Wolfgang Mozart at the age of seven, accompanied by his father, Leopold Mozart, and his sister, Nannerl.
Engraving by De La Fosse after Carmontelle (1764)

Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart

By HERBERT F. PEYSER

NEW YORK
Grosset & Dunlap
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1951 by
The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York

Mozart’s earthly career was so poignantly short yet so filled with incalculable achievement that the author of this booklet finds himself confronted with an impossible task. He has, consequently, preferred to outline as best he could in the space at his disposal a few successive details of a life that was amazingly crowded with incident, early triumphs, and subsequent crushing tragedies, rather than to consider (let alone evaluate) the staggering creative abundances the master bequeathed mankind.

It is scarcely necessary to disclaim for this thumbnail sketch any new slant or original illumination. If it moves any reader to renew his acquaintance with the standard biographies of the composer or, better still, to deepen his artistic enrichment by a study of modern interpretations of contemporary Mozart scholars like Alfred Einstein, and Bernhard Paumgartner, its object will be more than achieved.

Printed in the United States of America

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If the Mozartean family tree was nothing like the prodigious trunk of the Bachs it was still not without striking features. There were Mozarts in South Germany as far back as the end of the sixteenth century; and as remotely as the thirteenth the name stood on a document in Cologne. To be sure, various spellings of Mozart existed in those distant times. It appeared as “Mosshard,” “Motzhart,” “Mozert,” and in still other variants. Bernhard Paumgartner, Director of the Salzburg Mozarteum, thinks it derived from the old German root mod, or muot, from which came the word Mut (courage). Be this as it may, German “Mozarts” were anything but exceptional a couple of hundred years before Leopold Mozart or his son, Wolfgang, came into the picture. In Augsburg there was an Anton Mozart who painted landscapes “in the manner of Breughel.” Another Mozart from the same town, one Johann Michael, was a sculptor, who in 1687 moved to Vienna and became an Austrian citizen.

But of all these “Mossherts,” “Motards,” and the rest, only one, the mason apprentice David Motzert, born in the village of Pfersee, close to Augsburg, really belongs to our story. The Augsburger Bürgerbuch of 1643 mentions him and sets his fortune at 100 florins. By his marriage with the Jungfer Maria Negeler he was to become the great-great-grandfather of the creator of Don Giovanni. In the fullness of time David’s grandson, Johann Georg, abandoned the occupation of his forebears for that of a bookbinder. His second wife blessed him with two daughters and six sons. One of these sons, Franz Aloys, gained a kind of immortality as the father of Maria Anna Thekla, Wolfgang’s cousin, the “Bäsle,” to whom he wrote that series of notoriously smutty letters with which this lively young lady’s name is eternally linked.

Johann Georg’s first-born, Johann Georg Leopold, became for posterity simply Leopold Mozart, composer of arid music, author of a celebrated violin method, and father of Wolfgang and of Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia, whom the world remembers almost solely as “Nannerl.” It is a Nannerl, incidentally, that we have to look for a sort of continuation of the Mozart line down almost to our own time. On January 9, 1919, there died in the Feldhof Insane Asylum, near Graz, the seventy-seven-year-old Bertha Forschter, a great-granddaughter of Nannerl, who had lived on in Salzburg til 1829, highly revered because of her exalted kinship.

Early Life in Salzburg

What brought Leopold Mozart to Salzburg in the first place? A choirsinger in the Augsburg Church of St. Ulrich and a graduate of the Augsburger Jesuit Lyceum, he seemed to be shaping for a priestly career. He did not, at all events, follow the bookbinder’s trade like his brothers. Alfred Einstein finds it difficult to grasp why he should have preferred Salzburg to Munich or Ingolstadt for an orthodox theological education. Possibly a suggestion of the canons of St. Ulrich had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, he enrolled at the University in the town on the Salzach, July 22, 1738. There he studied philosophy, logic, and music, understood Latin, composed Passion cantatas and instrumental works, acquired some proficiency on the violin, and obtained a smattering of legal knowledge. Five years later he became fourth violinist in the court orchestra of the archbishop, but he maintained his close family connections with Augsburg and later encouraged his son not to relax these ties.

It is not quite certain exactly when he met Anna Maria Pertl, whose father was superintendent of a clerical institution at St. Gilgen on the nearby Wolfgang See. In the fall of 1772 he wrote her from Milan: “It was 25 years ago, I think, that we had the sensible idea of getting married, one which we had cherished for many years. All good things take time!” Anna Maria was her husband’s junior by a year. Jahn questions if she rose in any way above the average woman of her type. A good provincial, she had not the suspicious, mistrustful qualities of Leopold. She lacked intellectual depth, but she was a good wife and affectionate mother, a genuinely lovable creature, a receptacle of all the community gossip and local tittle-tattle. “She judged with an eye just as friendly as her husband’s was critical and sarcastic.” And from his mother Wolfgang inherited his gayety and some of his more incorrigible Hanswurst characteristics.

Though the Mozart couple had seven children, only two of these survived infancy—Nannerl, the fourth, and her great brother, who came last. Wolfgang was born on January 27, 1756, at eight o’clock in the evening in the house belonging to Lorenz Hagenauer, on the narrow Getreide Gasse, Salzburg. The very next morning the newcomer (whose birth came near costing the mother’s life) was carried to church and baptized with the name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus, the last in honor of his godfather, Johann Theophilus Pergmayr. Subsequently the Greek Theophilus was changed to its more euphonious Latin equivalent Amadeus. Wolfgang, like the other Mozart children, was at first nourished with water instead of milk, according to a preposterous superstition of the time. We have to thank the good health of the infant that he did not succumb, as did most of the other Mozart offspring, and even withstood later illnesses.

A sensitive and affectionate lad, Wolfgang was extraordinarily devoted to his parents, especially to his father, despite Leopold’s humorless and obstinate nature. “Next to God comes papa!” was a childhood expression of the boy. To be sure, the inflexible martinet commanded a certain respect by reason of his very genuine love for his family and