Read Mozart: A Life in Letters: A Life in Letters Online

Authors: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Tags: #Arts & Photography, #Music, #Musical Genres, #Classical, #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Composers & Musicians, #( M ), #Mozart; Wolfgang Amadeus, #Humor & Entertainment, #Literature & Fiction, #Essays & Correspondence, #Essays, #Letters & Correspondence

Mozart: A Life in Letters: A Life in Letters (87 page)

4.
‘stick of furniture’… ‘a scandalmonger’.

1.
‘Hier soll ich dich denn sehen.’

2.
‘Wer ein Liebchen hat gefunden.’

3.
At the words ‘Verwünscht seist du samt deinem Liede’.

4.
Trio: ‘Marsch, marsch, marsch!’; finale: ‘Nie werd ich deine Huld verkennen.’

5.
First-act aria: ‘Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen’. In the end, Osmin was not given an aria in the second act.

6.
Archbishop Colloredo.

7.
From the aria ‘Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen’.

8.
‘O how eagerly, o how ardently [my lovesick heart is beating]’.

9.
‘Ach ich liebte, war so glücklich.’

10.
‘Separation was my unhappy lot. And now my eyes swim in tears.’

11.
‘in a jiffy’… ‘quickly’… ‘but how quickly my joy disappeared’.

12.
‘Marsch, marsch, marsch!’

13.
‘for the gentlemen of Vienna’.

14.
In its final form, the third act of the opera begins with Belmonte’s aria ‘Ich baue ganz auf deine Stärke’; perhaps Mozart refers here to what was to become the quartet at the end of the second act, ‘Ach, Belmonte, ach mein Leben’.

15.
Johann Baptist Anton Daubrawa von Daubrawaick (1731–1810) was a Salzburg court councillor.

16.
K242 (originally for three keyboards but arranged by Mozart for two keyboards as well) and K365.

1.
Apparently Ceccarelli intended to visit Vienna.

2.
Friedrich Eugen of Württemberg (1732–97), youngest brother of Karl II Eugen, the reigning duke. His son was Ferdinand August (1763–1834).

1.
Idomeneo
, K296+376–80, probably K448, and cadenzas for the two-piano concerto K365, which Leopold had recently had copied for Wolfgang. Mozart and Josepha Auernhammer had performed K365 at a private concert on 23 November; they performed it again at a public concert in the Augarten on 26 May 1782.

2.
Mozart had hoped to be appointed music teacher to princess Elisabeth Wilhelmine Louise of Württemberg (1767–90).

3.
In a letter of 5 December Mozart had answered Leopold’s criticisms by noting that he knew perfectly well that he had an immortal soul but this did not mean he could carry out all his father’s wishes in the way Leopold might expect.

4.
Aloysia Weber had married the actor Johann Joseph Lange (1751–1831) on 31 October 1780.

5.
That is, when Mozart left Salzburg service.

1.
Johann Franz Joseph Thorwart (1737–1813), from 1783 an administrator in the Viennese court music establishment in Vienna, was guardian to Constanze, then nineteen years old, and her younger sister Sophie.

2.
Planned for 3 March 1782.

3.
Johann Michael, Baronvon Kienmayr (1727–92), deputy director of the court theatre.

4.
Thorwart had demanded that Mozart sign a document agreeing to marry Constanze within three years; if he failed to do so, he was to pay her 100 gulden per year compensation.

5.
Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), composer and piano virtuoso. Here Mozart describes the piano duel that had taken place on 24 December 1781 between himself and Clementi at the instigation of Joseph II.

6.
Maria Feodorovna (1759–1828), second wife of Grand Duke Paul of Russia (1754– 1801, Czar Paul I from 1796), was the daughter of Friedrich Eugen, duke of Württemberg.

7.
Giovanni paisiello was Kapellmeister to Catherine the Great of Russia from 1776.

1.
For
Idomeneo
.

2.
Leopold Mozart had been in Munich in early February.

3.
Anna Maria, Countess Zichy von Va´sonykö, wife of Karl, Count Zichy von Va´sonykö (1753–1826), court councillor.

1.
Johann Kilian Strack (1724–93), imperial valet.

2.
George Frideric Handel,
Six Fugues or Voluntarys
(London, 1735); Johann Ernst Eberlin, presumably the
IX Toccate e fughe per l’Organo
(Augsburg: Lotter, 1747); K382.

3.
Johann Sebastian Bach, his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–88) and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710–84).

4.
Johann Christian Bach died in London on 1 January 1782.

5.
K246.

1.
Martha Elisabeth, Baroness Waldstätten, see List; she was then thirty-eight.

1.
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
was premiered on 16 July. Mozart received 100 ducats for its composition.

2.
‘Marsch, marsch, marsch!’

3.
Johann Ernst Dauer (1746–1812) sang the role of Pedrillo.

4.
Blonde and Osmin’s ‘Ich gehe, doch rate ich dir’ and Pedrillo and Osmin’s ‘Vivat Bacchus, Bacchus lebe’.

5.
In the event, Mozart did not complete a wind arrangement of
Die Entführung
.

6.
For the ennoblement on 29 July of Siegmund Haffner (K385, ‘Haffner’).

1.
Of the ‘Haffner’ symphony.

2.
Almost certainly the wind serenade K388; in 1782 Mozart also revised the wind serenade K375, a work that is similarly described as a ‘Nacht Musique’.

3.
The ‘Haffner’ serenade K250 and its associated march K249.

1.
Mozart and Constanze had signed their marriage contract on 3 August. The wedding itself was on 4 August at St Stephen’s, Vienna.

2.
Probably K408/2.

3.
Here Mozart describes his preferred tempos for the ‘Haffner’ symphony.

1.
He was then seventy-two years old.

1.
A park in the second district in Vienna, formerly for the exclusive use of the imperial family but opened to the public by Joseph II in 1775; it contained a billiard room, a dance hall and a restaurant where concerts were also given.

2.
The impresario Philipp Jakob Martin.

3.
Josepha von Auernhammer had lodged with Baroness Waldstätten since the death of her father in March 1782.

4.
This presumably refers to a concert Mozart had given at the Burgtheater on 3 March 1782, when he had probably performed his concerto K175 with the newly composed rondo finale K382.

5.
The last twenty words of this letter are written in English.

1.
Johann Thomas von Trattner (1717–98), court printer, music publisher and book dealer; Mozart dedicated his fantasy and sonata in C minor, K457+475, to Trattner’s wife Therese, who had been his pupil. No details are known of the financial transaction described here.

2.
K413–415. An advertisement for the works in the
Wiener Zeitung
for 15 January 1783 reads: ‘Herr Kapellmeister Mozart herewith apprises the highly honoured public of the publication of three new, recently finished keyboard concertos. These 3 concertos, which may be performed either with a large orchestra with wind instruments or merely
a quattro
, viz. with 2 violins, 1 viola and violoncello, will not appear until the beginning of April of this year, and will be issued (finely copied and supervised by himself) only to those who have subscribed thereto. The present serves to give the further news that subscription tickets may be had of him for four I’d have borrowed the money for a longer period! – I beg your Ladyship in heaven’s name to help me so I don’t lose my honour and good name! – My poor little wife is slightly unwell and so I can’t leave her, otherwise I’d come in person to ask for your Ladyship’s help. We kiss your Ladyship’s hands 1000 times and are both ducats, counting from the 20th of this month until the end of March.’ See Deutsch,
Documentary Biography
, 212.

1.
Probably K175 with the new rondo finale K382, see letter 130, n. 4.

2.
This was the grand academy, a public concert at the Burgtheater given in the presence of the emperor.

3.
K297 ‘Paris’.

4.
K294.

5.
In 1776 Joseph II had installed a theatrical company (the National Theatre) at the Burgtheater to present plays in German (instead of the French drama favoured by the aristocracy). A singspiel company was established in 1778 but was disbanded in 1783 and replaced by an Italian opera troupe; it was briefly reconstituted from 1785 to 1788, with performances held at the Kärntnertortheater.

6.
The bass Johann Ignaz Ludwig Fischer.

7.
K314.

8.
K321 and K339; the masses are unidentified.

9.
Anton Teyber, see List.

10.
Mozart is asking Leopold to send copies of Salzburg church music: Michael Haydn’s offertory
Tres sunt
(composed 7 June 1773), for which there is a copy by Mozart, KAnh. A13, from the mid-1770s; the sequence
Lauda Sion
(1775); the fugue from the
Te Deum
(1770), for which there is a copy by Leopold Mozart, KAnh. 71; and the offertory
Ave Maria
(from before 1765). The
Tenebrae
(undated) is by Johann Ernst Eberlin; there is a copy by Leopold Mozart, KAnh. A76.

11.
A request that Leopold send some of his own church music.

12.
The portrait painter Joseph Grassi (
c
. 1758–1838) lived and worked in Vienna during the 1780s; his
Portrait of a Man
(1785), for many years considered lost but rediscovered in Moscow in 1998, is sometimes said to portray Mozart.

13.
K446. Mozart’s pantomime, a silent play with musical accompaniment (in this case based on
commedia dell’arte
characters), survives only incompletely as a fragmentary first violin part.

14.
Johann Heinrich Friedrich Müller (1738–1815), actor at the Vienna Court Theatre from 1763 to 1801.

15.
Possibly Johann Nepomuk, Count Esterha´zy (1754–1840); Mozart is known to have performed regularly at his house (see letter 140).

1.
Presumably the accompanied sonatas K296+376–380.

2.
K255,
Ombra felice – Io ti lascio
, composed in 1776 for the castrato Francesco Fortini; K374,
A questo seno deh vieni – Or che il cielo a me ti rende
.

3.
Therese Teyber’s concert was at the Burgtheater on 30 March.

4.
The grand academy; the concerto was K415.

5.
Carl Friedrich Cramer,
Magazin der Musik
, Hamburg, 9 May 1783: ‘Vienna, 22 March 1783… Tonight the famous Herr Chevalier
Mozart
held a musical concert in the National Theatre, at which pieces of his already highly admired composition were performed. The concert was honoured with an exceptionally large concourse, and the two new concertos and other fantasies which Herr M. played on the fortepiano were received with the loudest applause. Our Monarch, who against his habit attended the whole of the concert, as well as the entire audience, accorded him such unanimous applause as has never been heard of here. The receipts of the concert are estimated to amount to 1,600 gulden in all’ (Deutsch,
Documentary Biography
, 215). The report gives the wrong date for the concert; it should have been 23 March.

1.
Jean-Georges Sieber (1734–1822), publisher in Paris, had published Mozart’s accompanied sonatas K301–306 in 1778.

2.
K296+376–380.

3.
K413–415.

4.
These were eventually to be the six quartets dedicated to Joseph Haydn, K387, 421, 428, 458, 464 and 465. By this time Mozart may have completed only the first of the quartets, although K421 and 428 were also written about the time of this letter. K458 was completed in November 1784 and K464 and 465 in January 1785.

5.
Although Sieber’s reply is lost, he apparently rejected Mozart’s offer. Artaria eventually published both the concertos and quartets in 1785.

Other books

Hush: Family Secrets by Blue Saffire
Military Daddy by Patricia Davids
Captive Secrets by Fern Michaels
Grand Junction by Dantec, Maurice G.
X-Treme Measure by S. N. Garza, Stephanie Nicole Garza
Aethersmith (Book 2) by J.S. Morin
Tie My Bones to Her Back by Robert F. Jones