be done by jealous plotters to mar the composer’s success was done, and that so effectively that Mozart declared he would never bring out another opera in the city which treated him so meanly. Fortunately, Figaro, like Die Entführung, was repeated with brilliant success at Prague. Mozart went there to hear it, and received a commission to write an opera for the next season, with a fee of 100 ducats. Da Ponte furnished a libretto, founded on Tirso de Molina’s tale, El Convidado de piedra, and entitled Il Don Giovanni. By the 28th of October 1787 the whole was ready with the exception of the overture, not a note of which was written. This circumstance has led to the idea that it was composed in haste, but it is certain that Mozart knew it all by heart and transcribed it during the night from memory, while his wife told fairy tales to keep him awake.
The opera was produced on the 29th of October with extraordinary effect, and the overture, though played without rehearsal, was as successful as the rest of the music.[1] Yet, when reproduced in Vienna, Don Giovanni pleased less than Salieri’s comparatively worthless Tarare.
On returning to Vienna Mozart was appointed kammercompositor to the emperor, with a salary of 800 gulden (£80). In April 1789 he accompanied Prince Lichnowski to Berlin, where King Frederick William II. offered him the post of “kapellmeister” with a salary of 3000 thalers (£450). Though most unwilling to quit the emperor’s service, he informed him of the offer and requested leave to resign his appointment in Vienna. “Are you going to desert me, then?” asked the emperor; and Mozart, wounded by the reproach, remained, to starve. The emperor now commissioned Mozart to compose another Italian opera, which was produced on the 26th of January 1790 under the title of Cosi fan tutte. Though the libretto by Da Ponte was too stupid for criticism, the music was delicious, and the opera would probably have had a long run but for the emperor’s death on the 20th of February. In March 1791 Mozart consented to write a German opera upon an entirely new plan for Schikaneder, the manager of the little theatre in the Wieden suburb. The piece was to be addressed especially to the Freemasons, and to contain ceaseless allusions both in the words and music to the secrets of the brotherhood. Deeply interested in the affairs of a body of which he was himself a member, Mozart excelled himself in this new work, which took shape as Die Zauberflöte. He was rewarded for his labours by a brilliant artistic success, but Schikaneder alone reaped the financial benefit of the speculation.
Before the completion of Die Zauberflöte a stranger called on Mozart, requesting him to compose a Requiem and offering to pay for it in advance. He began the work under the influence of superstitious fear, believing that the messenger had been sent from the other world to forewarn him of his own approaching death. Meanwhile he received a commission to compose an opera, La Clemenza di Tito, for the coronation of the emperor Leopold II. at Prague. He worked incessantly and far beyond his strength. The coronation took place on the 6th of September, and its splendours threw the opera very much into the shade. Die Zauberflöte was produced on the 30th of September and had a splendid run. But the Requiem still remained unfinished; the stranger therefore made another appointment, paying a further sum in advance. Mozart worked at it unremittingly, hoping to make it his greatest work. In the Requiem he surpassed himself, but he was not permitted to finish it. When the stranger called the third time the composer was no more. The score of the Requiem was reverently completed by Süssmayer, whose task may have been simplified by instructions received from Mozart on his deathbed. It is now known that the work was commissioned by Count Walsegg, who wished to perform it as his own.
Mozart died on the 5th of December 1791, apparently from typhus fever, though he believed himself poisoned. His funeral was a disgrace to the court, the emperor, the public, society itself. On the afternoon of the 6th his body was hurried to a pauper’s grave; and because it rained, Van Swieten, Süssmayer, and three other “friends” turned back and left him to be carried to his last long home alone. (W. S. R.)
Mozart’s work falls conveniently into three periods, though O. Jahn makes out, more accurately, five. Our first period may be said, in sober seriousness, to begin at the age of five and to merge into the second somewhere about the age of sixteen or seventeen. It was fortunate that the infancy of the sonata-forms (q.v.) coincided with the infancy of Mozart; for while this coincidence gave his earliest attempts a marvellous resemblance to the work of the fully-grown masters of the time, it secured for his mental activity a healthy and normal relation to the musical world which infant prodigies can never attain in a modern artistic environment. The little pieces composed by Mozart in his fifth and sixth years are a fascinating study in the unswerving progress made by a child who masters every step, not by some miraculous intuition that enables him to dispense with learning, but by a hardly less miraculous directness of thought that prevents him from either making the same mistake twice or exactly repeating a form once mastered. The violin sonatas written in London and Paris at the age of seven in no way fall below the accepted standards of the period, while they already show that variety of invention and experiment which, by the time he was twelve, caused some sober-minded critics to regard him as a dangerous person. His studies in the severer contrapuntal forms speedily gave him the greatest technical mastery of choral music attained since Bach; and more than one stray piece of church music, or movement from a mass or litany, written before he was fifteen, deserves to take rank as a true masterpiece of which the date is immaterial. At the age of fifteen we see a loss of freshness, especially in the numerous operas which show at its worst that hopeless condition of operatic art from which only Gluck’s most drastic reforms could rescue it. Fortunately, Mozart had at fifteen acquired more than enough technique to rest upon; and thus the growing boy could keep his spirits up, continuing his public successes and indulging his easy sense of mastery, without putting a strain upon his brain which nature need revenge then or afterwards.
Lucio Silla, though loaded with conventional bravura arias, nevertheless shows him approaching the age of seventeen with clear signs of a man’s power, and in higher qualities than mere variety and fancy. Some of its recitatives and choruses strike a solemn dramatic note hitherto undreamt of in stage music, except by Gluck. La Finta giardiniera first gave Mozart scope for the exercise of his wonderful stage-craft and power of characterization. Though it has not kept the stage, yet it marks the beginning of Mozart’s true operatic career, just as the Masses in F and D, written in the same year, mark the close of his first really representative period as a composer of church music. It is, however, difficult to draw such lines definitely; for there is no period of Mozart’s career in which he did not practise all art-forms at once; and the difficulty of drawing inferences as to the relative importance of different forms in his intellectual development is increased by his invariable mastery, which seems to depend neither on method nor on inspiration. Most of the pianoforte sonatas and many of the best-known violin sonatas belong to his early manhood. To the same period also belong those unfortunate masses which, together with several spurious works, were at one time so popular, and have since been accepted as evidence that he had not the depth of feeling and earnestness necessary for church music. Idomeneo and Die Entführung are currently regarded as quite early works, but they are later than any of the masses except the great unfinished work in C minor, and there is some really great church music of his later period in the shape of stray pieces, litanies and vespers (i.e. collections of psalms sung at evening service) which is almost totally neglected, and which shows a consistent solemnity and richness of style no less in keeping with Mozart’s new artistic developments than worthy of the glories of Handel and Bach.
Idomeneo is the only opera of Mozart which unmistakably shows the influence of Gluck; because, with the exception of La Clemenza di Tito, it is the only opera seria by which Mozart is
- ↑ Michael Kelly, in his Reminiscences, has left a delightful account of the circumstances.
