Mozart's charming letters reveal to us such a gentle, sparkling,
affectionate nature, as to inspire as much love for the man as
admiration for his genius. Sunny humor and tenderness bubble in almost
every sentence. A clever writer says that "opening these is like
opening a painted tomb.... The colors are all fresh, the figures are all
distinct."
No better illustration of the man Mozart can be had than in a few
extracts from his correspondence.
He writes to his sister from Rome while yet a mere lad:
"I am, thank God! except my miserable pen, well, and send you and mamma
a thousand kisses. I wish you were in Rome; I am sure it would please
you. Papa says I am a little fool, but that is nothing new. Here we have
but one bed; it is easy to understand that I can't rest comfortably
with papa. I shall be glad when we get into new quarters. I have just
finished drawing the Holy Peter with his keys, the Holy Paul with his
sword, and the Holy Luke with my sister. I have had the honor of kissing
St. Peter's foot; and because I am so small as to be unable to reach it,
they had to lift me up. I am the same old
"Wolfgang."
Mozart was very fond of this sister Nannerl, and he used to write to
her in a playful mosaic of French, German, and Italian. Just after his
wedding he writes:
"My darling is now a hundred times more joyful at the idea of going to
Salzburg, and I am willing to stake--ay, my very life, that you will
rejoice still more in my happiness when you know her; if, indeed, in
your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled, honest, virtuous, and
pleasing wife ought to make a man happy."
Late in his short life he writes the following characteristic note to a
friend, whose life does not appear to have been one of the most regular:
"Now tell me, my dear friend, how you are. I hope you are all as well as
we are. You cannot fail to be happy, for you possess everything that
you can wish for at your age and in your position, especially as you
now seem to have entirely given up your former mode of life. Do you not
every day become more convinced of the truth of the little lectures I
used to inflict on you? Are not the pleasures of a transient, capricious
passion widely different from the happiness produced by rational and
true love? I feel sure that you often in your heart thank me for my
admonitions. I shall feel quite proud if you do. But, jesting apart,
you do really owe me some little gratitude if you are become worthy of
Fräulein N------, for I certainly played no insignificant part in your
improvement or reform.
"My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother,
who in turn told it to her daughter, my mother, who repeated it to her
daughter, my own sister, that it was a very great art to talk eloquently
and well, but an equally great one to know the right moment to stop. I
therefore shall follow the advice of my sister, thanks to our mother,
grandmother, and great-grandmother, and thus end, not only my moral
ebullition, but my letter."
His playful tenderness lavished itself on his wife in a thousand quaint
ways. He would, for example, rise long before her to take his horseback
exercise, and always kiss her sleeping face and leave a little note like
the following resting on her forehead: "Good-morning, dear little wife!
I hope you have had a good sleep and pleasant dreams. I shall be back in
two hours. Behave yourself like a good little girl, and don't run away
from your husband."
Speaking of an infant child, our composer would say merrily, "That boy
will be a true Mozart, for he always cries in the very key in which I am
playing."
Mozart's musical greatness, shown in the symmetry of his art as well as
in the richness of his inspirations, has been unanimously acknowledged
by his brother composers. Meyerbeer could not restrain his tears when
speaking of him. Weber, Mendelssohn, Rossini, and Wagner always praise
him in terms of enthusiastic admiration. Haydn called him the greatest
of composers. In fertility of invention, beauty of form, and exactness
of method, he has never been surpassed, and has but one or two rivals.
The composer of three of the greatest operas in musical history, besides
many of much more than ordinary excellence; of symphonies that rival
Haydn's for symmetry and melodic affluence; of a great number of
quartets, quintets, etc.; and of pianoforte sonatas which rank high
among the best; of many masses that are standard in the service of the
Catholic Church; of a great variety of beautiful songs--there is hardly
any form of music which he did not richly adorn with the treasures of
his genius. We may well say, in the words of one of his most competent
critics:
"Mozart was a king and a slave--king in his own beautiful realm of
music; slave of the circumstances and the conditions of this world.
Once over the boundaries of his own kingdom, and he was supreme; but the
powers of the earth acknowledged not his sovereignty."