Little Wolfgang in the Redoutensaal

The music-festival in the Redoutensaal, School van Meytens, Vienna 1760

Of all the magnificent rooms of Schönbrunn Palace, one is particularly special to me, and, I would imagine, to any Mozart-enthusiast. This is the Hall of Ceremonies, dedicated with its large paintings to the wedding in October 1760 of soon-to-be emperor Joseph II to Isabella of Parma. On one of those paintings, in the middle of the crowd a little Wolfgang Mozart can be seen, with his father, amidst the wedding guests. To avoid a weary tourist missing this priceless detail, or to protect the spot from the awed breaths of the initiated, attention is drawn by a plexiglass square covering exactly this part of the painting. Check out the spot for yourself on the 360° view of the room with this cool link. It’s the painting to the right of Maria Theresa’s famous, majestical portrait.

Detail of Wolfgang and Leopold artistically inserted after the event

The nicest story about this painting is that, of course, Mozart was not in reality present at the wedding. In 1760 he was 4 years old and absolutely unheard of by anyone, as his talents had yet to surface. The little man would not set foot in Vienna until October 1762, when he made his Schönbrunn debut to huge applause. This legendary event must have been the reason for Maria Theresa to request her court painter, Martin van Meytens, to add the new celebrity to the canvas, 2 years after the fact. Technically this would not have been a major problem, as the painting is supposed to have been a multi-year project anyway, and historical considerations were clearly of no concern to the empress.

All this is well-known in Mozart circles, and the Redoutensaal painting is often reproduced in the Mozart books, e.g. quite splendidly so in Mozart: The Golden Years: 1781-1791, H.C. Robbins Landon, 1989/2006, plate XXII.

Detail of the public wedding-meal, School van Meytens, Vienna 1760. Mozart again!

I was therefore quite puzzled when recently I came across another detail of a painting, also by van Meytens, also of the same wedding, and also with a strikingly similar little man tucked away, this time up in the box with the musicians. It looked so much like the music-festival painting, yet it wasn’t. Not being in a position to hurry off to Schönbrunn in person, it took me some pains to find out through the internet which painting this could have been taken from. I still have trouble understanding the outcome: unmistakenly this is a fragment of the painting that actually hangs in the very same Hall of Ceremonies. It’s directly opposite, left of the mirror, depicting the wedding-meal in the very same Redoutensaal and can be seen through the same cool link. I am not an expert, but surely there can be no doubt: if it’s Mozart in the music-festival painting, then it’s Mozart in the wedding-meal painting.

Questions rise. Why did I not know this when I was in Schönbrunn? Why isn’t this mentioned in the guide books, that all clearly mention Mozart in the music-festival painting? What about the plexiglass? Why have I never seen this in the Mozart books? One consoling thought: at least I have (another) excuse to make it to Vienna again sometime soon!

 

Mozart’s short nights

On a regular working day, Mozart did not sleep long. He started the day with composing from 6 to 9 A.M. Then he did whatever there was to do, until at 8 P.M. he sat down at the clavier or composed until midnight. So only 6 hours of sleep on a regular basis, at least in his Salzburg days, as this schedule comes to us through Nannerl, in a letter written in 1792 to Albert von Mölk, answering questions for Schlichtegroll’s obituary (Briefe vol 4, nr. 1213, p201).

Leopold’s apology

Salzburg’s cathedral archives record a detail about Leopold Mozart’s life that he no doubt wished would never have happened. In 1753 Leopold was charged by the cathedral magistrate with having written an “invidious pamplet” about two prominent citizens, a priest named Egglstainer and one of the counts of Thurn und Taxis. For this he was made to apologize by threat of imprisonment, and the pamplet was “torn to bits and scattered at his feet”. This event should not be considered inconsequential, because it clearly damaged Leopold’s prospects in Salzburg.

Sources:

• Maynard Solomon, Mozart, 1995, p29
• Hermann Abert, W.A. Mozart, 2007 edition, translated by Stewart Spencer, edited by Cliff Eisen, p3

Salzburg’s curtain of silence

The introduction of Maynard Solomon’s Mozart biography starts with a startling realization. Apparently there exists a guidebook to Salzburg from 1792-93 by a Lorenz Hübner that, among many other things, lists past and present inhabitants of various Salzburg streets. Familiar names come by for the Getreidegasse, where Mozart was born. And mention is made of the Tanzmeisterhaus, where Leopold Mozart lived from 1773 until his death in 1787. But nowhere is the name of Mozart to be found.

We know of course that Wolfgang had a troubled relation with Salzburg. His move to Vienna in 1781 was clearly seen as a defection by Salzburg’s archbishop Colloredo. But I find it quite astonishing that this has led to the censoring of his name from historic overviews like Hübner’s guidebook. And not only Wolfgang’s name, but also his father’s. Solomon aptly speaks of a curtain of silence that had begun to descend in Salzburg well before Wolfgang’s death. It wasn’t lifted until the middle of the 19th century, when in 1842 the first Mozart statue was unveiled in his home town. One wonders how it can be that both Wolfgang’s sister and his wife chose Salzburg as the place to spend their old age and, ultimately, be buried.

Links:

• http://www.salzburg.com/wiki/index.php/Lorenz_H%C3%BCbner

The traveling prodigy

The Mozart musicians, by Delafosse, 1764

In the early 1760s there was a buzz of excitement going through musical Europe. A Salzburg musician had started travelling along the courts of Munich and Vienna to show to the world his two children: an 11-year-old girl who played on the clavier the most difficult sonata’s with incredible ease and taste, and even more amazing, a 6-year-old boy who not only played those same sonata’s, but also improvised the most delightful tunes for hours in a row, and would sight-read anything that was put in front of him.

People can hardly have grasped what was going on, of course. Their excitement was much like the sensationalism that befell the rhinoceros travelling through Europe in the 1740s and 50s, or that made people marvel at Von Kempelen’s chess-playing machine built for Maria Theresia in 1770, or that gathered the masses to watch the first hot air balloons rising over Europe in the 1780s. But in hindsight the traveling Mozart family was not your every-decade sensation. As things turned out, the little boy then touring Europe is now recognized as the greatest musical phenomenon the world ever saw.

Explaining Mozart is, of course, out of the question. Yet there can be no doubt that Wolfgang’s extensive youthly travels contributed greatly to who he became. Especially the Grand Tour and the three Italian journeys brought him, at a very young age, into direct contact with Europe’s various musical styles and its most talented composers and musicians. Less favourably, it made him the center of the Mozart family enterprise -of which Carmontelle’s depiction can be considered the flyer- which in later years would put him under considerable psychological pressure. Finally, his health suffered severely, and in fact an extroardinary amount of good fortune was needed to survive those travelling days in the first place. If he hadn’t, despite the early fame, the world would not have remembered him.