05 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by Herbert Francis Peyser

Mozarts earthly journey was remarkably brief, yet it was rich with extraordinary achievements that left an indelible mark on the world. In this booklet, the author grapples with the challenge of capturing the essence of a life so densely packed with events—from early triumphs to profound tragedies. Rather than attempting a comprehensive evaluation of Mozarts immense creative legacy, the author offers a glimpse into the pivotal moments that shaped the master’s unforgettable story. - Summary by Authors Preface

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part five of wofgong Amadeus Mozart by Howard Payser. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Part five The
Magic Flute. Mozart was ill and despondent, but his activity
was untiring. It is an infinite pity that he did

(00:21):
not take the hint of Da Ponte and others who
were urging him to come to England, where he might
easily have made a fortune and become a British idol,
like Kendel before him, and Haydn and Mendelssohn after him.
He went on writing, because, as he was soon to say,
composition tires me less than resting. In the spring of

(00:43):
seventeen ninety one he was commissioned to compose another opera,
which was to be his last, and in a number
of respects, his most epoch, making the Magic Flute disauber Flirte,
and with it he was to write one of the
most extraordinary works of operatic history, to create German opera

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in accordance with a long cherished ambition of his. But
like Moses, never to do more than cross the frontier
of the promised land he had beheld in vision. Emmanuel Schickender,
who had known Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart in Salzburg, was
a wandering actor and a playwright of sorts. The head

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of a traveling company which gave Shakespeare, Gerta Schiller lessing
and for better or worse operas by Gluck and Shingspiela
by Heiden and Mozart. He had, like numerous barnstormers, a
keen knowledge of the taste of audiences, particularly of the
Plebeian ones to which his players catered in his own way.

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As adventurous a Personess de Ponte, Schickender took over in
seventeen eighty nine the direction of a playhouse on the
Starremberg estates, the Freihaus Teatre in the Widen district. There
he produced comic shows, Singspiela and operettas. With his grasp
of suburban tastes, he combined a thorough understanding of what

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could be done with his brother Mason and old acquaintance Mozart,
a business rival of the impresario Maranelli, who ran a
theater in the Leopoldstadt quarter and made a specialty of
magic plays. He now approached the composer with his own Singspiel.
We cannot here examine the sources from which he assembled

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his libretto. There ran through it a powerful strain of
Masonic influence, love interest, low comedy in abundance. Chickender took
care to taylor to his own measure the role of
the wandering birdcatcher, popaganio, and other sure fire theatrical ingredients.
He asked Mozart to supply the music and the latter,

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after warning him that since he had never yet written
a magic opera, he hesitated to court failure in this sphere.
At length complied. Between March and the end of September
seventeen ninety one, the Magic Flute was written. Chickener, aware
of the glorious bargain he had struck strove to be
the soul of complaisance, he supplied the composer with every

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comfort at his disposal, a charming summer house on the
grounds of the theater where he could work at this score,
with food, wine, and pretty actresses to divert him. In short,
whatever promised to humor the musician and promote the flow
of inspiration. He even hummed or sang the sort of
tunes he considered appropriate to the role he designed for himself.

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Let us, at this stage dispose of a few legends that,
in the course of one hundred and sixty years have
accumulated about the work. One is that the play is
a farago of childish nonsense, made tolerable only by the
variety and grandeur of Mozart's music. Another that the plot
was altered at a late hour because another manager was

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about to produce a work similar in its story. A
third that the piece was a failure. As a matter
of fact, the Book of the Magic Flute happens to
be one of the best librettos in existence. From the
point of view of good theater. The imagined revision never
took place. For considerations of parallels, let alone plagiarisms never

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bothered theater directors at this epoch. On the contrary, if
a play or opera had one feature that pleased its public,
a rival manager was quick to copy this very point
on an even broader scale. Although at the first performance
The Magic Flute did not achieve such an overwhelming triumph
as its composer had hoped, before many months had passed

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it was attracting throngs, and not many years later Schickender
was able to build out of the wealth. It brought
him that famous Theater on Devine, which still stands and
was to become the cradle of various storied master works.
As for the much maligned book, it appeared so powerfully
to none other than Gerta that he set out to

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write a sequel. While the sick and harried Mozart worked
with still inexhaustible fertility at the score of his Magic Opera,
he was interrupted by a sufficiently distasteful order from Prague
for an opera to be produced there at the coronation
of Leopold second as King of Bohemia. With no more

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than eighteen days to compose the music and assist in
the production of this occasional piece, he was ordered to
set an old text of Metastasios, retouched, it is true,
by one Catharino Mazzola La Camenza di Tito, an antiquated
specimen of opera seria, such as the composer had not

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bothered with since the period of Idomeneo. The available time
being so short, Mozart took along with him his pupil, Sussmyer,
who was asked to perform the almost secretarial job of
writing the Seco Resistes, leaving the more important parts of
the music to the master. His good friend, the empresario Guadassone,

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mounted the opera in sumptuous fashion, but goodwill did not
supplant genuine inspiration, and for all its craftsmanship, La Camenza
di Tito did not strike fire. The Empress dismissed it
as porcheria tedesca German rubbish. A correspondent of Studien Fortoon

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Kunchler unt Muzique Fronde reported that the beloved Kappelmeister Mozart
did not obtain this time the applause he had a
right to expect, for once. Clearly his progers did not
understand him. Doubtless, Tito is not a Figaro or a
Don Giovanni, but those unfamiliar with the work may well

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ask themselves if it is as bad as history paints it. Anyway,
its reception did not raise the master's spirit, and he
took leave of his friends with tears. He was now
seriously ill. He had fainting fits and accesses of exhaustion.
On September twenty eight, seventeen ninety one, he finished the

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Magic Flute, The March of the Priests and the overture,
being the last numbers set down the masonic symbols and
meanings with which the opera is filled. Comprehensible, however, only
to initiates are heard in the thrice reiterated three chords
at the opening of the superb tone piece. The overture

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is a fully developed sonata movement built on a fugal plan,
the mercurial subject having been borrowed from a clavier sonata
of his old friend and rival Clemente. At the first performance,
the compos roser Johann Schenk, later one of Beethoven's teachers,
crept through the orchestra to Mozart, who was conducting, and

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reverently kissed his hand, while the composer, continuing to conduct
with his right hand, affectionately patted Shank's head with his left.
He took pleasure in playing the Glockenspiel during Papaganio's air
aimechen oder vibchen, and once in fun introduced an unexpected
arpeggio which through Chickender completely out for a few minutes

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the requiem. As he was boarding his coach on the
trip to Prague, Mozart was startled on being accosted by
a gaunt, gray clad stranger of mysterious mien, who asked
him if he were willing to undertake for a certain sum,
the composition of a requiem mass, to be delivered at
a specified time. He agreed, But from this moment the

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weird visitor, whose identity he was admonished not to try
to discover, gave him no rest. He became convinced that
a messenger from the beyond had sought him out, that
the incident had a supernatural aspect, that he was indeed
ordered by a higher power to compose a death mass

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for himself, and the certainty that his time was at
hand grew steadily upon him. The incident, in reality, had
nothing but cob or mysterious about it. The gray messenger
was a certain leutgb steward of the Count balsag zou Stupac,
who had lately lost his wife and who, aspiring to

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be known as a composer, planned to perform the requiem
as his own work. But Mozart knew nothing of this.
He had a letter from his old friend a Ponte,
entreating him to join him in England, but it was
too late, and Mozart's tragedy had to be played out
to the bitter close that was now swiftly approaching to

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Da Ponte. He despatched this pathetic missive. I wish I
could follow your advice, but how can I do so?
I feel stunned. I reason with difficulty and cannot rid
myself of the vision of this unknown man. I see
him perpetually. He entreats me, he presses me, He impatiently

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demands the work. I go on writing. Otherwise I have
nothing more to fear. I know from what I suffer
that the hour is come. I am at the point
of death. I have come to the end before, having
had the enjoyment of my talent. Life was so beautiful,
my career stood at first under so auspicious a star.

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But one cannot change one's destiny. What tortured him more
than anything was the thought that, as furiously as he worked,
the Requiem might remain unfinished at the death he knew
was eminent. He had numerous discussions with his pupil, Xavier Zeussmayer,
but it was daily becoming clearer to him that he

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had small chance of completing the Mass himself. On a
walk in the Prator with Constanza in the early autumn,
he exclaimed, it cannot last much longer. Certainly I have
been given poison, that is a feeling I cannot shake off.
And this presumably is the basis of the age old
slander that Salieri had been his murderer at all events.

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Growing weakness forced him to take to his bed on
November twenty. He was never to leave it. I know,
he had said shortly before, that my music making is
about at an end. I feel a constant chill which
I cannot explain. I now have no more to do
save with doctors and apothecaries. His hands and feet were

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beginning to swell, yet he struggled desperately to get on
with the composition of the Mass. The visits of a
few friends seemed to comfort the sick man, and he
asked them to try over in his presence certain completed
pages of the score. At the beginning of December, he
himself struggled to sing some of the alto part of

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the work. When the La cremosa was reached, he gave
up the attempt after a few measures, and, overcome by
the certainty that he was doomed never to finish the music,
he broke down in a fit of weeping, and in
these days with tragic irony, there donned a promise of
better things. The rapidly growing popularity of the magic flute

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augured a carefree future. A group of Hungarian nobles began
to raise a subscription that would have assured Mozart an
annual income of a thousand gulden, and from Holland there
came almost at the twelfth hour, news of an even
more gratifying project. Mozart's death in the last hours. His

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sister in law, Sophie Habel, lent what assistant she could. Constanza,
grief stricken and stupefied, was helpless. The sick man, tortured
to the last by the thought of his unfinished requiem,
was shaken by the chills and fires of fever. It
was found necessary to take a canary out of the

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sick room because the singing of the bird seemed to
cause the sufferer physical pain. He appealed to Sophie to
remain with him, to comfort Constanza and to see me die.
I have the taste of death on my tongue already,
and who is to care for my Constanza when I
am gone? A doctor who attended him was at the

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theater when summoned, and, realizing the hopelessness of the case,
promised to come when the play was over, Sophie was
despatched to call a priest. When she returned, she found
the dying man bending over some sketches of the requiem
and giving souss Mayer some final directions about the work.
At last, he lapsed into unconsciousness a few moments before

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the end, puffing out his cheeks and making what the
tearful bystanders imagined to be an effort to imitate the
sound of the drums in his unfinished score, And five
minutes before one on the morning of December five, seventeen
ninety one, he died of what illness? Did Mozart die typhus?

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Some say a result of childhood illness, say others complicated
by the strain of overwork, traveling, disappointments and deprivations. The
most plausible medical explanation would appear to have been supplied
by a modern Salzburg physician, doctor H. Cosseroler, who diagnosed
the cause of the master's early demise as euremia resulting

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from Bright's disease, and this may explain the composer's persistent
idea in his last weeks that he had been adminis
ministered poison. The rest of the pitiful story need not
detain us. The parsimonious Baron von Schveeten advised Constanza to
observe economy in making the funeral arrangements, and so Mozart

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was buried in a pauper's grave. On December sixth, the
body was taken to the cemetery of Saint Mark's. A
handful of mourners who followed the hearse dispersed when a
heavy snowstorm made progress difficult. The stricken Constanza found it
impossible to accompany the pathetic little cortege, and when some

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time later she attempted to discover her husband's resting place,
a new grave digger who replaced the earlier one had
no idea whatever where he lay. What matter that posterity
has never discovered the whereabouts of his sepulcher Mozart, the
incessant wanderer, the infinitely lonely, now lives more fully and

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gloriously than ever in the hearts and souls of all
te true worshippers of the divinest in music, And if
his earthly tragedy has never seemed so poignant as it
does today. We can take consolation from the circumstance that
our generation has learned to prize the greatness, elevation, and

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beauty of his art, more perhaps than did any of
our predecessors. End of Part five end of Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart by Howard Peiser