Travels in Italy with the teenage Mozart

Between the ages of 13 and 17, Mozart made three trips to Italy, spending some two-and- a-half years in ‘the country at the heart of the opera world’. He would never return as an adult. His mature Italian operas – The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, La Clemenza di Tito – can be traced directly back to these formative teenage encounters and experiences in Bologna, Venice, Rome, Florence and Naples. So argues Jane Glover in Mozart in Italy.

A follow-up to 2005’s Mozart’s Women, the book is a lively account of journeys which the composer shared (mostly) with his father Leopold. What dominates initially is the business of 18th-century travel itself – something viewed very differently through the wide eyes of an eager young boy and the anxious gaze of his elderly tour manager-cum-PR-cum-chaperone parent.

Luckily letters home (Wolfgang’s mother and talented sister, Glover is quick to remind us, were perhaps resentfully and certainly unwillingly left behind in Salzburg) allow both to speak directly. ‘I simply love travelling,’ declares the youth, even as his father mutters about a process that is ‘nothing but dressing and undressing, packing and unpacking, and with no warm room, so one freezes like a dog’. And small wonder. From banking by a complicated system of credit notes to mountain roads and their inevitable accidents, snow and extreme heat, to inns of uncertain quality and ‘an incredible number of insects, fleas and bedbugs’, this was less a concert tour than a military campaign with an attractive soundtrack.

Leopold – ‘completely addicted to the cycle of travel, exhibition and reward’ – is both the champion and villain of the piece. Sacrificing his own career (and constantly testing the already tense relationship with his Salzburg employers but disappearing for years on end), he is both the reason Italy’s greatest doors – imperial palaces, opera houses, even the Vatican – open to his son and the reason many then firmly close.