There is an aura around the name Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. His name had that glow when he was six years old and still has it today. Whenever the idea of prodigy comes up, his is usually the first name evoked. When the notion was promoted that classical music makes your kids smarter, it was called the Mozart effect. A New Yorker cartoon showed a blasted landscape with bits of trash blowing about, its caption: “Life without Mozart.” The hit play and movie Amadeus portrayed him as a virtual idiot savant, childish and dirty-minded, an inexplicable vessel through whom music flowed directly from God.
But an aura obscures more than it reveals. Wrote Jorge Luis Borges: “Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.” Fame is a maker of myth, and from the day Mozart died the myths proliferated until they became legend: neglect, financial desperation, writing his Requiem for himself, a pauper’s grave.
Here are some realities behind the aura. Mozart was a born musical genius, but his gift for mimicry—as a child he could breeze into a city and turn out imitations of the local composers—was his worst enemy as an artist. He was reared by his father, a noted pedagogue and mediocre composer, to be a brilliant mediocrity. That Mozart turned out otherwise was a matter of painstaking work over years. At age twenty there was little to suggest what was to come: the incomparable melodies and social skewering of The Marriage of Figaro, the uncanny floating beauty of the nocturne of the Piano Concerto in C Major K. 467, the demonic drive of the Piano Concerto in D Minor and the Symphony in G Minor. In his glittering childhood, none of this was foretold.
Mozart was buried like most Viennese of his generation, not in the pauper’s grave of legend. He died at a moment when his fortunes were on the upswing and he was paying off his debts. By then his operas were selling out all over Europe. Most important, he had escaped from the prison of his early fame. Most of his greatest music was written in his last five years. Finally, only a few times in his life did Mozart sign his middle name as the familiar “Amadeus,” which means “beloved of God.” Usually he signed with the German equivalent “Gottlieb” or the French “Amadé.”
The stories of his youth are legendary, and some of these legends are actually true. His father, Leopold, was a court violinist in Salzburg, where Wolfgang was born. When he was five, the child began picking out at the harpsichord some of the tunes being studied by his older sister Nannerl, who was a budding keyboard prodigy. Leopold took his cue and tried teaching his son the pieces. To his astonishment he discovered that Wolfgang, not yet able to read notes and with no instruction in playing, could play and memorize whole keyboard pieces in a half hour. He began writing little compositions in a blotchy hand. Soon his father envisioned glittering possibilities of wealth and fame in showing the world “this miracle of God.” Leopold was a sophisticated musician, author of a celebrated violin method, a prolific composer, broadly educated in a number of directions. He would be Wolfgang’s only teacher.
In those days most artists lived largely as servants in courts and palaces and churches, supplicants to the aristocracy who ran things at their whim. When Wolfgang was six and Nannerl, at ten, a keyboard prodigy herself, Leopold decided to take his children to the courts and palaces and market their skills for fame and fortune. A decade of touring all over Europe and England began; stories proliferated of crowned heads idolizing the tiny boy and scientists examining him as a phenomenon of nature.
For Wolfgang and Nannerl it was a showbiz life. Leopold handled every part of the tour, advertising Wolfgang like a circus act: the boy will name any pitch heard, play with a cloth over the keyboard, improvise in any style, invent songs on the spot. In London and Munich and Rome and Vienna the children met the most celebrated musicians and composers of the day. The tours not only garnered cash and worldwide fame but also for Wolfgang a comprehensive education in music. He composed steadily during this time, with mounting maturity, his main models the music he encountered en route.
By the time the three returned to Salzburg after the last tour in late 1773, they were desperate to ride Wolfgang’s fame to a job somewhere bigger and better. Unfortunately for their plans, the new ruler of Salzburg, Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo, wanted his servants to stay home and serve him. Grumbling, Wolfgang settled down to the work of producing sacred pieces to order, but spent much of his time writing music for local musicians to play in the private parlors that were the main venue for music in those days.
In letters from his teen years we see the Mozart personality emerging: puckish, proud, cattily observant, endlessly imaginative, sometimes rabidly obscene. All this is epitomized in now notorious letters to his cousin Maria Anna. The two had engaged in some unspecified amount of fooling around. His letters to her show his style, using word games like music: “I must ask you, dearest dunce, why not?—if you happen to be writing… to send my regards to the two Misses Freysinger, why not?—Strange! Why not? And say that I beg the youngest one, Fräulein Josepha, to forgive me, why not?—Why should I not beg her to forgive me? Strange! Why should I not? Say that she must forgive me for having not yet sent her the sonata I promised… Why not?—What?—Why not?—Why should I not send it?—Why not?—Strange!”
Other letters to Maria Anna indulge in the kind of scatological humor common in the day—its fashion of being naughty. “Oui, by the love of my skin,” Mozart poeticized to her, “I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin.” In another letter: “I kiss your hands, your face, your knees, and your—————, that is, whatever you let me kiss.” In letters of his later life the rowdiness calmed down, but the vivacity did not.
It was in Mozart’s last Salzburg years that he finally began to escape convention and wrote his first real masterworks. One of the most memorable of his Salzburg pieces is the Sinfonia concertante for orchestra and solo violin and viola, whose soaring first entrance sweeps you off your feet. He would write more searching instrumental works than this one, but none more enchanting.
At age twenty-one, his mother in tow, Mozart set out hoping to find a job at a court somewhere. His goal was Paris, where he had triumphed in childhood. But he stopped in Mannheim on the way and there fell precipitously in love with a talented teenaged soprano, Aloysia Weber. Back in Salzburg, Leopold saw what was going on and was horrified. Finally at his father’s insistence Wolfgang and his mother dutifully went on to Paris for what became a six-month disaster. He was no longer a prodigy but a young man in a crowded field of composers, who had never had to make his own way. He wrote little music, got little attention, and as a crowning misery his mother died. Defeated, he headed home, stopping in Munich where Aloysia was now working, her singing career going nicely without his help. As the crowning indignity of those months, Mozart found himself jilted. At a party he sat down at a piano and sang, “Those who don’t want me can kiss my arse.” Then he slunk back to Salzburg.
Finally came what Leopold called catastrophe, but what Wolfgang deemed liberation: in spring 1781, Mozart was summoned to Vienna by his ruler Colloredo as part of the archbishop’s retinue. There he suffered more than his fill of indignities (among other things, he had to eat with the servants), made his disgust clear, and ended up literally booted out of the archbishop’s service with a kick on the backside. Now he was free to make his career in Vienna. Austrian emperor Joseph II was progressive in his politics and a sophisticated musical connoisseur. History would go hard on his treatment of Mozart, but in fact Joseph knew genius when he saw it, and kept Mozart busy (though he never got a lucrative job at court and remained essentially a freelancer).
Here began Mozart’s glory years. In Europe’s capital of music he vaulted over the hundreds of other pianists and composers. A few years later, when Leopold visited Vienna, he was astounded at his son’s relentless schedule of performing and composing, his income, his grand apartment, his extravagant wardrobe, his expensive pool table. Joseph Haydn, much older but by now a friend and mentor of Wolfgang, told Leopold that his son was the finest composer he knew.
In Vienna two things happened right away: from the court Mozart got a commission for a comic opera, in a genre called Singspiel, with spoken dialogue. He and his librettist picked an exotic yarn capitalizing on the Viennese fashion for quasi-Turkish music and stories. Called The Abduction from the Seraglio, it tells the story of an Englishwoman kidnapped for his harem by Pasha Selim. After the expected contretemps, most of them involving the cruel but bumbling servant Osmin, the lady is rescued by her lover, Belmonte. In a letter to Leopold, Mozart shows his minute attention to the emotional and physical life of his characters, and no less the qualities of his performers: “In working out [Osmin’s] aria I’ve… allowed Fischer’s beautiful deep notes to glow… As Osmin’s rage gradually increases there comes the Allegro assai, which is in a totally different meter and key… For just as a man in such a towering rage oversteps all the bounds of order, moderation, and propriety and completely forgets himself, so must the music also forget itself.”
The sparkle and charm that mark Abduction begins instantly with the overture, thrumming with the bass drum and cymbals and piccolo of the Turkish style. In the middle comes a preview of one of the arias, among the opera’s row of knockout numbers. Tuneful, fashionable, funny, irresistible, Abduction was a gigantic hit in Vienna and soon found performances all over Europe. Here Mozart discovered that comedy was his real métier on the stage. Although he grew far beyond it as a musician, Abduction remained his most popular opera to the end of his life.
Meanwhile he married his lost love Aloysia’s sister, also a singer though never a professional: Constanze Weber. Leopold gave grudging consent to the marriage; he and Nannerl never accepted Constanze as a worthy mate. But Mozart adored her, spiritually and physically, as shown in some lusty letters he wrote her on tour: Soon “I’ll be sleeping with my dear little wife;—Spruce up your sweet little nest because my little rascal here really deserves it, he has been very well behaved but now he’s itching to possess your sweet… [scratched out].”
For years he composed and played indefatigably, his servants trotting all over Vienna carrying his piano to performances. (By the 1780s the rapidly developing piano was edging out the harpsichord.) Home life was a lively uproar; Mozart liked having people around and was able to compose amidst the ruckus. He was a constant fidget, drumming his fingers, tapping his feet. His favored recreations were all physical: in Salzburg, air rifle competitions and the bowling game skittles; in Vienna, horseback riding and billiards at home. Constanze said he loved dancing, if anything, even more than music. Mozart was small and pale, often ill, nothing much to look at, but he possessed the tireless energy that also marks his music, along with the vibrant sense of drama and comedy and human psychology on display in his operas.
From his teens Mozart was one of the finest keyboard players alive, but though he thrived on applause, performing for him was a means to an end: he was a composer first. Still, much of his composing during the first Vienna years was geared toward furthering his career as a virtuoso, above all the series of spectacular piano concertos he wrote for himself. The history of the concerto from his time to ours rests on the foundation of those masterpieces. Late in the next century Brahms sighed in a letter: “The fact that people don’t appreciate the best things in music, such as Mozart’s concertos, is the reason people like me get famous.”
Here we can only hint at the glories of the concertos. Have a listen to the celebrated slow movement of the Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467. (The “K.” is for numbers later assigned his pieces by a gentleman named Köchel.) This dreamlike nocturne is unique, not quite like anything else by Mozart or anybody else, but it’s still absolutely him: drifting atmospheres, deceptive simplicity, a sense of languorous emotions washing through the music, the effect mysterious and unnameable. When you’re in this movement you can’t imagine anything more beautiful, more evocative of love sensuous and profound.
Here are two complete concertos in quite different directions. From its first page Concerto No. 17 in G Major, K. 453 announces it will be one of the delightful ones, the style close to comic opera—delicately tuneful, lilting, a touch ironic. By this point Mozart had mastered the art of giving us lovely musical surfaces that point deeper and beyond. There is a whiff of poignancy lurking in the background of the first movement, and that flowers in the slow movement, one of those Mozart adagios that can bring tears with its first notes. In the last movement the imaginary opera takes a turn to dancing, joking delight.
Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466, is the kind of music that rather scared Mozart’s contemporaries: dark, driven, overflowing with ideas. Its intensity prophesies the romantic generation of composers to come, who embraced the shadowed and demonic (later Beethoven played and admired this concerto). The driving intensity of the opening mounts steadily through the orchestral exposition, and the rest of the movement stays on that plane, relieved by lyrical moments. After a pensive and romantic second movement, the demon returns in an eruptive and searing finale that finally resolves to D major jollity. Mozart was able to convey sorrow and rage, but most of the time tragic endings were not his style.
He wrote a lot of pieces for everyday purposes, the kind of music played by small groups of amateurs in palaces and parlors while the audience browsed a buffet, played cards, chatted and flirted. The most familiar of these pieces is the exquisite Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music): Mozart relaxing at the top of his form, by turns vigorous, tender, joshing.
If opera was at the heart of his creativity, he was still a master of instrumental genres, what a later time would call “abstract music,” making its point through the power of notes and form. Try one of his set dedicated to Haydn, the String Quartet in C Major, K. 465, nicknamed “The Dissonant” for its bizarre introduction that stretches his harmonic language almost to breaking. Surprisingly, this gnarly opening gives way to a lively and lovely outing in Mozart’s high-C-major mood—a key that for him usually meant something sunny. The slow movement is a stretch of poignant feeling behind the mask of an elegant dance. After a folkish minuet the finale returns to the good humor of the first movement.
Mozart’s G-minor mood was another matter, tending toward the dark and anguished. That is the key of one of the crowns of his chamber music, the String Quintet No. 3 in G Minor, K. 516. From its beginning note of surging nervous energy, the piece offers little consolation. The second-movement minuet is one of the most eruptive, almost troubling pieces imaginable for that traditionally elegant dance movement. The hymnlike third movement presages the deeply affecting slow movements that Beethoven would be writing in the next generation. The long introduction to the finale is some of the most tragic music Mozart ever wrote. It is followed by a G major allegro that seems to resolve the sorrow, but only on the surface: a cloud lingers over the gaiety.
When Mozart began writing symphonies in his childhood, the genre was popular but minor, something to enliven a program but nothing ambitious. By the time they were done, he and Haydn elevated it to the king of musical genres. One of the finest of the late-middle symphonies is No. 38 in D Major, K. 504, called the “Prague” from 1786, in three movements. For Mozart, the key of D major was usually bright and cheery, and he wrote this symphony in and for a city that adored him. After a solemn introduction a blithe and beautiful allegro appears, full of his dashing, darting rhythms. Second comes one of his dreamy romantic nocturnes. A buoyant finale shows that this symphony is mainly about delight.
Mozart wrote his last three and most ambitious symphonies in a scarcely believable six weeks of 1788. Legend says that he wrote them for himself and for posterity, and never heard them performed. That is more claptrap. Mozart always wrote for a reason and he never talked about posterity. He probably used them in some of his later concerts in Vienna and elsewhere. We can’t confirm that these symphonies expressed his depression at a time when he was falling into debt and feeling desperate, but the idea is equally hard to dismiss. In Austria there was a war on with the Turks and not much money for art, Mozart was by then old news in Vienna, and he may have been gambling. During this period there were a number of pathetic letters to friends begging for loans. The depth of distress in the Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550, may have reflected his mood at the time. From its agitated beginning, as if in the middle of a thought, the piece lives on a plane of unrest. The main theme of the second movement is trancelike, the minuet a pounding G minor. The finale is the most agitated of all, its rocketing main theme like some threatful engine of fate.
For many of us Mozart is the greatest of opera composers. It certainly helps that he was one of our finest tunesmiths. Beyond that, he had a supreme understanding of the stage, of actors and singers, of the interaction between dramatic and musical pacing. And there was his understanding of people, their loves and lusts and yearnings and quirks, and how to turn these emotions into notes: brash and wily Figaro, girl-crazy Cherubino, Donna Anna searching for her father’s murderer. In his later operas, he also had a brilliant partner in the poet Lorenzo da Ponte, who was a libertine in the mode of his friend Casanova, but also one of the most sophisticated and finest of librettists.
Mozart’s greatest operas are all comedies, but he knew how to place comedy on top of deeper matters. As in all of them, The Marriage of Figaro unveils its tone and direction in its overture: skittering, whispering wit breaking out in laughter, perfect for a story of schemes and counterschemes. At the center of the story is sex. Figaro, barber for Count Almaviva, is about to marry the delicious Susanna, but it appears that the Count is planning to revive the ancient droit du seigneur, meaning the lord of the manor gets to sleep with the new bride on her wedding night. A jolly plot ensues. There’s the knowing wit of Susanna, one of Mozart’s collection of marvelous women: strong, sexy, smart, and as wily as the men they have to cope with. As for Figaro: “If you want to dance, little Count,” he sings, “I’ll play the tune!”
But beneath the scheming and laughter is something entirely serious. The original French play by Beaumarchais had been banned by Emperor Joseph II as too politically radical. The operative line from the original play, regarding the Count: “You went to the trouble of being born—nothing more! As for the rest—a rather ordinary man!” These years were the high Enlightenment, when the privileges and rule of the old regimes were coming under unprecedented scrutiny. Librettist da Ponte finagled Joseph into allowing Marriage by promising to take out the political stuff. Even so, it still remains a story of people at the bottom of the ladder fighting the depredations of the aristocracy with the only weapons they possess: their wits. The Count ends exposed and humiliated, apologizing pathetically to his wife.
Near the end of Mozart’s life came another masterful comedy, the incomparable Magic Flute. More even than the earlier ones, this is a people’s opera, full of tunes made to be whistled—and others far deeper than that. Prince Tamino is enlisted by the Queen of the Night to free her daughter Pamina from the clutches of the evil wizard Sarastro. There is a comic sidekick in Tamino’s quest—the randy birdcatcher Papageno, who will find his destined Papagena. Tamino discovers that in fact Sarastro is a great and noble man, head of a band of spiritual brothers, and the Queen is the villain. (Sarastro is based in part on Shakespeare’s wizard Prospero.) Of course, Tamino frees Pamina, and after trials of initiation both are inducted into the order.
Mozart was a passionate Mason, and The Magic Flute is a transparent allegory of Freemasonry, that international collection of lodges that were a kind of underground progressive force during the Enlightenment. I think, though, that the deeper subject of this opera is Mozart’s favorite subject, love: the earthy love of Papageno and Papagena, the exalted love of Tamino and Pamina, the divine love of Sarastro for all humanity. At the end, with the betrothal of Tamino and Pamina, Sarastro hails the couple and the victory of light over darkness. For Mozart, love was that light, the highest wisdom we know.
In October 1791 Mozart wrote two letters to Constanze, who was ill and away in the spa at Baden. In the first he details his day for her: composing, a glorious pipe of tobacco, a delicious piece of fish, at night taking in Magic Flute, which had become an enormous hit. In the next letter he talks about seeing the opera again with his supposed rival, composer Antonio Salieri, who was boundless in his praise. He was writing the Requiem, which he loved doing—he had never written a Requiem before. He probably knew it was commissioned by a nobleman who liked to pass off such pieces, with a wink, as his own. The Requiem is the greatest of its genre, full of death and hope, lacerating sorrow and uncanny beauty.
But Mozart himself never finished the Requiem. A month after those letters to Constanze—full of the opera’s triumph and of joie de vivre—Mozart lay in his deathbed. He died on December 5, 1791. Constanze commissioned a student of his to finish the Requiem, most of which was left in fragments, but the student did his job well. Then myth took over: that he was poisoned by Salieri, he was writing the Requiem for himself, he died in neglect and despair and was relegated to a pauper’s grave. None of it true.
Still, there are all kinds of truths. Shakespeare wrote, “the truest poetry is the most feigning.” Mozart was a man of the theater and had the temperament of an actor, who feigns for a living, who leaps nimbly from one emotion to another and in that can move us to the core. Mozart was a fierce craftsman, he studied and grew throughout his life, and he thought carefully about what he did. But what came out still flowed from a man who was made of music. He spoke sometimes in lace, sometimes from behind a mask, but all the same his spirit and soul and his joy and sorrow and love and lust emerged in sound: all at once, he was himself Papageno and Sarastro and Pamina and Tamino. When we connect with that, his works can illuminate our lives in a way unique to him. That is Mozart’s true aura.
More Mozart: Symphony No. 41 and the “Linz” and “Paris” Symphonies (No. 36 and No. 31, respectively); Don Giovanni; the rest of the six Haydn Quartets.