Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus - Mozart

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 paupers grave. Not even his name has survived intact: Mozart rarely used the Latinate middle name Amadeus and greatly preferred the French Amad.

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 Mozarts 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.

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Joannes Christostomos Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, the seventh and last child of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart, ne 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 Mozarts century, even among the prosperous; Edward Gibbons 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.

Mozarts father, Leopold, who loomed large in his sons 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 Mozarts 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 Mozarts Le nozze di Figaro, remembered him as a pleasing intelligent little man. 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.