Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Love for Music and the Music of Love

Abstract

At an early age, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) witnessed the celebration of his musical genius, though he had to strive during his lifetime in order to get the chance and the occasion to create many of his works, which eventually outdid all that his contemporaries might have expected from a child prodigy. Soon after his death, the growing demand for his scores prompted the first editions in Germany; by 1806, Breitkopf and Hartel had already published 17 volumes, including piano compositions (solo and duet), piano concertos, string quartets, a few masses, the complete Don Giovanni, and many concert arias, and by 1807-08 a large number of orchestral works had also been published.1 During the next two decades, over a hundred music publishers from many European cities, Copenhagen included, published roughly two-thirds of Mozart’s production, comprising symphonies, divertimenti, variations, concerts, chamber music, and operas, in order to meet the demand for scores for professional use as well as domestic, since Mozart’s music was already being widely used as teaching material. By then, Mozart was indeed ranked in importance with Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) and was accepted as a forerunner of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). He was on his way to gaining the middle position in the triad of composers (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven) who would later be acknowledged as the great tradition and recognized as masters by the Romantic school. Although later in the second half of the nineteenth century, Mozart’s star would fall into oblivion to rise again after the first centenary of his death, until the mid-century he was first acclaimed as a forerunner of the Romantics and then as an epitome of classicism. Mozart would then be often praised in the terms used to describe the idea of what the poetic in Beethoven stands for, which meant that many statements ended up by saying that “music has reached the level of the poetic by manifesting form as expression, and expression as form,” as Carl1 See John Daverio, “Mozart in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mozart, ed. by Simon P. Keefe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 171-Dahlhaus eloquently observed.2 On the other hand, he would also be praised in the style used by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) to pay tribute to Greek art, as Robert Schumann (1810-56) did in 1834: “Serenity, repose, grace-these are the characteristics of ancient works of art, to be found in Mozart’s school as well. Just as the Greek pictured his thundering Jupiter with a serene expression, so Mozart withholds his bolts of lightning.”3 Meanwhile, the operas of his later period, the three Mozart-Da Ponte ones, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Cosi fan tutte (1790), together with Die Zauberflote (1791), assured him fame and popularity all over Europe; nevertheless, these early productions were far from being faithful to the works originally created and, consequently, had little in common with what modern audiences were familiar with, namely, because there remained few vestiges of the original librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838) and Emanuel Schikaneder (1751-1812), as we shall see.