Mozart: A Life in Letters: A Life in Letters (3 page)

LANGE, (MARIA) ALOYSIA
(née Weber,
c
. 1761 – 1839) Mozart first met and fell in love with Aloysia, the daughter of Fridolin Weber (see below), during his stay in Mannheim in 1777. He gave her musical instruction and composed the concert arias K294, K316 and probably an early version of K538 for her; their relationship was the cause of considerable anxiety to Leopold. When she moved to Munich in 1778, Mozart followed her there, and may have proposed marriage and been rejected. Shortly after making her Mannheim debut in Schweitzer’s
Alceste,
she was engaged at the National theater in Vienna and married the actor Joseph Lange. From 1782 she was a leading singer of the Italian troupe but seems to have fallen out of favour and in 1785 was transferred to the less prestigious Karntnertortheater, where among other roles she sang Konstanze in
Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
Mozart married her sister Constanze in 1782.

LODRON FAMILY
One of Salzburg’s leading noble families. Count Ernst Maria Joseph Nepomuk von Lodron (1716–79) married Antonia Maria (1738–80), the fourth child of Count Georg Anton Felix von Arco, on 4 April 1758. During the reign of Archbishop Colloredo, Antonia Maria enjoyed great influence at court. It became customary to serenade her on her name day (Anthony of Padua, 13 June) with specially composed music: in 1776 Mozart
wrote the divertimento K247 (with its march K248) for this occasion, and in 1777 the divertimento K287. He also composed the concerto for three keyboards K242 for the countess anther daughters Aloisia and Giuseppina in 1776. Antonia Maria played a key part in easing Mozart’s return to Salzburg as organist in 1778.

MARIA THERESA, EMPRESS
(1717—80) The eldest daughter of Emperor Charles VI (1685—1740), her father appointed her heir to his hereditary Habsburg domains by the Pragmatic Sanction — a claim that led to the War of the Austrian Succession (1740—48). She married Francis, Duke of Lorraine (1708—65) in 1736; he became Holy Roman Emperor in 1745; they had ten surviving children. She first encountered Mozart when the six-year-old prodigy performed for her at Schonbrunn in Vienna on 13 October 1762, and saw him again in 1768, but for reasons that remain unknown, she came to disapprove of the family.

MOZART, (MARIA) CONSTANZE
née Weber, 1762—1842) Mozart first met Constanze during his visit to Mannheim in 1777—8, at which time he was infatuated with her older sister, Aloysia (see under
LANGE).
Their relationship blossomed only in 1781, by which time both Mozart and the Webers (see below) were living in Vienna. Wolfgang andConstanze married on 4 August 1782. It is clear that, on the whole, their marriage was a happy one, although Constanze was in frequent ill health as a result of her repeated pregnancies; his letters to her are affectionate and intimate. Only two of their six children survived: Carl Thomas (1784—1858) and Franz Xaver Wolfgang (1791—1844). Following Mozart’s death, Constanze was granted an annual pension of 266 gulden by Emperor Francis II. In 1809 she married a Danish diplomat, Georg Nikolaus Nissen, and lived in Copenhagen from 1810—21; after his retirement they settled in Salzburg, where Nissen began collecting materials for a biography of Mozart. Constanze completed the work after his death in 1826, and it was published in 1828.

MOZART, (JOHANN GEORG) LEOPOLD
(1719—87) The Son of an Augsburg bookbinder, as a schoolboy Leopold Mozart was a frequent performer in local theatrical productions, and was also an
accomplished organist and violinist. In 1737, after his father’s death, Leopold left Augsburg to study philosophy and jurisprudence at the Salzburg Benedictine University but was expelled in September 1739 for poor attendance and a failure to show proper deference to his professors and the university establishment. He served as valet and musician to Johann Baptist, Count of Thurn-Valsassina and Taxis, a canon of Salzburg cathedral and president of the consistory, before being appointed fourth violinist in the court orchestra of Archbishop Leopold Anton Eleutherius von Firmian in 1743; in addition to his court duties he taught violin, and later keyboard, to the choirboys of the cathedral oratory. By 1758 he had advanced to the post of second violinist and in 1763 to deputy Kapellmeister. Throughout these years he was a prolific composer of masses, litanies, smaller church works, cantatas, oratorios, symphonies, concertos, dances, divertimentos and other chamber music, and solo keyboard works; references in the family letters show that Leopold Mozart considered himself a ‘modern’ composer. It is almost certain that he composed new works for the court and for private performance up until
c
1770, but his output decreased dramatically as he became increasingly occupied with Nannerl’s, and especially Wolfgang’s, musical and general education and the family’s tours: he acted as teacher and private secretary to his son, and when necessary as valet, impresario, publicist and travel organizer. His relationship with Wolfgang appears to have become estranged after the death of Maria Anna Mozart in 1778, but the rift between them has probably been exaggerated. His letters, which form a great part of this volume, show him to have been a loving father, albeit querulous and over-anxious when his advice is ignored, andan interested observer of life.

MOZART, MARIA ANNA
(née Pertl, 1720–78) The daughter of Wolfgang Nikolaus Pertl, administrator of St Gilgen, a small town near Salzburg, she married Leopold Mozart on 21 November 1747. They had seven children, five of whom died in infancy. Leopold’s and Wolfgang’s letters to her when they were travelling on their own, and her letters to Leopold from September 1777 to June 1778 (when she and Wolfgang were travelling to Paris on Mozart’s
quest for an appointment) are full of news, jokes and gossip about Salzburg friends and neighbours, and especially about the target-shooting competitions, for money, that were a regular feature of their social life.

MOZART, MARIA ANNA (NANNERL)
(1751–1829) Mozart’s elder sister was a promising keyboard player, but even on the early concert tours of 1762–9 she was overshadowed by Wolfgang, who also played the violin and organ, and developed his compositional skills intensively. Surviving exercises and references in the letters show that Nannerl could compose a bass to a melody, accompany at sight and improvise; she also learned to sing and teach, but she never earned a living from music. Mozart and Nannerl remained close until he moved to Vienna: they frequently played duets, performed at private concerts and Wolfgang usually arranged to serenade Nannerl on her name day (it is likely that the so-called ‘Nannerl Septet’ K251 was written for her in 1776). However, her hopes that Wolfgang would make it possible for her to leave Salzburg dwindled after his marriage in 1782; from this date she appears to have shared with Leopold a degree of disenchantment with Mozart. On 23 August 1784 she married Johann Baptist Franz Berchtoldzu Sonnenburg (1736–1801), a magistrate of St Gilgen. He was twice widowed and already had five children; Nannerl bore him three more.

MOZART, MARIA ANNA THEKLA
(1758–1841) Usually called Basle (‘little cousin’) by Mozart, she was the daughter of Leopold Mozart’s brother, Franz Alois. Mozart became good friends with her during his stay in Augsburg in 1777. Nine of his letters to her survive, unfortunately without her answers. The Basle letters are irreverent and scatological (in contrast to those he wrote at about the same time to Aloysia Weber, which are formal, even pompous) and some commentators see in them proof that she and Mozart had sexual relations; others, however, that they merely show him as earthy and playful. After Aloysia rejected him in 1778 on his return from Paris, Maria Anna Thekla softened his homecoming to Salzburg by visiting him there.

ORSINI-ROSENBERG, FRANZ XAVER WOLF, PRINCE
(1723–96)
Imperial chamberlain and manager of the Vienna court theatres from 1776 to 1791 and from 1792 to 1794. As chief steward to GrandDuke Leopold of Tuscany (later Emperor LeopoldII) in Florence in 1770, Rosenberg helped Mozart and his father gain entry to the grand-ducal court, and after Wolfgang’s move to Vienna in 1781 he commissioned
Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
Relations between them cooled later, and Da Ponte, in his memoirs, recorded the details of a controversy that arose when, during rehearsals for
Le nozze di Figaro,
Rosenberg ordered that dancers be omitted from the wedding scene at the end of act three.

PUCHBERG, JOHANN MICHAEL VON
(1741–1822) Viennese textile merchant and Masonic brother of Mozart’s, who wrote for him either the piano trio K542 (1788) or the string trio K563 (1788). Puchberg loaned Mozart about 1400 gulden during the final years of the composer’s life. Between 1788 and 1791, Wolfgang wrote him at least 19 begging letters, some of which are included here.

SALIERI, ANTONIO
(1750–1825) Italian composer, active at Vienna from 1766, court Kapellmeister from 1788. He came to personify for Mozart the obstacles he perceived to be blocking the advancement of his own career, and particularly his dismay at the preferential treatment that was commonly given to Italian musicians in the Austrian musical establishments of the day. There is no evidence, however, to support the idea that Salieri conspired against Mozart in a systematic, long-term way.

SCHIKANEDER, EMANUEL
(1751–1812) Actor-manager of a touring theatrical company, Schikaneder became friendly with the Mozart family when the troupe played a season in Salzburg in autumn 1780; it was then that Wolfgang composed for him the aria K365a. Schikaneder was active in Vienna on and off between 1783 and 1789, when he became director of the suburban Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden. His most successful production there was Mozart’s German opera
Die Zauberftote
(1791), for which Schikaneder wrote the text and sang the role of Papageno.

SCHRATTENBACH, SIEGMUND CHRISTOPH VON
(1698 –1771), Prince-archbishop of Salzburg 1753–71. He was a great supporter of the Mozarts, awarding them with presents for compositions and
partly subsidizing their early tours; in 1763 he appointed Leopold Mozart his deputy Kapellmeister, and in November 1769 he gave Mozart his first (unpaid) position at court, as third concertmaster. Schrattenbach is often called Salzburg’s ‘pious’ archbishop: he is reported to have attended up to five church services daily and he kept all the traditional church feast days. He was no intellectual and was said to be not only bigoted, but also incapable of recognizing true virtue. Although there was a small nucleus of would-be reformers in Salzburg during his reign, the Enlightenment did not systematically penetrate institutions there until after his death.

STALER, ANTON PAUL
(1753–1812) Mozart became a good friend of clarinet virtuoso and composer Anton Staler soon after his arrival in Vienna; it is likely that they first met at the home of Countess Wilhelmina Thune in 1781; four years later Staler became a Freemason and frequently participated in Mozart’s Masonic music. Staler had created the basset clarinet in collaboration with Theodor Lotz; it included four keys beyond those found on normal clarinets of the time and extended the instrument’s range down to include a full four octaves. Mozart probably composed the quintet for clarinet and strings K581 (1789) and his concerto for clarinet K622 (1791) for Staler on this instrument.

STORACE, STEPHEN
(1762–96) and
NANCY
(1765–1817) Brother and sister from a musical English family of Italian extraction, they became friendly with Mozart in the early 1780s. Stephen was a composer of operas, including
Gli sposi malcontenti
(Vienna, 1785) and
No Song, No Supper
(London, 1790), that often show cased his sister in leading soprano roles. Nancy was a prominent member of the Viennese Italian company from 1783–87 and sang the first Susanna in
Le nozze di Figaro
(1786). The Storages returned to England in the spring of 1787, and at a farewell concert at the Kärntnertortheater on 23 February Nancy sang the scena
Ch’io mi scordi di te?… Non temer, amato bene
K505 for soprano andpiano that Mozart had composed for them to perform together specially for the occasion.

SÜSSMAYR, FRANZ XAVER
(1766–1803) Studied with Mozart in 1791 and quickly became a trusted friend. He may have composed
the recitatives for
La clemenza di Tito
and in December took over the completion of the unfinished Requiem; according to Constanze’s sister, Sophie Haibel (née Weber), Mozart issued instructions to Sussmayr the night before he died on how he wanted the work completed. Mozart frequently poked fun at him, describing him as ‘that idiotic fellow’, ‘a full-blown ass’ and calling him ‘Sauermayr’, a pun on
süss
(sweet) and
sauer
(sour). Süssmayr studied with Antonio Salieri soon after Mozart’s death, and wrote popular sacred and secular works in Vienna in the 1790s.

SWEETEN, GOTTFRIED (BERNHARD), BARON VAN
(1733 –1803) A former diplomat and occasional composer, from 1777 van Swieten was director of the court library and president of the education and censorship commission in Vienna. He was an ardent supporter of Mozart and his music, subscribing to his Trattnerhof concerts (1784) and to a series that never materialized in 1789; in the later 1780s he commissioned from him arrangements of some of Handel’s works. After Mozart’s death, van Swieten organized a Viennese benefit concert for Constanze and contributed to Carl Thomas Mozart’s education in Prague.