Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
A LIFE IN LETTERS
Translated by Stewart Spencer
644pp. Penguin. Paperback, £14.99.
978 0 14144 146 7
Franz Xaver Niemetschek
MOZART
The first biography
77pp. Berghahn Books. £29.95.
978 1 845 45231 5
Mozart learned much of his letter-writing technique from his father.
Throughout his childhood, on various lengthy travels across Europe, he
observed Leopold writing accounts of their activities and sending them back
to Salzburg, first to his friend and landlord Lorenz Hagenauer, and later to
his wife Maria Anna, when she and their daughter Nannerl were left at home;
to many letters, the growing boy would add postscripts. Leopold wrote these
chronicles, in part, for the publicity; he knew they would be circulated in
Salzburg, and he often edited his reports accordingly (“I am saying nothing
here about most of our journey”, he wrote from Munich on November 10, 1766.
“I know how differently people judge things, depending on the differences of
their own feeble understanding”). But in general his epistolary technique
was entirely stream-of-consciousness (“Don’t be surprised if I write things
down in no particular order, but in cases like these you have to write down
your ideas while they strike you, otherwise you forget them”), and
frequently his letters were several thousand words long. If Leopold had
paper, he filled it; and if he ran out of space, he continued up the margins
and onto the envelopes. Often his letters took days to compose, and then of
course days to arrive. But they were worth the wait; the early letters, in
particular, include wonderful descriptions of the places visited by the
family (he is illuminating on the subject of mid-eighteenth-century London,
for instance, with its high cost of living, its meat and beer, the pleasure
gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and its many eccentricities, among which
Leopold numbered pipe-smoking women), and lively insights into contemporary
manners as well as music.
When, at the age of twenty-one, Mozart himself at last became independent of
his father’s daily company, he too slid into the habit of lengthy
letter-writing. His style is immediate, conversational and engaging, and
there are clear parallels with his musical writing. He seems to have been as
fluent and inventive with words as he was with music, for his letters have
pace, narrative, dramatic contrast and terrific passion. He could develop
any subject with the greatest imagination, as he did when improvising at the
keyboard; and his phenomenal memory, famously shown musically when he wrote
down Allegri’s Miserere having heard it just once in Rome, enabled him to
recall lengthy conversations verbatim. But there was also something
therapeutic for him about the writing and receiving of letters.
“Occasionally I am overcome by bouts of melancholy”, he wrote on July 31,
1778, four weeks after the death of his mother, “but I can most easily avoid
them by writing or receiving letters; this immediately cheers me up again.”
For such a gregarious soul, this private form of social intercourse was
peculiarly important.
The relationship between Mozart and his father, including its gradual
disintegration, dominates A Life in Letters. Both personalities emerge with
sometimes painful clarity. Mozart himself was of the liveliest good humour,
shown in extremis in his nine celebratedly scatological letters (of which
only one is included here) to his naughty cousin, Maria Anna Thekla. Like
all private codes of communication (including the Mitfords’ Boudledidge,
perhaps), these letters were no doubt more fun for those who truly shared
the joke than for those afterwards who try to make sense of it all. But
though they are childish and surprising, they are essentially innocent, and
an intensification of the general teasing style that Mozart adopted with his
sister Nannerl, before that passionate relationship evaporated utterly after
the death of their father in 1787. Throughout A Life in Letters there are
brilliant snapshots of Mozart’s acquaintance (“She has sugar and honey on
her lips but pepper in her heart”, he wrote of the Countess Wallis, of whom
he was deeply suspicious, in July 1778), and no doubt accurate assessments,
both favourable and highly unfavourable, of musicians whom he observed or
with whom he worked. The ill-disciplined musicians of Salzburg (Leopold’s
colleagues) incited his fiercest rage (“rich in all that is useless and
unnecessary but very poor when it comes to what’s necessary and entirely
lacking in what’s most indispensable of all”, August 7, 1778). Mozart
clearly had an explosive temper, as he reported so graphically when
describing his dismissal from the service of Salzburg’s Archbishop. (And it
was his recognition of this which surely enabled him to depict rage so
effectively in the music of, for instance, Osmin, or the Queen of the
Night.)
But Mozart’s nature was also profoundly vulnerable. Even when desperately at
odds with his father, he required Leopold’s approval and support, and his
frequent cries from the heart (“In Salzburg I don’t know who I am”, October
15, 1778) are devastating. After his marriage to Constanze Weber, he was
more settled and confident; but any absence from her made him restless and
agitated, and within hours he was already writing her the most touching
letters (“I feel it’s years since I saw you . . . . I’ve grown far too
accustomed to you – I love you too much to be able to be separated from you
for long”, October 1790). The marriage, like any other, had its ups and
downs, but is revealed in these letters as being, for the most part,
passionate and secure. Constanze was for Mozart an anchor in a sea of
violently fluctuating fortune. Family life was important to him, and there
is no greater or more touching proof of this than his last letter to his
wife, written (October 14, 1791) just one month before his final illness
began to take hold. He wrote happily of having taken their seven-year-old
son Carl, with Constanze’s mother, to a performance of Die Zauberflöte, and
of having supper afterwards with Constanze’s sister Josefa (who had just
sung the Queen of the Night) and her husband: “It was no small treat for
Carl to be taken to the opera. – He’s looking splendid”. In letters such as
this, and in many others to Constanze, Nannerl, or to close friends, we peep
behind the curtain of genius to discover an intriguingly normal, albeit
lively, domesticity.
Leopold emerges from his letters with a depth similar to that of his son. At
first he is seen as the proud, resourceful, imaginative young father
determined to do the best for his remarkable children, a good friend and
neighbour, with a delightful sense of humour. But his joy in his children’s
talents soon became blinkered, and he instigated an unforgiving regime of
constant performance: “my children are used to work: if they were to get
used to hours of idleness, my entire edifice would collapse; custom is an
iron shirt” (November 10, 1766). Then, as the children grew up (and the
talents of Nannerl were tossed aside), the world became weary of prodigious
talent and Leopold’s passion ossified into obsession. His bigoted views
intensified: he was anti-Italian, then anti-French. His oldest friends
became less useful to him, so he abandoned them. When Hagenauer’s daughter
Martha died, to the great distress of Wolfgang and Nannerl, Leopold could
not be bothered to write a letter of condolence, but dismissed the matter
airily: “What can’t be changed must be left to God’s discretion” (October
20, 1770). In his desperate (and fruitless) quest for a job for his son, he
began effectively to stalk potential patrons, such as his own former
employer the Prince of Taxis, who refused to see him after Leopold followed
him home from church (January 26, 1770). And, most serious of all, he
antagonized the ruling Habsburg family, eventually provoking the Empress
Maria Teresa into a blistering dismissal of the whole Mozart family as
“useless people”.
In two particular periods of crisis, Leopold’s letters became longer and more
hysterical. The first was the disastrous job-seeking tour of 1777–8, which
culminated in the tragic death of Mozart’s mother in Paris. The second was
the prolonged episode in Vienna, in the spring of 1782, in which Wolfgang
got himself dismissed from archiepiscopal service. As Leopold reacted from
afar to these unfolding dramas, he resorted to bullying and emotional
blackmail in his letters. Father and son became utterly opposed to one
another. Leopold took the view that everything should be planned – by him –
to the smallest detail (“even though I am some distance away, I can still
see more and judge things better than you”, February 23, 1778), whereas
Wolfgang maintained that unpredictable circumstances might change anything.
In between these two crises, harmony was to an extent restored, and the
letters exchanged between them during Mozart’s composition of Idomeneo in
Munich in 1781, in which they invigoratingly shared musical and theatrical
insights, are among the best in the collection.
After the second crisis, Leopold reluctantly accepted the fact that Wolfgang
was now married to Constanze, and eventually visited the couple in Vienna in
1785. This visit, rich in musical activity and public acclaim, was all
reported in excited letters to Nannerl. But whenever Leopold was apart from
Wolfgang, he lost faith in his son and in Mozart’s ability to succeed on his
own. He even seemed to lose his artistic judgement, too. He poured scorn on
Wolfgang’s symphonies (“works that do you no credit”, September 24, 1778),
and deprecated Mozart’s collaboration with Lorenzo da Ponte on Le nozze di
Figaro (“a most wearisome piece”, March 23, 1786). When Leopold died in
1787, Mozart was devastated. In spite of everything his father had been the
rock in his foundation, and after its removal many other elements in his
life began to crumble. Soon afterwards, he was compelled to beg for money in
a humiliating series of letters to a fellow Freemason, Michael Puchberg.
Only three of them are included in this collection, but they are distressing
to read. And although Mozart’s fortunes took a turn for the better in 1791,
the account of his final illness, as recalled more than thirty years later
by Constanze’s younger sister Sophie, is as harrowing in this translation as
it is in any other: “The last thing he did was to try and mouth the sound of
the timpani in his Requiem; I can still hear it now” (April 7, 1825).
Mozart’s correspondence is well known, not merely in the four volumes of
original German, but also in English, most especially Emily Anderson’s
ground-breaking three volumes, originally published in 1938. Among many more
recent selections in different translations, Robert Spaethling’s Mozart’s
Letters, Mozart’s Life (2000) is particularly vibrant. And A Life in
Letters, edited by Cliff Eisen and translated by Stewart Spencer, is a rich
addition to the library. Eisen has selected 184 letters, ninety-nine by
Mozart himself, and the majority of the rest by Leopold. The result is
superbly prepared, excellently introduced and footnoted, and translated with
a real feeling for colloquialism. I would take issue with just one passage
of translation, and only do so because it is exceptionally important. On
June 12, 1778, Mozart wrote with some passion on the subject of singers’
vibrato – as thorny a topic in his age as it is today. He made the basic
point that the human voice vibrates naturally, and as such is very beautiful
(“Die Menschstimme zittert schon selbst – aber so – in einem solchen Grade,
daß es schön ist – das ist die Natur der Stimme”), but when vibrato is
overused it becomes ugly and distorting. Stewart Spencer translates this as
“the human voice is naturally tremulous”, which is not what Mozart is saying
at all, dilutes the impact of his statement – and indeed changes its
meaning. Elsewhere, there are some minor inconsistencies in the footnotes.
All titles of the dramatic works, for instance, have been helpfully
translated, with the exception of Il sogno di Scipione. And in the last year
of his life Mozart twice quoted from Die Zauberflöte while he was in the
throes of composing or performing it. (It was very rare for him to do this
in his letters, so these two quotations are all the more precious.) One of
the quotations (“lebt wohl, auf Wiedersehn!”) has been helpfully identified,
but the other (“Death and despair were his reward!”) has not. These are
minor flaws in an otherwise very fine publication.
Professor Eisen has also been involved in another welcome addition to the
Mozart library, a translation (by Helen Mautner) of the first biography of
the composer, by Franz Xaver Niemetschek. This brief work appeared in 1798,
just seven years after Mozart’s death, and was authorized by Constanze, the
education of whose children Niemetschek was now supervising in Prague. It
therefore bears the seductive stamp of authenticity, for it is clear that
Constanze was closely interrogated by the author. “This story comes from a
reliable source”, claims Niemetschek, near the beginning. Perhaps because of
Constanze’s proximity to the project, it rather gushes with superlatives,
and lacks a balanced view of the subject; the narrative is also slanted in
favour of Prague and its unreserved enthusiasm for the composer. Prague, of
course, had reason to be proud, for it had been responsible for Don
Giovanni, La Clemenza di Tito and the Prague Symphony; but Niemetschek’s
book, which also includes a list of contemporary Bohemian composers, is a
little lopsided as a result. Structurally, he devotes more than half his
book to Mozart’s life, and then comments on it; and a small postscript,
“Some Notes about his Works”, throws interesting light on the chaos of their
publication before Constanze made her deals with Breitfkopf and Härtel at
the turn of the century. Although by no means wholly accurate, this book
includes much contemporary debate (on whether music is a victim of fashion,
for instance, or on the paucity of good musical education), and is absorbing
to read.
One final thought. Much later, after Constanze had married a Danish diplomat,
Georg Nissen, she moved to Salzburg where Nissen prepared another “official”
biography of Mozart. He died before finishing it, so what was eventually
published in 1828 was inevitably a mish-mash of fascinating but inchoate
material. Perhaps Clifford Eisen, in collaboration with one of his
redoubtable translators, might turn his considerable editorial skills to
this.
Jane Glover is a conductor, and the author of Mozart's Women: His
family, his friends, his music, 2005. She has been Music Director of
Glyndebourne Touring Opera and Artistic Director of the London Mozart
Players.
