The real tragedy of his final act
Rupert Christiansen looks beyond the myths portrayed on stage and screen to find out what really happened in the last year of Mozart’s life
Most of the indelible myths about Mozart – perpetuated by Peter Shaffer’s hugely popular play and film Amadeus – focus on the final year of his life, 1791. The feud with murderously envious Salieri, his flighty silly wife Constanze, his suspicious death, his pauper’s grave. While one might not go so far as the scholar Volkmar Braunbehrens, who claimed that “not a single word, scene or location, to say nothing of the behaviour and appearance displayed [in Shaffer’s version] have anything to do with historical reality”, it is certainly true that all these notions are profoundly misleading, both for what they omit as well as what they suggest.
What can’t be denied is that 1791 dawned to find Mozart, at the age of 35, in a strange position. On the one hand, his genius was scaling new peaks of productivity and originality – in January, he gave the first performance of the celestial Piano Concerto No 27; three months later, he produced the fiercely intense E flat String Quintet, churning out in the interim a stream of charming songs and merry dances to pay the bills. On the other hand, he was confronted with a lot of worry and trouble. Constanze had health worries as well as expensive tastes and was pregnant for the sixth time, while his eldest son Karl was at a costly boarding school. To live in Vienna and keep up appearances, Mozart needed a lot of money – something he had always been careless at managing to the point of fecklessness.
At the age of 35, his fame had spread all over Europe and his music was played in every capital city, but before the age of copyright, these performances earned him not a penny.
After his violent quarrel with the Archbishop of Salzburg, he was determined to avoid the drudgery of working, like his senior colleague Joseph Haydn, as a salaried composer in an aristocratic household. But his insistence on personal freedom came at the cost of insecurity and reliance on irregular commissions, fees as a freelance pianist and teaching private pupils. In good times, he might have made an excellent living out of this portfolio, but Austria’s war with the Ottoman Empire was draining money out the city, and Viennese musical culture was changing: with fewer princes maintaining their own private orchestras and a glut of commercial dance bands, there was less demand for symphonies and more for shortorder waltzes and minuets. Mozart had to work not only harder, but faster and on a smaller scale.
A lucrative position as head of music at St Stephen’s Cathedral fell through at the last minute when the incumbent refused to die as expected. A tempting offer from a London impresario for a six-month residency and two new operas had to be rejected because of family commitments – Haydn would go instead. As the bills mounted, Mozart had to beg loans from his fellow Freemasons – a guild of men unpopular with the government owing to their suspected French Revolutionary sentiments.
But change was in the air, and Mozart was determined to take advantage of it. The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II had died in 1790, to be succeeded by his liberal brother Leopold II. In September 1791, he would be formally crowned as King of Bohemia in Prague and the parliament there wanted a new opera for the attendant festivities. Salieri had been first choice as its composer, but he had turned the offer down, so by the time the invitation was delivered to Mozart, time was running short – only two months remained. Even though he hadn’t quite finished composing Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), the money on the table was so good he could hardly refuse.
In the circumstances, there was no chance of finding a new libretto, so the decision was made to take a familiar existing text by Metastasio called La clemenza di Tito – already set to music at least 40 times since it was written in 1734! The plot focuses on an Ancient Roman emperor who shows exemplary mercy towards a young man misled by a jealous woman into joining a conspiracy to assassinate him: it was stiff and old-fashioned, and to shape it up and make it appropriate to the occasion, the hack Caterino Mazzolà was brought in to make some speedy alterations, excisions and additions, specifically so as to allow Mozart to include more of the duets, trios and ensembles that allowed his genius full rein.
As so often, he would be composing against the clock. Before he left Vienna, he appeared to have pulled one of the big numbers, Non piu di fiori, out of his back drawer of rejects; the less important business of writing the unaccompanied recitatives was delegated to his pupil Süssmayr. But it was a close-run thing, and much of his bumpy coach journey to Prague was spent scribbling down ideas; the overture would be written at the very last minute. The premiere was a bit of a disaster, not least as the King arrived at the theatre an hour late. The courtier Count Zinzendorf described the opera as “very boring”; the Emperor’s wife, Maria Luisa, thought it “so bad that almost all of us went to sleep”. An inadequate castrato in the leading role of Sesto and a problematic prima donna as the scheming Vitellia who, according to one commentator, “sang more with her hands than with her throat” and “who one has to consider a lunatic” couldn’t have helped. But like so many first nights, this one proved misleading. La clemenza di Tito quietly but firmly established itself and in 1806 became the first of Mozart’s operas to be performed in Britain. One of the composer’s first biographers, F X Niemetschek, wrote of “its Grecian sublimity” and “still simplicity”, claiming that “connoisseurs are in doubt whether Tito does not in fact surpass Don Giovanni.”
But with the Napoleonic ban on castrati and a new culture of liberalism, Clemenza fell clean out of fashion until the mid 20th century, when it could be reassessed for its expressive melodic beauty and many episodes and elements of remarkable formal daring and originality. One turning point was the wonderful production at Covent Garden of the Seventies, happily committed to record, conducted by Colin Davis with Janet Baker and Yvonne Minton (a mezzo-soprano substituting for a castrato) leading the cast. Since then, many directors have mined the apparently black-and-white plot and text for ironies and ambiguities: controversial new productions by Claus Guth at Glyndebourne and Peter Sellars in Salzburg this summer are only the latest in a long line of modernist reinterpretations.
Mozart returned to Vienna after the premiere at the end of September. During the two months of his life, he was furiously productive, polishing off Die Zauberflöte, which proved an enormous hit – perhaps the biggest of his career – with a non-aristocratic audience in a large suburban theatre in Vienna. He also wrote the enchanting clarinet concerto and started work on a requiem, commissioned anonymously by a nobleman grieving for his wife.
So things were looking up for the embattled composer – until rheumatic fever and the aggravation of a chronic kidney complaint killed him within two weeks on December 5.
He owed money all over town, but he wasn’t buried in a pauper’s grave – regulations at the time insisted for hygiene reasons that everyone should be buried in mass cemeteries outside the city walls. It’s tragic to think what a bright future Mozart had ahead of him before death snatched him – his personal life potentially happy, and his musical genius still flowering and branching.