Mozart in italy, p.1
Mozart in Italy, page 1
for Kate and Richard
Contents
Maps
List of Illustrations
Author’s Note
1. CIRCUMSTANCE
2. DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL
3. TO THE SOUTH
4. RECOGNITION AND TRIUMPH
5. IMPERIAL SPLENDOUR
6. COMING OF AGE
7. COROLLARY
Picture Section
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
1. Wolfgang aged thirteen, 1770. (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)
2. Leopold Mozart. (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)
3. Coach travel in the eighteenth century. (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)
4. Plaque commemorating Wolfgang’s stay in Rovereto. (REDA &CO srl / Alamy Stock Photo)
5. Gaspare Vanvitelli’s view of eighteenth-century Verona. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)
6. The interior of the Teatro Bibiena in Mantua. (Lorenzo Pegoraro / Alamy Stock Photo)
7. Canaletto’s Milan. (Bridgeman Images)
8. Count Firmian, Wolfgang’s passionate supporter. (BTEU/AUSMUM / Alamy Stock Photo)
9. Portrait of Gianluca Pallavicini-Centurioni. (Source: L. Rona’s book on the regimental history of Pallavicini Infantry, Wikimedia)
10. Wolfgang and his English friend Thomas Linley. (Album / Alamy Stock Photo)
11. Pio Panfili’s view of eighteenth-century Bologna. (DEA / G DAGLI ORTI, Fotostock)
12. Eighteenth-century Rome. (The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
13. Pope Clement XIV. (GL Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
14. Mount Vesuvius. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
15. Wolfgang’s list of musicians he met in Naples. (Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo)
16. Padre Martini. (Historic Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
17. The so-called ‘Bologna Mozart’. (The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
18. The printed libretto of Mitridate, re di Ponto. (GRANGER – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
19. Canaletto’s view of eighteenth-century Venice. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
20. Pietro Longhi’s depiction of gambling at the Ridotto. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
21. Pietro Longhi’s depiction of dancing in a private home. (Francesco Turio Bohm. All rights reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images)
22. The plaque commemorating Wolfgang’s stay in Venice. (akg-images / Gerard Degeorge)
23. Letter from Wolfgang to his sister. (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
24. Wolfgang’s autograph score of the Act I finale of Così fan tutte. (GRANGER – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
Author’s Note
After I wrote Mozart’s Women, nearly twenty years ago, I thought that I had said all I had to say about the composer whose music has most engrossed my life, joyously, challengingly, and with immeasurable spiritual reward. In that book, I told his story (which hardly needed telling, yet again) through the prism of the women in his life: his mother and sister, his wife and her sisters, and the remarkable women for whom he wrote. But I subsequently came to realize that I had largely skimmed over one part of his life, simply because none of those women was directly involved in it: the three extraordinarily important trips he made with his father Leopold to Italy, at the most impressionable of ages. I had reported on these only as he and his father had described them, in letters back to his mother and sister, and therefore as the women had received them. There was so much more to investigate, in their actual experience of travel, of social encounters, of hardships as well as delights, and of course of musical influence and then achievement – all in the context of a country which has beguiled and inspired its visitors since the days of its earliest civilization. As I performed the music that Mozart wrote in these crucial years, I became increasingly convinced that, at some point, I did need to repair my sins of omission.
Then, in 2020, the Covid catastrophe happened. The planet screeched to a halt, and all our lives were changed: we found ourselves in social isolation, with bewilderingly empty diaries. So I revisited this subject, and began to formulate this book. My wonderful agent, Maggie Hanbury, supported the project, and our old friend and colleague Georgina (George) Morley, who has edited my last two books, accepted it. Between devastating waves of infection and lockdown, I did manage to travel to Austria and Italy, and follow the routes that Mozart and his father had taken – exactly two hundred and fifty years later, as it happened. (With one glorious piece of serendipity, I found myself in Bologna on the exact anniversary – to the day – of Mozart’s taking the examination for membership of the august Accademia Filarmonica. I attended a conference there that evening, and sat in the very room where he had taken the test.) Despite lockdown restrictions and closures, I was able to access most of what I needed; and, everywhere I went, I met courtesy, assistance and encouragement.
My profound thanks therefore go first to Maggie and George, for their sharp eyes and sympathetic ears; and to George’s formidable team at Picador (Rosie Shackles, Nicholas Blake, Penelope Price, Stuart Wilson, Lindsay Nash, Bryony Croft and Connor Hutchinson). Jonathan Keates, superb historian, writer and fount of all knowledge relating to Italy, read the book in typescript, and as always was generous with his time, and extremely perceptive with his comments. My brother-in-law John Price, antiquarian book dealer, has again been crucial to my locating eighteenth-century publications, especially during the months of restricted access to libraries. Nick Guthrie accompanied and supported me on the inter-lockdown journeys in Austria and Italy. I am constantly grateful to all the musicians with whom I continue to perform the music of Mozart, for the insights they bring to it, and for the discoveries that we make together. And my greatest gratitude, really, is to Mozart himself, for sustaining me, not just through a lifetime of collaborative performance, but through the solitude too of lockdown, from which I could escape into a past world of adventure and beauty.
‘In no country have I received so many honours, nowhere have I been so esteemed as in Italy; and certainly it is a distinction to have written operas for Italy.’
Mozart to his father, 11 October 1777
‘Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.’
J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey
1
CIRCUMSTANCE
‘His father wishes to take him to Italy’
More than almost any other country, Italy has influenced the course of European, and often therefore world, development. Although it was not united until 1861, the peninsula as a whole has repeatedly been a pioneer in thought and, especially, culture. From the mighty stability of the Roman Empire, powerful and far-reaching for several hundred years from the third century BC, to the intellectual explosions of Renaissance Florence, Italian states have led and illuminated the civilized world with a matchless confidence. If the chaos and instability of Italy’s political allegiances lend some confusion to the narrative of its history, the constant beacons of its artistic achievement – coupled with the staggering beauty of its many different terrains – have ensured that the peninsula has been an irresistible and beguiling magnet to those from other lands.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the geopolitical map of Italy was subject to much change. The basic components remained the same: at either end of the peninsula were the large kingdoms of Sardinia in the north and Sicily in the south; between them lay the all-important Papal States, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the smaller but impressive duchies of Milan, Parma and Modena; and then there were the independent republics of Venice in the east and Genoa in the west. But, as in the rest of Europe, there were kaleidoscopic shifts of territory and boundary, largely the consequence of long-standing hostilities between the (French) Bourbons and the (Austrian and Spanish) Habsburgs. Back in the sixteenth century Italy had been the main battleground between them, until France had renounced its territories in the peninsula in exchange for others, and in the seventeenth century the focus of their enmity had shifted to northern Europe. There, alliances became religion-based too, when the conflict between Catholics and Protestants resulted in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). As Spain’s power declined and the Habsburg regime weakened, France became predominant. The Spanish Habsburg Charles II died in 1700, at which point Louis XIV of France claimed his throne for his grandson Philip, giving rise to the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), won by France. As the eighteenth century progressed, there were further wars and skirmishes (the War of the Polish Succession, 1733–5, and especially the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–8), all of which continued to alter the colours of the European map. In the north, Austria was threatened by Prussia, and France by Britain. But in 1756 – the year of Mozart’s birth – the old alliances switched dramatically in the Diplomatic Revolution: Prussia joined Britain, and Austria joined France. For the first time in 200 years, the two opposing dynasties were finally standing together. The War of the Austrian Succession was the last major conflict before the French Revolution to involve all European powers, and the second half of the eighteenth century was to remain relatively stable.
In much of this European warfare the Italians had been somewhat peripheral participants , and as France withdrew its attention from the peninsula, Austria’s interest was renewed. The key player in an energetic quest to secure Habsburg dominion there was that most important ruler in the age of enlightened absolutism, the Empress Maria Theresa. Her marriage at nineteen, in 1736, to Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine, would lead to her first encounter with Italy, when Francis became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1737. Over the next nineteen years she bore him sixteen children: her last, Maximilian Franz, was born in the same year as Mozart. Ten of them survived into adulthood, and eight of them could, as soon as they reached their mid-teens, be coolly – ruthlessly, even – married off to spouses with territorial advantage. In a hectic decade of imperial matrimony between 1760 and 1771, Maria Theresa secured Habsburg tentacles in Spain, Bavaria, Saxony, France (with her youngest daughter Maria Antonia destined for her wretched guillotine), and especially Italy.
The first of the marriages with Italian reward was in 1760, when Maria Theresa’s eldest son and heir, Joseph, later her co-regent and finally her successor, married Isabella of Parma. Isabella died only three years later, a bereavement from which Joseph never really recovered. Maria Theresa then arranged Joseph’s second marriage, to Maria Josepha of Bavaria, daughter of Charles VII, the Holy Roman Emperor. This marriage too was brief, for Maria Josepha died of smallpox in 1767; Joseph never married again. Meanwhile the Empress had earmarked her daughter Johanna, ever since she was a child, for the Crown Prince Ferdinand of Naples. But Johanna had died of smallpox in 1762 at the age of twelve, so Maria Theresa’s next daughter, another Maria Josepha, had been lined up instead. Then poor Maria Josepha also died of smallpox in the same year as her identically named sister-in-law, so yet another daughter, Maria Karolina, was inserted as a swift replacement. That marriage duly took place in 1768; Maria Karolina became Maria Carolina, and spent the rest of her life in Italy. In the following year Maria Theresa moved in on Parma again, marrying her daughter Maria Amalia to its Duke Ferdinand. This was a joyless marriage (the bride had been happily expecting to marry a man she truly loved, Prince Charles of Zweibrücken, and never forgave her mother for destroying her plans), but Maria Amalia too spent the rest of her life in Italy. Nearby, in Modena, young Princess Maria Beatrice d’Este was marked as a bride for Maria Theresa’s third surviving son, Ferdinand: they would marry in 1771, when he was seventeen. Her second son, Leopold, in addition to marrying the Infanta of Spain, had inherited the Duchy of Tuscany from his father on Francis’ death in 1765. So Maria Theresa had strong family representation down the spine of Italy. For Austrians travelling there in the second half of the eighteenth century this was fertile ground: there were familiar and sympathetic links with those in charge, from one region to the next.
And there was indeed much travel in eighteenth-century Italy. In those reasonably tranquil decades between the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the arrival of Napoleon’s occupying forces in 1796, there was a flood of traffic from northern Europe. This was the age of the Grand Tour. Travellers were increasingly drawn to the peninsula by its history, antiquity and culture, its great natural beauty and gorgeous climate, its delicious and often exotic food and wines, and its vibrant festivities at regular points in the year; and their experiences broadened their minds. Many of them kept diaries and journals, copious in detail, and some of these were then turned into travel guides for the instruction of those who followed. In Britain, Thomas Nugent’s mighty (four-volume) The Grand Tour: Containing an Exact Description of most of the Cities, Towns, and Remarkable Places in Europe, for instance, was published in 1743 and much reprinted, as young Englishmen (very rarely English women) encouraged each other to travel. Similarly, in Germany, Johann Georg Keyssler’s immensely thorough Neueste Reisen durch Deutschland, Böhmen, Ungarn, die Schweitz, Italien und Lothringen was first published in 1740–1 (with an English translation appearing in 1760) and much reprinted and disseminated. Mozart’s father Leopold acquired his own copies of Keyssler’s four volumes after the 1751 reprinting; their richly informative pages were crucial to all the planning that he would deploy for himself and his family. Whenever and wherever the Mozarts travelled, Keyssler’s relevant volumes came too.
For all those heading to Italy, the principal destinations were the same. The main focus was the Eternal City and capital of the Papal States, Rome. Its vibrant, multi-layered, ancient and modern history and the buildings, sculptures and artworks associated with it, and its position as the spiritual centre of the Christian world, gave it an overwhelming predominance in the planning schedule. Tourists would aim to arrive in Rome in time for Holy Week, when people flocked to St Peter’s Square to receive a papal blessing. The guidebooks generally agreed that, with a daily dose of three hours’ sightseeing, a visitor would need at least six weeks to experience the full glory and grandeur of Rome. Florence, the heartbeat of the Renaissance, with its somewhat slower pace and smaller scope, was nevertheless full of glorious palaces and churches, rich with paintings and sculpture; and the Uffizi Gallery, housing the many possessions of the Medici family, was opened to the public in 1743. (This was the last wish of Anna Maria de’ Medici, defiantly retaining the family’s treasures for Florence, as Maria Theresa and her Bourbon husband Francis brought the Grand Duchy into the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty.) Venice, once the centre of a powerful republic with huge international trading powers, had by the eighteenth century lost its political and economic supremacy, but was still unique in its staggering aquatic beauty. Its reputation now was as a city of wonderful dissolution, and travellers would plan to be there especially for its Carnival season, which ran for several weeks. (In Rome, Carnival was over in twelve days.) Once there, they could revel in its extravagant pleasures of regattas, masquerades, street parties, gambling and courtesans. But again, its palaces and churches were ablaze with architectural, pictorial and sculptural evidence of the city’s glorious past; and there was opera too, in the city which a century earlier had established the art form as an entertainment for all classes, and built or adapted theatre after theatre to accommodate it. And the fourth unmissable centre for any Italian visitor was Naples. Despite its huge and apparently uncouth population (one traveller, Leonardo di Mauro, described it as ‘a paradise inhabited by devils’), its setting in its bay, with Vesuvius – preferably smoking – in the background, was breathtaking. For tourists seeking extreme adventure, there was the challenge of actually climbing the volcano, negotiating cinders and hot ash. Then the allure of the city’s own rich heritage was, in the eighteenth century, more than doubled by the archaeological excavations in Herculaneum (begun in 1738) and Pompeii (1748). As fascination with these grew, and Naples’s appeal superseded even that of Florence, the southern half of the peninsula began to open up. But it was still relatively barren of culture in comparison with the north, which also contained the smaller but dynamic centres of Milan, Parma, Mantua, Modena and Bologna, all densely packed with their own treasures.
Of especial interest to eighteenth-century travellers, even those with essentially philistine tendencies, was Italy’s paramount place in the history of music. In all contexts, liturgical, instrumental or theatrical, its diverse artistic centres had been leading the way for centuries. From the early organization of plainchant, supervised by Pope Gregory in the seventh century, to the supreme polyphonic sophistication of Palestrina, or the rich polychoral contrasts of the Venetian school in the Renaissance, church music had thrived in Italy, with high standards of performance, and with the involvement too of instruments – not just organs, but consorts of cornetts or viols. In the seventeenth century, as instrument-makers in Cremona and other north Italian cities developed the brilliant new violin family, the writing of purely instrumental music surged too, and the concerto style of Corelli, for instance, was soon being imitated all over Europe. But Italy’s main musical revolution before the eighteenth century was in theatrical music. The earnest invention of a ‘reciting style’, or stile recitativo, whereby dramas could be entirely sung rather than spoken, in music which followed the natural inflections of speech rhythm, led, around 1600, to the birth of opera. This dazzling new art form, combining as it did drama, music and spectacle, spread in the seventeenth century away from the privileged courts of Florence and Mantua into the public theatres, first in Venice, then across the whole of Italy, and subsequently throughout Europe. Different countries adapted opera to their own requirements, but Italy continued to build opera houses in all the major cities and towns (Venice alone built or adapted as many as sixteen of them between 1637 and 1700), and to produce the personnel – composers and singers – to execute it. Going to the opera in Italy was as natural and regular as going to church: it was a way of life.
