After Leopold departed from Vienna, he never saw his son again.
Mozart’s relationship with his father was more ambivalent than Amadeus ever allows. Wolfgang’s view of his parent was trifocal, with distinctly different and conflicting feelings. There was the father of his early years, who viewed his son as a “god-given miracle” and devoted himself to his education in music (violin, keyboard, and composition) and other branches of learning. Leopold not only fathered him, but also nurtured him in every other way. These early years must have fostered Wolfgang’s fondest feelings. But the young Wolfgang was a pliable person, and Leopold was always in control as he directed tours to Paris, London, twice to Vienna, and three times to Italy.
During Wolfgang’s early twenties, this relationship was affected in two ways: Leopold could no longer leave Salzburg for extended tours with his son, due to the archbishop’s requirements for his residency, and Wolfgang was becoming less of the accommodating youth and more the headstrong adult. If Leopold could no longer share the glory, perhaps Wolfgang was no longer so glorious. Leopold hardly trusted his son, and while Wolfgang was in Paris and other locations, spies reported to him on his son’s activities. The goal of this Parisian tour was to find an appointment for Wolfgang, which was never forthcoming. But the trip revealed Wolfgang’s weakness for women and an inability to manage his money. The supreme blow was the death of his mother, from which the father-son relationship never recovered; Leopold blamed Wolfgang for her death.
After this taste of freedom from his parents and Salzburg, it became Wolfgang’s overriding desire to make the break from the home turf. Being literally kicked out the door from the employ of the archbishop may have liberated Wolfgang, but at the same time it further isolated Leopold, who wanted Wolfgang to return to Salzburg, for he did not believe him capable of independence and self-management. Leopold viewed Wolfgang’s not having a court appointment as a recipe for personal disaster, since he felt that the Viennese public would eventually tire of him and that Wolfgang was incapable of managing himself.
In addition, more than Leopold, the archbishop and the local musicians drove Mozart from Salzburg; the city also lacked a venue for a composer disposed toward opera. Lastly, there was the wunderkind factor, from which Wolfgang could certainly never escape as long as he remained in his birth city; everyone recognized him as “the little miracle” and not the young gifted man he was by the mid-1770s. Even though “next to God was Papa,” after Wolfgang had established himself in Vienna and married Constanze, the struggle for total independence was essentially won.
Wolfgang was certainly not as clever as Leopold in controlling others for one’s own purposes; but Leopold’s management style left its residue and may have made it more difficult for Wolfgang to gain the sort of appointment Leopold desired for him. Already in 1769, Johann Adolph Hasse raised a flag: “The said Sig. Mozard is a very polished and civil man, and the children are very well brought up. The boy is moreover handsome, vivacious, graceful and full of good manners; and knowing him, it is difficult to avoid loving him. I am sure that if his development keeps due pace with his years, he will be a prodigy, provided that his father does not perhaps pamper him too much or spoil him by means of excessive eulogies; that is the only thing I fear.”
And again in 1771: “Young Mozard is certainly marvelous for his age, and I do love him infinitely. The father, as far as I can see, is equally discontented everywhere, since here too he uttered the same lamentations. He idolizes his son a little too much, and thus does all he can to spoil him; but I have such a high opinion of the boy’s natural good sense that I hope he will not be spoilt in spite of the father’s adulation, but will grow into an honest fellow.”
In December of the same year the Empress Maria Theresia advised her son Ferdinand, governor of Milan, and underlined further concerns: “You ask me to take the young Salzburger into your service. I do not know why, not believing that you have need of a composer or of useless people. If however it would give you pleasure, I have no wish to hinder you. What I say is intended only to prevent your burdening yourself with useless people and giving titles to people of that sort. If they are in service it degrades that service when these people go about the world like beggars.”
The name Mozart may well have already acquired its own unenviable reputation when Wolfgang was searching for a new post in 1777-78.
To have cast Leopold’s Janus-faced black carnival mask as both the Commendatore and the messenger who commissioned the Requiem is another example of Shaffer’s theatrical brilliance; however, there is no basis for believing that at any time Mozart thought of this composition for his father’s memory. It was ordered by Count Walsegg-Stuppach for his wife, and he pawned it off as his own composition, a common practice of his.
“I love her and she loves me”
If Leopold was “next to God” in Wolfgang’s world, his wife Constanze must have been somewhere in the same constellation; she was the mechanism by which he was able to display and enforce his independence, a point well made in Amadeus. At the same time, the portrait of her as an “air-head” willing to participate in Wolfgang’s juvenile verbal games involving coprolalia, coprophilia, and sexual overtures in the Salzburg archbishop’s Vienna residence prior to a musical academy and reception seems beyond imagination. Again the chronology is adjusted for Shaffer’s and Forman’s purposes; he could not have been cavorting with Constanze until after his break with the archbishop and certainly not under the eye of Salieri. If we can believe Mozart’s own words, he presents a different sequence of events to his father: “One thing more I must tell you, which is that when I resigned the Archbishop’s service, our love had not yet begun. It was born of her tender care and attentions when I was living in their house.”
In the end, we know little about Constanze. The negative aspects of her character probably derive from Leopold and Mozart’s sister, Nannerl. From her conduct as a widow, Constanze must have had considerable musical and business acumen; she did much to further her deceased husband’s as well as her own reputation. The accusation in prefeminist literature that she was neither worthy of her husband’s genius nor understood it is patently unfair; this charge could have been leveled at any person Wolfgang might have married. Arthur Schurig, in the only book devoted to her, said she was “petty, narrow-minded, vain, greedy, superstitious, and gossipy.” To anyone who has read the Mozart family correspondence, all of these adjectives could just as well be applied to her in-laws.
The most complete description of Constanze comes from a not unbiased source: Wolfgang himself, who before their marriage was trying to persuade Leopold of her attributes: “But before I cease to plague you with my chatter, I must make you better acquainted with the character of Constanze. She is not ugly, but at the same time far from beautiful. Her whole beauty consists in two little black eyes and a pretty figure. She has no wit, but she has enough common sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother. It is a downright lie that she is inclined to be extravagant. On the contrary, she is accustomed to be shabbily dressed, for the little that her mother has been able to do for her children, she has done for the two others, but never for Constanze. True, she would like to be neatly and cleanly dressed, but not smartly, and most things that a woman needs she is able to make for herself; and she dresses her own hair every day. Moreover she understands housekeeping and has the kindest heart in the world. I love her and she loves me with all her heart. Tell me whether I could wish myself a better wife?”
Finally, Shaffer and Forman imply that Constanze may have been unfaithful while she was in Baden for extended cures. It has been proposed elsewhere that she had an affair with Mozart’s purported pupil and copyist, Franz Xaver S?ssmayr, who was also in Baden during some of this time. As part of the argument some writers have pointed out that after Mozart’s death her health seems to have returned and remained good. But it should be noted that she was never again pregnant. It has also been suggested that their son, born on July 26, 1791, named Franz Xaver Wolfgang, may have been S?ssmayr’s. This hypothesis is also untenable, for Franz Xaver Wolfgang carried his legitimate father’s most distinctive genetic mark: a misshapen left ear.
In the end, the evidence does not support a negative view of Constanze. Criticism comes chiefly from those not well disposed to her and from a male-biased musicological community. Granted, Constanze’s alteration of family letters has certainly irritated scholars and raised suspicions about her motivations, but that is applying twentieth-century views of biography to the more protective one of earlier times. Perhaps Constanze is best compared to another woman in Mozart’s life, his mother, Anna Maria Walburga Pertl. We know little about her, but from what we do know, both in ability and proclivity, she might be the most viable parallel. Both women were able to act with propriety for the circumstances, yet maintain a great degree of anonymity.
An ordinary mind and silly jokes
Amadeus portrays Mozart (Tom Hulce), in Salieri’s words, as a “giggling dirty-minded creature.”
? 1984 The Saul Zaentz Co.
Amadeus’ most controversial portrait is that of Wolfgang himself. How does one characterize an unexplainable phenomenon? While the problem for many lesser composers of Haydn’s and Mozart’s age is a lack of personal documentation, for Mozart and his family there is a plethora, including diaries, extended letters, notices and reviews in the press, and memoirs, as well as catalogs and autographs of the music itself. Yet, in a perceptive essay Alan Tyson asks: “What do we really know of Mozart or what can we know of Mozart?” Just how much does this bountiful documentation open to us the mind of a musical savant? Does the biography support the music, or is there no relationship between the man and the art? To the last question Shaffer would give a resounding “No.” Shaffer’s Wolfgang, in the words of his Salieri, was “a giggling dirty-minded creature.” And as Shaffer’s Salieri wonders about the “miraculous” nature and “sublimity” of the music, the dichotomy of the man and his music deepens. Thus, an implied but central question in Amadeus is: Does a relationship of Mozart’s personality to his artistic products exist?
Such a question again comes out of the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth. In Mozart’s time the prerequisites for a composer were neither genius nor the assertion of an individual artistic personality. Rather, it was a question of craftsmanship and the ability to provide new music appropriate to an occasion. A lexicon of musical ideas existed, designed and accepted for certain types of expression. A composer could select from this bank and create a musical product fully comprehensible to his audience. Mozart was able to manipulate this vocabulary both technically and affectively so as to create new depths of expression. It is within the essential style of the eighteenth century’s last decades that Mozart operated. Thus, one should not be surprised that the man and the music may not have been congruent. Karoline Pichler, a Biedermeier woman of letters, observed: “Mozart and Haydn, whom I knew well, were men in whose personal intercourse there was absolutely no other sign of unusual power of intellect and almost no trace of intellectual culture, nor of any scholarly or other higher interests. A rather ordinary turn of mind, silly jokes and in the case of the former, an irresponsible way of life, were all that distinguished them in society; and yet what depths, what worlds of fantasy, harmony, melody and feeling lay concealed behind this unpromising exterior.”
The Salieri of Amadeus, when confronted with Mozart’s autographs, remarked on seeing no corrections in the scores: “It is miraculous.” Such an observation is also not quite correct. While Mozart, like any composer of his time, had the craft to produce works with unusual rapidity, there were a number of false starts and compositions left in progress over a period of one or two years. For some compositions sketches survive, and one must believe that these were more common than the number of extant examples indicates. Regarding the six quartets dedicated to Haydn, Mozart acknowledged in the letter that prefaced their publication: “They are, indeed, the fruit of a long and laborious study.” When Shaffer’s Wolfgang tells Schikaneder that The Magic Flute is all in his “noodle” and just needs to be written down, this is something less than a half-truth. Certainly, the concept and much of the composition may have already been formulated; the act of setting the notes on paper certainly engenders changes. For operas, once the rehearsals began, all sorts of revisions might occur to accommodate both the drama and the cast.
The ideas about eighteenth-century opera that Shaffer presents in Amadeus in some cases are accurate and in others are miscarriages of history. For example, the creation of an opera began with the selection of a subject. Then a poet was commissioned to prepare the text, and lastly a composer was hired with the expectation that he would tailor the arias to the already engaged singers. To present the court with an already completed opera was not correct protocol. Thus, in Amadeus the director of the Imperial Opera, Franz Xaver Orsini-Rosenberg, was only expecting the normal practice when he expressed wonderment at Mozart’s presumptuousness in selecting a libretto, particularly of a drama — in this case Figaro — already forbidden to appear on the stage.
Amadeus also makes the point that The Abduction from the Seraglio is special because it is Turkish and takes place in a harem; such a setting was not unusual, and in fact Mozart had previously worked on a fragment known to us as Zaide with a similar location. When Mozart tries to make the case for The Marriage of Figaro as an opera, he is arguing for the genre of the opera buffa as opposed to opera seria, as if opera buffa were something totally unfamiliar to Joseph II and Vienna. This, too, is totally false. Opera buffa had played in the Viennese theaters with great success. When he compares the stiffness of a “Hercules” (that is, an opera-seria-type character) to the comic lightness of a “Hairdresser” (that is, Figaro himself), he finds the “Hairdresser” much more appealing. This had already been acknowledged by Viennese audiences through the success of Paisiello’s Barber of Seville, to which The Marriage of Figaro was a sequel. Opera seria is portrayed as a dead genre in the 1780s; according to words placed in Mozart’s mouth, it “*censored*s marble.”
Such an idea about opera seria was fostered by German musicologists needlessly trying to elevate further Mozart’s position on the historical horizon as the first German master of a new genre, opera buffa. Mozart’s last opera, The Clemency of Titus, also was an opera seria; it continued to breathe well into the nineteenth century, as testified by the popularity not only of Titus but of later representatives of the genre by such Italian composers as Mayr, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi. In Amadeus, Mozart’s speech to the emperor on the great finales in Figaro, pointing to their length, absence of recitative, and the accumulation of characters from a duet to the entire cast, is purported to be a new idea. In fact, it comes from his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. However, da Ponte wrote this as a description of what the audience demanded, and, regardless of its dramatic viability, it had to be. Even the reception of Figaro is altered for dramatic purposes; Amadeus views it as a failure. In truth, the emperor had to forbid encores so that performances of an already lengthy opera would not continue without end.
Lastly, one must take issue with the way the operatic performances themselves were led. In Amadeus both Salieri and Mozart conducted their operas in the manner to which today’s audiences are accustomed. Such was not the case in the eighteenth century; conductorial responsibilities were divided between the concertmaster, who was responsible for the orchestra, and the keyboardist, who was in charge of the vocal forces and played a supporting role for the orchestral music. For the first several performances of an opera, the composer directed from the harpsichord or fortepiano with a few leading gestures aimed at the singers.