In this deeply insightful portrait of our twenty-eighth president, Auchincloss examines a man who is perhaps better remembered for the force of his personality than for his accomplishments. We will always be left to ponder the extent to which his character shaped our century's history. This superb study sheds new light on his upbringing and career, from the grim determination with which he overcame dyslexia to his skillful dance of isolationism and intervention in World War I. Here are all the triumphs and the final tragic irony of this flawed apostle of world peace.
Woodrow Wilson
By Louis Auchincloss
Thorndike Press
Copyright © 2001
Louis Auchincloss
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0786233753
Chapter One
The Prodigy
The life of Mozart is the triumph of genius over precociousness.
A few five- or six-year-olds of his time could
produce pretty variations on a theme or lure coherent tunes
from a harpsichord with its keyboard covered so that they
could not see their hands. But unlike other mid-eighteenth-century
Wunderkinder, Mozart refined his inventions and
his performances into breathtaking beauty and never showed
the slightest sign of fading into ordinary adolescence, a fate
that has always bedeviled prodigies. In the course of a sadly
truncated life—he died on December 5, 1791, at the age of
thirty-five—Mozart claimed a place at the thinly occupied
pantheon of the greatest composers.
Naturally enough, from his childhood on, ardent admirers
turned Mozart into a celebrity whose life was obscured
by legends. Nor have the scholarly efforts of modern biographers
dislodged the images that fond music lovers like to
summon up when they hear his name: Mozart the willful
child unable to outgrow his infantile ways; the wizard so
captivating that no one dared to question his credentials for
a moment; the miracle worker who never needed to revise a
single note in his lightning-quick impromptu inspirations;
the exhausted volcano who took the mysterious commission
to compose a requiem as a supernatural hint at his own impending
demise; the derelict who was buried in a pauper's
grave. Not even his name has survived intact: Mozart rarely
used the Latinate middle name Amadeus and greatly preferred
the French Amadé.
By and large these tenacious caricatures are distortions
rather than fabrications; most of them, as we shall discover,
contain a kernel of truth. But many music lovers (like other
lovers) demand an extraordinary talent to have lived an
extraordinary life filled with memorable encounters, dramatic
turning points, and dazzling achievements unduplicable,
even unimaginable, by lesser beings. But Mozart's
life in music is fascinating enough without embroidery; his
reputation as a genius is not threatened by mundane truths.
For Mozart was a genius, a rank that the most unsentimental
biographer cannot deny him. The aged Goethe, who
as a young man had heard the seven-year-old boy concertize
in Frankfurt, considered him to be "unreachable" in music,
on a level with Raphael and Shakespeare in their domains.
Goethe defined genius as a "productive power" whose actions
"have consequences and lasting life," and he noted
that "all the works of Mozart are of this sort." Hence, when
his father called young Mozart a "prodigy of nature," he was
not simply engaging in salesmanship. Mozart's symphonies
and piano concertos, piano and violin sonatas, chamber music
and divertimentos, operas, concert arias, and masses
reached levels that only a few composers have ever hoped to
approach. Joseph Haydn, who could judge other composers
with the authority guaranteed by his own achievement, famously
told Mozart's father "before God and as an honest
man" that his son was "the greatest composer" he knew "either
in person or by name." In 1787, when Mozart was
thirty-one, Haydn declined an invitation from Prague to
write an opera buffa and called attention to the "Great, the
inimitable works of Mozart, so deep and with such a musical
understanding." If men with influence would only recognize
his worth, Haydn asserted, "the nations would compete to
possess such a jewel within their fortified walls."
Joannes Christostomos Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart was born
in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, the seventh and last child
of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart, née Pertl. Of his siblings,
five died in infancy, and only one sister, four years his
elder, survived: Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia, called Nannerl.
This appalling balance sheet was only too common in
Mozart's century, even among the prosperous; Edward Gibbon's
father, for one, gave each of his six sons the same first
name, Edward, in the expectation—justified, it turned
out—that only one of them would carry it to adulthood.
Mozart's father, Leopold, who loomed large in his son's
life, was a well-educated professional musician in the employ
of the prince-archbishop of Salzburg as a violinist and
assistant conductor—a kapellmeister. His textbook of 1756
on the art of violin playing spread his name across Europe.
"The most excellent violinists that Germany possessed in
the second half of the eighteenth century," noted one contemporary
observer, "were trained by its means." This was
the time for authoritative treatises on performance. Just
four years earlier, the German flautist Johann Joachim
Quantz had published an influential textbook on the transverse
flute. If Leopold Mozart had written his autobiography,
though, he would certainly have made much of his
talent as a fertile and versatile composer. His compositions
ran to the playful, but he could turn out a mass or an oratorio,
a symphony or a concerto on demand. A few contemporary
writers on music bestowed on him the epithet
"famous," but only a handful among his works have survived
in the repertory; his humorous six-part program
piece, The Sleigh Ride, is still performed occasionally. In the
end, whatever prestige remains to him rests on having been
Mozart's father.
As his copious correspondence attests, Leopold Mozart
was a keen-eyed traveler and amateur social historian; his
pages-long letters home from London, Munich, Paris, Vienna,
Milan, and smaller places in between provide precise,
valuable information about populations and customs, prices
and the local state of health, the attitudes of the upper echelons
toward music—which is to say about the Mozarts'
offerings—and amusing anecdotes about incidents vividly
observed. Another subject with which he liked to regale his
intimate correspondents was his health—he chronicled his
aches and pains in rigorous, technical detail as well as the
medications he took, not forgetting the exact dosage he
found most restorative.
Though a lively correspondent, Leopold Mozart was a
stern and self-absorbed schoolmaster. The Irish tenor Michael
Kelly, who performed for years in Vienna and sang in
Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, remembered him as "a pleasing
intelligent little man." But not everyone agreed that he
was pleasing. His favorite pupils—his children—found him
an exigent if professional teacher. "You know," he wrote to a
friend in 1766, when Nannerl was fourteen and Mozart ten,
"my children are used to working." He tried to control his
children's musical labors even when he was on tour with his
son. Early in 1770, writing from Milan, he asked his wife
anxiously: "Is Nannerl diligently playing the piano?" The
portraits of him that have survived suggest a man severe
and unyielding, marked by a prominent nose that was the
most visible legacy he left to Nannerl and Wolfgang. His
invisible legacy was more complicated.
Mozart's mother complemented, certainly did nothing
to resist, her husband's ambitions for his children, though
on occasion she softened his extreme demands on Nannerl
and Wolfgangerl. She had brought no dowry into the marriage,
a state that Leopold Mozart a little drily described as
"the Order of Mended Trousers." But she compensated for
her poverty by being less tense about life, less filled with
worries and hatreds than her husband. A sturdy traveler
who accompanied her family on several extensive concert
tours, she was good-natured, a welcome contrast to her husband's
almost paranoid misanthropy; fortunately, considering
her family, she seems to have been fond of music. But
her paramount duty, as she never failed to impress on her
children, was to serve her husband. To her mind, his moods
deserved the closest attention; his demands were by definition
reasonable.
In Mozart's day, Salzburg, the town and the surroundings
that bore its name, boasted some seventeen thousand
inhabitants, a sizable city for the time. A small, semi-independent
country squeezed between Bavaria on the west
and the Hapsburg domains on the east, like most of central
Europe part of the decaying Roman Empire, it was mainly
susceptible to pressures from Vienna, and largely conducted
its affairs as though it were Austrian territory. For many
centuries, it had been ruled by a prince-archbishop, who
dominated finances, education, the relations of church and
state, with the submissive support of a mayor and a town
council. The prince-archbishop, too, was the fount of whatever
music or theater or festivals the local citizenry might
enjoy.
In the course of the eighteenth century, as travelers
seeking the wilder, most picturesque aspects of nature discovered,
Salzburg was an admirable place for the views.
Situated on the river Salzach and virtually surrounded by
hills, the town in which Mozart grew up was also amply
supplied with colorful private houses and impressive public
buildings—the cathedral, churches, the university—mainly
dating from the seventeenth century. The urban
scenery reminded visitors of a late-Renaissance town; to
Mozart, the Italian cities he visited must have looked quite
familiar.
Salzburg was a mercantile town; its business was business.
Among its inhabitants, only heads of households with
a solid occupation—bankers, importers, wholesalers, manufacturers
of spices and cloth—were recognized as citizens;
during Mozart's lifetime, just around five hundred families,
about one in seven or eight, qualified as Bürger. This gave
them the right to stand for office, and they virtually monopolized
the town's government.
But this distinctive legal definition of Bürger was at least
partially subverted by men of talent and adroitness, especially
by those musically gifted, since the love of music was
a widespread and authentic passion. The Mozarts were not
Bürger, but they mixed with them socially, usually on a
footing of equality. One of Leopold Mozart's closest friends
and favorite correspondents was Johann Lorenz Hagenauer,
a leading, prosperous dealer in spices who was also his
banker, financial advisor, and, for years, the Mozarts' landlord.
Except for passages marked "for you alone," Leopold
Mozart's letters to Hagenauer circulated among friends and
acquaintances in Salzburg. No wonder that some of the
Salzburgers thought that these letters should be published.
As one might expect, the Mozarts thoroughly adopted
the values of the local bourgeoisie: hard work, honest dealings,
fidelity to one's spouse, prompt discharge of debts.
"You know," Leopold Mozart in 1778 warned his son, who,
he feared, might incur frivolous financial obligations, "my
credit here is good with everybody—as soon as I lose that,
my honor is gone," and, he stressed, "you know that honor
is more important to me than my life." At the same time,
Leopold Mozart, and later his son, led a double life. For in
addition to being welcome in Salzburg's leading middle-class
circles, they were the more or less humble employees
of the prince-archbishop, whose favor or disfavor could virtually
dictate the ups and downs of their careers.
An open and affectionate child, Mozart craved affection in
turn. He searched for signs of love wherever he could find or
produce them. As a six-year-old on a visit to Vienna, his father
reported, "Wolferl" jumped into the Hapsburg empress's
lap, put his arms around her neck, and earnestly
kissed her, apparently hoping for a like response. In the
summer of 1763, when he was seven and on a concert tour,
he suffered a curious attack of homesickness: "As Wolfgang
woke up—I think it was in Augsburg—he started to cry,"
Leopold Mozart wrote to Hagenauer. "I asked why; he said
he was sorry that he did not see Herr Hagenauer, Herr
Wenzel, Spizeder, Deibl, Leitgeb, Vogt, Caietan, Nazerl
etc., and other good friends." Even though he was with
his parents and sister and the subject of flattering attentions,
he seems to have felt unanchored and needy. Franz
Xaver Niemetschek, Mozart's first biographer, recounts that
the little Mozart would keep asking people whether they
loved him, and when they playfully denied it, the boy,
though given to jokes and pranks, would break down and
cry. The inference that he was hungry for more love than
he got from his parents is painfully plausible.
Yet it was of course at home that he started on his
musical education. When Leopold Mozart took time to initiate
the seven-year-old Nannerl in the mysteries of the
harpsichord—she was demonstrating a strong talent for
it—her three-year-old brother felt inspired to try the instrument
on his own. Seeking to secure his daughter's grasp
on keyboard technique, Leopold Mozart had compiled a
"notebook" of easy tunes arranged in a conventional step-by-step
progression, and her little brother soon made the
training manual his own. This Notenbuch was to acquire historic
importance as a source to Mozart's early development.
"Wolfgangerl," the father noted with fond precision and
unfeigned astonishment, "learned this minuet and trio one
day before his fifth birthday in half an hour at half past nine
in the evening of January 26, 1761." It had not escaped
him that such almost supernatural proficiency was worth
immortalizing.
Just after he turned five, Mozart took the inescapable
leap—inescapable for him—from performer to creator. Two
short pieces for clavier, which his father faithfully jotted
down in the notebook, may rank as his first compositions,
unless the almost illegible "concerto" he is supposed to have
scribbled down a few weeks before deserves primacy. Utterly
possessed by music, Mozart had little time or patience
for anything else and even wove it into his childish games.
And to improve his acquaintance with the muse, he taught
himself the violin before he was seven years old. Soon he
played it well enough to perform as a soloist in public.
Leopold Mozart did not long hesitate to capitalize on his
promising children, and certainly not for their sake alone.
They were to be his support in old age. A brief three-week
tour to Munich in January 1762—Mozart was not quite
six—served as a rehearsal for more extensive forays to come.
Its evident success prompted a longer sojourn in Vienna
toward the end of the year, complete with command performances
at the imperial court and munificent fees. Even before
the Mozarts had spent a month in Vienna, Leopold
Mozart could deposit 120 ducats in his Salzburg bank, a
sum exceeding two years' salary. Yet these excursions were
eclipsed by a grand tour that kept the four Mozarts abroad
for more than three years, from June 1763 to November
1766. When the family finally saw Salzburg again, Mozart
was ten years old, a seasoned performer and composer.
Much of that tour was consumed with extended stays
in important musical centers: five months in Paris, fifteen
months in London, and then, on the way back, three months
more in Paris, with frequent stops along the way, mainly in
the German states and the Netherlands in sizable commercial
cities and sleepy capitals of duodecimo dukedoms. The
fame of the brother-sister duo had spread across Western
Europe, and they were given ample opportunities for
displaying their charm and their precocious musicianship. In
city after city, the Mozarts could confidently expect an invitation
from the local ruler, from nobles and rich patricians,
and assume, for the most part correctly, that one performance
would bring calls for others. In London, advertisements
for Mozart concerts, at least some of them no doubt
written by Leopold Mozart, were addressed to the "Nobility
and Gentry." In fact, the touring Mozarts cultivated such
exclusive audiences everywhere they went. "We keep company
only with aristocrats and other distinguished persons,"
Leopold Mozart wrote to Hagenauer from Koblenz in September
1763. Uneasily aware that it was inappropriate for
him to indulge in such social boasting, he insisted a little
defensively that "it's the truth."
Leopold Mozart's travel notes and letters to Salzburg
document that it was the truth. In Paris, in 1764, the
Mozarts dined at the royal table, and the eight-year-old
Wolfgang stood by the queen, repeatedly kissed her hands,
and had her feed him tidbits. In London, they spent hours
with the royal family and became downright friendly with
them. "At all courts," Leopold Mozart wrote Hagenauer,
"we have been treated with extraordinary politeness, but
what we are experiencing here outdoes all the others."
Pampered by the great, Leopold Mozart had nothing but
contempt for the lower orders; he found them them disgusting
and, worse, godless. And he disapproved of the
Dutch because he thought them "a little coarse."
Some serious illnesses slowed up the Mozarts during
their grand tour; this was still the age of epidemics, and
Nannerl, like Wolfgang, caught a touch of all the infectious
illnesses going around, including a mild case of smallpox. It
is easy to underestimate the perils and sheer inconveniences
of such extended tours. Granted, the Mozarts' three-year-long
expedition across Western Europe, launched in June
1763, took place under favorable auguries. Their world was
again at peace: after seven years of war across Europe, North
America, and India, old enemies—France and Britain,
Prussia and the Hapsburgs, and the other combatants—had
settled their differences. War in the eighteenth century was,
of course, less devastating than it has become since. The
separation of civilian populations and military forces was
still sharp and clear; great cities were not yet home fronts,
and the theater and music thrived little less than in peacetime.
It is telling that Leopold Mozart fails to mention the
Seven Years' War in his voluminous correspondence. But it
had severely obstructed travel from one hostile capital to
another, and the peace treaties of 1763 removed that handicap.
Moving from Paris to London, as the Mozarts did in
April 1764, was as easy (except for the seasick-making
Channel) as moving from Salzburg to Vienna.
But there were other ordeals quite independent of the
international situation. The state of the roads, the hazards
of the local food, the constant threat of infection, the unsettling
experience of pulling up stakes over and over, the need
to learn new languages (in which father and son Mozart excelled),
and, in Italy south of Rome, the danger of rampant
highwaymen, made these expeditions risky ventures even
for travelers as privileged as the Mozarts. There were minor
irritations as well: fleas and bugs tormented the travelers.
On the occasions when father and son had to share a bed,
the son complained of getting little sleep; and in turn the
father reported, more in amusement than in anger, that his
son snored.
Their succession of triumphs and their lack of enthusiasm
for Salzburg kept them postponing their return. The
Mozarts had been awash in the applause, often the affection,
of the great; from the perspective of the gratifications and
the profits they had enjoyed, Salzburg seemed a dim prospect
financially, socially, emotionally. It was a place where
Leopold Mozart was only a servant, poorly paid and little
appreciated.
While each tour necessarily took on the local color, all
had much in common. The Mozarts would offer a concert
and were rewarded with precious snuffboxes and gold
watches or in cash, just as precious to them. They prepared
themselves for these events with meticulous care; more than
once, Leopold Mozart quite unself-consciously speaks of
their "producing themselves." They adroitly flattered those
among the mighty they thought truly worth cultivating:
the boy Mozart, no doubt at his father's urging, dedicated
his earliest compositions to queens, lords, and countesses.
This stratagem often paid off, literally. The queen of England,
to whom Mozart dedicated six sonatas for harpsichord,
gave him a present of fifty guineas. And they dressed
as stylishly as seemed befitting the occasion—Goethe still
recalled, more than sixty years after Mozart's appearance in
Frankfurt, the "little man in his coiffure and sword."
In his letters to his wife, who usually remained in
Salzburg, Leopold Mozart retailed such tantalizing details.
In England, the Mozarts tactfully adopted local fashions,
however eccentric they seemed to their Austrian tastes, and
they were astonished at their appearance. From London in
1764, Leopold Mozart exclaimed to Hagenauer: "How do
you think my wife and my little girl, and I and the big
Wolfgang, look in English clothes!" Mozart's passion for
finery dates from this time.
Wherever the Mozarts went, they found that for nearly
all their audiences, the habit of listening was at best intermittent.
In Mozart's day, music, sacred music alone excepted,
was still largely mere entertainment. Its romantic
exaltation into a profound semireligious experience that
called for rapt silence was still some decades away, though
there were signs of it in Mozart's last years. There is a
much-reproduced painting of 1766 by Michel Barthélemy
Ollivier which shows the ten-year-old Mozart bravely at the
keyboard while a select, elegantly garbed assembly help
themselves at a lavish buffet table.
The Mozarts tried not to let this casual inattention disturb
them. They were hard at work. "Master Mozart" (as
London's impresarios called him) was busy performing and
quite as busy composing; he cherished the moments he
could spare for his life's vocation. Before he was eight, he
had written sonatas for the violin, the harpsichord, and
other instruments; during the following year, in 1765, he
composed his first symphony. It is a lively, distinctly minor
work in three movements, the whole lasting some twelve
minutes, and scored for an intimate orchestra: four violins
and violas, a double bass, a bassoon, two clarinets, and two
horns. Like all his other boyish compositions, this first symphony,
too, does little to foreshadow his later masterpieces,
even though a benevolent listener might detect a touch or
two of Mozartian pleasures to come, notably in the relatively
individual voices he assigned to each instrument.
The only astonishing element in this precocious effort,
then, is the composer's age. It could have been written by
someone else, and in large part it was; his father's shadow
hangs over it, though we can hardly determine with this
composition whether Leopold Mozart acted as copyist, editor,
or, far more likely; fellow composer. Mozart spent invaluable
hours in these apprentice years listening to the
works of composers then in vogue, and like other novices,
he diligently copied them out. His uncommonly alert
absorptive capacity always awake, he freely appropriated
dominant styles, and the musical ideas of his foremost contemporaries
reverberated in his own. His manner of educating
himself was the manner of nearly every great artist: he
struggled toward originality by studying and imitating his
elders.
He was fortunate in his youthful journeys to the musical
capitals of Europe; they allowed him to hear, at times to
meet, the composers he took as his teachers. On his English
visit, he made the acquaintance of, and soon became
friendly with, Johann Christian Bach, a prolific composer of
church music, operas, and symphonies, then settled in London
and for some years better known than his father. It was
his symphonies that made the greatest impact on the young
Mozart; J. C. Bach's Italianate gracefulness, lightheartedness,
and brilliant orchestration—it was called the galant
style—based on sound technique, served him well.
Mozart made his debut in the symphonic genre (quickly
followed by several more) at a decisive moment in its history.
Its origins go back to the so-called Italian overture, an
orchestral piece designed to introduce an opera and conventionally
divided into three movements: fast, slow, very fast.
Mozart's first symphony, calling for molto allegro, andante,
and presto, did not depart from this pattern, though before
long he adopted the modern fashion of adding a fourth
movement. But the roots of his youthful symphonies in the
overture remained undisguised: when he was twelve, he utilized
his seventh symphony as an overture for his opera La
finta semplice. It was not until about 1773, when Mozart was
seventeen and had written more than two dozen symphonies,
that his true genius as a symphonist emerged. No. 29
in A Major (K. 201), rich in original thematic material,
stands out as an arresting move beyond earlier exemplars; it
would be at home in the repertory of any modern orchestra.
* * *
His audiences found Mozart's virtuosity overwhelming, particularly
since he was plainly anything but a mindless circus
entertainer but showed himself completely at home in
the fundamentals of music. His father repeatedly records
how this spectacular boy dazzled audiences with his photographic
memory, formidable dexterity at the keyboard, and
uncanny gift for weaving variations around a theme. Leopold
Mozart treasured the fame his little boy was gathering
even in prospect. "Now 4 sonatas by Mr. Wolfgang Mozart
are at the engraver's," he wrote from Paris in February
1764, "and imagine the noise these sonatas will make in the
world when it says on the title page that they are the work
of a child of seven." Mozart was in fact almost a child of
eight, but this minor, deliberate discrepancy hardly diminishes
his accomplishment.
Mozart's gift for learning new instruments was as uncanny
as his playing and his composing. Half a year before
his sonatas were being readied for print, his father reported:
"The latest news is that, in order to entertain ourselves, we
went to the organ, and I explained the pedal to Wolferl.
Whereupon he instantly proved himself. He pushed away
the stool, and, standing, improvised, treading on the pedal
as though he had practiced it for many months. Everyone
was covered with astonishment." Harpsichordist, violinist,
now organist, all at the age of seven.
Nannerl, too, was a talented performer, and widely praised
as a harpsichordist as competent as her brother. Showing a
glimmer of psychological insight, Leopold Mozart noted
that his daughter played so well that everyone talked about
her, and thus she no longer had to suffer from comparisons
with his son. She also tried her hand at composing,
though only for domestic consumption, and Mozart loyally
praised his sister's efforts; he urged her to keep them up,
though he could not suppress an undertone of disbelief. "I
have been quite astonished that you can compose so beautifully,"
he wrote to Nannerl from Rome in 1770, acknowledging
receipt of a song she had sent him. "In a word, the
song is beautiful; keep trying something time and again."
Yet Mozart's superiority both as a soloist and as a composer
was too palpable to be ignored, a reality with which his sister
gradually came to terms.
Precisely because Mozart made so powerful an impression,
cultivated music lovers anxious not to be taken in by
an impostor expressed doubts about the originality of his
extraordinary improvisations and precocious compositions.
Their mistrust was endorsed by envious competitors who
spread word that Mozart's accomplishments were too improbable
to be authentic. Given to bouts of suspicion,
Leopold Mozart is not a wholly trustworthy witness, and his
repeated denunciations of the cabals against his son in the
Vienna of 1768 have an air—to put it mildly—of extravagance.
There is no independent evidence for his claim that
Gluck was the chief schemer against his boy. His son's rivals,
he charged, refused to attend Mozart's performances,
since reports of his wizardry, they claimed, were nothing
but palpable lies. Were his appearances not sheer bluff,
arranged in advance? Is it not ridiculous to think this child
can compose anything? The idea of a twelve-year-old writing
an opera!
Occasionally given to observations about contemporary
culture, Leopold Mozart diagnosed this incredulity as a
symptom of a general epidemic of disbelief: "Nowadays,
people ridicule everything that is called a miracle and dispute
all miracles. Hence one has to persuade them; and it
was a great pleasure and a great victory for me to hear a
Voltairian say to me, `Now for once in my life I have seen a
miracle; this is the first!'" Skeptics would soon discover
that this was not the last.
The composition in contention among the musical
powers in Vienna was Mozart's first full-scale opera, La
finta semplice, an opera buffa. Though no performance could
be arranged in Vienna, it was staged the following year in
Salzburg. It is far from distinguished. What is notable is that
the composer was a prodigy of twelve. And that prodigy,
intent on showing his versatility, promptly composed the
slight one-acter Bastien und Bastienne, a Singspiel—an opera
with a German libretto and spoken dialogue—a hint, no
more, of greater things to come.
In this atmosphere of distrust, specialists never tired of
putting Mozart to the test. From London in 1764 to Naples
in 1770, they investigated his background, watched his
hands closely, gave him demanding unpublished scores to
play at first sight, asked him at a moment's notice to extemporize
songs about the passions or to write a fugue.
In Florence in April 1770, the Marchese Ligneville, "the
strongest contrapuntist in all Italy," presented him with the
most difficult fugues and the most difficult themes to work
out, which "Wolfgang played and carried through as one
eats a piece of bread." Baffled by what they found, these
professional doubters were soon reduced to seeking rational
explanations for this marvel Mozart. One of these, the eminent
Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste-André-David Tissot,
who could boast of his acquaintance with Voltaire, thought
he had solved "the puzzle of young Mozart" by speculating
on the connections between his "moral" and his "physical"
organization. In the company of all the other doubters of
good will, Tissot was converted into a true believer in
Mozart's genius.
A child prodigy is, by its nature, a self-destroying artifact:
what seems literally marvelous in a boy will seem
merely talented and perfectly natural in a young man. But
by 1772, at sixteen, Mozart no longer needed to display
himself as a little wizard; he had matured in the sonata and
the symphony, the first kind of music he composed, and
now showed his gifts in new domains: opera, the oratorio,
and the earliest in a string of superb piano concertos. Most
of Mozart's works of the late 1760s and early 1770s were
written on the road: he occupied the bulk of his time with
an extended visit to Vienna and three trips to Italy, all designed
to improve his family's bank balance. The expeditions
to Italy expanded the lessons that Leopold Mozart had
taught his son, and complemented the grand tours to England
and France.
In Italy, Mozart greatly profited from his exposure to
new musical experiences and took possession of them. The
most enduring dividend was the lessons he took in Bologna
with the Italian composer and renowned teacher Padre
Giovanni Battista Martini in the difficult science of
counterpoint, the manipulation of several melodies played
together. Martini—the "idol of the Italians," Leopold
Mozart called him, and, a little carelessly, "the famous P.
Martino"—was in his mid-sixties when the two met, and he
immediately took to the fourteen-year-old. Recognizing
that he had a genius before him, he defended him against
his detractors and, rightly, thought that the best he could
do for him was to put him through a thoroughgoing regimen
of counterpoint exercises and of that most formal
version of counterpoint, the fugue. The benefits of these tutorials
were not immediately apparent in Mozart's work,
but a decade and a half later he made counterpoint a central
device in his last phase. In short, "Wolfg: is not standing
still with his science, but grows from clay to day," wrote
Leopold Mozart to his wife in April 1770 from Rome, "so
that the greatest connoisseurs cannot find enough words to
express their admiration." Mozart received most of his
musical education abroad.
* * *
Mozart's promise had never been a secret, and became increasingly
palpable year by year. The only question in his
enthusiasts' minds was, Will it last? In 1769, the composer
Johann Adolph Hasse, then highly esteemed for his operas
and oratorios, wrote a letter of recommendation for Mozart
that spoke of him in the most glowing terms: "I have
looked at his compositions; they are certainly well done and
I have seen nothing in them that smacks of a twelve-year-old
boy." (Mozart was actually a year older, but the point remains
the same.) "I have no reason to doubt that they are
his own. I have tested him in diverse ways and he has done
things which for such an age are really incomprehensible;
they would be astonishing in an adult." He predicted great
things for the young man—with one reservation: "One
thing is certain: if his development keeps pace with his age
something wonderful will become of him. Though his father
must not overindulge him or spoil his nature with the
incense of unwarranted praise. That is the only danger I
fear."
But the Mozarts had more serious matters to worry about.
They undertook these expeditions partly to make money,
but partly, too, to secure for Mozart that elusive permanent
position his father hoped to find for him. In 1770, Pope
Clement XIV awarded him the Order of the Golden Spur,
a signal honor, and in the same year the Accademia Filarmonica
of Bologna elected him a member, even though at
fourteen he was six years younger than its statutes provided
for the age of admission. Wherever they went in Italy, father
and son associated with royalty, ecclesiastical dignitaries,
ambassadors, and rich English commoners on the
grand tour. They dressed accordingly. In Naples in the
spring of 1770, feeling the heat, they acquired a summer
wardrobe: Wolfgang, Leopold Mozart wrote his wife, was
wearing a suit in fiery reddish tones, "called in Italy Colore
di fuoco," decorated with braids and silver-toned lace, and
lined with material in azure. Writing to his sister, Mozart
boasted that in their new clothes, he and his father were "as
beautiful as angels."
But these spectacular tributes proved to be largely symbolic.
Even the opera he composed for Milan on invitation
later that year, Mitridate, rè di Ponto, which proved a great
success with the public and the critics alike, had only
ephemeral rewards. Yet in the midst of triumphs and disappointments,
Mozart kept composing, at the rapid rate that
had become his customary speed, and with increasing sophistication.
From the time in 1766 when the Mozarts returned
from their grand tour to the end of the third trip to
Italy in March 1773, he had written more than twenty symphonies,
a clutch of string quartets, three short operas, concert
arias for soprano, and sacred compositions.
At this time, now seventeen, Mozart had reached his full
height, which was somewhat below average and unduly
underscored his youthfulness. He was aware of it: when he
wanted to imitate the other tourists and kiss the toe of Saint
Peter's statue at Saint Peter's in Rome, he had to be lifted
up "because I have the misfortune of being so short." This
seems improbable, more a poignant joke than a real incident,
but it shows how self-conscious Mozart was about his
appearance. The several portraits we have of him, though
they differ somewhat from one another as such portraits
often do, agree on the fundamentals. What they show is a
commonplace, hardly attractive face with a pronounced
nose and large, serious eyes. Significantly, this last feature
was the one that his admiring friend Niemetschek singled
out, his "large, intense eyes," which lit up his plain appearance.
This description, confirmed by others, captures Mozart
in action as composer and virtuoso, an action that no portrait
could fully explore but which lives in his work.
Continues...
Excerpted from Woodrow Wilson
by Louis Auchincloss
Copyright © 2001 by Louis Auchincloss.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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