Paul Johnson - Mozart: a Life

ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON

Darwin

Socrates

Jesus

Churchill

Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties

A History of the Jews

The Birth of the Modern World: World Society 18151830

Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

A History of the American People

Art: A New History

George Washington: The Founding Father

Creators: From Chaucer and Drer to Picasso and Disney

Napoleon: A Penguin Life

Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle

Praise for Mozart and Paul Johnson

[Johnsons] gift for vivid storytelling is matched by an astounding command of large, complex subjects and an unflagging capacity for rendering them intelligible and compelling.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Johnson is a brilliant writer, fluent, precise, crisp, and in full command of the music of words.

The Baltimore Sun

Its a pleasure to sit around the gently crackling fire that is Mr. Johnsons mind.

The New York Times

Historian Johnson lauds everyones favorite composer so as to pique the interest of every reader.... Johnson starts debunking myths on the first page... [and] they all crumble under his commonsense presentation of evidence. An altogether excellent primer on possibly the most complete musician who ever lived.

Booklist (starred review)

Johnson writes more concisely than most scholars and brings to his prose a wealth of anecdote and asides unknown to academics.

The Washington Times

Most satisfying... A highly accessible initial foray into an astonishing, and inexhaustible, subject.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Impassioned... Johnson captures the depth of Mozarts achievement with a scholarly fans... enthusiasm.... A compact and knowledgeable portrait of genius.

Kirkus Reviews

Johnson packs a great deal of information into these pages... and his grasp of Mozarts musical output is astounding, his description of Mozarts works comprehensive and enlightening.... This is a solid, and often fresh, introduction to the life and work of the composer.

Publishers Weekly

A portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that will give pleasure to and increase the understanding of old Mozart hands as well as those reading for the first time about the man... Like his latest subject, Johnson never strikes a false note.

The American Spectator

Excellent... A delightful, concise read. Its funlike listening to Mozart is.... To learn about the life of such a remarkable musician is a treat and a privilege. Paul Johnson has made Mozarts story accessible and rewarding.

The Washington Independent Review of Books

This short, pithy, intelligent book will appeal to music lovers and general readers.

Hudson Valley News

PENGUIN BOOKS

MOZART

Paul Johnson is an acclaimed historian of extraordinary range whose many bestselling books include Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, Socrates: A Man for Our Times, Napoleon: A Penguin Life, and Churchill. He writes a monthly column for Forbes and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. He is also the author of Eisenhower, available from Viking. He lives in London.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

Published in Penguin Books 2014

Copyright 2013 by Paul Johnson

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Mozart in London by Daniel Johnson. Used by permission of Daniel Johnson.

Selections from The Letters of Mozart and His Family, edited by Emily Anderson.

Copyright 1966 by The Executors of the late Miss Emily Anderson.

Revisions copyright 1985, 1989 by The Macmillan Press Ltd. Published in Great Britain in 1989 by Macmillan. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and Palgrave Macmillan.

Ebook ISBN 9781101638125

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Johnson, Paul.

Mozart : a life / Paul Johnson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780670026371 (hc.)

ISBN 9780143126065 (pbk.)

1. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 17561791. 2. ComposersAustriaBiography. I. Title.

ML410.M9J76 2013

780.92dc23[B]2013017203

Cover design: Jason Ramirez

Cover images: Austria, Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 1791) / De Agostini Picture Library / A. Dagli Orti / The Bridgeman Art Library; Curtain, Maria Luisa Corapi / Getty Images

Version_2

Chapter One

THE MIRACLE PRODIGY

M ozart was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, the feast of St. John Chrysostom, and accordingly baptised the next day, at the cathedral, as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. The Theophilus came from his godfather, and Mozart usually preferred it in its Latin form, Amadeus. He died on December 5, 1791, a few weeks short of his thirty-sixth birthday.

His life thus spanned the end of the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the birth of the United States of America, and the beginning of the French Revolution. Indeed he was a contemporary of many of the chief actors in that horrific dramaPaul de Barras and Marie Antoinette were a year older; Louis XVI, Charles Talleyrand, and Madame Marie Roland two years his senior. His contemporaries, within a year or two, included Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Joseph de Maistre, Antonia Canova, James Monroe, Thomas Rowlandson, Horatio Nelson, Maximilien Robespierre, Noah Webster, John Trumbull, and Aaron Burr.

Mozart was the last of seven children born to Leopold Mozart, a musician employed by the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, and his wife, Anna Maria, daughter of a civil servant called Pertl. He and his sister Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, were the only two of the seven to survive infancy. But they were not sickly. Mozart was small, not much over five foot and, with his pale blonde hair, fine skin, and small, delicate bones, looked fragile. But apart from periodic trouble with his kidney throughout his life, Mozart was healthy and active, some would say hyperactive. He rode a horse regularly, traveled endlessly, was a fanatic and vigorous dancer, and worked relentlessly, often late into the night.

The shortness of Mozarts life is presented as a tragedy for music, and so it was. But the depth of the tragedy should not be exaggerated. His output was enormous, much greater than that of nine tenths of other composers. Liszt once remarked that Mozart actually composed more bars than a trained copyist could write in a lifetime. His earliest compositions, an Andante and Allegro (marked 1a and 1b in the list compiled by Ludwig von Kchel, the great annotator of Mozarts music), were composed when he was five. Donald Francis Tovey, the supreme musicologist, whose observations on Mozart are always shrewd, took the view that he was a mature artist in most forms at the age of twelve. Thereafter, working steadily (there was never a month, often scarcely a week, when he did not produce a substantial score), his output included 17 masses (including 9