Maynard Solomon's books on Beethoven and his renowned writings on Mozart, Schubert, and Ives led a contributor to Music & Letters to name him "the leading musicologist-biographer of our time." His classic biography, Beethoven, has been translated into seven languages and his Beethoven Essays received the Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for best book of the year in 1989. Mr. Solomon, who lives in New York, has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Universities.

Mozart

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Leopold Mozart

When Leopold Mozart died in 1787 at the age of sixty-seven, Lorenz Hagenauer's son, Dominikus Hagenauer, wrote in his diary that his father's late friend had been "a man of much wit and sagacity, who would have been capable of rendering good service to the State even apart from music," but that he "had the misfortune of being always persecuted here and was by far less beloved here than in other, greater places in Europe."¹ By several accounts, Mozart's father was a hard man to like. Nissen wrote, "In Salzburg he was regarded as a sardonic humorist."² His acerbic and dissatisfied nature was no secret to foreign observers either, among whom he acquired the reputation of being perpetually discontented. It is important to find the sources of this discontent, for it powered his restless, unrelenting search for fulfillment and thereby became central to his family's sense of purpose and obligation.

Leopold Mozart sprang from a family of artisans who had lived for generations in the South German city of Augsburg. His mother, Anna Maria Sulzer (1696-1766), was the eldest daughter of Christian Sulzer, a weaver from Baden-Baden who had come to Augsburg in 1695, and his wife Dorothea, née Baur, who was a weaver's daughter. On 1 May 1718 Anna Maria married Johann Georg Mozart (1679-1736), who came from a family of artisans and masons but had chosen to apprentice himself as a bookbinder. The entry in the town marriage registry reads, "Johann Georg Mozer, a bookbinder, widowed, and Anna Maria Sulzer, single, both of this place; his witness Johann Georg Mozer, master mason; her witness Christian Sulzer, weaver."³ Mozart's grandfather, a master bookbinder, had succeeded to his employer's guild license by marrying his widow, Anna Maria Banegger, in 1708; childless, she had died earlier in 1718. Leopold Mozart was the newlyweds' first child; he was baptized Johann Georg Leopold Mozart at St. George's Church in Augsburg on 14 November 1719. Seven more children were born to the couple by 1735; three boys and two girls survived, and all but one of these lived long lives.

The Catholic Church was the center of the Mozart family's life. They were members of the congregation of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, the larger of two congregations run by the Marian Brotherhood in Augsburg. From 1722 they lived in a house in the Jesuitengasse owned by the Jesuit Order. Johann Georg sent his two oldest sons, Leopold and Johann Christian, to the nearby Jesuit gymnasium of St. Salvator, one of the region's leading seats of humanistic education, drawing its pupils from Augsburg's aristocratic and bourgeois families as well as from "people of standing" in neighboring Bavaria, Swabia, and Austria.⁴ Leopold, whose godfather was Georg Grabherr, a prominent churchman and canon at St. Peter's, was apparently intended for the priesthood. That may have been one reason he very early became a choirboy in the monasteries of Heiligen Kreuz and St. Ulrich.

The course and content of Leopold Mozart's education is important to understand because he was to be his son's main instructor in virtually every branch of learning. The St. Salvator Gymnasium offered a rigorous six-year program of instruction, followed, for those deemed capable of pursuing the study of philosophy, by a two- or three-year term in the St. Salvator Lyceum. The curriculum centered on logic, science, theology, and rhetoric; spoken and written mastery of Latin were required, as was sufficient Greek to understand the New Testament in the original. Students were taught mathematics and the physical sciences; it was doubtless at St. Salvator that Leopold Mozart acquired his abiding interest in telescopes and microscopes.

An outstanding singer and proficient violinist, he participated in many of the school's annual celebratory performances, appearing in at least eight theater pieces as actor and singer between 1724 and 1736.⁵ After several years of preparatory studies, which began before he was five, Leopold was enrolled as a first-year student (Principista) perhaps as early as the fall of 1727 and graduated magna cum laude in 1735. Despite his intelligence, however, he seems to have been left back for one or even two years, so that it may have taken him seven or eight years to complete the six-year course at the gymnasium.⁶ Perhaps he was ill, or perhaps this was an early sign of his resistance to being educated for the priesthood. Indeed, there is a striking mention of that resistance in the reminiscences of a schoolmate, court counselor Franziskus Erasmus Freysinger, whom Mozart met in Munich in October 1777 and who vividly recalled Leopold Mozart's Augsburg days: "Ah, he was a great fellow. My father thought the world of him. And how he hood-winked the clerics about becoming a priest!"⁷ Even in Leopold Mozart's later years, he often had harsh and sarcastic words for the priesthood, drawing a sharp line between his faith and those who administered it.⁸

Leopold entered the St. Salvator Lyceum in October 1735, but the death of his father soon thereafter, on 19 February 1736, unexpectedly disrupted the orderly progress of his education. In June 1736, three months before the end of his first school year, he abruptly broke off his studies at the lyceum, and on 4 August he was granted a withdrawal certificate.⁹ That brought him to a crossroads: he now had to decide whether to resume his education, to take some role in his father's workshop, or to pursue some other profession, perhaps in music, for which he had already shown so pronounced a talent.

Leopold chose to resume his education, and on 26 November 1737, after a hiatus of one year, he matriculated at the Benedictine University in Salzburg as a student of philosophy and jurisprudence."¹⁰ But his formal schooling prematurely came to a dramatic conclusion, for in September 1739 the rector expelled him from the university for want of application and poor attendance."¹¹ His calm reaction was remarked by the authorities:

Johann Georg Mozart, a Swabian of Augsburg, has from the beginning of the civil year hardly attended Natural Science more than once or twice, and has thereby rendered himself unworthy of the name of student. A few days before the examination he was called before the Dean and informed that henceforth he would no longer be numbered among the students. Having heard this sentence, he offered no appeals, accepted the sentence, and departed as if indifferent: therefore he was not called for further examination.¹²