Mozart: A Life in Letters: A Life in Letters
Page 28
72. Leopold Mozart to his son, 5 February 1778, Salzburg
My Dear Son,
In all probability this will be the last letter that you can be certain of receiving from me in Mannheim, and so it is addressed to you alone. How hard it is for me to accept that you’re moving even further away from me is something you may perhaps be able to imagine, but you cannot feel as acutely as I do the weight that lies on my mind. If you take the trouble to recall what I did with you two children during your tender youth, you’ll not accuse me of timidity but, like everyone else, will concede that I am a man and have always had the courage to risk everything. But I did everything with the greatest caution and consideration that were humanly possible: – one can’t prevent accidents, for God alone can foretell the future. Until now, of course, we’ve been neither happy nor unhappy, but, thanks be to God, we’ve trodden a middle course. We’ve tried everything to make you happy and, through you, to make ourselves happier and at least to place your destiny on a firmer footing; but fate was against us. As you know, our last step has left me in very deep waters, and you also know that I’m now around 700 florins in debt and don’t know how I shall support myself, your mother and your sister on my monthly income, for as long as I live I cannot hope to receive another farthing from the prince.1 So it must be clear as day to you that the future fate of your old parents and of your sister, who undoubtedly loves you with all her heart, lies solely in your hands. Ever since you were born and, indeed, before that – in other words, ever since I was married – there is no doubt that I’ve had a difficult time providing a livelihood for a wife and 7 children, 22 servants and Mama’s mother, all on a fixed monthly income of only a little more than 20 florins, and to pay for accouchements, deaths and illnesses, expenses which, if you think them over, will convince you not only that I have never spent a farthing on the least pleasure for myself, but that, without God’s special mercy, I’d never have managed to keep out of debt in spite of all my hopes and bitter efforts: yet this is the first time I’ve been in debt. I gave up every hour of my life to you 2 in the hope of ensuring not only that in due course you’d both be able to count on being able to provide for yourselves but that I too would be able to enjoy a peaceful old age and be accountable to God for my children’s education, with no more cares but being able to live solely for my soul’s salvation and calmly awaiting my end. But God has willed and ordained that I must once again take on the undoubtedly wearisome task of giving lessons and of doing so, moreover, in a town where these strenuous efforts are so badly paid that it is not possible every month to earn enough to support oneself and one’s family. Yet one must be glad and talk oneself hoarse in order to earn at least something. Not only do I not distrust you, my dear Wolfgang, no, not in the very least, but I place all my trust and hope in your filial love: all depends on your good sense, which you certainly have – if only you will listen to it – and on fortunate circumstances. This latter cannot be coerced; but you will always consult your good sense – at least I hope so and beg of you to do so.
You’re now entering a completely different world: and you mustn’t think that it is simply prejudice that makes me see Paris as such a dangerous place, au contraire – from my own experience I’ve no reason at all to regard Paris as so very dangerous. But my situation then could not be more different from yours now. We stayed with an ambassador, 3 and on the second occasion in a self-contained apartment; I was a man of mature years and you were children; I avoided all contact with others and in particular preferred not to become over-familiar with people of our own profession ; remember that I did the same in Italy. I made the acquaintance and sought out the friendship only of people of a higher social class – and among these only mature people, not young lads, not even if they were of the foremost rank. I never invited anyone to visit me regularly in my rooms in order to be able to maintain my freedom, and I always considered it more sensible to visit others at my convenience. If I don’t like a person or if I’m working or have business to attend to, I can then stay away. – Conversely, if people come to me and behave badly, I don’t know how to get rid of them, and even a person who is otherwise not unwelcome may prevent me from getting on with some important work. You’re a young man of 22; and so you don’t have that earnestness of old age that could deter a young lad of whatever social class, be he an adventurer, joker or fraud and be he young or old, from seeking out your acquaintance and friendship and drawing you into his company and then gradually into his plans. One is drawn imperceptibly into this and cannot then escape. I shan’t even mention women, for here one needs the greatest restraint and reason, as nature herself is our enemy, and the man who does not apply his whole reason and show the necessary restraint will later do so in vain in his attempt to escape from the labyrinth, a misfortune that mostly ends only in death. You yourself may perhaps already have learnt from your limited experience how blindly we may often be taken in by jests, flatteries and jokes that initially seem unimportant but at which reason, when she awakes later on, is ashamed; I don’t want to reproach you. I know that you love me not just as your father but also as your staunchest and surest friend; and that you know and realize that our happiness and misfortune and, indeed, my very life – whether I live to a ripe old age or die suddenly – are in your hands as much as God’s. If I know you, I can hope for nothing but contentment, and this alone must console me during your absence, when I am deprived of a father’s delight in hearing, seeing and embracing you. Live like a good Catholic, live and fear God, pray most fervently to Him in reverence and trust, and lead so Christian a life that, even if I am never to see you again, the hour of my death may be free from care. With all my heart I give you a father’s blessing and remain until death4 your faithful father and surest friend
Leopold Mozart
Here are our Paris acquaintances, all of whom will be delighted to see you. […]5
[ Leopold’s postscript to his wife on the envelope ]
My Dear Wife,
As you’ll receive this letter on the 11th or 12th and as I doubt whether a further letter will reach Wolfg. in Mannheim, I’ll take my leave of him with this enclosure! I’m writing this with tears in my eyes. Nannerl kisses her dear brother Wolfg. a million times. She would have added a note to my letter and said goodbye, but the letter was already full and in any case I didn’t let her read it. We ask Wolfg. to take care of his health and to stick to the diet that he got used to at home ; otherwise he’ll have to be bled as soon as he arrives in Paris, everything spicy is bad for him. I expect he’ll take with him the big Latin prayer book that contains all the psalms for the full office of Our Lady. If he wants to have the German text of the office of Our Lady in Mannheim in order to have it in German too, he’ll have to try to obtain the very smallest format as the Latin psalms are difficult to understand. It would be better if he also had them in German. Learned contrapuntal settings of the psalms are also performed at the Concert Spirituel;6 it’s possible to gain a great reputation in this way. Perhaps he could also have his Misericordias 7 performed there. The opera singers aren’t coming but have gone instead to Straubing to entertain the Austrian officers. The prince has again forced the magistrature to hold 9 balls, the first one was yesterday and was attended by 30 persons; it lasted till half past one, but not a soul had arrived by half past 9 and it wasn’t till 10 that they started dancing; 1 capon and 6 mugs of wine were consumed. I hope you received the 2 sonatas for 4 hands, 8 the Fischer variations9 and the rondo, 10 which were all parcelled up in the same letter. – – The late Herr Adlgasser hasn’t found a decent bellows blower in the afterlife; the cathedral’s old bellows blower, the 80-year-old Thomas, has followed him into the next world. The main news is that Mme Barisani11 has become incredibly jealous of her old and respectable husband as he and Checco12 have on a handful of occasions been to perform at the home of handsome Herr Freysauff, who has a relatively pretty but witless wife. There was an incredible fuss. Farewell. We kiss you millions of times
Mzt
> Everyone sends their best wishes, especially Herr Bullinger and the wife of the sergeant of the bodyguards, Herr Clessin, Waberl Mölk etc.
73. Leopold Mozart to his son, 12 February 1778, Salzburg
My Dear Son,
I’ve read through your letter of the 4th with bewilderment and shock. I’m starting to answer it today, the 11th, as I was unable to sleep all night and am now so tired that I can write only slowly, one word at a time, but must complete it by tomorrow. Thank God, I have been well until now: but this letter, in which I recognize my son only by his failing in believing the first thing people say to him, laying bare his unduly kind heart to flattery and smooth words, allowing himself to be swayed this way and that by all the ideas that are put to him, and on the strength of ideas and baseless, impracticable and ill-considered plans letting himself be misled into sacrificing his own reputation and interests and even the interests and assistance owed to his old and honest parents to the interests of strangers; this letter has left me all the more dismayed in that I was hoping, not unreasonably, that a number of the situations that you’ve already faced and my own reminders, both spoken and written, would have convinced you that both for the sake of your own happiness and in order to be able to advance in the world and finally achieve your desired goal among such different types of people, be they good or bad, happy or unhappy, you should have concealed your kind heart beneath a veil of the greatest reserve, undertaking nothing without the greatest deliberation and never allowing yourself to be carried away by enthusiastic imaginings and vague and blind fancies. I beg you, my dear son, read this letter carefully – take time to read it properly – merciful God, gone are those moments of contentment for me when, as child and boy, you never went to bed without standing on a chair and singing me the oragna fiagata faà, 1 often kissing me on the tip of my nose and telling me that when I grew old, you’d put me in a glass-fronted box and protect me from the air so that I’d always be with you and you could honour me. – Listen to me patiently then. You are fully aware of our problems in Salzb. – you know how hard it is for me to make ends meet and ultimately why I kept my promise to let you leave and all my troubles. There were 2 reasons for your journey: either to find a good and permanent post; or, if that were not to succeed, to go to some big city where you could earn lots of money. Both plans were intended to help your parents and your dear sister to survive but above all to bring you fame and honour in the world, something that was partly achieved in your childhood, partly in your years of boyhood, but it now depends on you alone to raise yourself gradually to a position of the greatest eminence that a musician has ever known: you owe this to the exceptional talent that you’ve received from our most merciful God; and it depends only on your intelligence and way of life whether you die as an ordinary musician forgotten by the whole world or as a famous Kapellmeister whom posterity will read about in books – whether, cowed by a woman, you perish on a bed of straw in a parlour full of starving children or whether, after a Christian life of contentment, honour and posthumous fame, you die respected by all the world, with your family well provided for. Your journey took you to Munich – you know the reason for it – there was nothing that could be done. Well-meaning friends wanted to keep you there – your wish was to remain there: it was suggested that you should form a company, I don’t need to repeat all the details. At the time you thought the affair was manageable; – I did not think so – reread what I wrote on that occasion. You’re not without honour. – – Would it have done you honour, even if the affair had succeeded, to have depended on 10 people and their monthly charity? You were then extraordinarily taken up with that little singer2 at the theatre and wanted nothing more than to help the German theatre; now you declare that you don’t even want to write a comic opera. No sooner had you left the gates of Munich behind you than, as I foretold, your entire company of friendly subscribers had forgotten you. – And what would have become of you in Munich? – – Ultimately we can see God’s providence in all things. In Augsburg, too, you had your little fling and amused yourself with my brother’s daughter, who then had to send you her portrait. The rest I wrote in my initial letters to Mannheim. In Wallerstein you amused them endlessly, taking up a violin, dancing around and playing so that you were described to absent colleagues as a merry, high-spirited fool, thereby giving Herr Beecke a chance to disparage your merits, merits which thanks to your compositions and your sister’s playing these 2 gentlemen3 have subsequently come to see in a different light, as she kept saying: I’m only a pupil of my brother, so that they now have the highest opinion of your art and have been very disparaging about Herr Beecke’s inferior compositions. You did very well to ingratiate yourself with Herr Cannabich in Mannheim. But it would have borne no fruit if he himself had not been seeking a twofold advantage. I’ve already written to you about the rest. But now it was the turn of Herr Cannabich’s daughter to be heaped with praises, with her character portrayed in the adagio of your sonata, 4 in short, she was now your favourite person. You then became acquainted with Herr Wendling, and it was now he who was your most honest friend, and I don’t need to repeat what happened next. Suddenly I find you have a new acquaintance in Herr Weber and everyone else is forgotten; now it is this family that is the most upright and Christian family, and their daughter5 is the main character in the tragedy to be played out between her family and yours, and in the giddiness into which your kind and open heart has drawn you, you imagine that all your inadequately thought-through plans are as infallibly practicable as if they were the most natural thing in the world.
You’re thinking of taking her to Italy as a prima donna. Tell me, do you know a prima donna who has trodden the boards in Italy without having first performed many times in Germany? How many operas did Signora Bernasconi sing in Vienna – operas filled with the most extreme emotions and performed under the most watchful eye and guidance of Gluck and Calzabigi!6 How many operas did Mlle Teyber sing in Vienna under Hasse’s guidance – and after lessons from the old singer and exceptionally famous actress Signora Tesi, 7 whom you saw at Prince Hildburghausen’s and whose blackamoor you kissed as a child!8 How many times did Mlle Schindler 9 appear on the Viennese stage after she had started her career in a private production on Baron Fries’s10 country estate under the guidance of Hasse and Tesi and Metastasio! – – Did all these people risk exposing themselves to the Italian public? – – And how much patronage and how many powerful recommendations did they need before they could achieve their goal? – – Princes and counts recommended them; famous composers and poets vouched for their skill. And you want me to write to Lugiati; you want to write an opera for 50 ducats even though you know that the people of Verona have no money and never commission a new opera. I’m now to give thought to the Ascensa, even though Michele dall’Agata hasn’t even replied to my last 2 letters.11 Granted that Mlle Weber sings like a Gabrielli;12 that she has a powerful enough voice for the Italian theatres etc.; and that she looks like a prima donna etc. – but it’s absurd for you to vouch for her acting. There’s more to it than that; and old Hasse’s childish efforts, for all that they were well meant and motivated by a friendly love of humanity, ensured that Miss Davies13 was banished for ever from the Italian stage as she was booed on the first night and her part given to de Amicis. Not just women but even men with stage experience quake at the thought of their first appearance in a foreign country. And do you think that’s all? – – By no means – ci vuole il Posesso del Teatro 14 even in the case of a woman, and this applies to her dress, hairstyle, make-up etc.: but you know this yourself if only you’ll think about it – I know that a moment’s serious consideration will convince you that your idea, however well meant, needs time and considerable preparation and that a completely different course is necessary if this plan is to be carried out in the longer term. What impresario wouldn’t laugh if one were to recommend a girl of 16 or 17 who has never appeared on stage? – – Your suggestion– I can hardly write when I think about it – the suggest
ion that you should travel around with Herr Weber and, be it noted, his 2 daughters almost robbed me of my wits. My dearest son! How can you allow yourself even for a moment to be taken in by such an appalling idea? Your letter reads just like a novel. – – Could you really bring yourself to travel the world with strangers? To cast aside your reputation – your old parents, your dear sister? – To expose me to the mockery and ridicule of the prince and of the whole town that loves you ? – Yes, to expose me to mockery and yourself to contempt as I’ve been obliged to tell everyone who asked me that you’ll be going to Paris; and finally you now want to set out at random with total strangers? No, it surely requires little forethought to put this idea from your mind. – In order that I may convince the two of you that you’re being overhasty, let me tell you that the time is now approaching when no one in his right mind could consider such a move. The situation is such that it is impossible to know where war may break out as whole regiments are everywhere on the march or waiting in readiness.15 – In Switzerland? – In Holland? – – But there’s not a soul there all summer; and in winter one can just about make enough in Berne and Zurich not to die of hunger, but there’s nothing anywhere else. And Holland now has other things to think about, apart from music, while Herr Hummel 16 and your concert expenses will eat up half your income. And what will become of your reputation? – This is a matter for lesser lights, for second-rate composers, for scribblers, for a Schwindl, a Zappa, a Ricci etc.17 Just name another great composer who’d deign to take such an abject step? – – Be off with you to Paris! And soon! Mix with great people – aut Caesar aut nihil 18 – the mere idea of seeing Paris should have kept you from all these flighty ideas. From Paris the fame and reputation of a man of great talent spread to the rest of the world, there the nobility treats people of genius with the greatest deference, respect and courtesy – there you’ll find an attractive lifestyle in remarkable contrast to the coarseness of our German courtiers and ladies, and you’ll become proficient in the French language. As for the company of Wendling etc., you simply have no need of it. You’ve known them for a very long time, and didn’t your mother realize? Were you both blind? – No, I know what must have happened, you were taken in by them and she didn’t dare oppose you. I’m angry that you both lack the trust and honesty necessary to tell me these things candidly and in detail; it was exactly the same with the elector, although it was all bound to come out in the end. You wanted to spare me the annoyance, but in the end you’ve lumbered me with a whole pile of worries that have almost cost me my life. You know – and you have 1000 proofs of it – that God in His goodness has endowed me with sound common sense, that my head is firmly screwed on and that I’ve often found a way out of the most confused situations, predicting and guessing a whole host of eventualities: what stopped you from asking for my advice and from always acting according to my wishes? My son, you should see me as your most honest friend rather than as a stern father. – Consider whether I have always treated you as a friend and served you as a servant serves his master, providing you with all possible support and helping you to enjoy all manner of honest and respectable pleasures, often at great inconvenience to myself. – – Presumably Herr Wendling will already have left! Although half dead, I’ve already managed to plan and arrange everything relating to your journey to Paris. Herr Arbauer, a well-known businessman from Augsburg and Frankfurt, is now with his German agent in Paris and will be remaining there throughout Lent, a letter will go off to him on the 23rd and on the same day I’ll send you detailed instructions on what you must do and approximately how much the journey may cost, and I’ll enclose an open letter that you must hand over on your arrival, as Herr Arbauer – who, I believe, was at your concert in Augsburg – will already have received news of your arrival. This beastly business has cost me more than one sleepless night. As soon as you receive this letter, I want you to write and tell me how much money you have in hand. I hope you can count for certain on the 200 florins. I was astonished when you wrote to say that you now plan to finish off the music for Monsieur Dejean at your convenience. – Haven’t you handed it over yet? And you were thinking of leaving on 15 Feb.? – And yet you went off on that jaunt to Kirchheim – and took Mlle Weber with you, so that you received less as the princess had 2 people to reward, a gift you’d otherwise have had just for yourself. It doesn’t matter – but, really, what if Herr Wendling were now to play a trick on you and Monsieur Dejean were not to keep his word as the whole idea was for you to wait and travel with them. Send me news by return so that I know how things stand. I now intend to tell you what you can do for Mlle Weber. Tell me, who are the people who give Italian lessons, – aren’t some of them old maestri, but mostly old tenors ? Has Sgr Raaff heard Mlle Weber sing? Talk to him and ask him to hear her sing your arias; by way of an excuse you can say that you want him to hear some arias of your own composition. In this way you can do your best for her, then speak to him alone privately afterwards. No matter how he may sing, he knows what he’s talking about – and if she can win him over, she’ll have won over all the impresarios in Italy who knew him as a great singer. Meanwhile she should find an opportunity to appear onstage in Mannheim: even if she’s not paid, it would be of use to her. That you take pleasure in helping the downtrodden is something you’ve inherited from your father: but above all you must think single-mindedly of the welfare of your parents, otherwise your soul will go to hell.