Notes before the last trump
J. G. Links 1791: MOZART'S LAST YEAR by H. C. Robbins Landon The great Robbins Landon has so associated himself with Haydn that we pick this book up half expecting to read Haydn on his friend Mozart's final year. But of course, we realise, Haydn was not in Austria in 1791: he was in London, freed from his 30-year servitude in Esterhazy by the death of his Prince, snapped up by the impresario, Salomon, becoming famous and quite rich at the age of 58, while the 35-year-old Mozart went from poverty to the final disaster. And the pain returns. Why could it not have been Mozart? Also the fury against Leopold Mozart who had denied his son the same opportunity four years earlier by refusing his modest request that his children should be looked after in Salzburg while Mozart and Constanze went to London ('Not at all a bad arrangement!' Leopold wrote to his daughter, 'They could go off and travel — they might even die — or remain in England — and I should have to run off after them with the children . . . well, Basta!') Well, why not? Surely he owed this small service to the world he had brought Mozart into? Six months later Leopold was dead, as he deserved to be for his selfishness.
But we must not get emotional, particu- larly as the facts may not be at all as they seemed. Mozart had no offer of an engage- ment in London and he might well have returned home, if at all, with more gold watches and no money, as had happened so often before. In 1791, according to Salomon's obituarist, he really did intend to engage Mozart the year after Haydn, but many slips could have occurred (Haydn's immense success in London might well have been one of them — why change horses?). And even if the visit had taken place Mozart might well have died, as Leopold feared. 'The greatest tragedy in the history of music,' is Robbins Landon's description of Mozart's death in Vienna in 1791. Well, how greedy can we get? Mozart had been ill, often dangerously, every year between the ages of six and 12. Had he died, it is true, we should hardly have known our loss. But the hair stands on end while reading of the reprieves during the last ten years in Vienna. The kidney disease that was to cause his death, we are now told, began in September 1784, that is to say before he was half way through the piano concertos that have transformed our musical heritage. They were still incom- plete when the illness came back in 1786 just before he began Figaro. The terminal stage of the illness held off just long enough to give us the clarinet quintet and The Magic Flute. The greatest tragedy? Surely, the greatest miracle in the history of music.
This is not to criticise Mr Robbins Landon. He and his work are beyond criticism, even though we might draw different conclusions to his on occasion. As a musician he may be judged by one quotation which shows his insight. Many of us non-musicians know that Haydn's glo- rious instrumental music still falls far short of Mozart's but find it impossible to say why. Haydn's music, according to Robbins Landon (but for whom we should never have heard much of it) has
something very self-contained about it; he does not invite you to share in his problems because he has reduced these problems to a brilliant intellectual tour de force. His great quartets, symphonies and religious music unfold before us like a pageant which we watch with fascination but which does not necessarily require our personal participa- tion, our immediate emotional involvement.
Mozart, on the other hand, 'invites us to share his emotional world, he takes us by the hand, as it were, and leads us, ultimate- ly requiring us to follow wherever he goes. Hence, his joys are our joys, his sorrows our sorrows . . .'. Precisely. If only all musicologists wrote like that.
The book covers ground which has been thoroughly excavated for 200 years and could hardly be expected to yield very much that is new. On the origins of the Requiem, however, the author presents a translation of a long history first published by 0. E. Deutsch in 1963 which is quite new to me, and another document of 1826, also recently published in German. The astonishing conclusion is that everything we have heard, and disbelieved, of the mysterious stranger who commissioned the Requiem is quite simply true.
Mozart's wife, Constanze, who has nev- er yet had a friend in the world, finds a white knight in Robbins Landon. There are no new documents in her case but he goes through the great quantity already known and finds her 'cultivated and polished', which is more than Mozart found her, judging by his letters. The author is certainly right in blaming Leopold for the prejudice against her, and Peter Shaffer, author of Amadeus, for ensuring that it should not be allowed to die down. Whether she loved Mozart we shall of course never know or whether Mozart would have been happier with a more refined and intelligent wife: again judging by his letters, I doubt it.
The author makes an interesting, but not altogether successful, attempt to unravel Mozart's chaotic finances during his last years, suggesting that in 1791 he earned the equivalent of almost £600, the amount that Haydn banked after his London season that year. Yet Mozart was still writing those harrowing letters to Michael Puch- berg which had begun in 1788 in which he sacrificed all dignity in order to beg a couple of pounds. Robbins Landon would like to believe that Mozart was borrowing to pay old debts but this carries little conviction. The year after Leopold had stayed with his son and daughter-in-law in 1785, and was convinced there was plenty of money, Mozart was writing to Hoffmeis- ter 'in distress' and receiving two ducats less than the price of one concert ticket in London. His hopelessness over money must have been a great strain on his fellow- masons' charitable instincts.
Nor can the author help us over that extraordinary sentence in a letter from the amiable Haydn to a friend of October, 1791. 'My wife writes to me, but I don't believe it,' the translation reads, 'that Mozart speaks very ill of me. I forgive him. . .'. It seems to have had something to do with Haydn's earnings in London but 'we shall never know what it was all about,' writes Robbins Landon and if he says so we shall not. Otherwise, almost every aspect of that tragic and triumphant year is dealt with and explained as best it may be. This is particularly valuable because there are virtually no letters for 1791 except to Puchberg and to the intolerable Constanze who had chosen that year to take an expensive 'cure' for months at Baden. Many readers will accordingly want to turn back to Mozart's marvellous letters of the happier years, again available in the Emily Anderson translation. References in Mozart's Last Year are to the original German edition. The book is well illus- trated and ends with a diverting 'Illustrated Study of Mozart's Apartment and Ward- robe'.
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