MOZART'S LETTERS.* WE should be disappointed were we to look
for the same kind of interest in Mozart's as in Mendelsaohn's letters. The circum- stances of the two lives were different. Different worlds sur- rounded the two men. Mendelasohn was happy, fortunate, appre- ciated. Mozart's sunny temperament gave way under the pressure
of sorrow, ill-luck, and ill-treatment. He started in life badly, and he never made up his arrears. From the first he was the slave of a cruel master, and no better master would have pity on him and release him. When at last he was forced to renounce that service, he had only the most precarious support to depend upon, pupils who were capricious, and compositions that were not certain of acceptance. It is a miserable spectacle, the career of a man whom everybody now reverences as one of the greatest of musicians, but who was condemned to failure and poverty all his life, and whose very grave is unknown to this day.
Nevertheless we think Dr. Nohl has done us a service by col- lecting these letters, and Lady Wallace a service by translating them. Both editor and translator have their faults. Dr. Nohl should have added more explanatory notes, and should not have left the reader to supplement Mozart's letters by one of the lives of Mozart. One of the doctor's omissions, which we have had occasion to trace, is fatal to the interest of the letter in which it occurs, and many such would seriously injure the collection. Writing of the Archduke Maximilian, Mozart says, "Stupidity peers out of his eyes." Now in the original of this letter the words "Archduke" and " stupidity " are in cipher, a fact we learn from Dr. Nohl himself in the notes to his Life of Beethoven. But surely such a fact ought to be stated in its own place ; it adds greatly to the value of Mozart's letters ; it is apt to be overlooked in notes at the end of another man's life. Lady Wallace's faults are of another order. She is generally speaking one of our best translators from the German, but she is apparently less familiar with Italian. In Letter 11, " Sentimmo la ;masa can- tata" ought to be, "we heard the mass chanted," not" the chan- ted mass," and " Campidoglio " is generally known in English as "Capitol." Again, " jeri altro" is the day before yesterday, not the other day ; and "deutsche Compositor" (patois) stands for a German, not a good, composer. If Lady Wallace means to imply that German and good are synonymous, we must beg to differ from her ; but as we presume this mistake is merely a slip of the pen, we pass it with a slight protest. In other parts we find that she has softened down Mozart's phrases almost unnecessarily. One • The Lette,s of Wolfgang Amadva Mozart (1709-1791). Translated from the col- lection of Ludwig liobl by Lady Wallace. 2 ye". London; Longman&
passage, meant to be unusually emphatic, as it is written large in the ' original manuscript and printed in small capitals by Dr. Nohl, is not marked at all in the English. Mozart tells a story of an infamous case of official brutality at Innsbruck. A noble abused the manager of a theatre in the street, and followed up the abuse by a blow. On the manager returning this he was taken to the House of Correction by a party of soldiers, and given fifty blows with a stick. "At the fifth blow," says Mozart, "his trousers were in pieces ;" but this most significant touch, which lights up the whole atrocity of the scene, is left out by Lady Wallace.
Even if this whole story had been left out, there would be
enough in these litters 'to show the chaos existing in Germany before- the French Revolution. Mozart began life as concert inadtef to the Archbishop of Salzburg, at the magnificent salary of twelte florins 'and a half yearly. In order that he might not apply for an increase, his water always proclaimed that he knew nothitig,' and that he Ought to go to a training school to learn Music. "'The slavery of Salzburg," that "beggarly Court," the Archbishop "playing 'The great man with me," are significant phrases. Bat *hen the Archbishop took Mozart to Vienna in his suite the slavery was more pronounced, and the beggary (though of course Mozart's salary had been increased) was quite as con-
spictunte:: The Archbishop treated Mozart as a lackey, would not allow him to give a concert for his own benefit, quarrelled with him because he was not ready to leave Vienne at a moment's notice, and at last drove him out of his service with the foulest abuse. "All the edifying things the Archbishop said to me, and the pious epithets this admirable man of God applied to me," 'writes Mozart, "had such an effect on my bodily frame that the
seine evening at the opera I was obliged to go home in the middle of the first act in order to lie down, for I was very feverish, trembled in every limb, and staggered in the street like a drunken man." No wonder that the Archbishop considered him "a most self- sufficient young man." Basil Hall makes a captain roar with laughter at the idea of a midshipman having any feelings, and in the eighteenth century a musician who could object to such mild phrases as rogue, rascal, ragamuffin, was evidently unfit to serve a prince. It was no doubt this overstrained delicacy in Mozart that hindered all other princes from taking him into their employment. He had many admirers, but few supporters. Gluck and Haydn could afford to praise him without reserve, and a travelling pianist, after watching him play, exclaimed, "Good heavens ! how I do labour and overheat myself without getting any applause, while to you, my dear friend, it seems all child's play." But when Salieri applauded openly, it was in order to intrigue in private, and his
'epitaph on Mozart ran, "The loss of so grand a genius is much to , be deplored, but it is fortunate for us that he is dead, for if he had lived longer we really should not have been offered a crust of bread for our compositions." The Elector of Bavaria asked, "Who Could believe that such great things could be hidden in so small a head ?" but would not give the small head a chiince of taking off its hat in Munich. Prince Kaunitz said of Mozart that " Such peeple only come into the world once in a hundred years, and must not be driven away from Germany, more particularly when we are so fortunate as actually to enjoy their presence in the capital.'' But had Prince Kaunitz already lost his influence with the Emperor, and could he do nothing more than talk in favour of Mozart ?
While such was the state of German patrons, the rest of the country was equally in darkness. After trying several Courts without success, Mozart turned his eyes to France or England. "If Germany will not accept me," he says, "then in God's name let France or England be enriched by one more German of talent, to the disgrace of the German nation ! " The opera at Vienna was given up to the Italians. "It would be thought an everlasting blot on Germany if we Germans were ever really to begin to think in German and te 'act like Germans, to speak German, and above all, to sing in Gernian !" But in what we are apt to con- sider the national peculiarities of Germany the eighteenth cen- tury eclipsed the nineteenth. In matters of paternal government and tardiness of locomotion even Germany has made great im- provements. When Mozart wished to marry against the will of his future mother-in-law,, she threatened a, resort tq the ubiquit- ous pollee. J( Have the police really the power.to enter any house they please?" he asks. We did not know their right had ever been contested. The use of ciphers in Mozart's letters prove' that they were liable to be opened at the post office, and when he writes to announce his quarrel with, the Archbishop of Salzburg, he _says significantly, "I write this in our native
German tongue,, that the whole world may know." This clause • Narratire of an .xpecution to the Z,ambesi and its Tributaries and of the Disco- would hardly have been iteeded if the post office was Preei stew. with Map end illustrations. ,Loadon.: dela' Iltirrey. 1835 against official curiosity. As for the travelling of those days it must have been unendurable. A carriage was detained a quarter of an hour. outside a city because the gates were under repair. The conveyance by which Mozart went. from Paris to Strasburg took ten days on the road, never changing horses, and setting off sometimes at two in the morning. Owing to the constant stoppages, the expense of living on the road made the diligence dearer than posting, as it was also the custom to treat the conductor at all the inns. The roads were so bad that it was impossible to sleep in night travel ; "the carriage jolted our very souk out, and the seats were as hard as stone. Freen Was- serburg I thought I never could arrive in Munich with whole bones, and during two stages I held on by the straps, suspended in the air, and not venturing to sit down." The truth- of these descriptions may be certified by Mozart's English biographer, Mr. Holmes, who :states, in his Ramble among the Musicians of Germany (1828), that the diligence took six days from Munich to Vieena. Nothing on the way but beer-houses and the most lenten entertainments ; in three days they only had one solitary dish of 'veal, bread and beer being all they could count upon regularly. Mr. Holmes also bears witness to the state of the roads ; such malignant bumps are inflicted on the inferior part of the traveller's person in the many sharp descents and abrupt rises of the roads there, that seated in a diligence, be is incontinently jerked into the arms of a lady opposite." No doubt this was a necessary prepara- tion for writing the life of Mozart.
These letters throw so much light on the external state of the times, that we have neglected their still more valuable additions to our knowledge of the character of their author. In many of them Mozart, both as man and composer, stands clearly before us. His knowledge of his own powers and his trust in them were proper pride with the genius without which they would have been vanity. He could not help despising many of his contemporaries when he saw their inferiority to himself, and how they were pre- ferred to him. Occasionally he showed this contempt by an open sarcasm, which rankled all the more for its truth. The victims of his epigrams might say,— " Pudet hale opprobria nobis Et did potuisse, et non potuisse refelli ;" —but if they could not refute him they could intrigue against him, and dulness in high places was naturally leagued with its brothers and subordinates. In these letters we see Mozart's spirit gra- dually giving way. The cheerful nonsense of his earlier letters yields to gloom or bitterness. He was worked and worried to death. With a temperament alive to the slightest changes, and affected keenly by pleasures ; a fiery spirit that would havefretted a less puny body to decay, and a genius that was perpetually yoked to the dullest round of musical lessons; enemies that harassed him, and friends that preyed on him; an eternal want of pence, and a critic pen of his own that would not suffer him to write down to the tastes which had pence to bestow,—it wouldhe strange if his familiar letters did not reflect his troubles, and par- take of the despondency which more than once beset him. We cannot justly say that we wish they were pleasanter reading, for every line that flowed from Mozart, whether on plain or ruled paper, must be pleasant to read or to hear. But we wish they had been pleasanter to write, and that their subject-matter had not been the cause of so much pain to a man for whom we feel such admiration and such love.
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