WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)

PART 2: THE VIENNA YEARS

The Vienna years cover the last ten years of Mozart’s life following his ultimate
departure from Salzburg. Some commentators describe Mozart’s Vienna years as a
struggle for recognition and suffering from poverty, as a struggle for survival followed
by a pauper’s funeral. It was not so. After the death of Maria Theresa in 1780 Josef
II continued alone and there followed an enlightened time until his death in 1790, a
period more or less contemporaneous with Mozart’s remaining years of life.

In fact Mozart’s Vienna career took off well. He performed often as a pianist,
including the celebrated competition with Clementi which took place before the
Emperor on 24 December 1781, and he soon had established himself as the finest
keyboard player in Vienna. That was as a performer. In fact his Vienna career began
well. and he soon had established himself as the finest keyboard player in Vienna.
He was also doing well as a composer of opera , and in 1782, just before getting
married, he completed his opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and which was
first performed in July 1782 with huge success.

The years from 1781 to 1785 were an extremely productive period for Mozart – all
periods were - and it was in that time that he met Haydn, probably in 1782 and wrote
the six so-named Haydn quartets which Mozart dedicated to the older man.

It was there in Vienna, just before the split from Archbishop Colenso that Mozart
would again meet the Weber family who had moved to Vienna from Mannheim. They
had fallen on hard times following the death of the father, and they were now
reduced tp taking in lodgers to make ends meet. Mozart had immediately
established a roof over his head by moving in with them. Aloysia, who had earlier
turned Mozart down, was now married to an actor and artist and Mozart's interest
shifted to the third Weber daughter, Constanze.

The course of true engagement did not go entirely smoothly; surviving

correspondence indicates that Mozart was up against difficulties in getting
permission from his father for the marriage resulting in he and Constanze briefly
separating in April 1782. Still the couple finally made it and married on 4 August 1782
in St. Stephen's Cathedral. They would have six children of which four of them died
within six months of birth and only the other two survived infancy. I am please to
have in my collection two piano concertos by Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (1791 –
1844). It would not be until 1783, that Mozart and Constanze were to visit his
Leopold, his father and Nannerl, his sister, in Salzburg who it is said were cordially
polite to Constanze.

From 1782 to 1785 Mozart mounted concerts with himself as soloist, presenting
three or four new piano concertos in each season. As he was not always able to
reserve a theatre, he booked unconventional venues, a large room in an apartment
building and the ballroom of a restaurant. It sounds a bit like the Blackheath Music
Appreciation Society and Trinity Laban. The concerts were very popular ensuring
Mozart’s continuing recognition. With substantial returns from these, he and
Constanze adopted a rather plush lifestyle.
Haydn and Mozart are thought likely to have first met late in 1782. There is written
record of their playing together, Haydn, first violin; Dittersdorf, second violin; Vanhal,
cello and Mozart, viola. Perhaps it should have been called the Composers Quartet!
Haydn was then 51 and Mozart 27. We do not know what prompted Mozart to write
the six quartets and dedicate them to Haydn. Dedication customarily followed a
commission, usually from an aristocrat who himself would have been a dab hand at
playing. Mozart was not an inexperienced writer for the string quartet although his
early works, like those of Haydn, were more in the line of divertimenti than the
sonata string quartet. Looking down a list of them one can observe Koechel
numbers 136-138 which are known as fun divertimenti and usually played by an
enlarged chamber group. The difference between them and the Haydn quartets
could be compared to the Simple Symphony of Benjamin Britten with that of his
second string quartet. 1781 was the year of Haydn’s opus 33 quartets which Mozart
would have known and likely to have played with their composer.

One wonders also whether Mozart might originally have intended three quartets and
not six. The first of the quartets was finished on 31 st December 1782. The second
two were completed in June/July 1783. Then a gap. The Hunt was not completed
until November 1784 and the last two on 10 th and 14th January 1785. What we do
know is that Haydn first heard them on 15 th January which indicates a last minute dot
com rush by Mozart to finish them off in time for their meeting again.

But why the long gap between the third and fourth? It is often said that Mozart had
some difficulty with string quartets but this gap was no equivalent of writer’s block
like William Walton taking a year to ponder whether to add a fourth movement to his
first symphony. First, Mozart could not have afforded that luxury. Secondly difficulty
was not a noun in Mozart’s vocabulary and you only have to listen to the Haydn
quartets from beginning to end to realize that. For Mozart the difficulty may have
simply meant the limitations posed by the instrumental combination when he might
possibly have liked to have had another instrument available. Thirdly, composer
block is out of the question. A research of 1784 shows the six piano concerti,
numbers 14 to 19 on top of one horn concerto, a piano sonata, a violin sonata,
several contre-danses and various arias! The answer is probably that the two,
Haydn and Mozart, if not all four, had difficulty in getting together. Haydn, as we
have seen earlier, was busy enough with his Esterharzy duties. Most of that time
was spent at Esterharza, the summer palace in Hungary and if his symphony No 45
(the Farewell) is anything to go by the summers tended to be longer than the winters.
In winter the Esterhazy palace was at Eisenstadt, not far away according to one
programme note, a mere 40 kilometres, from Vienna. This would have been more
than a mere bus ride had they had buses at the time. The chances were that fixing a
time to meet from one year to the next was not easy, apart from also getting Vanhal
and Baron Dittersdorf to check their diaries. Then suddenly it was on and Mozart
dropping whichever piano concerto he was then writing in order to finish off the
compilation for Haydn.

How did Haydn re-act to these quartets? The evidence is contained in the famous
letter he wrote to Leopold Mozart “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that
your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name: He has
taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition.” Was it an
exaggeration? Haydn could afford to be generous. After all he was the greatest
composer alive. His own quartets are perhaps a little more inventive or
improvisatory but then Mozart’s plumb some spiritual depths. Haydn would not have
heard anything from anyone else to match his own or Mozart’s creations. His own
quartets would not have come as a surprise to his own ears as did those of Mozart
which clearly bowled him over. And one must also bear in mind that Mozart was
much the same age then as Haydn had been when he joined Esterhazy in 1760. Yet
Mozart at age 29 was already a veteran genius.

On 14 December 1784, just when finishing the Haydn Quartets, Mozart became a
freemason. This played an important role for the remainder of his life. He attended
meetings, a number of his friends were masons, and on various occasions he
composed masonic music.

Despite the great success of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Mozart did little
operatic writing for four years which followed. He focused instead on his career as a
composer currently of piano concertos in addition to that of piano soloist. There
now followed his famous operatic collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.
1786 saw the successful premiere of The Marriage of Figaro in Vienna. Its reception
in Prague later in the year was even greater and led to a second collaboration with
Da Ponte, with Don Giovanni. This was premiered in October 1787 to acclaim in
Prague, but less success in Vienna the following year. Sadly, Mozart’s father,
Leopold, did not live to see their success. He died in May 1787.

In December of that year, 1787, Mozart at last was offered the position by the
Emperor himself as his "chamber composer", a post which had become vacant
following the death of Gluck. It was a part-time appointment which limited Mozart
only to composing dances for the annual balls. It produced only a modest amount of
income which became important when the hard times round the corner arrived. The
aim of the Emperor was to keep Mozart in Vienna in order to prevent him from
pursuing more attractive offers. Get the guy under contract first and then put him on
the sub’s bench.

To begin with, he was receiving substantial returns from his privately promoted
concerts and he and Constanze were able to maintain a rather plush lifestyle. They
moved into an expensive flat; Mozart began to live it up and bought a fine fortepiano
for about 900 florins (in monetary terms twice his final annual salary with the
Archbishop), and a billiard table for another 300. What with a fortepiano and a billiard
table he was able to practise more than one form of canon. The Mozarts were able
to send their son, Karl Thomas, to an expensive boarding school (like some like to
do in Blackheath) and they kept servants (like they don’t do in Blackheath). Saving
was therefore not in their vocabulary.

The problem is that one can never be certain as to what may be around the corner
but in 1788, the year that he was to write the last three symphonies, Mozart’s
fortunes became seriously affected. Commissions began drying up fast following
Austria deciding in February to join the Russian side in their war with the Ottoman
Empire. It was a war which would last through till 1792. Austria’s aim was to bring
Serbia into the Hapsburg kingdom. This brought Turks crossing the Austrian border
and some 50,000 Serb refugees crossing the Danube. Shortage of supplies struck
on both sides. Disease spread amongst the Austrian soldiers which spread to the
civilian population. The domestic effect of the war upon Austria was unpopular and
debilitating. Fears of conscription led many aristocratic families to leave Vienna.
There was open opposition fuelled by the economic burden it placed on the
population. Food prices had risen drastically and, in some cases, doubled. One
important consequence of this social exit was that the vibrant musical life of Vienna
became greatly diminished, with the closure of two opera companies and decline of
concerts and invites to wealthy salons.

Meantime in Bonn in the Rhine area of Germany one young Ludwig van Beethoven
aged 18 was granted leave of absence to travel to Vienna in 1788. The aim was for
him to meet Mozart and indeed Beethoven is said to have played to him. The stay
was short, indeed cut short, as Beethoven became forced to return to Bonn on
learning that his mother had fallen ill. In fact she was to die soon after his return.

By 1788 poor Mozart was now in a downhill spiral and could not help himself. He
moved into the suburbs which was cheaper though somewhat cancelled out by his
renting more space. He was borrowing heavily from one of his masonic friends and
elsewhere. It was against this background that his last three symphonies, numbers
39, 40 and 41 came to be written. There is barely any evidence to hand concerning
how these three came to be written. We do not even know how many symphonies
Mozart actually wrote. The last has since the 19 th century been called the Jupiter, is
numbered 41. We know now that there is no number 37 which turned out to be
written by Michael Haydn who succeeded Mozart at Salzburg and for which Mozart
on his 1783 return visit added a few bars of introduction. Some 25 other works or
workings have since been identified as Mozart who himself never kept a
comprehensive list. His symphonies numbered 31 (The Paris) to 36 (The Linz)
become more mature. By 1784 he had written three such mature symphonies over
three years. In 1787 he wrote his symphony no 38 when going to Prague for a
performance of The Marriage of Figaro. The signs are that this was a commission
especially as it reverts to three movements, fast-slow-fast, which was how they liked
their symphonies in Bohemia. I regard the Prague as on a par with the three last
symphonies. Otherwise, by 1788 Mozart had not written a symphony for four years.
One clear fact about all his previous symphonies is that they were written for
commission or with his calling card for a specific performance. Not so with 39, 40
and 41, all written incredibly in the summer of 1788. There is no record of any
performance of any of them except that there are two versions of No 39, with one
with clarinets and one with oboes, indicating one performance where the ensemble
did not have clarinets. Was he planning ahead? Did he have in mind a possible trip
to England such as Haydn would undertake some three years later? Did he have in
mind producing something miraculous for the court despite the limitations in his
terms of engagement? Had there been a concert which got cancelled because of
the shadow of the Austro-Turkish war? Or, had he developed some eccentric notion
that a composer might go and write something off the bat just for himself and to
prove artistically what he can do?

It is also argued that these symphonies never got an airing but they were not
Mozart’s last word. He was to live on for another three years. Times were changing.
1789, the year of the French Revolution would change much but it was hardly likely
to have trickled through to Mozart. Austria had its own problems. The war with
Turkey was approaching its end but Josef II died in 1790. Mozart probably felt that
this would kiss good bye to his job. He clearly had already started looking around
and in 1789 he made long journeys around Germany in a preparatory but vain
search. He visited Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin in the spring of 1789, and also
Frankfurt and Mannheim in 1790 but with no successful results. There was however
some recovery to the Austrian economy which led to an improvement. Whilst he
remained in the red he was at least beginning to pay back his debts.

Mozart died in December 1791 but during that last year he was particularly
productive including “The Magic Flute” which was enormously successful, the
clarinet concerto, the last piano concerto and two late string quintets. It was in
Prague, which he had visited again for the first performance of La Clemenza di Tito
as part of the coronation celebrations of the new emperor, Leopold VII, that he was
suddenly struck down with swelling, pain, and vomiting. He became confined to his
bed and in such state, so it is said, an anonymous visitor called upon him to
commission a requiem. Despite his feverish obsession he was not able to finish it
but instructed or discussed it with his pupil, Franz Süssmayr. True or apocryphal?
Poppycock, according to the down to earth Constanze, who with her youngest sister
nursed her Wolfie during his last days.

Mozart died in his home on 5 December 1791 aged 35. His money situation could
not have helped but life in general was often tenuous and death was but a cough
round the corner. The cause of death is unknown. The official record shows it to be a
form of fever but there are over a hundred other theories which have been
advanced.

Following his death he was buried in a common grave but this was not, as is often
said, a pauper’s grave or a communal grave for the unknown but the standard form
of burial for any non-aristocrat. This allowed bodies to be moved after ten years.
There was no storm on the day of the funeral as was depicted in the painting and
much surrounding this event is myth. Contemporary accounts state that no mourners
attended but that too is in line with Viennese burial customs of the time

Had Mozart lived on, then...who knows?... It is safe to assume he would have been
young enough to have matured into the nineteenth century and, unlike Haydn, would
have buried his periwig. Just suppose he might have lived on, say thirty years. He
would have then died aged 65, not 35. He would have produced God knows how
many more symphonies, operas, concertos, quartets, quintets, sonatas, masses.
Instead he left a vacuum of expectation. It hardly bears thinking about. As it
happened Haydn had left for London already in 1791 and was shattered on receiving
the news of Mozart’s death. The following year, 1792, Beethoven arrived from Bonn
to settle in Vienna. An upheaval rather than a change of direction was about to take
place but the influence of Mozart was immense and one cannot guess at what he
would have gone on to produce had he lived on just another measly thirty years and
had been around just in time to hear Beethoven’s choral symphony!