The five-year-older Nannerl being a remarkable clavier performer and
Wolfgang absorbing his father’s instructions with the utmost facility,
Leopold was not long in deciding that he might profitably bring his pair
of prodigies before the public and make them known in aristocratic
circles, where he had a good chance of capitalizing on their talents.
Besides, there were new artistic currents astir in the world to which
the boy, in particular, might be exposed to his advantage. “If ever I
knew how priceless time is for youth I know it now and you know that my
children are used to work,” he wrote to H. Hagenauer, insisting he had
no idea of permitting the youngsters to fall into habits of idleness. He
seems to have given little thought to the strain of travel, especially
since the children were healthy and Wolfgang, though small, appears to
have been of wiry physique. So in January 1762, he took them on a
three-weeks’ excursion to Munich, where they appeared before the Elector
Maximilian of Bavaria with success.
The following September, however, the family began their travels in
earnest. With a small clavier strapped to their vehicle the little band
of wanderers set out along the Danube by way of Linz and several smaller
localities to Vienna. By October 6 they had reached the capital and they
drank in its wonders with the astonished eyes of small-town folk. A week
later they stood in the presence of the music-loving empress, Maria
Theresia, and her family and court at the Palace of Schönbrunn. The
children played and were admired and duly rewarded. There have come down
to us a quantity of pretty anecdotes about the pair—how Wolfgang climbed
up in the lap of the Empress and was kissed by her; how he insisted on
having the composer Georg Christian Wagenseil in the room when he was to
play (“because he understands such things”); how, when he slipped on the
polished floor and was helped to his feet by the princess, Marie
Antoinette, he thanked her and then added “I shall marry you for this
when I grow up!” Unquestionably the motherly tenderness of Maria
Theresia went out to the child from Salzburg. Yet it is a question
whether she actually saw in Wolfgang and his sister more than a pair of
precocious little people in spite of Leopold’s extravagant claims.
Certainly she was less agreeable several years later when she wrote her
son, the archduke Ferdinand, governor-general of Lombardy, who
contemplated taking Wolfgang into his service: “I do not know why you
need saddle yourself with a composer or useless people.... It discredits
your service when such individuals run about the world like beggars.”
At all events Leopold was voluble in the letters he wrote to his
Salzburg landlord, Hagenauer, about the wonders of the Vienna visit and
the impression exercised everywhere by Wolfgang’s talents and his lively
intelligence and unaffected manner. Leopold built towering air castles.
Two weeks later Wolfgang came down with what was said to be scarlet
fever but which was actually (according to Bernhard Paumgartner)
diagnosed by a German doctor, Felix Huch, as “erythema nodosum,” which
could have had serious consequences and may have planted the seeds of
Mozart’s last illness. Before returning to Salzburg, Leopold accepted
the invitation of a Hungarian magnate to make a flying trip to
neighboring Pressburg after Wolfgang had recovered. Finally, on January
5, 1763, the Mozarts came home to Salzburg. It is uncertain how much
musical stimulation Wolfgang obtained from this first Viennese visit.
The one important event in Vienna at this period—the première of Gluck’s
_Orfeo_—went unmentioned by either Wolfgang or his father.
However, the success of the trip whetted Leopold’s appetite for more of
the same thing. After a brief period for recuperation, plans were laid
for a much more elaborate odyssey to include nothing less than Paris and
London. On June 9, 1763, consequently, the family carriage set out for
the Bavarian frontier—“the same road by which Leopold Mozart, then a
hopeful student, had wandered into Salzburg.” This trip was to keep the
Mozarts away from home for three years.