The culminating point of Mozart's artistic development was in 1786.
The "Marriage of Figaro" was the first of a series of masterpieces
which cannot be surpassed alike for musical greatness and their hold
on the lyric stage. The next year "Don Giovanni" saw the light, and
was produced at Prague. The overture of this opera was composed and
scored in less than six hours. The inhabitants of Prague greeted the
work with the wildest enthusiasm, for they seemed to understand Mozart
better than the Viennese.
During this period he made frequent concert tours to recruit his
fortunes, but with little financial success. Presents of watches,
snuff-boxes, and rings were common, but the returns were so small that
Mozart was frequently obliged to pawn his gifts to purchase a dinner
and lodging. What a comment on the period which adored genius, but
allowed it to starve! His audiences could be enthusiastic enough to
carry him to his hotel on their shoulders, but probably never thought
that the wherewithal of a hearty supper was a more seasonable homage.
So our musician struggled on through the closing years of his life
with the wolf constantly at his door, and an invalid wife whom he
passionately loved, yet must needs see suffer from the want of common
necessaries. In these modern days, when distinguished artists make
princely fortunes by the exercise of their musical gifts, it is not
easy to believe that Mozart, recognised as the greatest pianoforte
player and composer of his time by all of musical Germany, could
suffer such dire extremes of want as to be obliged more than once to
beg for a dinner.
In 1791 he composed the score of the "Magic Flute" at the request of
Schikaneder, a Viennese manager, who had written the text from a fairy
tale, the fantastic elements of which are peculiarly German in their
humour. Mozart put great earnestness into the work, and made it the
first German opera of commanding merit, which embodied the essential
intellectual sentiment and kindly warmth of popular German life. The
manager paid the composer but a trifle for a work whose transcendent
success enabled him to build a new opera-house, and laid the
foundation of a large fortune. We are told, too, that at the time of
Mozart's death in extreme want, when his sick wife, half-maddened with
grief, could not buy a coffin for the dead composer, this hard-hearted
wretch, who owed his all to the genius of the great departed, rushed
about through Vienna bewailing the loss to music with sentimental
tears, but did not give the heart-broken widow one kreutzer to pay the
expense of a decent burial.
In 1791 Mozart's health was breaking down with great rapidity, though
he himself would never recognise his own swiftly advancing fate. He
experienced, however, a deep melancholy which nothing could remove.
For the first time his habitual cheerfulness deserted him. His wife
had been enabled through the kindness of her friends to visit the
healing waters of Baden, and was absent.
An incident now occurred which impressed Mozart with an ominous chill.
One night there came a stranger, singularly dressed in grey, with an
order for a requiem to be composed without fail within a month. The
visitor, without revealing his name, departed in mysterious gloom, as
he came. Again the stranger called, and solemnly reminded Mozart of
his promise. The composer easily persuaded himself that this was a
visitor from the other world, and that the requiem would be his own;
for he was exhausted with labour and sickness, and easily became the
prey of superstitious fancies. When his wife returned, she found him
with a fatal pallor on his face, silent and melancholy, labouring with
intense absorption on the funereal mass. He would sit brooding over
the score till he swooned away in his chair, and only come to
consciousness to bend his waning energies again to their ghastly work.
The mysterious visitor, whom Mozart believed to be the precursor of
his death, we now know to have been Count Walseck, who had recently
lost his wife, and wished a musical memorial.
His final sickness attacked the composer while labouring at the
requiem. The musical world was ringing with the fame of his last
opera. To the dying man was brought the offer of the rich appointment
of organist of St. Stephen's Cathedral. Most flattering propositions
were made him by eager managers, who had become thoroughly awake to
his genius when it was too late. The great Mozart was dying in the
very prime of his youth and his powers, when success was in his grasp
and the world opening wide its arms to welcome his glorious gifts with
substantial recognition; but all too late, for he was doomed to die in
his spring-tide, though "a spring mellow with all the fruits of
autumn."
The unfinished requiem lay on the bed, and his last efforts were to
imitate some peculiar instrumental effects, as he breathed out his
life in the arms of his wife and his friend, Süssmaier.
The epilogue to this life-drama is one of the saddest in the history
of art: a pauper funeral for one of the world's greatest geniuses. "It
was late one winter afternoon," says an old record, "before the coffin
was deposited on the side aisles on the south side of St. Stephen's.
Van Swieten, Salieri, Süssmaier, and two unknown musicians were the
only persons present besides the officiating priest and the
pall-bearers. It was a terribly inclement day; rain and sleet came
down fast; and an eye-witness describes how the little band of
mourners stood shivering in the blast, with their umbrellas up, round
the hearse, as it left the door of the church. It was then far on in
the dark, cold December afternoon, and the evening was fast closing in
before the solitary hearse had passed the Stubenthor, and reached the
distant graveyard of St. Marx, in which, among the 'third class,' the
great composer of the 'G minor Symphony' and the 'Requiem' found his
resting-place. By this time the weather had proved too much for all
the mourners; they had dropped off one by one, and Mozart's body was
accompanied only by the driver of the carriage. There had been already
two pauper funerals that day--one of them a midwife--and Mozart was
to be the third in the grave and the uppermost.
"When the hearse drew up in the slush and sleet at the gate of the
graveyard, it was welcomed by a strange pair--Franz Harruschka, the
assistant grave-digger, and his mother, Katharina, known as 'Frau
Katha,' who filled the quaint office of official mendicant to the
place.
"The old woman was the first to speak: 'Any coaches or mourners
coming?'
"A shrug from the driver of the hearse was the only response.
"'Whom have you got there, then?' continued she.
"'A bandmaster,' replied the other.
"'A musician? they're a poor lot; then I've no more money to look for
to-day. It is to be hoped we shall have better luck in the morning.'
"To which the driver said, with a laugh, 'I'm devilish thirsty,
too--not a kreutzer of drink-money have I had.'
"After this curious colloquy the coffin was dismounted and shoved into
the top of the grave already occupied by the two paupers of the
morning; and such was Mozart's last appearance on earth."
To-day no stone marks the spot where were deposited the last remains
of one of the brightest of musical spirits; indeed, the very grave is
unknown, for it was the grave of a pauper.