Mozart on the Road

Nicholas Kenyon

that survives as Wolfgang’s Symphony No 1. But this is indeed an authentic Mozart site: in the 1991 Mozart celebrations, the group of houses was renamed Mozart Terrace, unveiled by Roger Norrington with a wind serenade in the street.

If you have some time to spare when travelling from Victoria Coach Station (or a little longer when at the train terminus), pop round the corner into Ebury Street and walk south. There at 180 Ebury Street at the end of a Georgian terrace, is a house which bears a brown plaque. The young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, it claims, ‘composed his first symphony here in 1764’. Well, that may or may not have been the case, as his sister Nannerl’s recollections of that his composing that work ‘with all the instruments of the orchestra especially trumpets and kettledrums’ do not quite match the piece

The house is one in which the eight-yearold Mozart, his sister Nannerl and father Leopold stayed on their first visit to London, and in the context of ‘Mozart on the Road’ it perhaps has special significance in representing the huge, time-consuming importance of the Mozarts’ travels in the search for fame and fortune. Leopold was unremitting in his efforts to earn attention and income from his two talented children, but in London he was overcome by what he called ‘a sort of national disease here which is called a “cold”’, hence the move from the centre of the city out to this address in Chelsea, where the air was better and there were extensive gardens.

Given the demands of travel by horsedrawn coach at the time, long before Victoria Station existed, it is extraordinary to read of the journeys which the family had started the previous year including to Munich, Swetzingen, Frankfurt, Aixla-Chapelle, Brussels and Paris, in the presence of royalty and the aristocracy, attracting amazed praise and disbelief: ‘Tell me, does this not exceed all imagination?’ wrote one astonished listener. And of course, a trip to London involved a channel crossing, all the more surprising for those like the young children from inland Austria who had never before seen the sea or felt its effects. the young Mozart. Nannerl recalled that Johann Christian took the young Wolfgang between his knees at the keyboard, ‘the former played a few bars, and then the other continued, and in this way they played a whole sonata and anyone not watching would have thought it was played by one person alone’.

There is a big question as to how far Leopold’s proud parading of his children was exploitative: it certainly made extreme demands on the family, especially on Nannerl who, though highly skilled, always seems to have played a supporting role to her brilliant brother. But one mitigating factor in the treatment of Wolfgang was surely the fact that being on the road exposed him to a wide range of music – for him, travel was an immersive school in the styles of the time from which, with his sponge-like genius in absorbing and transforming influences, he learned a huge amount.

For example, when in London the Mozarts almost certainly heard the opera Artaxerxes by Thomas Arne, perhaps some Handel oratorios, and in particular the opera Adriano in Siria by Johann Christian Bach which had its premiere while they were in town. Johann Christian, the son of JS Bach, whom we will encounter in Mozart on the Road: Part 2, befriended

Thus Mozart learned on his travels, and thus he prospered. At home in Salzburg his main influences would have been the music of his father, Joseph Haydn’s brother Michael, and composers like Wagenseil, whose music Wolfgang had played since the age of five. Now his world-view was much wider, and it eventually led to a profound disenchantment with Salzburg and its music-making. He had received opera commissions, toured Italy, and worked in Mannheim where the superb instrumentalists of the orchestra inspired him. A much less happy tour occurred in 1777, when Leopold petitioned the Archbishop of Salzburg for permission for the family to travel to Paris. It was grudgingly given, and his wife Anna Maria went with Wolfgang, and it was on this trip that she died, causing huge problems and recriminations for the composer.

It was clear that Salzburg was a restrictive, restraining force on Wolfgang’s development, and his unhappiness boiled over in 1781 when he asked to be released from service in Salzburg (‘to waste one’s life in inactivity in such a beggarly place is really very sad’) and determined to set up in Vienna, earning in his ‘exit interview’ the immortal ‘kick on the arse’ from the Archbishop’s chief steward to send him on his way.

This was a decisive moment for Mozart, and we might add for the world of music as a whole, because he was now casting himself into the uncertain landscape of a freelance life without court appointments, creating his own opportunities and earning his own income. He did it, for a time very successfully, by ceasing to go on the road, and by settling to creating relationships with the influential families of the city. He acquired teaching jobs, mounted concerts to display his skills, made use of the carnival period, and married Constanze Weber the following year, creating another storm of domestic drama with his father’s disapproval.

The arrangements for giving concerts were dependent on the enthusiasm of the nobility, and entrepreneurs who mounted events: one observer noted ‘music is the only thing about which the nobility shows taste. Many houses have their own band of musicians, and all the public concerts bear witness that this aspect of art is in high respect here’. Mozart described to his father arrangements for a twelveconcert series in the Augarten in 1782, from which he would potentially earn significant income. He gradually became famous at the centre of Viennese musical life, the Emperor Joseph II attended some of his concerts, and all was set fair for a dazzling career. But it was not to last.

In retrospect, the year 1784, when Mozart turned 28, was one of the most successful years of his life: he was settled in Vienna at the peak of his public success, and produced a string of masterpieces three of which we hear in this concert. I think an important sign of the composer feeling both comfortable in Vienna and satisfied with his success, is that in February of that year he begins to keep a meticulous Thematic Catalogue of his work. This remarkable document is now in the British Library, as it was owned from the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, whose heirs first loaned and then bequeathed it to the Library. It is an intensely touching document, especially for the many blank staves which are unfilled on his death, and the incomplete title ‘February 1784 to [blank] 1 [blank]’, as if he assumed he would live into the next century.

The centrality of Mozart’s own work as a performer can observed from the fact that the first entries in the catalogue are piano concertos. Then the fourth entry from 30 March is the Quintet for Piano and Wind K452 with which this concert begins. This intimate masterpiece was performed on 1 April (which did not leave much time for preparation). However, Mozart was ecstatic about the work’s reception, writing to his father, who still needed persuading that his son had done the right thing by going to Vienna, ‘I consider it to be the best work I have ever composed’.

Mozart’s skill at balancing the solo instruments with the piano, teasing out the special character of each wind instrument, is evident throughout; the slow introduction gives a weightiness to the work, though both first and last movement are transparently scored (especially noticeable with the contrasted textures of period instruments) while the central Larghetto allows each instrument to make the simple theme its own. The joyous contrasts reach their culmination in the cadenza to the last movement, in which all the instruments participate in imitation.

The same sense of intimate conversation between pianist and ensemble pervades the ensemble of the Piano Concerto in G, which was performed by Mozart’s pupil Babette von Ployer at a concert in a summer palace in the Viennese suburb of Döbling in June 1784. It’s a serene and sunny work, with few dark clouds: the succession of varied themes in the first movement are combined and reordered in magical sequences. The dance-like theme of the last movement has become famous because Mozart claimed that his pet starling could sing it, albeit with a wrong note. He noted this down in his cash book – another innovation for the organised composer in 1784, but one which did not last long.

The magnificent ‘Linz’ Symphony in C is so named because Mozart had to write it as he put it ‘at breakneck speed’ while he was visiting the city at the end of 1783 and his hosts wanted a concert. So his travels dominate once again at the end of this event: it seems that it was easier for Mozart to write a new symphony than to remember an old one. (When he looked back at the ‘Haffner’ symphony a year after he had written it, he claimed to his father it astonished him because he had forgotten every note.) Like the Quintet, the Symphony gains weight from a slow introduction, and the intricate writing for the wind is again prominent. But here there is pain as well as pleasure, in the bare passages of the first movement between the fanfares, in the strange scale passages of the central siciliano which reach up the interval of a ninth before falling back, and especially in the Presto finale. Here the propulsive, simple melodies are interwoven with heart-rending sequences, not paralleled anywhere else in Mozart’s symphonic output: the strings dialogue in aching off-beat phrases under wind chords, before subsiding chromatically to nothing. Where on earth did this come from, and what did it mean? As so often with Mozart, we can only wonder and marvel.