What brought Leopold Mozart to Salzburg in the first place? A
choirsinger in the Augsburg Church of St. Ulrich and a graduate of the
Augsburger Jesuit Lyceum, he seemed to be shaping for a priestly career.
He did not, at all events, follow the bookbinder’s trade like his
brothers. Alfred Einstein finds it difficult to grasp why he should have
preferred Salzburg to Munich or Ingolstadt for an orthodox theological
education. Possibly a suggestion of the canons of St. Ulrich had
something to do with it. Whatever the reason, he enrolled at the
University in the town on the Salzach, July 22, 1738. There he studied
philosophy, logic, and music, understood Latin, composed Passion
cantatas and instrumental works, acquired some proficiency on the
violin, and obtained a smattering of legal knowledge. Five years later
he became fourth violinist in the court orchestra of the archbishop, but
he maintained his close family connections with Augsburg and later
encouraged his son not to relax these ties.
It is not quite certain exactly when he met Anna Maria Pertl, whose
father was superintendent of a clerical institution at St. Gilgen on the
nearby Wolfgang See. In the fall of 1772 he wrote her from Milan: “It
was 25 years ago, I think, that we had the sensible idea of getting
married, one which we had cherished for many years. All good things take
time!” Anna Maria was her husband’s junior by a year. Jahn questions if
she rose in any way above the average woman of her type. A good
provincial, she had not the suspicious, mistrustful qualities of
Leopold. She lacked intellectual depth, but she was a good wife and
affectionate mother, a genuinely lovable creature, a receptacle of all
the community gossip and local tittle-tattle. “She judged with an eye
just as friendly as her husband’s was critical and sarcastic.” And from
his mother Wolfgang inherited his gayety and some of his more
incorrigible _Hanswurst_ characteristics.
Though the Mozart couple had seven children, only two of these survived
infancy—Nannerl, the fourth, and her great brother, who came last.
Wolfgang was born on January 27, 1756, at eight o’clock in the evening
in the house belonging to Lorenz Hagenauer, on the narrow Getreide
Gasse, Salzburg. The very next morning the newcomer (whose birth came
near costing the mother’s life) was carried to church and baptized with
the name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus, the last in honor
of his godfather, Johann Theophilus Pergmayr. Subsequently the Greek
Theophilus was changed to its more euphonious Latin equivalent Amadeus.
Wolfgang, like the other Mozart children, was at first nourished with
water instead of milk, according to a preposterous superstition of the
time. We have to thank the good health of the infant that he did not
succumb, as did most of the other Mozart offspring, and even withstood
later illnesses.
A sensitive and affectionate lad, Wolfgang was extraordinarily devoted
to his parents, especially to his father, despite Leopold’s humorless
and obstinate nature. “Next to God comes papa!” was a childhood
expression of the boy. To be sure, the inflexible martinet commanded a
certain respect by reason of his very genuine love for his family and
his determination to rear his children according to what he considered
their best interests. But he seemed unable to rise above his
middle-class prejudices and, when all is said, his attitude toward his
son was like that of a conventional Victorian father, who guided the
footsteps of his son according to his lights, yet refused to permit him
any freedom whatever for explorations of his own. All the same, Leopold
could be self-sacrificing in the interest of his children and therein
lay one of the saving features of an unlovable character.
[Illustration: The boy Mozart (1767-8)
_Oil painting by Thaddeus Helbling_]
[Illustration: View of Salzburg at the end of the eighteenth century
_Engraving by Anton Amon after Franz Naumann_]
It was one of his merits to have perceived at once the musical
predispositions of his children, to have cultivated them, even to have
grasped early the most advantageous ways of exploiting them. Nannerl was
by no means slow in showing uncommon aptitude for music, and Leopold
lost no time in embarking upon her training. Wolfgang in his cradle
listened to his sister’s lessons in the adjoining room and we can only
surmise what mystical instincts vibrated in the childish consciousness.
He was hardly more than three when these impelled him to the keyboard,
there to search for consonant intervals and to shout with delight when
he discovered and sounded thirds. He had an abnormally refined and
sensitive hearing, was distressed by impurities of pitch, and perturbed
by any violence of sound (who does not remember the story of the child
Mozart fainting on hearing the tone of a trumpet?). We are told that he
was very soon able to play light piano pieces without any signs of
effort and to memorize and perform them without notes, “cleanly and in
perfect time,” in less than half an hour. Nor was the violin unfamiliar
to him and, though he is not supposed to have started his studies on
that instrument till his sixth year, Nissen tells that a certain Herr
von Murr heard Wolfgang play the violin at four!
Leopold Mozart’s chief trouble lay not in making his son practice but in
getting him away from the piano. Music occupied his waking hours almost
exclusively, and for the customary games and amusements of childhood the
boy showed little interest; or, if it was a question of fun, it had to
be in some way associated with music. Before putting him to bed in the
evening his father would stand him on a chair to give him a good-night
kiss, whereupon the child would declaim Italian nonsense syllables, like
“oragnia figatafa” and such, to some scrap of folk tune, as if imitating
an opera singer. Then he would return his father’s caresses, kissing him
on the tip of his nose and promising when he grew up “to enclose him in
a capsule and carry him about at all times!” In after years Leopold
reminisced in a letter to his son: “When you sat at the piano or
otherwise occupied yourself with music nobody was allowed to joke with
you in any way. Indeed, the expression on your face would become so
serious that many, struck by what they considered your prematurely
ripened talent, feared that your life might be short”—fears that were to
be only too well founded. And, when barely six, he stubbornly refused to
play before any audience that did not include at least one musically
cultured listener.
Abraham Mendelssohn used to say that, whereas he had once been famous as
the son of his father, he was now celebrated as the father of his son.
Leopold Mozart was most indisputably the father of his son. His
juiceless compositions, his violin method, and the rest of his dreary
talents and moral virtues have a kind of museum value only as they
contributed to Wolfgang’s artistic upbringing and guidance. Alfred
Einstein observes that “the first signs of musical talent in Wolfgang
completely changed the direction of Leopold’s life and thought.”
Unquestionably it was better so, and in the long run he was far more
richly rewarded for cultivating the fruitful soil committed to his
tillage.
Systematic piano instruction was the first thing on which he seems to
have concentrated. Composition was a by-product. Wolfgang improvised
unceasingly, which meant that numberless minuets and simple pieces of
various types took shape under his fingers, the father writing down
industriously what his son’s fancy dictated. Nannerl extemporized no
less actively. Leopold spurred his children by acquainting them with
short works by himself and recognized musicians to divert them after dry
technical exercises. Each had a little study book of pieces. The one
that Wolfgang received from his father on October 31, 1762, has come
down to us complete and contains 135 examples for study. Among them
Wolfgang tried his hand at brief works of his own. In the father’s
writing we can read the following: “Di Wolfgango Mozart, May 11, 1762
und July 16, 1762.” Some of the masters given the boy to study were
Wagenseil, Telemann, Hasse, and Philipp Emanuel Bach. Wolfgang’s
compositions include an innocent minuet and trio with very simple basses
and a little Allegro in three-part song form. In these and other
childish efforts the improving hand of Leopold can be repeatedly
detected. It was to be so for some time to come and when the father did
not have a correcting finger in the pie we become aware of it. It is
evident in a sketch book Wolfgang was given in London a year or two
later when Leopold fell ill and, in order not to be disturbed by the
sounds of practicing, asked the boy to write something and refrain from
noise. The book is filled with a great variety of minuets, contradances,
rondos, gigues, sicilianos, preludes, and even an unfinished sketch for
a fugue. Here one sees indisputable genius in conflict with technical
lapses and other evidences of inexperience that somewhat modify the
notion that Wolfgang had acquired all his skill by instinct rather than
by carefully disciplined study.