuous soul and sweet ways; experience has verified this in several great artists, and little Mozart supplies a new proof of it; his heart is as sensitive as his ear; he has modesty such as is rare at his age, and rare combined with such superiority; it is truly edifying to hear him attribute his talents to the giver of all things and to conclude from this, with a charming candor and an air of the most intimate conviction, that it would be unpardonable to pride himself on them.⁵

Thus, beyond the miraculous surface, Mozart was held to be, in the words of Tissot’s German translator, not only a natural but a moral human being; a splendid object, in truth, worthy of study, and his parents were to be congratulated for knowing so well how to unite and nurture in [him] the moral and the natural man.⁶ Leopold Mozart was regarded as God’s surrogate in this matter, guiding the development of his son—and his daughter, Marianne, who had an important role in the early concerts—with a benevolent, scientific, and loving disposition. One cannot see without emotion, wrote Tissot, all the evidence of his tenderness for a father who seems most worthy of it, who has taken even greater care over the formation of his character than the cultivation of his talents, and who speaks of education with as much sagacity as of music; who thinks himself well rewarded by success, and regards it as sweet for him to see his two lovable children better rewarded by a glance of approval from him, which they seek with tender anxiety in his eyes, than by the plaudits of a whole audience.⁷

Mozart was seen, then, as a superlative example of the child’s unlimited potentiality for creative and moral development, which could be unlocked by enlightened upbringing. The most famous musical prodigy in history, he was marked from the outset as the quintessential, perfect child. In an extraordinary series of triumphs, he was received, feted, and honored by the royal families of Europe—the king and queen of France, the empress of Austria and her son Emperor Joseph, the king and queen of England—and Pope Clement XIV himself. Mozart and his family were showered with money and expensive presents. He was kissed by empresses and petted by Marie Antoinette. And all because he was a gifted child, one who not only could perform wonders and miracles but was the very incarnation of a miracle, one whose small body exemplified the infinite perfectibility of the child and, by inference, of mankind.

The early literature about the child Mozart inevitably drew on a variety of rich traditions about other child heroes. There are tales in the Herculean mode of his endless labors and feats: he was undaunted by blindfolds and by keyboards covered with cloths; he emerged victorious from strenuous musical contests; it was claimed as a miracle that he was able to write down Allegri’s Miserere—the Church was said to have forbidden copying it—after a single hearing at the Vatican. Legends of the Christ child readily attached themselves to him. We have seen him for an hour and a half on end withstand the assaults of musicians, wrote Grimm, echoing Luke’s narrative of the twelve-year-old who was questioned by the elders in the temple, and while they sweated blood and had the hardest struggle in the world to keep even with him, the child came out of the combat unfatigued.⁸ There is perhaps something of the youthful trickster in all this: While Mozart certainly had the capacity to write out the Miserere from memory, he may also have had prior access to a manuscript copy of Allegri’s score;⁹ and he professed to read at sight compositions of unlimited difficulty but sometimes, without missing a beat, substituted different passage-work already in his repertory.¹⁰ Many people—perhaps most—doubted his age, suspecting deception and even sending to Salzburg for his baptismal records.¹¹ In Naples, so they said, Mozart was accused of wearing a magical ring to aid his dexterous left hand.¹² It was reported—perhaps apocryphally, for the story has the sound of legend—that the archbishop of Salzburg, not crediting his young subject’s abilities as a composer, shut him up for a week, during which he was not permitted to see any one, and was left only with music paper, and the words of an oratorio, for which he triumphantly produced the music at the close of his incarceration.¹³

In a rare moment of self-revelation, Leopold Mozart let us glimpse the extent to which he himself identified the boy with the Christ child; he wrote to his friend Lorenz Hagenauer in 1768 that his son was "a miracle, which God has allowed to see the light in Salzburg…. And if it is ever to be my duty to convince the world of this miracle, it is so now, when people are ridiculing whatever is called a miracle and denying all miracles…. But because this miracle is too evident and consequently not to be denied, they want to suppress it. They refuse to let God have the honor."¹⁴ In the descriptions of Mozart there are hints, too, of Apollo and Hermes, of Dionysus and Ganymede. Primarily, however, he is seen as Eros, the divine child, the playful embodiment of love and beauty. And the preoccupations of Eros were his as well. Who is this, that will not kiss me? he is said to have asked imperiously when Madame de Pompadour rebuffed his embrace. The empress kissed me.¹⁵ He had indeed animated the Austrian empress to kiss him by jumping on her lap, hugging her, and saying that he loved her with all his heart.¹⁶ The Salzburg court trumpeter Johann Andreas Schachtner recalled, He would often ask me ten times in one day if I loved him, and when I sometimes said no, just for fun, bright tears welled up in his eyes.¹⁷

To be sure, from the first there were also hints that the perfect child—so small, delicate, prone to illness—was somehow doomed, and might not survive to adulthood. Writing to him in 1778, his father recalled, Why, even your expression was so solemn that, observing the early efflorescence of your talent and your ever grave and thoughtful little face, many discerning people of different countries sadly doubted whether your life would be a long one.¹⁸ Grimm worried whether so premature a fruit might fall before it has come to maturity.¹⁹ Daines Barrington hoped that Mozart might attain "to the same advanced years as Handel, contrary to the common observation that such ingenia praecocia are generally short lived."²⁰

Homer tells us that the child gods are timeless and unchanging: They age not, they die not, they are eternal.²¹ In the course of time, however, Mozart’s physical appearance began to diverge from the world’s image of him. It was as though the grown Mozart was a quite different person, one descended from but not identical with a legendary child Mozart. The boy faded from view, replaced by a somewhat strange and awkward adolescent and adult. Fanciful imaginings about the young Mozart materialized and remained frozen in time while another Mozart grew older, suffered, and died. The maturing historical Mozart became the porcelain-child Mozart’s double, and the divine child survived his own death. A sickly infant with a large head and a tiny body, a winning youngster with an arch smile and unshakable confidence, a little magician gifted with marvelous powers, performed wonders before the crowned heads and elite of Europe, while everywhere were heard predictions of his early doom.

Adding to the sense of uncanniness was another picture, of a zealous father who had created a living instrument in the shape of a little boy to labor in God’s service, producing things of beauty. On one side are the classical images of Apollo and Eros, on the other, hints of the medieval Faust and his homunculus, of Maelzel and his mechanical trumpeter, and even of Rabbi Loew and his golem.

To all appearances, Mozart was a happy child. He was perfectly compliant and undemanding, working for the commonweal, which is to say, for the ideal family of which he was so integral a part. He delighted in his role as virtuoso-magician-prodigy; he rejoiced in applause and caresses, in being able to bring honor and fortune to his family; he derived pleasure from his celebrity and its accompanying adulation. It was a seductive role for him: from the age of six he wielded extraordinary power over his audiences, moving them to enthusiasm and rapture. And though he may not have been altogether conscious of it, he held great power over his family, for he had become its main source of wealth and status, a breadwinner charged with contributing to the support of his mother, father, and sister.

But anyone who troubled to look could have perceived many early signs of Mozart’s difficulty in sustaining his multiple burdens: he was quick to tears, stricken and often taken ill by the loss or absence of friends, bereft when his constant pleas to love me were not reciprocated. There was no indication that the child understood the extent to which he had been converted into an instrument of patriarchal ambition and subjected to the inevitable resentments that attach to a father’s growing realization that he has become deeply dependent upon his little boy.

Leopold Mozart had gained esteem, even glory, from his role as begetter, instructor, and impresario of so noble a creature, and he had seized every opportunity to turn the labors of his miraculous child into a cash equivalent, reaping extraordinarily large sums of money from the family’s European tours. More and more, his career, financial health, and hunger for recognition came to depend on his son, particularly when he began to neglect his duties as deputy kapellmeister to the Salzburg court and abandoned his activities as a composer and litterateur. And during years of almost nonstop travel, the Mozart family had grown accustomed to servants, private carriages, friseurs, and expensive clothing, and to the sense of superiority that attended their mingling with the highest levels of the nobility and intelligentsia. Not surprisingly, then, Leopold came to fear that Mozart would grow up, that is, would cease to be a child. He wrote to Hagenauer from Lyons in 1766, when Mozart was ten, Surely you will agree that now is the time when my children on account of their youth can arouse the admiration of everyone.²² He felt an urgent need to exploit his possibilities before they evaporated: Every moment I lose is lost forever. And if I ever guessed how precious for youth is time, I realize it now. You know that my children are accustomed to work. But if with the excuse that one thing prevents another they were to accustom themselves to hours of idleness, my whole plan would crumble to pieces.²³ It is most telling that as Mozart was approaching his teens, Leopold asked bitterly, Should I perhaps sit down in Salzburg with the empty hope of some better fortune, let Wolfgang grow up, and allow myself and my children to be made fools of until I reach the age which would prevent me from traveling and until he attains the age and physical size that no longer attract admiration for his merits?²⁴

From dreading Mozart’s maturity Leopold eventually undertook to prevent it from coming to pass. Even in his adolescence and young adulthood, Mozart was not allowed to travel unless accompanied by his father, who made all the practical decisions and appraised every opportunity with a view to the family’s interests. Beginning in 1772, Mozart held a modest post as a violinist in Salzburg, where he had uncertain prospects of advancement, let alone of fulfilling his ambitions as a composer, for these ambitions required a larger arena than was available there. Frustrated both personally and professionally, he asked his father to let him pursue his career elsewhere, but Leopold Mozart raised every conceivable objection. He sought to bar Mozart’s departure by making it conditional on the entire family’s accompanying him and even upon finding appropriate employment for himself. And he complained about the high travel expenses. But if Mozart countered that these expenses would be minimal for a single man traveling alone, living frugally, and earning something from his talents, his father would shift the ground to Mozart’s helplessness and childishness. I could not let you travel alone, because you were not accustomed to attend to everything or to be independent of the help of others and because you knew so little about different currencies and nothing whatever about foreign money. Moreover, you had not the faintest idea about packing nor about the innumerable necessary arrangements which crop up on journeys.²⁵ And when Mozart set out from Salzburg at the age of twenty-one and the archbishop refused to give Leopold Mozart leave to travel, Frau Mozart went along as her husband’s agent, covertly pledged to report home any sign that their son was going astray.

Also following Mozart on his journey were Leopold’s exhortations and remonstrances, transparent attempts to barricade his son within the family. Mozart was instructed to be wary of both the friendship of men and the love of women. All men are villains ("Die Menschen sind alle Böswichter") was a basso ostinato of Leopold Mozart’s letters to his son. Trust no one! he warned, adding, All friendships have their motives, and scoundrels hover about whose only intent is to squeeze [you] dry.²⁶ All men are villains! he reiterated. The older you become and the more you associate with people, the more you will realize this sad truth.²⁷ (Oddly, the Mozart scholar Hermann Abert sees this as Enlightenment pessimism, springing from the dream of a more perfect world,²⁸ but the contrast with Schiller’s "Alle Menschen werden Brüder [All men shall be brothers] could not be more striking.) In 1778, on Mozart’s arrival in Paris, his father abjured him to avoid not only strangers, adventurers, and unbelievers but members of the musical and theatrical professions as well; from what he had heard about Paris, You should be on your guard against its dangers and…should refrain from all familiarity with young Frenchmen, and even more so with the women, who are always on the look-out for strangers to keep them, who run after young people of talent in an astonishing way in order to get at their money, draw them into their net or even land them as husbands.²⁹ Obviously, women constituted a particularly dangerous class of creatures: Where they are concerned, the greatest reserve and prudence are necessary, Nature herself being our enemy. Whoever does not use his judgment to the utmost to keep the necessary reserve with them, will exert it in vain later on when he endeavors to extricate himself from the labyrinth, a misfortune which most often ends only at death."³⁰

To Leopold Mozart’s mind, the greatest hazard was that Mozart might form a family of his own to which he would owe his primary allegiance. Suddenly you strike up a new acquaintanceship—with Herr Weber, he wrote, referring to the father of the young singer Aloysia Weber, with whom Mozart had fallen in love. "All your other friends are forgotten, now this family is the most honorable, the most Christian family and the daughter is to have the leading role in the tragedy to be enacted between your own family and hers!"³¹ Distraught over Mozart’s infatuation with Fräulein Weber and his attachment to her family, Leopold inveighed against the prospect of his son’s marriage: Now it depends solely on your good sense and your way of life whether you die as an ordinary musician, utterly forgotten by the world, or as a famous kapellmeister, of whom posterity will read—whether, captured by some woman, you die bedded on straw in an attic full of starving children, or whether, after a Christian life spent in contentment, honor, and renown, you leave this world with your family well provided for and your name respected by all.³² Without significant exception, Leopold Mozart opposed or interfered with all of his son’s love affairs, up to and including his marriage to Aloysia’s sister, Constanze, in 1782, an event that rent the family fabric beyond repair.

Thus, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first attempted to emerge from the bosom of his family, he discovered that his way was barred. His extraordinary family, rather than being a loving haven within which he could grow to maturity, had somehow come to resemble a kind of debtor’s prison from which he could escape only by the most strenuous effort. Or, to shift metaphors, the family had come to resemble a miniature authoritarian society whose benevolent leader made every decision, organized all enterprises, and took complete responsibility, whose will was held to represent the interests of the commonweal. Within its tiny confines, the Mozart family illustrated the pathways by which a rationalist Utopia may readily be transformed into a patriarchal autocracy.

Naturally, the Mozart children derived important benefits from their participation in the family covenant: approval, a sense of belonging, of being part of a greater enterprise. Control was exercised through a variety of techniques: the inculcation of guilt regarding desires for personal gratification; indoctrination of the idea of unlimited responsibility to the family as a whole; cultivation of tribal values—altruism and cooperation within, distrust and suspicion without; the alternation of caring, teaching, and nurturing with the threat to withhold love; and, at its most extreme, the threat of expulsion. At each sign of Mozart’s resistance to family imperatives, the full weight of his father’s coercive rationality was brought to bear upon him. And if this proved insufficient, his sister and his mother were conscripted to stand against him as well. Marianne Mozart did so unquestioningly, but Frau Mozart, with great qualms and mixed feelings, sought to shield her beloved son, and even, on occasion, like an inwardly recalcitrant servant of the state, to undermine her husband’s instructions while appearing to carry them out. Nevertheless, when she perceived the possibility of losing her son to the Webers—In short, he prefers other people to me, she wrote to Leopold—she helped to precipitate a series of events that had tragic consequences.³³

Leopold Mozart had pictured his son as the ideal subject of an experiment in enlightenment, one he intended to record for posterity in a biography written by himself. Yet he would scarcely have acknowledged the justness of Rousseau’s remark, in his Discourse on Inequality, that by the law of nature the father continues master of his child no longer than the child stands in need of his assistance; that after that term they become equal, and that then the son entirely independent of the father, owes him no obedience, but only respect.³⁴ In contrast, true to the deep-rooted outlook of the artisan class from which he sprang, Leopold Mozart regarded his son as his personal economic resource and insurance against the calamities of old age.³⁵ Mozart was held to have an unlimited obligation to care for and support his family, to augment Leopold Mozart’s salary, and to pay off the debt the father had supposedly incurred on his son’s behalf. In the course of time, Mozart came to understand that his debts could never be paid in full.

If you continue to pursue your empty hopes, Leopold Mozart wrote him, you will make me and your sister into beggars.³⁶ He even came to imagine that his son had already brought him to poverty, and he did not hesitate to lay this charge upon him:

I myself do not possess a kreuzer. I look like poor Lazarus. My dressing gown is so shabby that if somebody calls in the morning, I have to make myself scarce. My old flannel jerkin…is so torn that I can hardly keep it on any longer and I cannot afford to have either a new dressing gown or a new jerkin made. Since your departure I haven’t had a single pair of new shoes, nor have I any black silk stockings left. On Sundays I wear old white stockings and during the week black woolen Berlin stockings, which I bought for 1 florin 12 kreuzer.³⁷

There is no need to question Leopold Mozart’s sincerity here: doubtless he felt abandoned, forlorn, and poverty-stricken as he faced the absence of his wife and son and the prospect of losing his son. But his claims of poverty were egregiously false. From Mozart’s performances in earlier years, Leopold had been able to save very large sums, perhaps equivalent to more than fifty times his annual salary, and in light of his prudent stewardship there is no reason to believe that these sums had since been dissipated.³⁸

Stunned by his father’s lament, Mozart pledged to remain his loyal subject. "Next to God comes Papa was my motto or axiom as a child, and I still cling to it…. But I must tell you that I was absolutely horrified and that tears came into my eyes when I read in your last letter that you have to go about so shabbily dressed. My very dearest Papa! That is certainly not my fault—you know it is not! We economize in every possible way here; food and lodging, wood and light have cost us nothing, and what more can we want!"³⁹

What more did Leopold Mozart want, indeed? As I will try to show, economic factors were only the surface of his motives, which also included an erotically tinged drive to dominate and a penchant for an almost Jamesian vicarious creativity, with Mozart serving as his father’s sacred fount. And there may be a sense in which Mozart was appointed to assume the burden of his father’s own earlier transgressions against God and family, both to repair past sins and to prevent future ones. Leopold’s struggle to control his son was a desperate one, for he was seeking to preserve not merely the source of his surplus income but the integrity of his personality.

Leopold Mozart would not—indeed, could not—surrender his prerogatives, and he would try to thwart his son’s every move toward independence and maturity. In the end, Mozart clearly understood that his father would never be reconciled to his departure for Vienna in 1781, his subsequent marriage, or even his brilliant career. He learned that his freedom would have to be purchased dearly.

It has become a commonplace of psychoanalytic aesthetics that art—on the Proustian model—seeks the reparation of loss, attempting to reconstruct a fragmented past, to memorialize and resurrect departed love objects. Whatever the partial validity of theories of art as restoration of the past, it seems clear that they are forms of piety to tradition and to ancestry, and often they are unmindful that recollection and forgetfulness are always intertwined, that creativity involves destruction as well as restoration, erasing and undoing as well as making and preserving. Surely, some part of the creative impulse aims to accomplish a separation from the dead, or at least from the paralysis of tradition.

That may be why the refusal of the past to stay put has often given rise to some bitterness: All that has once lived clings tenaciously to life, wrote Freud in his last years. Sometimes one feels inclined to doubt whether the dragons of primeval ages are really extinct.⁴⁰ From quite another perspective, Marx exclaimed, "We suffer not only from the living but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!"⁴¹ The desire to alter or improve reality is the desire to give it over to a new generation, not only to restore it to an older one or to fulfill an ancient prophecy.

It may be that an impulse to recapture a real or fantasied era of personal bliss informed Mozart’s creativity, though it seems equally likely that his elaboration of multiple alternative universes in his music was also powered by some discontent with the order of things. But throughout his life, Mozart struggled against the demands of his past, the survival of archaic patterns of behavior, and the incessant invocation of his childhood image, for these were largely insignia of the reenactment and perpetuation of ancient rites of submission. His father often lamented that Mozart neither respected the past nor considered the future: The present alone engulfs you completely, and sweeps you off your feet.⁴² In actuality, Mozart wanted to leave childhood and its subjections behind, to shatter the frozen perfection of the little porcelain violinist and to put in his place a living man, one with sexual appetites, bodily functions, irreverent thoughts, and selfish impulses, one who needed to live for himself and his loved ones and not only for those who had given him life. The altruistic impulse was too deeply rooted in him to be eradicated, but it desired to choose its objects freely and to expand beyond the tribal unit to larger entities; it wanted to demonstrate that not all men are malevolent, not all women bent upon ensnarement.

Though he ultimately founded his own family, attached himself to still other, idealized families, and joined what he viewed as the universal family of Freemasonry, Mozart nevertheless continued to yearn for the old relationships. In a sense, the pathos of Mozart is that of the freedman who discovers to his dismay that he still dreams of slavery, even with all its attendant terrors. Of course, a repetition compulsion is at work here—always returning to the scene of the crime, ever doubling back, going home, filled with disbelief, to confirm, to deny, and perhaps to revise a graven narrative, somehow symbolically to convert terror into beauty, dissonance into harmony, hostile attachment into unalloyed love. But also at work is the yearning to be needed, to be essential to the community, to be a child who labors eternally for the benefit of the family, whatever the cost.

The received view of Mozart as eternal child is the Mozart family’s ideology writ large. It was inculcated in him by verbal force, contrived logic, and appeals to sentiment. Leopold Mozart repeatedly invoked their early relationship as a model of his expectations: Those happy moments are gone, he wrote in February 1778, when, as child and boy, you never went to bed without standing on a chair and singing to me ‘Oragna fiagata fa,’ and ending by kissing me again and again on the tip of my nose and telling me that when I grew old you would put me in a glass case and protect me from every breath of air, so that you might always have me with you and honor me.⁴³ He brought the child Mozart to bear against his mature self: My son! You are hot-tempered and impulsive in all your ways! Since your childhood and boyhood your whole character has changed. As a child and a boy you were serious rather than childish and when you sat at the clavier or were otherwise intent on music, no one dared to have the slightest jest with you.⁴⁴ Now, he charged, Mozart permitted others undue familiarity and had become an easy prey to flatterers, whereas as a boy you were so extraordinarily modest that you used to weep when people praised you overmuch.⁴⁵ The myth of Mozart as eternal child was utilized to perpetuate his subjection.

For a time the myth was also an impediment to his success as a mature composer and virtuoso, forcing him to contend with those who remained blinded by his fabulous career as a young prodigy. In 1770 Abbé Ferdinando Galiani wrote to Madame d’Épinay, from Naples, that little Mosar is here, and that he is less of a miracle, although he is always the same miracle; but he will never be anything else than a miracle, and that is all.⁴⁶ Similarly, Mozart was described by Louis de Visme as one further instance of early Fruit, which is more extraordinary than excellent.⁴⁷ In 1778 Mozart complained to his father about his reception in Paris: What annoys me most of all here is that these stupid Frenchmen seem to think I am still seven years old, because that was my age when they first saw me.⁴⁸ His physical stature played into this perception. As late as 1780, at the last rehearsal of Idomeneo, the elector of Bavaria jested: Who would believe that such great things could be hidden in so small a head?⁴⁹ Mozart was not amused. And of Mannheimers who failed to treat him with respect, he observed, They probably think that because I am little and young, nothing great or mature can come out of me, adding, with a touch of malice, But they will soon see.⁵⁰

Mozart’s triumphs in Vienna put an end to these understandable misconceptions. But if, during his last decade, he had largely won the battle to be recognized as a man, his voice was stilled after his death while those of his father and sister dominated the discourse. Wolfgang was small, thin, pale in color, and entirely lacking in any pretensions as to physiognomy and bodily appearance, reads an entry in Marianne Mozart’s biographical notes and reminiscences in early 1792. Apart from his music he was almost always a child, and thus he remained: and this is a main feature of his character on the dark side; he always needed a father’s, a mother’s or some other guardian’s care. He married a girl quite unsuited to him, and against the will of his father, and thus the great domestic chaos at and after his death.⁵¹ Mozart’s first biographer, Friedrich Schlichtegroll, used these condescending formulations in his lengthy obituary notice, published in 1793, whence they made their way into many influential contemporary writings about Mozart.⁵² The Mozart family’s tendentious view of him prevailed with the publication of many of Leopold Mozart’s voluminous letters in Georg Nissen’s documentary biography of 1828. It was as though Leopold had posthumously managed to fulfill his ambition to write his son’s biography, and in particular the story of their conflicts, from his own point of view. Mozart’s widow, Constanze, who married Nissen and edited the biography, could have counteracted these trends, but instead elected to pose, in the words of Mozart’s greatest biographer, Otto Jahn, as a patient martyr, suffering from the thoughtlessness of a man of genius, who remained a child to the end of his days.⁵³

Soon notions of Mozart’s irresponsibility and childishness coalesced with other reports and fictions about the supposedly automatic, almost somnambulistic nature of his creative process. All this seemed to imply a channel between childhood and creativity that early Romantic aestheticians found irresistible, for it echoed their rediscovery in childhood of the mourned Golden Age.⁵⁴ Using Mozart as his primary example, and citing both Schlichtegroll and Nissen, Schopenhauer elevated this connection to a kind of principle of creativity, asserting that every genius is already a big child, since he looks out into the world as something strange and foreign, a drama, and thus with purely objective interest.⁵⁵ Other purveyors of the Mozart-as-child myth viewed him not only as a child but as a simpleton or, to put it more kindly, a divine vessel. Hegel obviously had Mozart in mind when he wrote: Musical talent declares itself as a rule in very early youth, when the head is still empty and the emotions have barely had a flutter; it has, in fact, attained real distinction at a time in the artist’s life when both intelligence and life are practically without experience. And, for that matter, we often enough see very great achievement in musical composition and performance combined with considerable indigence of mind and character.⁵⁶

This tendency to downgrade Mozart’s character and intellect appeared quite early. By 1825 the violinist Karl Holz was writing of Mozart in Beethoven’s conversation book, "Outside of his genius as a musical artist, Mozart was a nullity."⁵⁷ At century’s end, the British composer and critic Hubert Parry declared that Mozart was gifted with the most perfect and refined musical organization ever known; but he was not naturally a man of deep feeling or intellectuality.⁵⁸ And recently Wolfgang Hildesheimer has revived this antiquated but vigorous viewpoint, almost in Leopold Mozart’s own words. Mozart, he writes, was as great a stranger to the world of reason as to the sphere of human relations. He was guided solely by the aim of the moment.⁵⁹ Apparently, commentators feel the need to portray Mozart’s nonconformism, his bohemianism, his liberated sexual attitudes, his critique of authority, his Freemasonry, as devoid of larger significance, as merely the reactions of a child to necessary constraints. Don’t take Mozart seriously is their message, he is only a child at play. It is but a short step from here to a denial of Mozart’s capacity for feeling as well as reason: Human ties, as we know them, were alien to him, says Hildesheimer. He was relatively quick to get over human disappointments, and we do not know if they ever really touched him deeply at all.⁶⁰ Extending the claim that Mozart never felt the simple mortal pain that makes him our kin, the author of Amadeus is perplexed by references to Mozart’s suffering and contends that there is really not the slightest evidence, either in his own voluminous correspondence or in accounts of him by contemporaries, that Mozart ever suffered for his art.⁶¹

Nineteenth-century biographers found much to admire in the elder Mozart’s exhortations to probity, piety, and family obligation, as well as in his descriptions of his own virtue, self-sacrifice, and wholesome influence upon his son, which, in Jahn’s words, was the foundation of [Mozart’s] moral and social existence. Jahn pictured a Mozart who

grew up in an atmosphere of conjugal and parental affection, of sincere religion and conscientious morality, and of well-ordered economy, which could not fail in its effect on his character…. We have seen, and shall see further, how fully Leopold Mozart deserved the trust reposed in him. It was absolute confidence, not timid fear, that bound wife and children to him, and candor and truth ruled all the family intercourse.

Above all was the father’s earnest devotion to duty, and his example gave weight to his unsparing demands on the labor and industry of his children…. He was not content to recognize in the wonderful receptive and productive powers of his son a passport to easy indolence, but strove to make him consider them as deposits to be turned to the best account by study and cultivation. He accustomed his children to work from their youth up, and made it his first object that their outer circumstances should afford them no excuse for idle hours.⁶²

This became a dominant view, echoed to one degree or another in most conventional biographies of Mozart, but it was not the only one. Several influential scholars, unimpressed by Jahn’s portrait of an exemplary life shaped within an ideal patriarchal family, read the Mozart correspondence in a quite different way. A few years after Jahn’s biography was published, Ludwig Nohl wrote of Leopold Mozart’s unconscious feeling of mortification at his son’s independence of action and found it admirable that Mozart at last shows his strength of character by no longer listening to his father’s remonstrances.⁶³ In the first major revisionist biography, published in 1913, Arthur Schurig could not restrain his condemnation of Leopold; he described him as a pedantic calculator who sought to maintain Mozart in unconditional slavery and he observed that Leopold’s tyranny had the unexpected result of forcing Mozart, against his own nature, to become callous, reserved and, on occasion, even actually hypocritical toward his father.⁶⁴ In England, at the same time, Edward J. Dent, in his now classic study of Mozart’s operas, portrayed Leopold as a rigid disciplinarian, a disagreeable personality who viewed any potential opponent as a monster of jealousy and intrigue and was incapable of grasping either his son’s human dimension or his capacity for creative development: Wolfgang was to be forced upon the world as a miraculous prodigy, and the iron was to be struck while it was hot; there was no reason to suppose that after he was grown up he would be anything more than a respectable professional musician like his father.⁶⁵ According to Dent, Leopold Mozart was quite content to be a servant of the Archbishop himself and he could not understand why Wolfgang should be so rebellious. He was inwardly convinced that what really governed his son’s actions was a love of pleasure and dissipation, and that once set free from paternal discipline he would merely lead a life of self-indulgence and extravagance.⁶⁶

By the mid-twentieth century these antithetical opinions were still being reflected in Mozart scholarship. In an influential book, Alfred Einstein described Leopold as no mean psychologist and praised his patient handling of Mozart’s childish tendencies.⁶⁷ But an equally outstanding musicologist of the same generation, Erich Hertzmann, believed that Leopold tried to force Mozart into a position of emotional dependence. He wrote:

The young Mozart idolized his father and tried to emulate him in every way; even his musical handwriting was the image of Leopold’s. At the age of twenty-six he asked his father to write out the alphabet for him, in capital and small letters, so that he might continue to practice and improve his own hand. Only through the outward rebellion against the Archbishop was it possible for him to break loose from the strong domination of his father, whom he both loved and resented.⁶⁸

It seems evident that, by this time, Hertzmann’s view was not untouched by psychoanalytical thinking about fathers and sons. And indeed one has the sense of a digging of trenches on either side of an oedipal divide. Those who approved of Leopold Mozart’s pedagogy necessarily found themselves supporting the view of Mozart as an eternal child, while those who were outraged by the father’s actions understood Mozart’s need and capacity for autonomy.

For the present, Mozart has largely lost the struggle to be regarded as something other than a child. The most venerable tropes have recently been revived, and to them we are even now adding new perceptions of Mozart the child, albeit now as the rebellious-patricidal-oedipal child or the polymorphous child of his bawdy letters to his cousin, the Basle, whom he loved so tenderly.

It is also true that the child images persist because Mozart himself often licensed them, with an ironic exaggeration usually lost on posterity. This shows itself in Mozart’s comic attitude—his game playing, punning, riddling, obscenity, wit, and general propensity for outrageousness—which he could assume in a trice. In part this represented his admission that the family was correct to designate him an irresponsible child. It is as though he were saying, "You regard me as a child? Well, then, I am a child!" More interesting is that the comic seems to have opened for him a realm relatively free from compulsion, an arena in which he could—indirectly, mockingly—confront those who would infantilize him. No less than Hamlet, Mozart showed the world an antic disposition even as he pursued a momentous purpose whose fulfillment he would not long survive. But unlike Hamlet, Mozart eventually found the strength to stop playing his part, thereby establishing a zone of free will within which, however painfully, his creativity could come to fruition.

And so there may be something to be learned even from misreadings of Mozart’s life. This is not altogether unexpected, for views of Mozart as a child waver between transcendence and tragedy, innocence and wisdom, and other extreme juxtapositions, covering much of the spectrum of mythic possibility. All of these are partial, one-sided, and reductionist, for they are attempts to understand a protean phenomenon by drastic simplification. As a good child Mozart knows his place in an orderly universe. As an evil child he ungratefully destroys his own father and mother. As innocent child his sexuality and darker impulses are sublimated into art and altruistic service. As doomed child and ancient child he symbolizes the transience of virtue, beauty, and life, the indissolubility of pleasure and pain. What is a poet? asked Kierkegaard in the opening words of Either / Or: A poet—by which he meant both himself and Mozart—is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music…. And men crowd about the poet and say to him: ‘Sing for us soon again’; that is as much as to say: ‘May new sufferings torment your soul.’⁶⁹ Finally, as the immortal divine child, Mozart is the beloved of the gods, favorite of the muses, blessed with the genius to provide a temporary surcease from pain, a glimpse of felicity, a yearning for a remote horizon. It is ungracious to subject so consoling a view to close scrutiny. In the end, one wants to yield to the dreamlike image of Mozart that the young Schubert inscribed in his diary on 13 June 1816: As from afar the magic notes of Mozart’s music still gently haunt me…. They show us in the darkness of this life a bright, clear, lovely distance, for which we hope with confidence. O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, oh how endlessly many such comforting perceptions of a brighter and better life hast thou brought to our souls!⁷⁰

BEGINNINGS

1

LEOPOLD MOZART

When Leopold Mozart died in 1787 at the age of sixty-seven, Lorenz Hagenauer’s son, Dominikus Hagenauer, wrote in his diary that his father’s late friend had been a man of much wit and sagacity, who would have been capable of rendering good service to the State even apart from music, but that he had the misfortune of being always persecuted here and was by far less beloved here than in other, greater places in Europe.¹ By several accounts, Mozart’s father was a hard man to like. Nissen wrote, In Salzburg he was regarded as a sardonic humorist.² His acerbic and dissatisfied nature was no secret to foreign observers either, among whom he acquired the reputation of being perpetually discontented. It is important to find the sources of this discontent, for it powered his restless, unrelenting search for fulfillment and thereby became central to his family’s sense of purpose and obligation.

Leopold Mozart sprang from a family of artisans who had lived for generations in the South German city of Augsburg. His mother, Anna Maria Sulzer (1696-1766), was the eldest daughter of Christian Sulzer, a weaver from Baden-Baden who had come to Augsburg in 1695, and his wife Dorothea, née Baur, who was a weaver’s