New Illustrated Lives of Great Composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

1. Growing up in Salzburg

‘Mozart is good and admirable’ – Beethoven

The house in Salzburg where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born was tall and narrow; it had an elaborately moulded portico over the large front entrance and beautiful wrought-iron gate-doors leading into an open hallway. The ground floor was the storeroom of a shop, nothing to do with the Mozarts; their part of the house began at a higher level on the third floor. Today the house faces a street; in the 1750s, however, it looked out over an open square, the Löchelplatz, which, with its sparkling fountain, must have been a pleasant sight. In his biography of Mozart, Eric Blom has left us a fine pensketch of the atmosphere of the place:

Left: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Portrait in oils by Barbara Kraft, 1819 (Vienna, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde). This was based on a detail from the family portrait of 1780–81 painted by Croce. According to Otto Erich Deutsch, Kraft worked under Nannerl’s supervision: the picture appears to be the best and most faithful likeness of all.

Right: Mozart’s birthplace. A drawing (Schenk, Mozart and His Times).

The room in which Mozart was born. The Mozart house was acquired by the International Foundation of the Mozarteum in 1917, and is now a notable museum.

The flat-fronted house, with no visible roof, looks Italianate from the outside, but has a Germanic homeliness within. How apt a setting for a master whose manner is Italian, whose soul German. A curious odour strikes the visitor as he enters the whitewashed and roughly paved entrance hall, a smell that makes one think of drains and cats and dinners all in one, without being exactly redolent of any of these things.

The house was stuffed with musical instruments in every corner; three members of a family of four were full-time musicians. There were violins, harpsichords, clavichords, recorders, and probably sheets of music everywhere. Wolfgang’s father, Leopold Mozart (1719–87), was a well-known musician; he played and taught the violin, organ and clavier. He had written a popular book about playing the violin called Violin School (published in the year of Wolfgang’s birth), which was widely known and used in the musical world.

Leopold was also the official composer to the Court of Salzburg, a court ruled over at the time of Wolfgang’s birth by a Prince-Archbishop called Count Schrattenbach, a good man who encouraged music and the arts, and kept a permanent orchestra of between 21 and 33 musicians. At that time Germany and Austria were divided internally into small city-states, ruled over by electors or princes; each ruler kept up as lavish a court as he could afford, based on the example set by the Emperor in Vienna.

Salzburg, with the Archbishop’s palace, the Cathedral, the Nonnberg Convent and St. Peter’s Monastery. A contemporary painting.

Music was an important part of court life; each court had a Kapellmeister who was in charge of all the music, both of the religious music in the chapels and churches, and the music needed for festivals, balls and receptions. Leopold was Vice-Kapellmeister, as well as court composer; the Court of Salzburg was famous for its music, although it was only a small court in a small town.

So Leopold was an accomplished musician, and when his son was born on 27 January 1756, the child lived and breathed in an atmosphere of music from the start. The little boy was christened Johan Chrysostom Wolfgang Theophilus; this was shortened to Wolfgang Amadeus (Amadeus being the Latin version of the Greek name Theophilus). Leopold called his son Wolfgangerl or even Woferl, just as he called Wolfgang’s elder sister Nannerl, instead of Anna Maria. Nannerl was five years older than Wolfgang; she was born in July 1751. There were other children, but they all died very young, victims of the high rate of infant mortality.

Prince-Archbishop Sigismund Schrattenbach (1698–1771). A portrait in oils.

Nannerl was an extremely musical little girl; her father had been teaching her the clavier since she was about five, and was delighted with her progress. The ‘clavier’ was the generic word used in those days in Germany to mean any sort of stringed keyboard instrument, including the clavichord, the harpsichord and the piano.

The clavichord looked like a small piano, rather an odd-shaped one. It had a keyboard like a piano, though it was smaller in range, and it had a very soft tone. A brass blade or tangent struck a string when the clavichord key was pressed, and the harder it was pressed the higher in pitch was the note; it was no louder. From the early fifteenth century until Mozart’s time, the clavichord was held the king of keyboard instruments.

Leopold Mozart (1719–87). Frontispiece to the first edition of his Violin School, 1756.

The harpsichord, which has enjoyed such a revival in recent years, is as old as the clavichord, and its strings, which look like those in a piano, are plucked. The player, however, has less control over the tone and length of the note he strikes than he does in the clavichord, but the range of notes is larger. There can also be several keyboards or manuals coupled together, as on an organ – a distinctive feature.

The piano, or rather a forerunner of it, was perfected in Florence by an Italian, Bartolomeo Cristofori. In his workshops sometime between 1693 and 1700 he invented an instrument in which the tangents of the clavichord and the plectra of the harpsichord were replaced by a wholly new innovation, a leather-covered hammer that struck the strings. In the process the player could suddenly control and graduate the tone and the duration of a pitch (or note) and, even more dramatically, its loudness and softness. The early piano was a refined instrument, full of colour and delicate nuances. The Viennese pianos of Mozart’s day, unlike their English counterparts, further allowed for a light, rapid action with precise damping (or silencing of sound) and correspondingly greater clarity. Early pianos went by various names. Most, however, were known as forte-pianos (later pianofortes), a term that essentially emphasised the ability of the instrument to distinguish between soft (piano) and loud (forte).

Anna Maria (‘Nannerl’) Mozart (1751–1829). The superimposed head was probably done by Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni in 1763. The rest of the body and the background would have been painted beforehand, as was the custom of the period. Nannerl married in 1784. On her husband’s death in 1801 she devoted herself to teaching in Salzburg. Becoming blind in 1820, she died in poverty.

The Mozart household, as we have seen, was from the outset exposed to all kinds of keyboard instruments. When Leopold taught his daughter Nannerl to play the ‘clavier’ it can accordingly be safely assumed that she probably played most of them, but specifically the harpsichord and forte-piano. She was a hard-working, good-tempered, sweet girl, and Leopold had high hopes for her.

German clavichord, 1763.

Harpsichord by Johann Adolf Hass of Hamburg, 1764. The instrument was restored in about 1840, which may explain why the natural keys are ivory and the accidentals ebony: normally these colours would have been reversed, with ebony natural keys and ivory accidentals. This instrument appears to have once belonged to Mozart himself (Russell Collection, University of Edinburgh).

Piano by Cristofori, Florence, 1726 (Leipzig, Museum of Musical Instruments, Karl Marx University).

Then, when Wolfgang was four, and a lively, intelligent little boy, he started interrupting Nannerl’s lessons. He had already been amusing himself since he was three years old by trying out his own chords and tunes for hours on the clavier, and now he needed to be properly taught. Leopold was amazed by his son’s progress; Wolfgang, only four years old, would learn a whole minuet and trio in half an hour. Leopold kept a diary about his family, and there are passages from it which give a vivid picture of what Mozart was really like as a little boy. Evocative recollections are also found in a letter written to Nannerl by one Johann Andreas Schachtner (1732–95), court trumpeter at Salzburg. The letter dates from April 1792, a matter of months after Mozart’s death, and is full of anecdotal material:

As soon as he began to give himself to music, all his senses were as good as dead to other activities, and even his pranks and games with toys had to be done to music if he was really going to enjoy them. When he and I carried toys for a game from one room to another, whichever of us was empty-handed had to sing and play a march on the fiddle.

Wolfgang was single-minded about everything he did. When he was learning arithmetic, for instance, he even stopped his music for a while, and in his enthusiasm covered the table, chairs, walls and even the floor with chalked figures. His mother, kind and cheerful, probably cleared it up without much fuss, because Wolfgang was always making her laugh with his unpredictable antics. He was a fiery, affectionate little boy, ready for anything.

Austrian pedal grand piano, probably by Johann Schmidt, late 18th century. Leopold Mozart recommended Schmidt to the Salzburg court and Wolfgang must have been familiar with his instruments (Nürnberg, Rück Collection, Germanisches Nationalmuseum).

From an early stage Wolfgang displayed a remarkable sense of absolute pitch. Schachtner, for instance, tells how he possessed a very good violin,

which Wolfgang always called butter-fiddle on account of its soft and full tone. One day, soon after you returned from Vienna, I let him play on it, and he could not extol it enough. A day or two later I came to see him again, and found him amusing himself with his own violin. At once he said: ‘How is your butter-fiddle?’ and then went on fiddling away at his improvisation. Finally he reflected a little and said to me: ‘Herr Schachtner, your violin is tuned half a quarter-tone lower than mine, if you have left it tuned as it was when I last played on it.’ I laughed at that, but Papa, who knew the child’s extraordinary ear and memory, asked me to fetch my violin and see whether he was right. I did so, and that was how it was.

This same letter of Schachtner’s to Nannerl tells us much else besides. For example, Mozart’s dislike of wind instruments because of their impure tone: