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MOZART IN VIENNA
 After the success of Idomeneo Mozart lingered in Munich as long as he could, dreading the idea of a return to Salzburg. Finally he was summoned to Vienna with a group of the Archbishop’s musicians. On his arrival, he wrote to his father that his chief object there was to get introduced to the Emperor Joseph II. He was determined to be known. He never returned to Salzburg to live.
At first he stayed with the Archbishop’s group but was not allowed to give his own concerts. When he finally resigned, the Salzburg authorities tried, in vain, to get him to come back. Mozart took a room in the home of the widow Maria Weber who had three unmarried daughters, Josepha, Constanze and Sophie. Even then, his father tried to control his life, complaining about his behavior with women, and predicting his failure. He took the proceeds from Idomeneo and gave his son mere pocket money. Nevertheless, Mozart did make the break from dependence on his father and was immediately successful, giving concerts and composing, even though musicians were looked down on because of a reputation for bad manners and lack of education and were treated as servants instead of professionals. One advertisement sought a musician who played well, could sing well, give lessons and serve as a valet.
For Mozart, Vienna, a city of about 210,000, meant liberation. He became engaged to Constanze Weber and moved out of the house. The Webers were afraid Mozart would renege on the engagement and made him sign a contract saying he would either marry Constanze within three years or give her a yearly stipend; the girl tore up the agreement. They were married in August, 1782, soon after he had had his first operatic success with Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). After the birth of their first child, the young couple made a three-month visit to Salzburg, the only time Mozart ever went back. Since a long trip with an infant was dangerous, they left the baby in Vienna with a nurse. Unfortunately, the baby died while they were gone.
 During his early years in Vienna, Mozart rose at six, composed until nine or ten, gave lessons until one, worked in the afternoon, gave concerts in the evening and then composed again for a few hours, sleeping only five or six hours a night. A doctor advised him to compose standing up to get more exercise. Mozart often composed a piece completely in his head before writing any notes on paper. His wife reported: “He was always strumming upon something, his hat, his watch fob, the table, the chair, as if they were the keyboard....He wrote music like letters, and never tried a movement until it was finished”. Once he wrote down only the violin part for a sonata for violin and piano and, the next day in a concert, played the piano part from memory. He carried scraps of paper around with him so he could jot down ideas at any time. When Mozart met the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, they began the fruitful collaboration which produced three of his greatest operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.
Mozart was one of the first self-employed musicians and composed for a public of all social levels. He wrote for the occasion, not on speculation (Le nozze di Figaro was an exception). The public’s need for new compositions was intense, and the composer was often in demand as a guest artist and accompanist; we simply do not know all of his appearances. (His letters, our best source of information for his early years, got fewer and farther between after he moved to Vienna, and there were no announcements in the newspapers as there are today.) His income came from at least four sources: new works, ticket sales from concerts, royalties from publishers, and fees for lessons. Based on our knowledge of concert receipts, he was among the best paid soloists in Vienna, and his total earnings were unusually high for the period. However, the couple spent money on things like a billiard table (both he and Constanze were avid billiards players), two pianos, fancy clothing, and a horse and carriage. Mozart was crazy about horses and rode frequently on his doctor’s advice. He gave generously to charity and friends and knew all the great musicians and singers of the day.
In 1784, Mozart joined the Freemasons, and he remained an active member until the time of his death. He dressed like the nobility and felt “show” was necessary to his success, yet he wore his own hair at a time when wigs were more fashionable. At his death, an inventory of his clothing listed seven frock coats of varying colors, a suit, a greatcoat, and nine pairs of breeches. Part of his elaborate dress may have been to distract from his physical appearance; he was short with a head too large for his body and a nose too large for his face.
Mozart’s years in Vienna coincided with the reign of the Emperor Joseph II (1780-1790). It was a time of “enlightened” reform, not only in Vienna, but in much of Europe. Censorship was largely abolished, and tolerance laws for minorities, especially Jews, were adopted. (Mozart had many Jews among his friends.) Joseph removed the death penalty, abolished serfdom and somewhat relaxed censorship, yet he was austere and unpopular compared to his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa; the Viennese were more interested in fun and music than in political reform. As a childless widower— two wives had died much earlier — he kept a Spartan household, wore simple clothing (except for official portraits), and thought of himself as the people’s emperor. His court was not a center of social life; that was left to the nobility. He tried to forbid the wearing of corsets by women as unhealthy, censured funeral banquets, improved the training of physicians, increased the availability of medical care, protected illegitimate children against discrimination, and even helped put out fires. He opened the Prater and Augarten, former royal hunting preserves, as parks for the general public. A dedicated musician and a lover of theatricals, Joseph had some musical talent and, on his travels, he sought out new singers, scores and libretti for his court. He played chamber music for an hour every day. Applying himself to reforming the theater and the opera, he reviewed singers’ salaries, holidays and accommodations and frequently attended rehearsals. Nevertheless, today his musical knowledge is judged chiefly from his comment that Mozart’s opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), had “too many notes”. Joseph died of tuberculosis on February 19, 1790 and was succeeded by his brother Leopold II.
Constanze was musical and seems to have been a loving wife and mother, if occasionally inclined to flirt with other men. The couple had six children, only two of whom survived infancy. Mozart tried out his new compositions on Constanze and let her talk to him while he composed. He always found separation from her painful and wrote very loving letters, some in French, whenever she was away. She was not a good housekeeper; after all, that is what servants were for. The Mozarts entertained lavishly and moved frequently, living in eleven places in less than ten years, but they never saved. By the time of his death, copies of his works were sold everywhere, he did not lack for commissions, and he was able to send his son, Karl, to a relatively expensive boarding school. He was hardly a pauper. It is true that, when emergencies such as Constanze’s illness arose, they had to borrow and, in spite of the great success of Die Zauberflóte, Mozart was in debt at time of his death.
THE DEATH OF MOZART
Ironically, at the end of his life, three days before his death, Mozart was appointed to the well-paying position of organist at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, but was too ill to take it up. He was also to receive stipends from the nobility of Hungary, and from Amsterdam. He was working on a Requiem Mass when his final illness overwhelmed him. The Mass had been commissioned anonymously, and Mozart became obsessed with the idea that it was for his funeral. (We now know that it was commissioned by a Count Walsegg.) There is a story that, on the day of Mozart’s death, a rehearsal of the Requiem was held at his bedside. This is only a romantic fiction. If it took place at all, it was some days before he died. At one time it was thought that Mozart died of uremia brought on by kidney failure, but recent research points to rheumatic fever, an illness from which he had suffered several times in the past.
Then the greatest of the myths surrounding him took shape. According to these he was poisoned, probably by Antonio Salieri, and buried in a communal paupers’ grave, forgotten by the world. The first is completely false and the second requires some explanation.
The poisoning story gained credence with the drama and opera Mozart and Salieri by the Russians, Pushkin and Rimsky-Korsakov respectively. Mozart and Salieri were certainly rivals, and many attested to his jealousy. He probably used his influence at court to hinder the younger composer, but Salieri was a good enough musician to know that he was not Mozart’s equal. On his death-bed Salieri denied any complicity in Mozart’s death, and the attending physicians never had any suspicion of poisoning. Salieri is reported to have said, “What a shame so great a genius has died — but what a good thing for us! If he had lived, any music the rest of us composed wouldn’t have earned us even a crust”.
Mozart’s funeral was no different from that of 85% of the bourgeois Viennese of the period. In 1784, Joseph II issued a series of ordinances regarding burial which were designed to cut down on contagion (there was a cholera epidemic in Vienna) and on ostentation. (Joseph made sure his own coffin was simple but the state funeral had to follow Hapsburg protocol.) All cemeteries within the city limits were closed and new ones opened at some distance from town. After a church ceremony, the corpse was carried, without ceremony, to a cemetery. To speed decomposition of bodies, no coffins were used. Instead, they were sewn unclothed into linen sacks, placed in a communal grave, and covered with unslaked lime and earth. Each parish would own a number of coffins which could be used during the services, but bodies were not buried in them. Instead they were reused for other funerals. To save space, no memorial stones were allowed by the graves but, if desired, could be erected along the cemetery wall. Mozart’s was precisely such a funeral. Reaction was strong to these ordinances and, although burial in coffins was eventually allowed, it remained far from common.
Mozart’s death was announced in many European papers; the one in the Vienna paper was especially laudatory. Although Constanze was ill and could not attend, many in Vienna’s music community, including Salieri, were at his funeral. His friends accompanied the body to the city gates; then, as was customary, they turned back. It was three miles to the cemetery, and only the well-to-do could afford the trip by carriage. Furthermore, hearses were not allowed to go through the city until after 6:00 PM and it was a winter night. The hearse drivers would want to make a speedy trip; even if mourners had chosen to undertake the long dark walk, the body would have been consigned to the grave long before they could arrived at the burial site. Later, funerals changed completely, and the simple customs of the late eighteenth century were forgotten. Reading the bare details, new generations, unfamiliar with the conventions of the time, inferred that Mozart had had a pauper’s funeral.
In December of 1791, soon after Mozart’s death, solemn ceremonies commemorating the event were held in Prague — the city in which Don Giovanni had had its première. A special Requiem was composed, and well over 4,000 people attended. In Vienna, his fellow Masons held a special memorial service for him and the newspaper printed the following obituary:
In the night of the fourth and fifth of this month, there died here the Hofkammerkompositor [court composer] Wolfgang Mozart. Known from his childhood as the possessor of the finest musical talent in all Europe, through the fortunate development of his natural gifts and through persistent application, he climbed to the pinnacle of the greatest master; his works, loved and admired by all, bear witness to this, and are the measure of the irreplaceable loss that the noble art of music has suffered by his death. — Weitung, December 7, 1791
After her husband’s death, Constanze did not sell his works for monetary gain. In fact she kept many pieces that had never been published and saw that they were preserved. She spent the last years of her life in Salzburg, was friendly with Mozart’s sister, and helped the city become an attraction because of its association with her husband.
That is not the end of the story. Because cemeteries were so crowded, it was the custom then, and still is in some European towns, for all the graves to be emptied periodically and the bones placed in a charnel house. The graves could then be reused. Ten years after his burial, a skull claimed to be Mozart’s was recovered. After passing from owner to owner, it found a home in Salzburg. Scientists have reconstructed the appearance of the head using well-established techniques, and the result bears a striking resemblance to portraits of the composer.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter how Mozart died or where he was buried. His music will live forever.
For more on Mozart, see "Mozart, The Early Years" under IDOMENEO: KING OF CRETEEAO
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