Yet from now on he was to pay for his Prague triumphs. With a kind of
fateful persistence things seemed to go wrong. That an infant daughter
died was a rather familiar affliction (of the children of the Mozart
couple only the sons, Karl and Raymund Leopold, survived infancy). Money
troubles plagued him unremittingly. Again and again he had to appeal for
loans to Michael Puchberg, a merchant and brother Mason, and later to
Franz Hofdemel, a jurist of his acquaintance whose wife was one of his
pupils. But, by and large, these pupils were becoming scarcer and there
seemed steadily less patronage for the academies he planned. To make
matters worse Constanze’s management of the household appeared to go
from bad to worse. The arrangements of works like Handel’s _Acis and
Galathea_ and _Messiah_, which he was making about this time for the
parsimonious Baron van Swieten, brought in as good as nothing. Mozart’s
affairs were falling into a sordid, not to say a tragic, state.
Small wonder, therefore, that he grasped at the opportunity to settle
outside of Vienna proper in a house in the Waehring district, where the
air was purer than in the heart of the city and where he had the added
advantages of quiet and a garden. A change of residence had never been a
particular hardship for the Mozarts. In the space of nine years they
moved eleven times in Vienna alone.
_“Their life,” says Alfred Einstein, “was like a perpetual tour,
changing from one hotel room to another.... In one of the handsomer
dwellings, Schulergasse 8, the ceiling of Mozart’s workroom had fine
plaster ornamentation with sprites and cherubs. I am convinced that
Mozart never wasted a glance on it. He was ready at any instant to
exchange Vienna for another city or Austria for another country.... He
was thinking of a trip to Russia, as a result of conversations with the
Russian ambassador in Dresden in 1789. But he had to be satisfied with
smaller journeys, and with ‘journeys’ within Vienna.”_
In his Waehring surroundings, however, he boasted of being able to
accomplish more work in a few days than elsewhere in a month. The finest
fruit of this suburban sojourn is the glorious symphonic trilogy, the
masterpieces in E flat, G minor, and C major, composed in June, July,
and August, respectively—the third, the sublime “Jupiter,” the last of
Mozart’s forty-one symphonies and given its deathless name no one knows
exactly by whom or why. The three, which have a profound psychological
connection, were written, in all probability, for a series of academies
that never took place. However this may be, they are the crown of
Mozart’s symphonic compositions and rank indisputably as the greatest
symphonies before Beethoven.
_Così fan tutte_
In April 1789, a ray of hope suddenly appeared to illuminate his
depressing horizon. A friend and pupil, the young prince Carl
Lichnowsky, who had estates in Silesia and an important rank in the
Prussian army, invited Mozart to accompany him on a trip to Berlin.
Lichnowsky enjoyed influence at the court of the music-loving Prussian
king, Frederick William II, and seemed ready to recommend his teacher to
the good graces of the monarch. At last Mozart had reason to anticipate
a well-paying post! The pleasure-loving Constanze resigned herself with
the best grace possible to remain behind. The travelers stopped off in
Prague, in Dresden, in Leipzig (where Mozart played the organ in St.
Thomas Church in so masterly a fashion that Bach’s erstwhile pupil, the
aged cantor, Johann Friedrich Doles, believed for a moment that his old
master had come back to life and hastened to show his delighted guest
one of the Bach motets the church possessed). On April 25 Mozart arrived
at the court in Potsdam, where the King gave him 100 Friedrichsdor,
ordered six string quartets and some easy clavier sonatas for his
daughter, but did nothing about a Kapellmeister position or a commission
for an opera! Mozart did go to the theater in Berlin where he heard his
own _Entführung_, was applauded by the audience, and audibly scolded a
blundering violinist in the orchestra!
But his fortunes had not materially changed and in May he was writing to
Constanze: “My dear little wife, you will have to get more satisfaction
from my return than from any money I am bringing.” When he reached home
and found her suffering from a foot trouble he sent her, regardless of
his depleted purse, to near-by Baden for a cure—at the same time
admonishing her to beware of flirtations! Then he set to work on the
quartets for the Prussian king, of which he finished three (the last he
was to write), and a single “easy” sonata, instead of the promised six,
for the Princess Friederike. In September 1789, he was to compose for
his friend, the clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler, the celestial Clarinet
Quintet (K. 581), which for sheer euphony is almost without parallel in
its composer’s writings.
The success of a revival of _Figaro_ in August 1789 appears to have
moved the Emperor to approach Mozart with a commission for a new opera.
The outcome was _Così fan tutte_, the incentive to the plot being an
incident said to have taken place in Viennese society. Once again
Lorenzo da Ponte was called upon to put the piece into shape. The
fundamentals of the story are to be found in Boccaccio and it may well
have been in the _Decameron_ that Da Ponte discovered the real basis of
his dexterous and amusing, though highly artificial, comedy. We know
little about the circumstances surrounding the composition of the piece.
On January 21, 1790, _Così fan tutte_ was performed at the Burgtheater.
The reviews, if middling, were not outright unfavorable. “The music of
Mozart is charming, the plot amusing enough,” wrote Count Zinzendorf in
his diary; and the _Journal des Luxus und der Moden_ remarked: “It is
sufficient to say of the music that it was composed by Mozart!” Until
the following autumn the work achieved only ten performances. It is not
unreasonable to explain this by the fact that in 1790 Joseph II, who for
some time had been ailing, died and was succeeded by a ruler of very
different tendencies—his brother, Leopold II.