From the beginning, it was nothing like the old tours. When Wolfgang and Maria Anna Mozart departed Salzburg in September 1777, heading for Munich and Augsburg, they left a good deal of unhappiness in their wake. Family friend Franz Firmian observed to Archbishop Colloredo, “Your grace has lost a great virtuoso. Mozart is the greatest clavier player I’ve ever heard in my life … and he is a first-rate composer.” The archbishop’s answer was silence.1 After playing a Mozart violin concerto at a concert in Salzburg, Herr Kolb declared to the audience, “You have been hearing the compositions of a good friend who is no longer with us.” The musicians responded in their fashion: they got drunk, banged disconsolately around the room and smashed a priceless chandelier.2

Mother and son traveled for much of this tour in a chaise Leopold had recently bought; horses would be hired at inns en route.3 In the first of his letters that followed Wolfgang and his mother around the map, Leopold described the reactions at the Tanzmeisterhaus. He was still hoarse from his cold and said that in the rush of packing and their departure he had forgotten to give his son a proper blessing. He ran to a window and delivered it to the air. Nannerl fell ill with a headache and violent vomiting and spent two days in bed with Bimperl beside her.

Then Leopold got down to his endless well of advice. “When you’re in Augsburg,” he wrote Wolfgang, “you should stay in the ‘Lamm’ in the Heiligkreuzgasse, where the tariff is 30 kreuzer for lunch, where the rooms are comfortable, and where the most respectable people, both Englishmen and Frenchmen, put up. From there it is quite a short distance to the church of the Holy Cross; and my brother, Franz Aloys, also lives close by … the ‘Drei Mohren’ is far too expensive.” Soon he was giving personal and spiritual directives: “You know that you soon get hot and that you prefer cold to warmth, which is a clear proof that your blood, which has a tendency to heat, immediately boils up. Strong drinks therefore and too much wine of any kind are bad for you.”4 At a distance, Leopold was straining to direct this tour down to the last detail as he always had, his wife serving as deputy. “I could not let you travel alone,” he wrote to Wolfgang, “because you are 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 have not the faintest idea about packing or about the innumerable necessary arrangements which crop up on journeys.”5

Wolfgang would follow some of his father’s advice, usually give at least lip service to it, and ignore it increasingly. Now and later there was to be no break between father and son, not exactly. But Wolfgang was no longer under his father’s thumb. Though his mother was serving as his father’s stand-in, she had no thumb for him to be under. Maria Anna did not direct things; she had always done as she was directed. Wolfgang left Salzburg with the same intense relationship with Leopold he had always had. But on this journey he was going to find out who he was without his father standing over him. He would return home, as the saying goes, sadder but wiser, by which point their relationship had settled into a volatile truce.

The story of the next months would be told in letters among father, son, mother, and sister. They document a journey and a process of growth by Wolfgang, the only one of them to grow. Call the story something on the order of a bildungsroman, the long-delayed completion of one.

Mother and son arrived in Munich on September 24, lodging at an inn owned by friend and musical connoisseur Franz Joseph Albert.6 Mozart was well remembered in the city from the recent production of La finta giardiniera. He got busy looking up contacts. The first was Count Joseph Anton von Seeau, supervisor of entertainment for the Munich court, who advised Mozart to get an audience with the elector right away. Wrote Leopold, “You could find an opportunity of showing the Elector everything you can do, especially in fugues, canons and counterpoint compositions. You must play up all you can to Count Seeau and tell him what arias and ballets and so forth you are prepared to compose for his theater.” In fact Count Seeau, who appeared entirely cordial, was no admirer of Mozart, had found nothing good about La finta giardiniera, and claimed, falsely, that it had received hisses from the audience.7 To those who knew him better, Seeau was a glutton, a drinker, a libertine, and thoroughly two-faced.8 At length Mozart would learn that about him the hard way.

In her occasional addendums to letters on this trip, Maria Anna Mozart reveals herself as bright, funny, well informed, and as submissive to her son as she was to her husband. She also reveals herself as a prime source of not only her son’s scatological inclinations, but also his raunchy poetizing. “We lead a charming life, early to rise, late to bed, all day we have visitors,” she wrote her husband. “We live a life of princely clout / until the knacker comes to put it out. adio ben mio. Stay well in body and mind / and try to kiss your own behind. / I wish you a good night / shit in your bed with all your might.”9 Her humor was aided, it appears, by a considerable enthusiasm for wine.10

Nannerl’s first letter to her brother continues in the vein of their ironic and affectionate, sometimes alarmingly affectionate, relationship:

I am delighted to hear that Mama and Jack Pudding are cheerful and in good spirits. Alas, we poor orphans have to mope for boredom and fiddle away the time somehow or other. That reminds me, please be so good as to send me soon a short preambulum. But write me this time from C into Ba, so that I may gradually learn it by heart. I have no good news to send you from home. So I kiss Mamma’s hands and to you you rascal! You villain! I give a juicy kiss and I remain Mama’s obedient daughter and your sister who is living in hope—Marie Anne Mozart / Miss Pimpes too is living in hope, for she stands or sits at the door whole half hours on end and thinks every minute that you are going to come in. All the same she is quite well, eats, drinks, sleeps, shits and pisses.11

Another acquaintance Mozart renewed in Munich was with Czech composer Joseph Mysliveček, who had befriended the Mozarts in Italy and had been kind and helpful toward Wolfgang. But he was no longer the same man. Mysliveček was a well-known womanizer, and it had caught up with him: he had contracted syphilis, the scourge of the age. Wrote Goethe in this period: “Whom love does not deter, apprehension does. Nowhere does one in security lay one’s head in a woman’s lap. Neither the marriage bed nor adultery is safe any longer.”12 The treatment, useless like most medicine of the day, had disfigured Mysliveček’s face and destroyed his nose. Everybody knew about that too.

Leopold was disgusted, and advised Wolfgang to stay away from the man: “If … Mysliwecek [sic] hears or has heard that you were in Munich, your excuse, if you do not wish to visit him, will have to be that your Mamma forbids you to do so and that other people have persuaded you, and so forth. It is indeed a pity. But … where does the blame lie, but on himself and on the horrible life he has led? What a disgrace he is before the whole world! Everybody must fly from him and loathe him.”13

Mozart did not loathe or shun this friend, instead visited him in the hospital. Mysliveček’s explanation for his disfigurement was a carriage accident and bad doctors. Nobody believed this, and if Mozart did at first, he soon learned better. This was no small matter for him. Mozart saw in the most graphic way, on the face of a friend, what can happen from venereal disease. It horrified him. He had promised to visit Mysliveček again the next day, but, he wrote Leopold, “I thought it beyond my powers to come to him. I had eaten close to nothing and been able to sleep only three hours … In the morning I was like a man who had lost his reason … He was always before my eyes.”14

As far as the record knows, Mozart truly fell in love only twice in his life. It is entirely possible that he had affairs here and there, and during this trip he was going to have some sort of dalliance. But for a man as manifestly devoted to women and sex as he was, there is a surprising lack of evidence for an affair or even of his visiting a brothel, which was usual for bachelors of the time. If Mozart’s collection of lovers was as limited as the record implies, the reason for that may have been Joseph Mysliveček. As man and artist, Mozart was instinctively self-protective. Now he knew the risks, and it could be that, on the whole, he steered clear.

In Munich at the end of September, Mozart had an encounter, scarcely an audience, with Elector Maximilian III Joseph. This elector had studied music seriously, with a number of compositions to his credit, and had appreciated La finta giardiniera. Munich was among the places at the center of Mozart’s hopes for a court position, and he knew the elector from his visits to the city going back to 1763. Their meeting this time, however, was on the order of a polite humiliation.

Mozart’s friend Franz Woschitka, a cellist in the court orchestra, positioned Mozart in a room through which the elector and his party were to pass on the way to a hunt. They duly appeared, decked out in hunting attire. Count Seeau gave Mozart a friendly greeting. Seeing the familiar face, the elector paused, and Mozart recited, in proper form, “Your Highness will allow me to throw myself most humbly at your feet and offer you my services.”

The elector had been informed of the situation. “So you have left Salzburg for good?” he asked.

Yes, Mozart said.

“How is that? Have you had a row with him?”—meaning the archbishop.

“Not at all, your Highness. I only asked for permission to travel, which he refused. So, I was compelled to take this step, though indeed I had long been intending to clear out. For Salzburg is no place for me, I can assure you.”

“Good heavens!” the elector exclaimed. “There is a young man for you! But your father is still in Salzburg?”

Mozart began to talk fast. “Yes, your Highness. He too throws himself most humbly at your feet. I have been three times to Italy already, I have written three operas, I am a member of the Bologna Academy, where I had to pass a test, at which many maestri have labored and sweated for four or five hours, but which I finished in an hour. Let that be a proof that I am competent to serve at any court. My sole wish, however, is to serve your Highness, who himself is such a great—”

He was not allowed to finish. The elector was impatient to get to his hunt. “Yes, my dear boy, but I have no vacancy. I am sorry. If only there were a vacancy.”

The moment was slipping. “I assure your Highness that I should not fail to do credit to Munich!”

“I know,” said the elector, walking away, “but it’s no good, there is no vacancy here.”15

So much for that. Elector Maximilian was a sophisticated musician, and he knew Mozart’s worth. Privately he told a patron of Mozart’s, “It’s too early yet. He ought to go off, travel to Italy and make a name for himself. I am not refusing him, but it’s too soon.”16 Anyway, for the moment there was no post available, and after all, this young man was another in an endless line of petitioners waiting in anterooms. Perhaps Mozart had been ill advised to impugn one ruler in front of another, but in any case, Maximilian was not going to do anything for Mozart—the elector would be dead by the end of the year.

It was only the first disappointment. Each of Mozart’s hopes and plans during this trip was going to blow up one after the other, for a row of reasons. It would take a while, though, for discouragement to set in. He was enjoying his freedom, come what may. At the end of his account of being brushed off by the elector, Wolfgang appended a note to Nannerl, “My greetings to A. B. C. M. R. and other such letters,” these presumably being the initials of friends and/or girls. He ended with one of his bits of doggerel apropos of nothing: “When I built my house I was very glad, / when I knew its cost, I got very sad. / … Building a house takes a lot of loot, / and you should have known it, you nincompoop.”17

A scheme he embraced from his innkeeper friend Albert was to collect ten of the Munich nobility who would agree to give him a mere ducat a month for support, which would add up to some forty-five florins and a workable living. Leopold was quick to discourage the idea. “I have no great hopes of anything happening in Munich. Unless there is a vacancy, the Elector is bound to refuse to take anyone and, moreover, there are always secret enemies about, whose fears would prevent your getting an appointment. Herr Albert’s scheme is indeed a proof of the greatest friendship imaginable. Yet, however possible it may seem to you to find 10 persons, each of which will give you a ducat a month, to me it is quite inconceivable … To me it seems far more likely that Count Seeau may contribute something.”18 From a distance, it did not occur to Leopold that Count Seeau might be one of those secret enemies.

In his account of his abortive conversation with the elector, Wolfgang goes on to describe a court councillor in one of the sharply and cattily observed passages that would mark his letters and, eventually, his operas.

Court Councillor Effele is like a character in one of Mozart’s operas to come, his description of the man like a phrase of music in one of those operas. It could also be a description of a character in a novel by an author to come named Dickens. In another letter Wolfgang describes a meeting with Leopold’s adored poet Christoph Martin Wieland, with whom his father had corresponded. Wieland was in town for the premiere of an opera set to his libretto. Wolfgang did not find the old man overly impressive.

I … have finally met Herr Wieland. He doesn’t know me as well as I know him, because he hasn’t heard anything about me. I would never have imagined that he would be the way he was when I saw him. His speech is somewhat stilted; he has a somewhat childish voice, and is constantly scrutinizing you through his glasses, he has a certain learned rudeness and yet, now and then, an air of stupid condescension. But I’m not surprised that he acts in such a way here, he may be different in Weimar or elsewhere; for the people here stare at him as if he came straight down from heaven; they are actually embarrassed to be in his presence, no one says a word, everyone is hushed; all play close attention to each word he utters; it’s a pity they often have to wait so long because he has a speech defect and, because of it, speaks very slowly and can hardly say six words without coming to a halt. Apart from that he has, as we all know, a superb mind, though his face is really ugly, full of pockmarks, and he has a rather long nose.20

Leopold and Wolfgang were each writing two or more times a week, many of the letters voluminous, with additions from Nannerl and Maria Anna. As was proper for the time, in his letters to Leopold Wolfgang used the formal Sie for “you,” whereas Papa used the intimate du one used for a child.21

After the elector waved him off, mother and son did not dally in Munich. In mid-October Mama reported her struggles at packing: “I’m sweating so that the water is running down my face … The devil take all this traveling. I feel like shoving my feet into my mouth, that’s how tired I am.” She noted without apparent rancor that Wolfgang gave her no help at all. Wolfgang reported that Mama had gone out for coffee with friends but downed two bottles of wine instead. For his part he had gone to the theater for a pantomime, the name of which sounded like one of his own neologisms: Girigaricanarimanarischariwari.22

On the eleventh, they departed Munich for Papa’s hometown of Augsburg. It would be an eventful visit, though not because of music. (That would be the story of most of this journey.) At twenty-one, Mozart was learning fast in his understanding of the world and of himself. But fundamentally he remained an innocent abroad, stumbling from one boondoggle to another. All the same, as the miles grew between him and the father who had always run his life, he was becoming, month by month, more his own man.

*

IN AUGSBURG, HIS FATHER’S BOOKBINDER BROTHER FRANZ ALOIS MOZART introduced his nephew to the city’s governor, Jakob Wilhelm von Langenmantel, who received this visitor, wrote an annoyed Wolfgang, like “a reigning King of Diamonds … speaking down from the height of … his niggardly throne.”23 Langenmantel’s name means “long coat”; in letters, Mozart took to calling him Longotabarro, “long beard.” Wolfgang wrote of his visit to the governor, “I had the honor of playing for about three quarters of an hour upon a good clavichord by Stein in the presence of the dressed-up son and the long-legged young wife and the stupid old lady. I improvised and finally I played off at sight all the music he had.”24

Besides Langenmantel, Franz Mozart reintroduced his nephew to his daughter Maria Anna Thekla, known to the Mozarts as die Bäsle (the little cousin). Wolfgang had presumably met her as a child on their visit in 1763. Now she was nineteen, a sparkler, highly interested in men. Wolfgang and the Bäsle hit it off very well indeed.

Taken by a son of Governor Langenmantel to visit clavier maker Johann Andreas Stein, Mozart on his entrance introduced himself as “Trazom.” Having heard the child at age six, the older man was at first confused, then surprised and delighted to encounter this marvel grown up and out in the world. In his excitement, Mozart reported, Stein “kept crossing himself and making faces and was as pleased as punch.”25 For his guest Stein proudly showed off his wares: clavichords, harpsichords, pianos.26 Stein was the most celebrated and innovative clavier maker in Europe, and he knew it. (Later, in Vienna, his daughter Nannette would be the same.) Mozart’s enthusiastic letter home about Stein is the first indication of his involvement with musical technique and technology.27

Mon très cher Père! / Let me start right off with Stein’s Piano forte. Before I had seen Stein’s work, I favored Spät’s Claviers. But now I must give Stein’s Claviers preference because they have a much better damper than the Regensburg instruments … No matter how I play the keys, the tone is always even … What distinguishes his instruments from all others is that they are built with an escapement. Not one in a hundred will bother about this, but without escapement action you cannot possibly have a Piano forte that will not have a clangy and vibrating after-effect. When you press down on the keys, the little hammers fall back the moment they have struck the strings … He told me himself that after he has finished a Clavier, he will first of all sit down and try all sorts of passages, runs and leaps, and then he goes on filing and fitting until the Clavier does everything he wants it to…. When he has finished a soundboard for a Clavier, he puts it outside and exposes it to the weather, to rain, snow, the heat of the sun … so that it will crack; then inserts a wedge and glues it in to make it all strong and firm.28

He goes on to describe the damper lever below the keyboard that was operated with the knee. His letter amounts to a summary of where the piano stood in 1777. The instrument’s range was about five octaves. It was made and painstakingly voiced by hand; its timbre projected the wood from which its body was entirely made. On the whole, the slim build and the sound were closer to a harpsichord than to pianos of the next century. Rather than an overall evolution of the instrument in this period, each region had its own style, individual makers their own proprietary tricks and techniques. Nothing about the piano, in short, was standardized, and would not be for more than a century to come.

Mozart had grown up a harpsichord player and became one of the finest in the world. Surely he understood by this point that the harpsichord was on its way out and the piano was the clavier of the future. He had played pianos here and there, whenever he came across one. But if there was a moment when he began to be a true pianist, his encounter with Stein in Augsburg was surely that moment. His mother heard the change in his playing. At the end of 1777 she wrote her husband, “Everyone thinks the world of Wolfgang, but indeed he plays quite differently from what he used to in Salzburg—for there are pianofortes here on which he plays so extraordinarily well that people say they have never heard the like.”

Another of Mozart’s letters from Augsburg describes another new acquaintance, Friedrich Hartmann Graf, the town music director and a well-regarded composer and flutist, who largely wrote flute concertos. Mozart liked the man, his music not so much; he described it sardonically and also incisively to Papa, as one composer to another:

The key word is natural, which Mozart used as a term of praise in the same way his future friend and mentor Haydn did. It meant something that lies well in the ear and under the fingers; that does not show off whatever effort may have gone into making it; that does not strain for effects; that sounds on first hearing (whatever surprises may arise) like something familiar, as if it had written itself. The ideal of the eighteenth century was an art that modestly veiled its artistry and respected rules and conventions, though not slavishly: originality was prized, within bounds. One of the great achievements of the period, what eventually came to be called the Classical style, was to make even the unexpected logical, such as the famous movement that gave Haydn’s Surprise Symphony its name. It is based on an ingenuous little tune that has a sort of quiet ahem at the end. Haydn teaches us to expect that ahem. Then, when we’re accustomed to it, he lets us have it with a forte explosion. The surprise is prepared, it is logical, it is, in a word, natural, even if it shocks the pants off us. This sort of logic was instinctively ingrained in Mozart well before he met Haydn, but Haydn would sharpen those instincts significantly.

Leopold replied to his son’s reportage with endless prompting. Let Herr Stein open doors for you, have him arrange for a newspaper article. Set a high price on your talent. Do not neglect your immortal soul, be faithful to your religious duties, use the Latin prayer book: “You should sometimes for a change say your morning and evening prayers out of it. These are easy to understand and you might add some confession and communion prayers.”30 Wolfgang was playing violin here and there on the trip, and Leopold prodded him about that, too: “You yourself do not know how well you play the violin, if you will only do yourself credit and play with energy, with your whole heart and mind, yes, just as if you were the first violinist in Europe. You must not play carelessly, or people will think that from some foolish conceit you consider yourself to be a great player … Say these words first: ‘I really must apologize, but I am no violinist.’ Then play with your whole mind and you will overcome all difficulties.”

At the same time Leopold also dispensed his wisdom about the world and its denizens, always in terms of what could be expected of people for one’s benefit. “All men are villains!” he instructed Wolfgang. “The older you become and the more you associate with people, the more you will realize this sad truth. Just think of all the promises, flatteries in the hundred circumstances we have already experienced, and draw for yourself the conclusion as to how much one can build on human aid.”31 And again, “Mark it well, my son, if there is just one man in 1000 who with no element of self-interest is your true friend, he is one of the greatest wonders of this world.”32 These were bitter maxims that Leopold lived by. For well and ill, his son did not.

On the whole, in Augsburg Mozart at first found the kind of welcome he considered his due: “In no place have I been overwhelmed with so many marks of honor as here.”33 As usual, he was dining and playing in various houses, including that of Governor von Langenmantel, who had become a touch more agreeable and, after Mozart protested, no longer referred to him as er, “he,” the pronoun one used with servants.34 His son proved to be another matter. Young Langenmantel understood that his privilege gave him license to make sport with musicians and their sort. As Leopold had instructed him, Mozart wore his Golden Cross to dinner at the house. Young Langenmantel and his brother-in-law quizzed Mozart about it; he explained that it came from the pope. My, my, they said. They must send away and get one for themselves, so they could be in the same league as a Mozart. They started addressing him, with a smirk, as “Signor Cavalier.” What does such a cross cost, anyway? Of course, it’s not really made of gold, it’s only tin. Say, if I send a servant over, can I borrow your cross tomorrow? But can I leave off the spur?

Finally Mozart snapped, “You don’t need a spur, you already have one in your head!” After a few more words in that direction he doffed his hat and left, to general embarrassment. Shortly Herr von Langenmantel Jr. ran into Mozart on the street and invited him nicely to play at a concert. Mozart politely declined. “I decided not to go and let the entire Patrician lot kiss my arse,” he wrote Leopold. He was suddenly sick of Augsburg. Well, not entirely. Before ending the letter, he added, “I must tell you something about my dear Mademoiselle Bäsle. But I will wait till tomorrow because one should be in a cheerful mood if one wishes to praise her as she deserves.”

*

IN MID-OCTOBER 1777, FRANZ MOZART’S DAUGHTER MARIA ANNA Thekla, the Bäsle, wrote Leopold, “My particularly lovable uncle, It is impossible for me to express the great pleasure which we have felt at the safe arrival of my aunt and of such a dear cousin and indeed we regret that we are losing so soon such excellent friends, who showed us so much kindness … Please give my greetings to my cousin Nannerl and ask her to keep me in her friendship, since I flatter myself that I shall one day win her affection.”

Things had been transpiring. Around the same day Mozart reported to Papa, “I write and declare that our Bäsle is pretty, sensible, charming, talented, and jolly … The fact is, the two of us are just made for each other, because she too is a bit of a rascal.” They play tricks on their hosts, giggle together behind their hands. Presumably she was present at a concert where he played and, as he reported, “a goodly number of high Nobility was present: the Duchess Kickass, the Countess Pisshappy, also the Princell Smellshit with her 2 daughters, who are married to the 2 Princes of Mustbelly von Pigtail. Farewell, everyone, everywhere. I kiss Papa’s hands 100,000 times and I embrace my sister, the rascal, with the tenderness of a bear.”35

Leopold took all this in stride. For whatever reason, his son’s sexuality never seemed to trouble him, though a given woman might trouble him greatly. Leopold grasped soon enough that his son and his niece were engaged in some sort of fooling around beyond the public hijinks. What their private activities amounted to, how far they went, was never specified. On the whole, in those days one was frank about sexual matters in general but did not tend to provide the details (unless one was a professional voluptuary, like Casanova). But clearly Leopold had been getting other reports from Augsburg that his son was not privy to, including ones about the Bäsle. “I am altogether delighted to hear that my niece is beautiful, sensible, charming, clever and gay,” he wrote his son mildly, “and so far from having any objection to make, I should like to have the honor of meeting her. Only it seems to me that she has too many friends among the priests.” The charming and gay Bäsle, it appears, had a reputation. But Wolfgang was having none of it: “My dear Bäsle, who sends regards to both of you, is not at all a Pfaffenschnitzl,” he declared to Papa, using the familiar Augsburg expression “priests’ morsel.”36

As it tended to be with Mozart and other people, his relations with his cousin struck a chord at the beginning and stayed in that tonality for the duration. He appreciated the Bäsle greatly but did not take the relationship unduly seriously. It was a matter of exploration and delight as if between two naughty and lusty adolescents. How seriously the Bäsle took him—they exchanged letters, only his would survive—is impossible to say. But did she hope to win Nannerl’s affection as her sister-in-law?

Mozart had courted and flirted with Salzburg girls before this, maybe fooled around with them intimately. He was making the immemorial discoveries of youth and sexuality, which are profoundly vibrant and new, a discovery of yours and another person’s body as if in an Edenic garden—which is to say that every generation believes it invented lovemaking, just as every dog believes it invented barking.

If Augsburg soured for Mozart, the town still felt on the whole warmly toward him. Perhaps prompted by one of his patrons, a local paper crowed, “An honor for us, dear Patriot! To have a composer, a compatriot here with us whom the whole of England, France and Italy envies … This can be nobody else than Herr Chevalier Wolfgang Amadee [sic] Mozart, who did such great wonders before the above nations in his tenderest youth.”37 This was the introduction to a story detailing his grand concert at the Fugger concert hall that included the Concerto K. 242 on three new Stein pianos.38 Cathedral organist Johann Demmler handled the first solo part, Mozart modestly taking the second, Stein the easy third.39 The audience was large and delighted, the local critic in ecstasies: “Everything was extraordinary, tasteful and admirable. The composition is thorough, fiery, manifold and simple; the harmony so full, so strong, so unexpected, so elevating; the melody, so agreeable, so playful, and everything so new; the rendering on the forte piano so neat, so clean, so full of expression, and yet at the same time extraordinarily rapid, so that one hardly knew what to give attention to first, and all the hearers were enraptured.”40 Among the audience was his old Paris champion Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, who happened to be in town. Mozart did not spot him—he was shortsighted but refused to wear spectacles—and as Grimm recounted to Leopold in a letter, he did not have time after the concert to greet Wolfgang.41 They would meet again soon enough.

There was also an informal concert connected with a lunch at the Holy Cross Monastery, of which Mozart reported,

Everyone praised my beautiful, pure tone. Then they brought in a small Clavichord. I played a Preludium, after that a sonata and my Fischer Variazionen. Somebody whispered into the Dean’s ear that he should really hear me play in the organ style [meaning more learned and contrapuntal]; so I asked him to give me a theme, he didn’t want to, but one of the clergymen did. I took the theme for a walk, then in the middle of it—the fugue was in g minor—I changed it to major and came up with a very sprightly little tune, … then I played the theme again, but this time arsewise [retrograded]; in the end, I wondered whether I couldn’t use this merry little thing as a theme for the fugue?—Well, I didn’t stop to inquire, I just went ahead and did it, and it fit so well as if it had been measured by Daser [a Salzburg tailor]. The Herr Dean was quite beside himself with joy … “I would not have believed what I just heard, what a man you are!”

Clavier maker Stein asked Mozart to give some keyboard lessons to his cherished eight-year-old daughter, Nanette. This was a potentially sticky matter, as Stein was a famous master of his craft and a generous patron. Mozart managed to be amused, a bit horrified, but encouraging—at least concerning a child. Around her father he could be a touch discreet with his opinions. But with Papa he could be candid.

Mozart was going to do a good deal of teaching in his life, and if the quality of his students is any indication, he was like his father a first-rate teacher—he could even be patient sometimes, if other times on the sarcastic side. Mozart appreciated and praised talent when he found it, but he was a hard man to impress. He was supremely aware that there had rarely if ever been a more impressive talent than himself.

To Leopold he added another technical matter, one that speaks volumes about his playing: “I always keep correct time. They are all wondering about that. They simply can’t believe that you can play a Tempo rubato in an Adagio, and the left hand knows nothing about it but goes on playing in strict time.”43 With nearly everybody else, he complained, when the right hand drifts, the left drifts along with it. So in Mozart’s playing the left hand kept the tempo steady while the right ranged freely around the beat—but this sort of rubato, he implied, was mainly for slow music, which tended to be more rhapsodic and ornamented in the playing.

Finally they had lingered long enough in Augsburg. In contrast to Munich, the stay had brought in the kind of earnings it was hoped would finance the tour en route. At the end of October Wolfgang and his mother left for Mannheim, where they arrived on the twenty-eighth hoping for a long and fruitful stay. “To some extent Augsburg has made up for your losses,” Leopold wrote. “Now you must be well on your guard, for Mannheim is a dangerous spot as far as money is concerned. Everything is very dear.”44

They had departed a town with a solid musical life and the finest clavier maker in Europe. Now they would be in a town whose court was one of the glories of European music, its orchestra the most celebrated in the world, and both court and orchestra would make an enduring impression on him.

NOTES

1. Anderson, Complete, no. 215.

2. Anderson, Complete, no. 211.

3. Sadie, The Early Years, 420.

4. Anderson, Complete, no. 211.

5. Anderson, Complete, no. 262.

6. Sadie, The Early Years, 421.

7. Gutman, Mozart, 342.

8. Clive, Mozart and His Circle, 135.

9. Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 63.

10. Glover, Mozart’s Women, Location 884.

11. Glover, Mozart’s Women, Location 868.

12. Gutman, Mozart, 379.

13. Anderson, Complete, no. 213.

14. Gutman, Mozart, 373.

15. Anderson, Mozart’s Letters, 38–39.

16. Solomon, Mozart, 138.

17. Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 66.

18. Anderson, Complete, 215a.

19. Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 70.

20. Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 116–17.

21. Gutman, Mozart, 370n3.

22. Anderson, Mozart’s Letters, 45–46; Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 70.

23. Gutman, Mozart, 376.

24. Anderson, Mozart’s Letters, 47.

25. Anderson, Mozart’s Letters, 48.

26. Gutman, Mozart, 377.

27. Komlós, “Performer,” 6.

28. Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 77.

29. Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 73.

30. Anderson, Complete, no. 222.

31. Anderson, Complete, no. 226.

32. Sadie, The Early Years, 431.

33. Anderson, Mozart’s Letters, 46–48.

34. Gutman, Mozart, 376.

35. Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 76.

36. Clive, Mozart and His Circle, 109.

37. Deutsch, Documentary Biography, 166–67.

38. Komlós, “Performer,” 219.

39. Gutman, Mozart, 378.

40. Deutsch, Documentary Biography, 168.

41. Gutman, Mozart, 378n17.

42. Anderson, Mozart’s Letters, 54.

43. Spaethling, Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, 80–81.

44. Anderson, Complete, no. 231.