Luckily, the incorrigibly musical Czechs championed Mozart to the limit! WithDie Entführunghe had won them heart and soul, and by the timeFigaroreached Prague, that city was on the way to becoming the true Mozart capital of Europe. From that moment nothing seemed greatly to matter but that opera. In the composer’s own words, people would listen to nothing else and talk of nothing else. Its melodies were worked up into dance arrangements. Players in beer gardens and even the wandering street musicians who begged for pennies on corners had to sing or strum theirNon piu andraiand the rest of the tunes if they wanted any passer-by to pay attention to them. “Truly a great honor for me,” mused the composer. Prague, now a high altar of Mozart worship, was for some time to remain so.
The creator ofFigarohad valued friends in Prague. Among the dearest of these were the Duscheks, whom he had known in Salzburg—Franz, a gifted pianist and composer, and his wife, Josefa, both older than Mozart. Josefa, an excellent musician, became an exceptional singer, and for her Wolfgang was to compose some superb though difficult concertarias. She was well-to-do and, with the money an admirer lavished on her, she bought herself an estate known as theBertramka—still one of the show places of Prague, despite the vicissitudes of more than a century and a half. Here Mozart was often an honored guest, and to this day the villa and the hilly gardens surrounding it seem to breathe his spirit.
The permanent Italian company that supplied opera to the people of Prague, though not large, was exceedingly capable. At this time it was managed by a certain Pasquale Bondini. Its two efficient conductors (both of them Bohemians), Josef Strobach and J. B. Kucharz, were heart and soul devoted to Mozart. The intensely music-loving Czechs jammed Mozart’s academies and could not hear enough of his symphonies and clavier works. Small wonder, therefore, that Bondini resolved to take advantage of the heaven-sent opportunity of Mozart’s presence to commission him to write a new opera for the company next season. The fee was the usual sum of 100 ducats (no more!), the opera—Don Giovanni.
Actually, much more could be said of this Prague visit of Mozart’s. At one of his concerts he presented for the first time the D major Symphony which sent its hearers into such raptures that the world has forever named it the “Prague” Symphony. When he arrived from Vienna it had been arranged that he was to stay with the Duscheks, but, Josefa being away, Mozart accepted the hospitality of the aristocrat, Count Thun, and sat as an honored guest among the great of the land. He doubtless remembered how at Colloredo’s court his table companions had been cooks and grooms! He was taken to the sumptuous dwelling of still another local patrician, the Count Canal. And so it continued from day to day. Yet he found time to write a piecefor a wandering harpist, which the latter played everywhere, boasting that Mozart had specially composed it for him.
In February 1787, Mozart was back in Vienna in a joyous frame of mind. One may question that this jubilant mood was of long duration. That the new opera was to be ready as early as the following October was hardly the greatest of his worries, for Mozart, like Haydn, Bach, and other masters of that century, was accustomed to a speed of creative production that puts our machine age to shame. The welcome the Viennese accorded the returning traveler, flushed by the recollection of his recent triumphs, was frosty. Also, there came the news that his father’s health was failing. “Naturally,” reflected Leopold, “old people do not grow younger!” Wolfgang wrote his parent in words that nobly convey the essence of his own mature philosophy:
“I need not tell you with what anxiety I await better news from you ... although I am wont in all things to anticipate the worst. Since death is the true goal of our lives, I have made myself so well acquainted during the past two years with this true and best friend of mankind that the idea of it no longer holds any terror for me, but rather much that is tranquil and comforting. And I thank God that He has granted me the good fortune to obtain this opportunity of regarding death as the key to our true happiness. I never lie down in bed without considering that, young as I am, perhaps I may on the morrow be no more. Yet not one of those who know me say that I am morose or melancholy, and for this I thank my Creator and wish heartily that the same happiness may be given to my fellow men.”
One is moved to think of Shubert’s words to his father a few years later when, looking upon the lakes and peaks of the Austrian Alps, he wrote:
“As if death were the worst thing that could befall one ... could one but look on these divine lakes and mountains ... he would deem it a great happiness to be restored for a new life to the inscrutable forces of the earth!”
All the same, Mozart was profoundly shaken when, on May 28, his father passed away without the opportunity to see his son once more. “You can realize my feelings,” he wrote his friend Gottfried von Jacquin. We shall not go far wrong when we surmise that these deep and solemn emotions colored to a considerable degree some of the more tragic pages of the nascentDon Giovanni, the book of which Da Ponte was now writing for him while working at the same time on librettos for Salieri and Martin!
In the spring of 1787 the composer had a brief but memorable encounter; for at this time there came briefly to Vienna from Bonn a sixteen-year-old youth—Ludwig van Beethoven, a protégé of the Count Waldstein—presumably to study with Mozart. The latter heard his visitor improvise and was at first unimpressed because he believed the extemporization had been “memorized,” but was converted as soon as he gave the young Rhinelander a complicated theme to treat on the spot. The originality and seriousness of what he heard stirred the older musician to the prophecy: “This young man is going to make the world talk about him!” But Mozart had, at the moment, no leisure for this prospective pupil, who returned shortly to Bonn and on his later trip after Mozart’s death placed himself under the direction of Haydn.
In mid-September Mozart and Constanze went to Prague, bringing the partly finishedDon Giovanniscore. Bondini had found the composer lodgings at the house on the Kohlmarkt called the “Three Lion Cubs.” Across the way, at the innZum Platteis, rooms were engaged for Da Ponte and, as the windows faced each other, composer and librettist had long discussions across the narrow street about details of the book, in the preparation of which Mozart, with his keen dramatic instincts, played a dominating role. He and Constanze appeared, however, to have spent quite as much time with the Duscheks at theBertramkaas at the “Three Lion Cubs.” Rehearsals consumed a great amount of energy, there were numerous modifications to be made in the music (the young baritone, Luigi Bassi, who had the title role, demandedfiverecastings of the duetLa ci darembefore he was satisfied with the music), and Mozart had all manner of trouble with Catarina Micelli, the Elvira. In addition, the singer of Zerlina, Caterina Bondini, could not utter the peasant girl’s shriek in the first finale to the composer’s satisfaction until he terrified her by grasping her roughly and thus causing her to scream exactly as he wanted. After one of the last rehearsals the conductor, Kucharz, being asked by the master for his candid opinion of the opera, replied encouragingly: “Whatever comes from Mozart will always delight in Bohemia.” “I assure you, dear friend, I have spared myself no pains to produce something worthy for the people of Prague!” declared the composer, who had already boasted that “my Praguers understand me.”
Here is the place, no doubt, to tell once more the oft-repeatedtale of the overture, put on paper, according to a hoary legend, the night before the première while Constanze kept the master awake by plying him with punch and telling him stories. As a matter of fact, the overture was written the night before the dress rehearsal—and it was nothing unusual for Mozart to write down at the last moment a work mentally finished in every detail.
A few days after the first performance the PragueOberpostamtszeitungpublished a review that probably excels anything ever written about the opera. It read simply: “Connoisseurs and musicians say that nothing like it has ever been produced in Prague.” The opinion is probably as true today as in 1787. For there is literally nothing likeDon Giovanni, either among its composer’s creations or elsewhere. One can only share the emotion of Rossini when, being shown the manuscript score, he said to its owner, the singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia: “I want to bow the knee before this sacred relic!” And echo the words of Richard Wagner: “What is more perfect thaneverynumber in ‘Don Giovanni’? Where else has music won so infinitely rich an individuality, been able to characterize so surely, so definitely and in such exuberant plentitude as here?”
Figarois, if you will, the more perfect artistic entity of the two;Don Giovanniis looser, less consistent, on the surface even grossly illogical. But so, too, is human nature. And if all the world’s a stage, what more than adramma giocosois the experience of life? Whatever the narrow intent of Lorenzo da Ponte, when he carpentered the book out of well-worn odds and ends, it was with a profound knowledge of the sorrows and absurdities of humankind that Mozart breathed into it an abiding soul.
“Long live da Ponte, long live Mozart!” had written the stage director, Domenico Guardasoni. “All impresarios, all artists must exalt them to the skies; for as long as such men live there can be no more question of theatre miseries!” The Duscheks outdid themselves to make life pleasant for their guests. Mozart found time to compose several songs and even a superb concert air,Bella mia fiamma, addio, for Josefa after that lady had locked him up in the garden house till he had finished the promised music.
On November 15, 1787, which virtually coincided with the composer’s return to Vienna, Gluck died. Less than a month later Joseph II appointed Mozart to the older master’s post of Kammerkompositeur, with an annual salary of 800 Gulden. Gluck had received 2000; and before long Mozart was complaining that his pay was “too much for what he did, too little for what he could do.” What he did was principally to supply minuets, contradances, andTeutschefor court balls and similar occasions.
The year 1788 dawned in gloomy fashion for Mozart. To be sure,Don Giovannihad its first Viennese hearing on May 7, with a cast including his sister-in-law, Aloysia Lange, as Donna Anna, Catarina Cavalieri (the original Constanze inDie Entführung) as Elvira, and Francesco Benucci, the first Figaro, as Leporello. Mozart had cut out some numbers, replacing them with new ones, eliminated the platitudinous epilogue, and ended the work with the prodigious hell music of Don Giovanni’s disappearance. The Emperor remarked: “The opera is divine, perhaps even finer than ‘Figaro.’ But it is a rather tough morsel for the teeth of my Viennese”—to which Mozart replied, “Let us give them time to chew it!”
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’sAcis and GalatheaandMessiah, 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 glanceon 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.
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 ownEntführung, 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 ofFigaroin August 1789 appears to have moved the Emperor to approach Mozart with a commission for a new opera. The outcome wasCosì fan tutte, the incentive to the plot being an incident said tohave 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 theDecameronthat 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 tuttewas 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 theJournal des Luxus und der Modenremarked: “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.
With the accession of the new emperor, Mozart briefly imagined the “gates of his good luck were about to open.” He was quickly disillusioned. Leopold II was hard, cold, unmusical. He instantly dismissed some of his predecessor’s most faithful artistic servitors. Da Ponte, for one, was dropped. Mozart’s opponent, Salieri, cautiously withdrew into obscurity and waited behind the scenes for a new opportunity. Van Swieten tried to obtain for Mozart a position as teacher of the Archduke Franz, but nothing came of the well-meant effort, and presently the composer found his pupils reduced to two. His health began to trouble himalarmingly, with headaches and tooth troubles. He had the mortification of being ignored when the King of Naples visited Vienna, while Salieri and Haydn enjoyed special honors.
He was not even asked to participate in the musical festivities in connection with the Emperor’s coronation in October 1790, or to travel to Frankfurt, where the ceremony was to take place. So he decided to make the journey at his own expense, hoping against hope for some distinction or reward. Though he did not obtain either, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that hisDon Giovanni,Figaro,Entführung, and even the earlyFinta giardiniera, were relished in neighboring Mainz. The opera chosen for the actual coronation was Wranitzky’sOberon. However, the Frankfurt town council “graciously” allowed Mozart to give a concert “on his own responsibility” at a local theater, October 13 at 11 in the morning! “Plenty of honor, but little money,” he wrote. He played two concertos (probably the F major, K. 459, and the D major, K. 537) and a rondo. As ever, his improvisation impressed deeply—only a royal luncheon party and a maneuver of Hessian troops were counter attractions that cut down the attendance. On the way home he stopped off in Mannheim and Munich, saw his old friends Cannabich and Ramm, played at an academy the Elector Carl Theodor gave for the returning King of Naples, and went home to Vienna, where Constanze had moved their effects into a new apartment in the Rauhensteingasse—destined to be his last home on earth!
In his new dwelling the composer completed by December two superb works—the String Quintet in D (K. 593) and the stunning Adagio and Allegro in F minor (K. 594) “for an organ cylinder in a clock.” About that same timethe director of the Italian Opera in London, one O’Reilly, suggested that he come for half a year to England, to write two operas for that theater and give concerts, and promised him 300 pounds sterling. Nothing stood in the way of O’Reilly’s suggestion, except operas that the master was soon to provide for Vienna and Prague. Soon afterwards, Haydn on his way to London took leave of his younger friend who bade him farewell with the heart-shaking words: “I fear, Papa, this is the last time we shall see each other!” Salomon, Haydn’s manager, had planned to bring Mozart to England on the older composer’s return to the Continent.
To be sure, there was other work to be done, if in large part trifling. But early in January 1791, Mozart completed his last clavier concerto, the singularly affecting one in B flat (K. 595), which harks back to earlier models and lacks some of the more original and dramatic elements of the incomparable ones in D minor, E flat, A major, C major, and C minor. And in June 1791, on a visit to Constanze in Baden (where she had gone for another cure!), he wrote for a local choirmaster, Anton Stoll, that shortAve Verummotet, than which nothing of Mozart’s is more unutterably seraphic.
He was ill and despondent but his activity was untiring. It is an infinite pity that he did not take the hint of Da Ponte and others who were urging him to come to England, where he might easily have made a fortune and become a British idol like Handel before him and Haydn and Mendelssohn after him. He went on writing because, as he was soon to say, “composition tires me less than resting.” In the spring of 1791 he was commissioned to composeanother opera, which was to be his last and, in a number of respects, his most epoch-making—The Magic Flute(Die Zauberflöte). And with it he was to write one of the most extraordinary works of operatic history, to create German opera in accordance with a long-cherished ambition of his but, like Moses, never to do more than cross the frontier of the promised land he had beheld in vision.
Emanuel Schikaneder, who had known Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart in Salzburg, was a wandering actor and a playwright of sorts. The head of a traveling company, which gave Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and, for better or worse, operas by Gluck andSingspieleby Haydn and Mozart, he had like numberless barnstormers a keen knowledge of the tastes of audiences, particularly of the plebeian ones to which his players catered. In his own way as adventurous a person as Da Ponte, Schikaneder took over in 1789 the direction of a playhouse on the Starhemberg estates, the Freihaus-Theater, in the Wieden district. There he produced comic shows,Singspiele, and operettas. With his grasp of suburban tastes he combined a thorough understanding of what could be done with his brother Mason and old acquaintance, Mozart. A business rival of the impresario Marinelli, who ran a theater in the Leopoldstadt quarter and made a specialty of “magic plays,” he now approached the composer with his ownSingspiel.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1789Drawing in silver on ivory by Dora Stock
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1789Drawing in silver on ivory by Dora Stock
Mozart’s wife, Constanze, about 1783Lithograph from a drawing by Joseph Lange, Constanze’s brother-in-law
Mozart’s wife, Constanze, about 1783Lithograph from a drawing by Joseph Lange, Constanze’s brother-in-law
We cannot here examine the sources from which he assembled his libretto. There ran through it a powerful strain of Masonic influence, love interest, low comedy in abundance (Schikaneder took care to tailor to his own measure the role of the wandering bird-catcher Papageno), and other surefire theatrical ingredients. He asked Mozart to supply the music, and the latter, after warning him that since he had never yet written a “magic opera” he hesitated to court failure in this sphere, at length complied. Between March and the end of September 1791,The Magic Flutewas written. Schikaneder, aware of the glorious bargain he had struck, strove to be the soul of complaisance. He supplied the composer with every comfort at his disposal—a charming summerhouse on the grounds of the theater where he could work at the score, with food, wine, and pretty actresses to divert him—in short, whatever promised to humor the musician and promote the flow of inspiration. He even hummed or sang the sort of tunes he considered appropriate to the role he designed for himself.
Let us at this stage dispose of a few legends that, in the course of 160 years, have accumulated about the work. One is that the play is a farrago of childish nonsense, made tolerable only by the variety and grandeur of Mozart’s music; another, that the plot was altered at a late hour because another manager was about to produce a work similar in its story; a third, that the piece was a failure. As a matter of fact, the book ofThe Magic Flutehappens to be one of the best librettos in existence from the point of view of good theater. The imagined “revision” never took place, for considerations of “parallels,” let alone plagiarisms, never bothered theater directors at this epoch. On the contrary, if a play or opera had one feature that pleased its public, a rival manager was quick to copy this very point on an even broader scale. Although at the first performanceThe Magic Flutedid not achieve such an overwhelming triumph as its composer had hoped, before many months had passed it was attracting throngs; and not many years later Schikanederwas able to build out of the wealth it brought him that famous Theater an der Wien which still stands and was to become the cradle of various storied masterworks. As for the much-maligned book, it appealed so powerfully to none other than Goethe that he set out to write a sequel!
While the sick and harried Mozart worked with still inexhaustible fertility at the score of his magic opera he was interrupted by a sufficiently distasteful order from Prague for an opera to be produced there at the coronation of Leopold II as “King of Bohemia.” With no more than eighteen days to compose the music and assist in the production of this “occasional piece,” he was ordered to set an old text of Metastasio’s (retouched, it is true, by one Caterino Mazzolà)—La Clemenza di Tito, an antiquated specimen ofopera seria, such as the composer had not bothered with since the period ofIdomeneo. The available time being so short, Mozart took along with him his pupil Süssmayr, who was asked to perform the almost secretarial job of writing theseccorecitatives, leaving the more important parts of the music to the master. His good friend, the impresario Guardasoni, mounted the opera in sumptuous fashion. But good will did not supplant genuine inspiration and, for all its craftsmanship,La Clemenza di Titodid not strike fire. The Empress dismissed it asporcheria tedesca(German rubbish). A correspondent ofStudien für Tonkünstler und Musikfreundereported that the “beloved Kapellmeister Mozard” did not obtain this time the applause he had a right to expect! For once, clearly, “his Praguers did not understand him.” Doubtless,Titois not aFigaroor aDon Giovanni, but those unfamiliar with the work may well ask themselves if it is as bad as history paints it.Anyway its reception did not raise the master’s spirit. And he took leave of his friends with tears.
He was now seriously ill. He had fainting fits and accesses of exhaustion. On September 28, 1791, he finishedThe Magic Flute—the March of the Priests and the overture being the last numbers set down. The Masonic symbols and meanings with which the opera is filled (comprehensible, however, only to initiates) are heard in the thrice-reiterated three chords at the opening of the superb tone piece. This overture is a fully developed sonata movement built on a fugal plan, the mercurial subject having been borrowed from a clavier sonata of his old friend and rival, Clementi. At the first performance the composer Johann Schenk (later, one of Beethoven’s teachers) crept through the orchestra to Mozart, who was conducting, and reverently kissed his hand, while the composer, continuing to conduct with his right hand, affectionately patted Schenk’s head with his left. He took pleasure in playing the glockenspiel during Papageno’s air “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” and once, in fun, introduced an unexpected arpeggio which threw Schikaneder completely out for a few minutes.
As he was boarding his coach on the trip to Prague, Mozart was startled on being accosted by a gaunt, gray-clad stranger of mysterious mien who asked him if he were willing to undertake, for a certain sum, the composition of a requiem mass to be delivered at a specified time. He agreed but from this moment the weird visitor, whose identity he was admonished not to try to discover, gave him no rest. He became convinced that a messenger from theBeyond had sought him out, that the incident had a supernatural aspect, that he was, indeed, ordered by a higher power to compose a death mass forhimself! And the certainty that his time was at hand grew steadily upon him.
The incident, in reality, had nothing macabre or mysterious about it. The “gray messenger” was a certain Leutgeb, steward of the Count Walsegg zu Stuppach who had lately lost his wife and who, aspiring to be known as a composer, planned to perform the requiem as his own work. But Mozart knew nothing of this. He had a letter from his old friend, Da Ponte, entreating him to join him in England. But it was too late and Mozart’s tragedy had to be played out to the bitter close that was now swiftly approaching. To Da Ponte he dispatched this pathetic missive:
“I wish I could follow your advice, but how can I do so? I feel stunned, I reason with difficulty, and cannot rid myself of the vision of this unknown man. I see him perpetually; he entreats me, he presses me, he impatiently demands the work. I go on writing.... Otherwise I have nothing more to fear. I know from what I suffer that the hour is come; I am at the point of death; I have come to the end before having had the enjoyment of my talent. Life was so beautiful, my career stood at first under so auspicious a star! But one cannot change one’s destiny!”
What tortured him more than anything was the thought that, as furiously as he worked, theRequiemmight remain unfinished at the death he knew was imminent. He had numberless discussions with his pupil, Xaver Süssmayr, but it was daily becoming clearer to him that he had small chance of completing the mass himself. On a walk in the Prater with Constanze in the early autumn he exclaimed:“It cannot last much longer ... Certainly, I have been given poison; that is a feeling I cannot shake off!” And this, presumably, is the basis of the age-old slander that Salieri had been his murderer! At all events growing weakness forced him to take to his bed on November 20. He was never to leave it. “I know,” he had said shortly before, “that my music-making is about at an end. I feel a constant chill which I cannot explain. I now have no more to do save with doctors and apothecaries!”
His hands and feet were beginning to swell. Yet he struggled desperately to get on with the composition of the mass. The visits of a few friends seemed to comfort the sick man, and he asked them to try over in his presence certain completed pages of the score. At the beginning of December he himself struggled to sing some of the alto part of the work. When theLacrymosawas reached he gave up the attempt after a few measures and, overcome by the certainty that he was doomed never to finish the music, he broke down in a fit of weeping. And in these days, with tragic irony, there dawned a promise of better things! The rapidly growing popularity ofThe Magic Fluteaugured a carefree future; a group of Hungarian nobles began to raise a subscription that would have assured Mozart an annual income of 1000 Gulden; and from Holland there came, almost at the twelfth hour, news of an even more gratifying project.
In the last hours his sister-in-law, Sophie Haibl, lent what assistance she could. Constanze, grief-stricken and stupefied, was helpless. The sick man, tortured to the last by the thought of his unfinishedRequiem, was shaken by thechills and fires of fever. It was found necessary to take a canary out of the sickroom because the singing of the bird seemed to cause the sufferer physical pain. He appealed to Sophie to remain with him, to comfort Constanze, and to “see me die. I have the taste of death on my tongue already and who is to care for my Constanze when I am gone?” A doctor who attended him was at the theater when summoned and, realizing the hopelessness of the case, promised to come “when the play was over.” Sophie was dispatched to call a priest. When she returned she found the dying man bending over some sketches of theRequiemand giving Süssmayr some final directions about the work. At last he lapsed into unconsciousness, a few moments before the end puffing out his cheeks and making what the tearful bystanders imagined to be an effort to imitate the sound of the drums in his unfinished score. And five minutes before one on the morning of December 5, 1791, he died.
Of what illness did Mozart die? Typhus say some; a result of childhood illness, say others, complicated by the strain of overwork, traveling, disappointments, and deprivations. The most plausible medical explanation would appear to have been supplied by a modern Salzburg physician, Dr. H. Kasseroller, who diagnosed the cause of the master’s early demise as uremia resulting from Bright’s disease. And this may explain the composer’s persistent idea in his last weeks that he had been administered poison.
The rest of the pitiful story need not detain us. The parsimonious Baron van Swieten advised Constanze to observe economy in making the funeral arrangements; and so Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave. On December 6, the body was taken to the cemetery of St. Marx. A handfulof mourners who followed the hearse dispersed when a heavy snowstorm made progress difficult. The stricken Constanze found it impossible to accompany the pathetic little cortege; and when some time later she attempted to discover her husband’s resting place, a new gravedigger who replaced the earlier one had no idea whatever where he lay.
What matter that posterity has never discovered the whereabouts of his sepulcher? Mozart, the incessant wanderer, the infinitely lonely, now lives more fully and gloriously than ever in the hearts and souls of all true worshipers of the divinest in music. And if his earthly tragedy has never seemed so poignant as it does today, we can take consolation from the circumstance that our generation has learned to prize the greatness, elevation, and beauty of his art more, perhaps, than did any of our predecessors.
Harp and cello logo