Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words Part 3

50. "Herr Stein is completely daft on the subject of his daughter. She is eight years old and learns everything by heart.

Something may come of her for she has talent, but not if she goes on as she is doing now; she will never acquire velocity because she purposely makes her hand heavy. She will never learn the most necessary, most difficult and princ.i.p.al thing in music, that is time, because from childhood she has designedly cultivated the habit of ignoring the beat."

(Augsburg, October 23, 1777, to his father. Nanette Stein afterward married Andreas Streicher, who was Schiller's companion in his flight to Franconia. As Frau Streicher she became Beethoven's faithful friend and frequently took it upon herself to straighten out his domestic affairs.)

51. "If she does not get some thoughts and ideas (for now she has absolutely none), it will all be in vain, for G.o.d knows, I can not give her any. It is not her father's intention to make a great composer out of her. 'She shall,' he says, 'not write any operas, or arias, or symphonies, but only great sonatas for her instrument and mine!' I gave her her fourth lesson today, and so far as the rules of composition and her exercises are concerned I am pretty well satisfied with her. She wrote a very good ba.s.s to the first minuet which I set her, and has already begun to write in three parts. It goes, but she gets bored too quickly. I can not help her; progress is impossible, she is too young even if she had talent. Unfortunately she has none; she must be taught artificially; she has no ideas, there are no results, I have tried in every sort of way. Among other things it occurred to me to write down a very simple minuet and to see if she could write a variation on it. In vain. Well, thought I, it is because she does not know how to begin. I then began a variation of the first measure and told her to continue it in the same manner; that went fairly well. When she had made an end I asked her to begin something of her own,--only the first voice, a melody. She thought a full quarter of an hour, and nothing came. Thereupon I wrote four measures of a minuet and said to her: 'Now look what an a.s.s I am; I have begun a minuet and can't finish even the first part; be good enough to finish it for me.' She thought it impossible. At length she produced a little something to my joy.

Then I made her finish the minuet, i.e. only the first voice. For her home work I have given her nothing to do except to alter my four measures and make something out of them, to invent another beginning, to keep to the harmony if she must, but to write a new melody. We shall see what comes of it tomorrow."

(Paris, May 14, 1778, to his father. The pupil was the daughter of the Duke de Guines, an excellent flautist. "She plays the harp magnificently," writes Mozart in the same letter; "has a great deal of talent and genius, and an incomparable memory. She knows 200 pieces and plays them all by heart." When it came to paying Mozart for the lessons the Duke was anything but a n.o.bleman.)

52. "The Andante is going to give us the most trouble, for it is full of expression and must be played with taste and accurately as written in the matter of forte and piano. She is very clever and learns quickly. The right hand is very good but the left utterly ruined. I can say that I often pity her when I see that she is obliged to labor till she gasps, not because she is unapt, but because she can't help it,--she is used to playing so, n.o.body ever taught her differently. I said to her mother and her that if I were her regular teacher, I would lock up all her music, cover the keyboard with a handkerchief, and make her practice both hands at first slowly on nothing but pa.s.sages, trills, mordents, etc., until the difficulty with the left hand was remedied; after that I am sure I could make a real clavier player out of her. It is a pity; she has so much genius, reads respectably, has a great deal of natural fluency and plays with a great deal of feeling."

(Mannheim, November 16, 1777, to his father. The pupil was Rose Cannab.i.+.c.h, to whom the sonata referred to is dedicated. Her father, whom Mozart admired greatly as an able conductor, was Chapelmaster of the excellently trained orchestra at Mannheim. He lived from 1731 to 1798. [The Andante from which trouble was expected was that which Mozart wrote with the purpose that it should reflect the character of Rose Cannab.i.+.c.h, a lovely and amiable girl, according to all accounts. H.E.K.])

53. "This E is very forced. One can see that it was written only to go from one consonance to another in parallel motion,--just as bad poets write nonsense for the sake of a rhyme."

(From the exercise book of the cousin of Abbe Stadler who took lessons in thorough-ba.s.s from Mozart in 1784. It is preserved in the Court Library in Vienna.)

54. "My good lad, you ask my advice and I will give it you candidly; had you studied composition when you were at Naples, and when your mind was not devoted to other pursuits, you would, perhaps, have done wisely; but now that your profession of the stage must, and ought to, occupy all your attention, it would be an unwise measure to enter into a dry study. You may take my word for it, Nature has made you a melodist, and you would only disturb and perplex yourself. Reflect, 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing;'--should there be errors in what you write, you will find hundreds of musicians in all parts of the world capable of correcting them, therefore do not disturb your natural gift."

(To Michael Kelly, the Irish tenor, to whom Mozart a.s.signed the parts of Basilio and Don Curzio at the first performance of "Le Nozze di Figaro" in 1786. Kelly had asked Mozart whether or not he should study counterpoint. [See No. 8. Three years later Kelly returned to England, began his career as composer of musical pieces for the stage. He was fairly prolific, but failed to impress the public with the originality of his creative talent.

He went into the wine business, which fact led Sheridan to make the witty suggestion that he inscribe over his shop: "Michael Kelly, Composer of Wines and Importer of Music." He was born in 1764 and died in 1826. H.E.K.])

55. "This is generally the case with all who did not taste the rod or feel the teacher's tongue when boys, and later think that they can compel things to their wishes by mere talent and inclination. Many succeed fairly well, but with other people's ideas, having none of their own; others who have ideas of their own, do not know what to do with them. That is your case."

(In a letter written in 1789 to a n.o.ble friend criticizing a symphony.)

56. "Do not wonder at me; it was not a caprice. I noticed that most of the musicians were old men. There would have been no end of dragging if I had not first driven them into the fire and made them angry. Out of pure rage they did their best."

(Reported by Rochlitz. Mozart was rehearsing the Allegro of one of his symphonies in Leipsic. He worked up such a fit of anger that he stamped his foot and broke one of his shoe-laces. His anger fled and he broke into a merry laugh.)

57. "Right! That's the way to shriek."

(At a rehearsal of "Don Giovanni" the representative of Zerlina did not act realistically enough to suit Mozart. Thereupon he went unnoticed on the stage and at the repet.i.tion of the scene grabbed the singer so rudely and unexpectedly that she involuntarily uttered the shriek which the scene called for. [The singer was Teresa Bondini, the place Prague, and the time before the first performance of the opera which took place on October 29, 1787. H.E.K.])

TOUCHING MUSICAL PERFORMANCES

58. "Herr Stein sees and hears that I am more of a player than Beecke,--that without making grimaces of any kind I play so expressively that, according to his own confession, no one shows off his pianoforte as well as I. That I always remain strictly in time surprises every one; they can not understand that the left hand should not in the least be concerned in a tempo rubato. When they play the left hand always follows."

(Augsburg, October 23, 1777, to his father. [We have here a suggestion of the tempo rubato as played by Chopin according to the testimony of Mikuli, who said that no matter how free Chopin was either in melody or arabesque with his right hand, the left always adhered strictly to the time. Mozart learned the principle from his father who in his method for the violin condemned the accompanists who spoiled the tempo rubato of an artist by waiting to follow him. H.E.K.])

59. "Whoever can see and hear her (the daughter of Stein) play without laughing must be a stone (Stein) like her father. She sits opposite the treble instead of in the middle of the instrument, so that there may be greater opportunities for swaying about and making grimaces. Then she rolls up her eyes and smirks. If a pa.s.sage occurs twice it is played slower the second time; if three times, still slower. When a pa.s.sage comes up goes the arm, and if there is to be an emphasis it must come from the arm, heavily and clumsily, not from the fingers. But the best of all is that when there comes a pa.s.sage (which ought to flow like oil) in which there necessarily occurs a change of fingers, there is no need of taking care; when the time comes you stop, lift the hand and nonchalantly begin again. This helps one the better to catch a false note, and the effect is frequently curious."

(Augsburg, October 23, 1777. The letter is to his father and the young woman whose playing is criticized is the little miss of eight years, Nanette Stein.)

60. "When I told Herr Stein that I would like to play on his organ and that I was pa.s.sionately fond of the instrument, he marveled greatly and said: 'What, a man like you, so great a clavier player, want to play on an instrument which has no douceur, no expression, neither piano nor forte, but goes on always the same?' 'But all that signifies nothing; to me the organ is nevertheless the king of instruments.' "

(Augsburg, October 17, 1777, to his father.)

61. "I had the pleasure to hear Herr Franzl (whose wife is a sister of Madame Cannab.i.+.c.h) play a concerto on the violin. He pleases me greatly. You know that I am no great lover of difficulties. He plays difficult things, but one does not recognize that they are difficult, but imagines that one could do the same thing at once; that is true art. He also has a beautiful, round tone,--not a note is missing, one hears everything; everything is well marked. He has a fine staccato bow, up as well as down; and I have never heard so good a double shake as his. In a word, though he is no wizard he is a solid violinist."

(Mannheim, November 22, 1777, to his father.)

62. "Wherein consists the art of playing prima vista? In this: To play in the proper tempo; give expression to every note, appoggiatura, etc., tastefully and as they are written, so as to create the impression that the player had composed the piece."

(Mannheim, January 17, 1778, to his father. Mozart had just been sharply criticizing the playing of Abbe Vogler. [See No. 66.])

63. "I am at Herr von Aurnhammer's after dinner nearly every day.

The young woman is a fright, but she plays ravis.h.i.+ngly, though she lacks the true singing style in the cantabile; she is too jerky."

(Vienna, June 27, 1781, to his father. Beethoven found the same fault with Mozart's playing that Mozart here condemns.)

64. "Herr Richter plays much and well so far as execution is concerned, but--as you will hear--crudely, laboriously and without taste or feeling; he is one of the best fellows in the world, and without a particle of vanity. Whenever I played for him he looked immovably at my fingers, and one day he said 'My G.o.d! how I am obliged to torment myself and sweat, and yet without obtaining applause; and for you, my friend, it is mere play!' 'Yes,' said I, 'I had to labor once in order not to show labor now.' "

(Vienna, April 28, 1784, to his father in Salzburg, whither the pianist Richter, whom he recommends to his father, is going on a concert trip.)

65. "Meissner, as you know, has the bad habit of purposely making his voice tremble, marking thus entire quarter and eighth notes; I never could endure it in him. It is indeed despicable and contrary to all naturalness in song. True the human voice trembles of itself, but only in a degree that remains beautiful; it is in the nature of the voice. We imitate it not only on wind instruments but also on the viols and even on the clavier. But as soon as you overstep the limit it is no longer beautiful because it is contrary to nature."

(Paris, June 12, 1778, to his father. [The statement that the tremolo effect could be imitated on the clavier seems to require an explanation. Mozart obviously had in view, not the pianoforte which was just coming into use in his day, but the clavichord.

This instrument was sounded by striking the strings with bits of bra.s.s placed in the farther end of the keys which were simple and direct levers. The tangents, as they were called, had to be held against the strings as long as it was desired that the tone should sound, and by gently repeating the pressure on the key a tremulousness was imparted to the tone which made the clavichord a more expressive instrument than the harpsichord or the early pianoforte. The effect was called Bebung in German, and Balancement in French. H.E.K.])

66. "Before dinner Herr Vogler dashed through my sonata prima vista. He played the first movement prestissimo, the andante allegro and the rondo prestissimo with a vengeance. As a rule, he played a different ba.s.s than the one I had written, and occasionally he changed the harmony as well as the melody. That was inevitable, for at such speed the eyes can not follow, nor the hands grasp, the music. Such playing at sight and...are all one to me. The hearers (I mean those worthy of the name) can say nothing more than they have seen music and clavier playing. You can imagine that it was all the more unendurable because I did not dare to say to him: 'Much too quick!' Moreover it is much easier to play rapidly than slowly; you can drop a few notes in pa.s.sages without any one noticing it. But is it beautiful? At such speed you can use the hands indiscriminately; but is that beautiful?"

(Mannheim, January 17, 1778, to his father.)

67. "They hurry the tempo, trill or pile on the adornments because they can neither study nor sustain a tone."

(Recorded by Rochlitz as a criticism by Mozart of Italian singers in 1789.)

68. "It is thus, they think, that they can infuse warmth and ardor into their singing. Ah, if there is no fire in the composition you will surely never get it in by hurrying it."

(According to Rochlitz Mozart used these words while complaining of the manner in which his compositions were ruined by exaggerated speed in the tempi.)

EXPRESSIONS CRITICAL

69. "We wish that it were in our power to introduce the German taste in minuets in Italy; minuets here last almost as long as whole symphonies."

(Bologna, September 22, 1770, to his mother and sister. Mozart as a lad was making a tour through Italy with his father. [There might be a valuable hint here touching the proper tempo for the minuets in Mozart's symphonies. Of late years the conductors, of the Wagnerian school more particularly, have acted on the belief that the symphonic minuets of Mozart and Haydn must be played with the stately slowness of the old dance. Mozart himself was plainly of another opinion. H.E.K.])