The Mozarts, Who They Were (Volume 1). Diego Minoia
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married before sending his request and without the permission of his mother, who was never to forgive him) all while keeping citizenship in his birthplace.
Well, in his request he told a series of lies, claiming that his father was alive and well (he had already passed away) and that he had recently moved to Salzburg to continue his studies at the Benedictine University (in truth, he had gone to Salzburg ten years earlier by his own will and against his mother's wishes and had furthermore already suspended his studies). Moreover, he claimed to have endorsements by the Princely Archiepiscopal Court (which he did not possess) and maintained having married the daughter of a wealthy citizen (as we have seen, his wife came from an anything but wealthy family). But we will further discuss this aspect related to his lies and manipulation of the truth, based on what emerges in the epistolary.
To complete the description of Leopold Mozart, we shouldn't forget about his cultural interests. During the course of his travels, he never missed an occasion to visit monuments, museums, works of art in private palaces of which he talks about in the epistolary (the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the paintings by Rubens in Brussels, etc.). He was also interested in the scientific progress of his epoch, staying informed by attending the experimental demonstrations offered by the University of Salzburg to the courtiers, as well as purchasing instruments such as a microscope. He was also interested in pharmacology, so much so, that he brought a collection of powders and recipes with him on his trips to heal the most common diseases, curing himself and his children, unless the severity of the disease didn't require the intervention of a "medicus". If he wasn't able to administer the therapy himself, he would communicate by letter, going into detailed description and at great length to explain to Wolfgang (who was in that period in Munich with his mother) how to cure a phlegmy cough.
The musician
While Leopold's musical formation seems to be rather solid in relation to his instrumental profile (thanks to his studies as a youth at the Jesuit schools in his birthplace in Augsburg), there appears to be no evidence of his attendance with teachers of composition with the exception of his friend and mentor, Johann Ernst Eberlin, who was the organist of the Court from 1727 and Kapellmeister from 1749. This information leads us to believe that his studies were predominantly self-taught with the possible occasional supervision of Eberlin and suggestions from a few friends or acquaintances in the musical circle of Salzburg. Self instruction was, in any case, quite common in that epoch. Antonio Lolli, who appears to have stopped over in Salzburg on his tour, was a self-taught violinist, but this did not stop him from being considered a virtuoso of the instrument, obtaining prestigious and well-paid charges, such as violinist at the Stuttgart Court where he earned an annual salary of 2,000 florins, which was later increased to 2,500. Based on comparison, we should remember that in 1750 Leopold Mozart, as he himself writes in a letter to his daughter, as a violinist in the Court Orchestra and instrument teacher to the children's chorus of the Cathedral earned a monthly salary of 29 florins and 30 kreutzers, which amounts to approximately 360 florins a year. This "tradition" of self-taught virtuosi were not limited to Lolli, since just a few decades later, we had "the" virtuoso par excellence of the violin, Niccolò Paganini, self-taught violinist and guitarist.
Without a doubt, the most useful instruments for Leopold Mozart to learn from, as was for other musicians from that epoch, were the manuscripts of the active composers in Salzburg as well as from abroad, and which were requested by Leopold from his connections in other cities. Maybe we should remember the scores from Antonio Vivaldi's concerts that Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed in order to study them, and it was thanks to those studies that he was able to reach the musical summits of the 6 Brandenburg Concertos? The tendency of obtaining scores from other composers (more or less legally) continued in the case of Leopold, as well as following Wolfgang's compositional formation, keeping up to date with the fashionable styles of the times.
In this epoch, we have many examples of amateur musicians, often of a religious formation, who composed for the necessity of their circle of friends or for work performances. Defining them as amateurs, in some cases, did not impede them from composing in less than an all together pleasurable and fashionable style of the times. The musical simplification that occurred in the transition from Baroque to Galant music rendered compositional musical activity available to more people. To get an idea, just compare the complex polyphonic architecture of Johann Sebastian Bach with the much more simplistic compositions of the musicians of the Salzburg Court, such as Eberlin and Adlgasser.
During his years at the school of Jesuits in Augsburg, Leopold did have instruction in singing, organ and violin with some basic rudiments of musicality (just enough to complete an accompaniment on numbered basses or to create simple harmonic structures for improvisations with simple frequency modulations). In that epoch, orchestra musicians were supposed to know how to play several instruments in order to comply with the various requirements of the sacred and profane. Clearly, though with a few exceptions, such a custom meant that the quality of playing instruments was not always particularly brilliant (an example being Schachtner, a family friend, who was a trumpeter in the Court Orchestra, but who is also described as a violinist and cellist). Leopold, and later his son Wolfgang, played keyboard (harpsichord, and later piano and organ), string instruments (violin and viola) and were able to execute vocal musical compositions. Nannerl's preparation, on the other hand, was focused on keyboard and singing.
In a famous portrait painted in 1763 by Louis de Carmontelle in Paris, we see one of the one of the instrumental formations in which the Mozart "prodigious children" performed during one of their promotional journeys: Wolfgang at the harpsichord, Nannerl singing, Leopold on the violin. The variety of instruments that many performers were meant to know how to play also indicates the inadequate compensation that troubled many of the musicians from that epoch. Many were forced to seek out employment outside of their profession.
Among the friends of the Mozart family, there was, for example, a certain Fink who was a Court trumpeter and organist; to make ends meet, he worked as a vintner at the Ai 3 Mori Inn. Another Salzburg musician, the horn player Ignaz Leutgeb and friend of Wolfgang, who upon returning to Vienna after a falling out with Leopold, asked Wolfgang's father for a loan to open a small shop that sold cheese.
Now let us go back and have a look at Leopold as a composer. His first compositional work was a collection of 6 church and chamber sonatas with three instruments (two violins and a bass), published at his expense in 1740 when he was 21 years old and dedicated to Count Johann Baptist Thurn, President of the Chapter of the Salzburg Cathedral, where he was employed as a Chamberlain and Musician. His subsequent compositional endeavors were two cantatas composed for the Easter season, written respectively in 1741 and 1743 and were quite probably performed at the Princely Court where Leopold Mozart had evidently been appointed by Count Thurn, as well as a scholastic opera entitled "Antiquitas personata" (History personified, or rather, Ancient History up till the Birth of Christ), composed in 1742 and performed at the small student auditorium at the University.
Once hired at the Court, his compositional activity (besides that of executive and educational duties) became legitimate and prolific, enough to enable him to "cover" the civil and religious requirements of the Court, as well as to create music for the Collegium Musicum of Augsburg, where he sent his compositions entitled "Passeggiata in slitta" ("A Sleigh Ride"), "Nozze contadine" ("Country Wedding") and "Sinfonia pastorale" ("Pastorale Symphony"). He composed a relevant number of musical works, many of them masses and church music, pieces for the keyboard, various Symphonies and Divertimenti, concerts and all types of music for festive occasions. Among the interesting facts, we can cite the series of 12 pieces that Leopold Mozart wrote (in collaboration with his friend, Kapellmeister Eberlin) for the pipe organ situated in the fortress that overlooks Salzburg from the hilltop.
Leopold, nevertheless, did not remain mentally closed within the limited confines of the provincial Salzburg. Besides his contacts in his native Augsburg, he cultivated epistolary relations with German musicians and music lovers from Leipzig (Lorenz Mizler) and Berlin (Friedrich Marpurg), as well as with various publishers such as Hulrich Haffner from Nuremburg (who, at his own expense, he had commissioned to print his first published opera, the Six Sonatas Trio dedicated to Count Thurn, and had also published three of his Sonatas for the harpsichord in Italian style) and Gottlieb Immanuel Breitkopf from Leipzig (who inserted numerous compositions of Leopold