The emperor sent for Wagenseil, and gave up his place to him by the side of the piano. ‘Sir,’ said Mozart to the composer, ‘I am going to play one of your concertos; you must turn over the leaves for me.’ The emperor said, in jest, to the little Wolfgang; ‘It is not very difficult to play with all one’s fingers, but to play with only one, without seeing the keys, would indeed be extraordinary.’ Without manifesting the least surprise at this strange proposal, the child immediately began to play with a single finger, and with the greatest possible precision and clearness. He afterwards desired them to cover the keys of the piano, and continued to play in the same manner, as if he had long practiced it.
From his most tender age, Mozart, animated with the true feeling of his art, Was never vain of the compliments paid him by the great. He only performed insignificant trifles when he had to do with people unacquainted with music. He played, on the contrary, with all the fire and attention of which he was capable, when in the presence of connoisseurs; and his father was often obliged to have recourse to artifice, in order to make the great men, before whom he was to exhibit, pass for such with him.”
Here, in childlike soft unconsciousness, Mozart acts the same part that Beethoven did, with cold imperial sarcasm, when the Allied Sovereigns were presented to him at Vienna. “I held myself ‘vornehm,’” said Beethoven, that is, treated them with dignified affability; and his smile is one of saturnine hauteur, as he says it; for the nature, so deeply glowing towards man, was coldly disdainful to those who would be more than men, merely by the aid of money and trappings. Mozart’s attitude is the lovelier and more simple; but Beethoven’s lion tread and shake of the mane are grand too.
The following anecdote shows, that Mozart (rare praise is this) was not less dignified and clear-sighted as a man than in his early childhood.
“The Italians at the court of the Emperor, Joseph the Second, spoke of Mozart’s first essays (when he was appointed chapel-master) with more jealousy than fairness, and the emperor, who scarcely ever judged for himself, was easily carried away by their decisions. One day after hearing the rehearsal of a comic opera, which he had himself demanded of Mozart,
