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.
Tags: 18th century, mozart, prodigy
