Early on September 23, 1777, Wolfgang and his mother (who would much
rather have remained in Salzburg) drove off in a newly purchased
carriage. The departure was a bitter event for Leopold, whose trouble
was such that he forgot to give his son his blessing before the vehicle
was out of sight! Nannerl, equally distraught, was sick and had to take
to her bed. To add to the melancholy of the occasion Father Mozart
darkened the house and fell asleep till roused hours later by Bimperl,
the dog. The woeful day finally dragged itself to an end; it would have
been far more terrible had they known that poor Maria Anna was never to
return!
They went first to Munich, where Wolfgang made an ineffectual appeal to
the Elector and received that answer with which he was in the course of
his life to become so tragically familiar: “Yes, my dear child, but
there is no position free! Now if only there were...,” etc., etc. At
Augsburg, the next stop, he divided his time between Andreas Stein, the
pianomaker whose instruments stirred his interest, and his cousin, the
“Bäsle,” with whom he freely indulged in those ribaldries that so
shocked the puritanical generations of the next century. From that
ancestral seat they turned to Mannheim, which was a very different
story. For here Mozart found all manner of musical interests and
important personalities. And here he fell devastatingly in love!
He had made the acquaintance of the family of Fridolin and Maria Cäcilie
Weber. A streak of bohemianism ran through the lot of them. The father,
in straitened circumstances, eked out an existence in Mannheim as
singer, musician, copyist, prompter—in short, a kind of man-of-all-work
in the theater and orchestra. The mother was a sinister creature—an
out-and-out adventuress. The couple had four daughters, Josefa, Aloysia,
Constanze, and Sophie. Constanze was, in the fullness of time, to become
Mozart’s wife. But his feelings were at first kindled by Aloysia, who
was then only fifteen and with whom Maria Cäcilie at this stage set
about to tempt the young man, who was quickly bowled over by the girl’s
feminine charms, her lovely voice, and her musicianship. In the years to
come each of these women was to play some part in the composer’s life.
(A few years later there was born in a closely related branch of the
Weber family that figure who made the name immortal—Carl Maria von
Weber; so that through marriage the creators of _Der Freischütz_ and of
_Die Zauberflöte_ became cousins!)
Love caused Wolfgang to build castles in the air and to concoct
extravagant schemes. He composed abundantly in Mannheim, planned operas
and what-not for his idolized Aloysia, and before long was writing to
his father proposing to give up the Paris venture altogether and set out
on a trip to Italy with the Webers. Leopold was horrified, the more so
as his wife wrote telling him exactly how things stood. Father Mozart
sternly laid down the law to his son and ended with the words: “Off with
you to Paris! And that soon! Find your place among great people. _Aut
Caesar aut nihil._ The mere thought of seeing Paris ought to have
preserved you from all these flighty ideas!” Wolfgang did not, it is
true, rebel and in the end he went to Paris. But he answered his father
with some heat. He declared that he was no longer a child and had no
intention of tolerating aspersions on his conduct with Aloysia. “There
are some people,” he added, “who think it impossible to love a girl
without evil designs and this pretty word mistress is indeed a fine
one!”
But Leopold had, for the moment, won his point and in March 1778,
Wolfgang and his mother were off. The Paris adventure turned out a
dismal fiasco. Even Melchior Grimm, once so helpful, was not interested
this time. He was willing to promote a sensation who gave promise of
being a money-maker. But, as Alfred Einstein has noted,
“_It was Wolfgang’s character that made Leopold wrong in his estimate of
Paris and the Parisian nobility. For Wolfgang was no conqueror and he
could not have conquered Paris even if he had wanted to.... How
carefully Gluck’s conquest of Paris had been prepared! Not only
ambassadors and queens but the entire public took part in these
preparations.... Mozart slipped into Paris quietly and unobserved,
accompanied by his mother, who had come along to keep an eye on him._”
He detested Paris, thought continually of Aloysia, had no use for the
now-surly Grimm, turned down the offer of an organist post in Versailles
(feeling that the place was no more than a suburb), had some
unsatisfactory dealings with Le Gros, director of the Concert Spirituel,
composed for the Parisian stage no more than the ballet _Les Petits
Riens_, easily succumbed to some of Le Gros’ intrigues, and was
demoralized generally. Only one work of his—the D major Symphony (K.
297)—was outspokenly successful. To climax his woes his mother fell ill
and died on July 3, 1778. He had to ask the old Salzburg family friend,
Abbé Bullinger, to break the news to his father and sister. And he
wrote, “You have no idea what a dreadful time I have been having here
... until one is well known nothing can be done in the matter of
composition.... From my description of the music here you may have
gathered that I am not very happy and that I am trying to get away as
quickly as possible.”
“As quickly as possible” was not till September 1778. He decided
reluctantly to return to Salzburg, to the Archbishop’s service, where he
would conduct and accompany, but not play violin. Even so, he was
momentarily tempted to stay on in Paris and might even have done so if
Grimm had not been obviously eager to be rid of him. He did not hurry
back to the hated Salzburg but stopped off in Strassburg, Mannheim, and
Munich, where he found the flighty Aloysia already the wife of Joseph
Lange (the itinerant actor to whom posterity owes the familiar
unfinished portrait of Mozart). When he finally did submit to the
inevitable trip home he lacked the courage to meet his bereaved father
alone and so took his “dear little Bäsle” with him.