Beethoven and Mozart

• 1. Introduction

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  Beethoven and Mozart never definitively shared a room, yet one composer's shadow fell so completely over the other that Beethoven once stopped mid-sketch to accuse himself of theft. On a sketch leaf from around October 1790, the young Beethoven jotted down a brief C-minor passage, then wrote in alarm between the staves that he had stolen the phrase from a Mozart symphony. He could not let it stand. He rewrote the passage just below and signed it, defiantly, "Beethoven himself." The passage he feared he had copied cannot be traced to any Mozart symphony that exists. That episode raises the questions this documentary will follow: how deep did Mozart's influence actually run, what happened when the teenage Beethoven traveled to Vienna to find his idol, and what did Beethoven do with that inheritance across an entire career?

• 2. Bonn, at a Distance

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  Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756; Beethoven arrived in Bonn in 1770, roughly fourteen years later. By 1781, Mozart had already moved to Vienna, the Austrian imperial capital, chasing a career that Salzburg could no longer contain. Bonn lay about 900 kilometers away from Vienna, on the opposite side of German-speaking Europe, farther in practical terms from the center of musical life than even Salzburg had been. Yet the Bonn court was politically and culturally tied to Vienna, and Mozart's music crossed that distance. Beethoven played Mozart's piano concertos with the Bonn court orchestra. He performed in Mozart's operas, playing the viola from inside the ensemble rather than watching from the stalls. The historian Lewis Lockwood draws on a phrase Mozart once used about himself, writing that just as Mozart told his father he was "soaked in music," so Beethoven was soaked in Mozart. That immersion was intimate and sustained, not the passing encounter of a student with a famous name on a score. It shaped the instincts of a teenager who was already beginning to compose.

• 3. The Vienna Visit

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  In January 1787, Beethoven arrived in Vienna. Evidence from the Regensburgische Diarium, which tracked the arrivals of individual travelers through Regensburg, places the visit that month and suggests he remained in the city for roughly six weeks before departing in March or April. His reason for leaving was personal: his mother was gravely ill, and she died of tuberculosis in July of that year. His father had been nearly incapacitated by alcoholism, and Beethoven had two younger brothers who depended on the household. The trip had been arranged by a group of influential nobles in Bonn who were, in the framing of biographer Maynard Solomon, deliberately grooming Beethoven to be Mozart's successor. What happened during those weeks is not documented. Mozart was away in Prague for part of early 1787, narrowing the window when any meeting could have occurred. The 19th-century biographer Otto Jahn preserved an anecdote in which Beethoven improvised before Mozart and drew the response, "Don't lose sight of this young man, he will one day tell you some things that will surprise you." Jahn cited only that the story was communicated to him in Vienna on good authority. Contemporary scholarship is skeptical. The New Grove Dictionary does not repeat the tale; it says only that Beethoven "met Mozart and perhaps had a few lessons from him." Solomon goes further, raising the possibility that Mozart, preoccupied with his father's declining health, a visit to Prague, the early stages of Don Giovanni, and his own financial worries, may have auditioned the sixteen-year-old and turned him away. Mozart already had a pupil living in his home at the time: the nine-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel. What Beethoven carried back to Bonn from that summer was not triumph. His first surviving letter, written to a family in Augsburg who had befriended him on the journey, describes the melancholy events of those months and hints at illness and depression.

• 4. Parallel Lives in Vienna

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  Beethoven returned to Vienna permanently in 1792, the year after Mozart died. What followed was a series of near-exact repetitions of Mozart's own trajectory in the city. Both composers built early reputations as keyboard performers. Both were mentored by Joseph Haydn. Both received patronage from Countess Maria Wilhelmine Thun, and both performed the works of Baroque masters in the home of Baron van Swieten. In 1796, Beethoven traveled to Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin in the company of Prince Lichnowsky, retracing a circuit Mozart had made. On the Prague leg of that journey, Beethoven composed an extended concert aria for the soprano Josepha Duschek, the same singer for whom Mozart had composed on his Prague visit in 1789. By the early 19th century, the impresario Emanuel Schikaneder, who had been the driving force behind Mozart's The Magic Flute, was sponsoring the sketch phases of Beethoven's intended opera Vestas Feuer. Beethoven eventually abandoned Vestas Feuer and turned instead to Fidelio. The pattern across these years is not coincidence or imitation for its own sake; it suggests that the cultural infrastructure Mozart had navigated in Vienna was still largely intact when Beethoven arrived, and that Beethoven moved through it along a groove already worn smooth.

• 5. Direct Musical Borrowings

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  Scholar Charles Rosen identifies Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, K. 491, as a direct model for Beethoven's own Third Piano Concerto in the same key. He also sees Mozart's Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452, behind Beethoven's quintet for the same instruments, Op. 16, and Mozart's A major String Quartet, K. 464, behind Beethoven's A major String Quartet, Op. 18 No. 5. Robert Marshall traces the Pathétique Sonata, Op. 13, back to Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C minor, K. 457. Beethoven also wrote cadenzas, catalogued as WoO 58, for the first and third movements of Mozart's D minor Piano Concerto, K. 466. He composed four sets of variations on Mozart's themes: one on "Se vuol ballare" from The Marriage of Figaro for piano and violin in 1792-93; one on "La ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni for two oboes and cor anglais; one on "Ein Madchen oder Weibchen" from The Magic Flute for piano and cello; and one on "Bei Mannern welche Liebe fuhlen" from the same opera, completed in 1801. When Beethoven was composing his Fifth Symphony, he copied a passage from Mozart's 40th Symphony into the same sketchbook, and the third movement of the Fifth opens with a theme similar to one from the Mozart. Late in his career, Beethoven paid homage by making the opening notes of Leporello's aria "Notte e giorno faticar" from Don Giovanni the basis of the 22nd of the Diabelli Variations. That last gesture, embedded in one of the grandest sets of keyboard variations ever written, shows the relationship did not fade with time.

• 6. What Beethoven Heard

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  Beethoven's student Carl Czerny told the biographer Otto Jahn something Beethoven had said about Mozart's piano playing: that Mozart "had a fine but choppy" way of playing, using the German word zerhacktes, meaning something like hacked apart, and that he lacked ligato. Beethoven could only have formed this impression during the 1787 Vienna visit. The observation is pointed. Beethoven's own playing became known for its legato and its capacity to sustain a singing line, qualities he described and valued. Whether the judgment on Mozart was professional assessment or the revisionism of a younger composer who had surpassed his model is impossible to know. What is certain is that Beethoven remembered the sound of Mozart's touch well enough to characterize it decades later, and that the characterization was specific enough to be passed down through Czerny to Jahn and into the record.