Arriving in Salzburg, ahead of this week’s Whitsun music festival, the first thing that greets you is a rather grumpy statue of the greatest composer who ever lived. Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in this implausibly pretty Alpine city, and each time I return here the boyish creator of the world’s most beautiful music seems more ubiquitous than ever.
Wandering the narrow alleyways of Salzburg’s medieval Altstadt, its cobblestones worn smooth by centuries of tourist traffic, Mozart’s pale and pensive face stares back at you from the window of every souvenir shop, emblazoned on every conceivable knick-knack, from fridge magnets to action figures (my personal favourite is the Playmobil Mozart, which comes complete with violin, frock coat and powdered wig). The apotheoses of this personality cult are the omnipresent Mozartkugeln – chocolate baubles wrapped in silver foil, each one adorned with a mugshot of Salzburg’s musical Wunderkind.
Mozart is big business here, and the competition for tourist Pounds and Dollars (and Yen and Yuan) is intense. Sightseers queue for tickets to Mozart concerts in rococo mansions, performed by musicians in period dress. They flock to Mozart’s Geburtshaus, where he was born, and lived until he was 17. They swarm around Mozart’s Wohnhaus, where he lived until he left Salzburg, at the age of 25. It’s all deliciously ironic, for Mozart grew to hate his hometown, and couldn’t wait to get shot of it: (literally) kicked out of his last job in Salzburg, he flounced off to Vienna, where he wrote his greatest hits.
Mozart lived in Vienna for the rest of his brief, prolific life, and although he came back to Salzburg for a few fleeting visits, to see his sister and his widowed father, he never entertained the slightest notion of returning here to live. So what lures all these sightseers here? What exactly are they looking for? Like Hardy’s Wessex or Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, the answer lies in that no-man’s land midway between the reality and the myth.
Mozart was born in 1756, in a modest apartment in the Getreidegasse – today Salzburg’s busiest (and most touristic) street. He was the seventh of seven children. Only one of his six siblings, his sister Nannerl, survived infancy – a shocking mortality rate by modern standards, but fairly normal back then.
Are great composers born or made? Mozart is frequently cited as a prime example of the former, a man with a facility so extraordinary that it seemed positively supernatural. However in the great debate between nature and nurture, he actually scores about half and half. His father was not alone in calling his incredible talent ‘God-given.’ Even to a devout atheist, his immortal melodies seem heaven-sent. However he also had the good fortune to be born into a city that was custom-built to cultivate his unique gifts.
With barely 17,000 inhabitants in 1756, Salzburg was a small city (London and Paris, by comparison, both already had populations of well over half a million) but its musical heritage was out of all proportion to its compact size. This anomaly was the result of an ecclesiastic quirk of history.
Sandwiched between Austria and Bavaria, Salzburg was an independent city-state – part of the Holy Roman Empire but ruled by a Prince-Archbishop, whose hybrid role, as the name suggests, was both religious and secular. Salzburg was the most important Episcopal See in the whole of German-speaking Europe, and its Prince-Archbishop carried the same sort of clout as an Archduke.
In earlier eras, these Prince-Archbishops had led armies into battle, but by the 18th century they’d long since settled into a more comfortable way of life. Rather than wasting their money on costly wars, they sensibly sidestepped the internecine squabbles that had plagued Central Europe for centuries, and devoted their considerable resources to the glory of God.
Successive Prince-Archbishops transformed Salzburg into the most spectacular city in the Alps, an intricate cluster of baroque palaces and churches – and they filled these palaces and churches with art and music. By the time Mozart came along, Salzburg boasted several hundred professional musicians (a huge number for such a small city) and among them was his father, Leopold.
Great footballers tend to be the progeny of journeymen players, rather than superstars or rank amateurs. The same generally goes for great musicians. Leopold was a good enough musician to recognise and develop his son’s abilities, but he wasn’t good enough to harbour any competing ambitions of his own. A competent but undistinguished composer and violinist, he’d done well enough to secure a steady job as the Prince-Archbishop’s Deputy Kappellmeister (concert master), but he’d been passed over several times for the principal post. His own career was going nowhere and so, like a lot of frustrated fathers, he transferred his thwarted ambitions onto his son.
If Leopold had any talent, it was as a music teacher – the only thing he wrote of any note was a popular primer for young violinists. His ruthless hothousing deprived his son Wolfgang of a normal childhood, but even though his style of parenting may seem merciless to modern minds, music-lovers owe him a great debt of gratitude – although it was little Wolfgang who paid the price. Thankfully for us (though maybe not so much for Wolfgang), he made sure his son’s vast talents were fully exploited – in both senses of the word.
Leopold did an admirable job of home-schooling his prodigious son. What was far more questionable were the marathon concert tours he arranged. These tours would have tried the stamina of an Olympic athlete, never mind a frail and often sickly child. Father and son travelled all over Europe for months on end, criss-crossing the continent in horse-drawn carriages on dreadful roads. Wolfgang frequently fell ill. On at least one occasion, he nearly died.
Remarkably, Salzburg’s Prince-Archbishop, Sigismund von Schrattenbach, seemed perfectly happy for Leopold to bunk off work for months at a time. However in 1771, von Schrattenbach inconveniently dropped dead. He was succeeded by a far tougher taskmaster called Hieronymus von Colloredo. Prince-Archbishop Colloredo is commonly portrayed as the pantomime villain of the Mozart story – a petty, reactionary ruler who was indifferent to Mozart’s immense talent and went out of his way to thwart him.
In fact, Colloredo acknowledged Mozart’s gifts and employed him as a court musician. However, after his predecessor’s largesse he needed to balance the books, and so (not unreasonably) he expected his employees to remain in Salzburg, rather than moonlighting abroad.
Being grounded by Colloredo was the main cause of Wolfgang’s growing discontent with Salzburg. Touring the capitals of Europe had given him a taste for the brighter lights of bigger cities – royal courts and theatres far grander than anything Salzburg had to offer. There were creative limitations too. Mozart’s piano concertos may seem to us like the absolute pinnacle of his achievement, but his greatest love was opera, and Salzburg had no opera house.
Mozart’s lively letters are full of slights about the shortcomings of his hometown. ‘Salzburg is no place for my talents,’ he wrote. ‘To waste one’s life in such a beggarly place really is very sad.’ Coming from virtually any other musician, such ingratitude would sound a lot like arrogance, but for Mozart it was fair comment, and some of his put-downs were very funny (he claimed the only competent singer in the city was the court castrato, Ceccarelli). Mozart was an irreverent correspondent, with a wicked sense of humour. Sometimes, his frustrations with Salzburg were sincere and heartfelt (‘in Salzburg I do not know who I am’). Sometimes, it seems he was merely letting off steam.
Matters came to a head when Mozart fired off an imprudent letter to Colloredo (quite possibly dictated by his father,) requesting yet another leave of absence, ‘to profit from our talents, as is taught to us by the Gospel.’ Colloredo clearly didn’t care for this impertinent lecture in theology. ‘Father and son are hereby granted permission to seek their fortunes – according to the Gospel,’ he replied. Leopold and Wolfgang had been fired. Realising he’d badly overplayed his hand, Leopold had to beg his boss to reconsider.
Ironically, the final showdown with Colloredo didn’t happen in Salzburg, but in Vienna. Colloredo had been summoned to the Austrian capital to attend the coronation of the new Emperor, Joseph II, and he commanded Mozart to accompany him, along with the rest of his courtly entourage. Reluctantly, Mozart tagged along, hoping to use the visit for his own advancement, only to find that he’d been billeted with Colloredo’s servants, rather than with Colloredo’s more prestigious employees, like the castrato, Ceccarelli.
For Mozart, this was the last straw. He tendered his resignation – not to Colloredo, who was too busy to receive him, but to his deputy, Count Arco, a man whose main claim to fame is that he kicked the world’s greatest composer up the arse.
Before Count Arco sent Mozart on his way (with a boot up his knickerbockered backside) he offered him some shrewd advice: ‘You allow yourself to be far too easily dazzled by Vienna,’ Arco warned him, sagely. ‘A man’s reputation there lasts but a short time. At first, you’re overwhelmed with praise, and you make a lot of money, but how long does that last? After a few months, the Viennese want something new.’
Mozart’s freelance life in Vienna was productive but precarious, and although there’s no way of knowing, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that living there contributed to his early death. ‘Apart from my health, I know of nothing more necessary than money,’ he wrote to his father, from Vienna. In Vienna, he relinquished both. Vienna was ten times the size of Salzburg, and notoriously unhealthy. With so many inhabitants, living so close together in such insanitary conditions, disease was rife.
Mozart died in Vienna in 1791, probably of rheumatic fever. He was only 35. His father, Leopold, who remained in Salzburg, lived to the grand old age of 77 (this was not unusual – Haydn lived to the same age). If Mozart had lived to the same age as his father, he would have outlived Beethoven. We could have had another 40 years of him. In the last year of his life he wrote two operas, a piano concerto, a clarinet concerto, and most of his final meisterwerk, his unfinished Requiem. Given another 40 years, just imagine how many more eternal masterpieces he might have produced?
And yet in those 35 years, 25 of them in Salzburg, he left us more timeless melodies than any other composer, before or since. Without Vienna, we never would have heard Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute or The Marriage of Figaro. But without Salzburg, we might never have heard of Mozart at all.
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