Robert W. Gutman - Mozart: A Cultural Biography

XI: The Grand Tour Continues: Brussels and Paris

About the Author

Robert W. Gutman is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Richard Wagner . Gutman was one of the founders and directors of the Master Classes at Bayreuth Festival, where he lectured on Wagner. He was a member of the faculty of the State University of New York, and has taught at The City College of New York, The New School for Social Research, Bard College, and Duchesne College.

To the memory of Ted Hart

A Cultural Biography

ROBERT W. GUTMAN

Frhling, Sommer und Herbst genoss der glckliche Dichter;

Vor dem Winter hat ihn endlich der Hgel geschtzt .

Goethe, Anakreons Grab

Ich schreite kaum ,

doch whn ich mich schon weit .

Wagner, Parsifal

This is no mortal business, nor no sound

That the earth owes .

Shakespeare, The Tempest

F ROM THE TIME of Mozarts death, the public became rooted in prejudices and misapprehensions concerning his life. Only in recent decades did earnest efforts begin to eradicate from his biography the large and seductive stock of supposititious and distorting legends, both devotional and defaming, that had achieved the authority repetition bestows: most of the anecdotes about him have this kind of promiscuous pedigree. Moreover, not unlike attitudes of mind that long surrounded Shelley and reduced this greatest and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain, the prevailing view of Mozarts works, though it seldom failed in tributes to his lyric giftshis own luminous wingslong continued unmindful of the spiritual depth and moral dimension of his art. If today this aesthetic undervaluation has given way to clearer perceptionsin fact, his artistic reputation now carries all before itbiographical myths, quite otherwise, take an unconscionable time dying.

The temptation to equate the art of a genius with the life well lived must for the most part be resisted as vain; however, when the parallel does, as here, show forth triumphantly, it should be celebrated. The decades I have passed studying Mozart have rich recompense in both acquaintance with and loving admiration for this affectionate and generous man, an austere moralist of vital force, incisiveness, and strength of purpose who, thoughlike allbearing the blame of faults and lapses, yet played his role in the human comedy with honor, engaging with grace the frustrations of his complicated existence: his goodness of heart, unaffected charm, winning ways, and self-humor run like gorgeous threads through its web.

His biography and his creations receive my simultaneous attention, for Mozarts career took shape and meaning from the preoccupations of the mind with the works even as he responded to the spirit of his times. This full-scale study thus places him against the flow of his eras intellectual, political, and artistic currents as well as its daily routines, its domestic ways. However, the name of Mozart informs these excursions into cultural, musical, and traditional history: during their course, the reader will seldom lose sight of him. Though the nonspecialist may pass over these chapters without loss of biographical continuity, yet, inasmuch as they either eschew or explain technical terms, I hope that few will make such a jump carrying the cost of wider perceptions. My ambition has been to provide a comprehensive one-volume biography of Mozart combined with historical-critical discussions of his works, the essential purpose being to present him to both layman and connoisseur in terms of ideas, of cultural history.

By nature biography, like memory, is selective: it sets apart a corpus of facts and plausible conjectures and chooses a structure in which to house them, one calling to mind the workings of a kaleidoscope, its essential element the instability of a store of data that, though constant, yet can undergo instant transformation; but rotate the instrument and the same pieces of colored glass, turn by turn, will vary themselves into new patterns, the angled mirrors in the tube, moreover, providing images of reassuring symmetry and defining contours. For biographersmost of them hold such elements of design dearthe realigning of materials into fresh and balanced configurations offers rich possibilities (and, indeed, temptations). The discovery of new material, however, calls, not for a twist, but for reconstructing the very stock of data; thus, even while manipulating his elected paradigms and inflections, the biographer must remain ever aware of the protean nature of his craft, the precariousness of his efforts: his worktable rests upon a shaky floor; no one writes the last word.

Two schedules appear toward the end of these pages, one providing the sources of the quotations, the other a bibliography selected from the body of scholarship upon which this volume rests and to which it hopes to contribute. Though its debt to a host of distinguished Mozarteans will be obvious to those acquainted with this vast literature, the reader will nonetheless discover more than one unaccustomed interpretation of familiar documents and incidents. (After years of immersion in a subject, uncertainty can arise as to whether an idea or turn of phrase is original or has emerged from a corner of the memory.) Sensible of the biographers responsibility to be more than a chronicler, more than a marshal of ascertainable facts, I nonetheless have guarded against permitting conjecture to cross into romance, in particular when gaps open in the record and one must cast an ever finer net: the text makes clear when supposition comes into play.

I shy from overuse of Christian names in biography. However, here Wolfgang seems appropriate to the child and adolescent, the unadorned Mozart becoming more frequent as he evolves into the master. This approach, which cannot be outright consistent, leaves his father, alas, answering too often to Leopold, for which I would like to ask the distinguished gentlemans pardon. (Genial Mama Mozart, I imagine, would take no offense at the persistent Anna Maria.) All in all, a tasteful resolution of the problem has been the goal.

When rendering foreign proper names and titles pertaining to a work, a rank, or an office, I set consistency aside; ear and custom guide my choice of a particular form: on the one hand, King Frederick, Emperor Francis, Elector Karl Theodore, The Abduction from the Seraglio , and The Marriage of Figaro; on the other, Kapellmeister Bonno, Titularkapellmeister Fischietti, Francesco Galli da Bibbiena, Cos fan tutte , and La clemenza di Tito . With the few exceptions that add force to the rule, quotations from German, French, Italian, and Latin appear in the authors English, as do all foreign phrases but the most obvious, which remain untranslated. Since scores, recordings, and discs of Mozarts works abound, this book forgoes musical illustrations. Its body stands whole without the numerous footnotes; yet I trust that they enrich the points and arguments they amplify. I assume a general familiarity with the librettos of Mozarts operas from The Abduction to La clemenza .

Money Matters

THE UNITS OF currency most common in Mozarts world (the Holy Roman Empire) were the pfennig, kreuzer, groschen, gulden or florin (interchangeable terms), thaler (two varieties: reichs and spezies, the last also called konventions), and ducat. Four pfennig made a kreuzer and sixteen groschen a gulden, as did sixty kreuzer; a gulden equaled half a speziesthaler and two-thirds of a reichsthaler; four and a half gulden constituted a ducat (which in Austrian lands came in three varieties slightly less in value: ordinary, imperial, and kremnitz, all on the average worth about four gulden, sixteen kreuzer); the Prussian friedrich dor amounted to eight gulden, the Austrian souverain dor to thirteen and a half, the Bavarian max dor to six and a half, and the south German carolin to nine. As to foreign currency, the French louis dor (or pistole) stood at seven and a half gulden (twenty-four livres constituted one louis dor), the Venetian zecchino at five, the doppio (double zecchino) at ten, the English pound sterling and guinea at eight to nine and eleven, respectively. The Italian gigliato converted to a ducat. Values fluctuatedin Germany even from one principality to another: Mozart, for example, insisted that his legacy from his fathers estate be discharged in Viennese gulden, at the time (1787) valued at some twenty percent above the rate of exchange for the same coin in Salzburg, where the court of probate sat ().