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, recognized 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 humor. 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 recognize 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 gray, 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 labor 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, laboring 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 laboring 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 band-master,' 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.