Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart
Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart was born in Vienna on the 26th of July 1791, four months and ten days before his father died. His father was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and the baby was the youngest of six children born to the composer and his wife Constanze. Only he and one older brother lived on. He grew up to be a composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher, and some of the great musicians of his day thought well of him. Yet he carried a surname that every audience already knew. What do you do with a name like that? Why did a man with such a thorough musical education write so little? And how did one of his piano pieces end up catalogued as the work of the young Franz Liszt?
Baptized Franz Xaver Mozart, the boy was never called that by his family, who always used the name Wolfgang. Joseph Haydn, a close friend of the household, supervised and supported his education. Antonio Salieri and Johann Nepomuk Hummel gave him excellent musical instruction. Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Sigismund von Neukomm taught him composition. He learned to play both the piano and the violin.
In April 1805, thirteen-year-old Wolfgang Mozart made his debut at a concert in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. He had started composing at an early age, as his father had before him. He also wrote a cantata in 1805 for Joseph Haydn's 73rd birthday, honoring the man who had watched over his training.
Money drove Mozart to Lemberg, now Lviv, in 1808. There he gave music lessons to the daughters of the Polish count Wiktor Baworowski. The pay was good, but he felt lonely in Pidkamin, a town near Rohatyn.
In 1809 another Polish aristocrat, the imperial chamberlain Count von Janiszewski, offered him a post teaching his daughters in Burshtyn. Mozart accepted. Besides teaching, he gave local concerts there, playing his own pieces and his father's. Those evenings introduced him to the important people of Galicia.
After two years in Burshtyn, he moved back to Lemberg in 1813. He spent 25 years there, teaching and giving concerts. He still traveled as a performer. Between 1819 and 1821 he toured Europe, and in 1819 he gave concerts in Warsaw, Elbing, and Danzig, now Gdansk.
From 1826 to 1829 he conducted the choir of Saint Cecilia, which numbered 400 amateur singers. Out of that choir he created the musical brotherhood of Saint Cecilia, and with it the first school of music in Lemberg. In 1826 he conducted his father's Requiem in a concert at the Ukrainian Greek Catholic cathedral of St. George, far from Vienna.
Professional success came to Franz Xaver Mozart in moderate amounts, both as a teacher and as a performer. Unlike his father, he was introverted and given to self-deprecation. He constantly underrated his own talent. He feared that anything he composed would be set beside what his father had written. His style leaned toward early Romanticism, yet it was heavily influenced by his father's mature manner.
The Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, Op. 14, dates from 1808 and was published in 1811. It could pass for one of his father's late works, those numbered K. 550 and above. Two details give it away. One is a youthful exuberance. The other is a keyboard range that had widened in 1795.
The Piano Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major, Op. 25, was first heard in Lemberg on the 17th of December 1818. It suits the 1810s better, with a more virtuosic piano part. It hints that the younger Mozart was finding a style of his own. These two concertos are the largest pieces he ever wrote, in a catalogue that stayed small.
Anton Diabelli's waltz theme drew variations from 50 composers in the 1820s, and Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart was one of them. His variation went into Part II of the Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. Part I held the 33 variations supplied by Beethoven, which later gained an identity of their own as the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120.
Around that time Mozart met Franz Schubert, and the two became close. Their friendship lasted until Schubert's death in 1828. Schubert and Robert Schumann both held Mozart in high esteem.
In Lemberg, one of his pupils was Julie von Webenau, born Baroni-Cavalcabò. Her mother, Josephine, who lived from 1788 to 1860, became his lover and his sole heir. She was also a longtime patron, and Mozart dedicated his cello sonata to her. After his death, she carried out his will. He never married and had no children, just like his brother.
Another dedication to Josephine appears on a set of Five Variations on a romance from Méhul's Joseph, dated the 28th of October 1816.
Opus 30 is the highest number in the catalogue of Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, which is a small output for a composer with his training. After 1820 he seems to have given up composing almost entirely. There is also an 11-year gap, from 1828 to 1839, with no sign of any new work. He wrote mainly chamber music and piano music.
The early opus numbers show a young man at work. The Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 1, was published in 1802. The Variations on a minuet from Don Giovanni, Op. 2, are dated 1805.
Polonaises run through the middle of the catalogue. Op. 17 holds six Polonaises mélancoliques written in 1811-14. Op. 22 adds four more from 1815-18, and Op. 26 has two from 1824. Russian melodies appear too. Op. 18 is a set of seven variations in D minor on a Russian melody, dated 1809 and published in 1820.
His songs with piano fill several opus numbers. Op. 5 is eight German songs, including Die Einsamkeit, Das Klavier, and Todtengräberlied. Op. 9 includes Der Schmetterling auf einem Vergissmeinnicht and Klage an den Mond. The cantata Der erste Frühlingstag, meaning The First Spring Day, is Op. 28.
His last numbered work, Op. 30, is a Festchor from 1840, written for the unveiling of the Mozart monument in Salzburg.
A copyist's manuscript of Mozart's Five Variations on a romance from Méhul's Joseph, Op. 23, carried the words "par le jeune Liszt". That note wrongly named the young Franz Liszt as the composer. The Neue Liszt-Ausgabe published the work in good faith in 1990 and catalogued it as S147a.
In 1992 the Liszt scholar Leslie Howard recorded the piece for his series of the complete solo piano music. It appeared on a disc called The Young Liszt. Shortly afterward, Howard added a note to the release. The attribution, he wrote, had been shown to be false, and the work came from the pen of Mozart's son Franz Xaver.
Howard kept the piece on the disc anyway. It remained unknown and unrecorded, like the vast majority of F X Mozart's output. The writing was also not vastly different from other pieces in the collection. In his words, it "was thought best not to discard it".
The mistaken credit lasted until 1994. Since then the variations have belonged to Mozart's son, who published them as his Op. 23 in 1820.
In 1838 Mozart left for Vienna, and then for Salzburg. There he was appointed Kapellmeister of the Mozarteum. From 1841 he taught the pianist Ernst Pauer.
He died of stomach cancer on the 29th of July 1844, three days after his 53rd birthday. The place was the town of Karlsbad, now Karlovy Vary, and he was buried there. His father's shadow reached even to the grave. The epitaph on his tombstone reads: "May the name of his father be his epitaph, as his veneration for him was the essence of his life."
A monument to Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart stands in Lviv, Ukraine, in Yevhena Malanyuka Square. That city was Lemberg in the years when he taught there.
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Common questions
Who was Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart?
He was the youngest child of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Constanze. He was born in Vienna on the 26th of July 1791 and worked as a composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.
Why was he known as Wolfgang?
He was baptized Franz Xaver Mozart, but his family always called him Wolfgang. He is also known as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Jr.
Where did he spend most of his career?
He taught and gave concerts in Galicia. He spent 25 years in Lemberg, now Lviv, after moving there in 1813.
Why was one of his works credited to Franz Liszt?
A copyist's manuscript of his Five Variations on a romance from Méhul's Joseph, Op. 23, wrongly said it was by the young Liszt. The error held until 1994.
How did he die?
He died of stomach cancer on the 29th of July 1844 in Karlsbad, now Karlovy Vary, and was buried there.
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6 references cited across the entry
- 1The elder was Karl Thomas Mozart (21 September 1784 – 31 October 1858), who was an excellent pianist and long considered becoming a professional musician. Instead, he entered Austrian government servi
- 4BookThe Cambridge Mozart EncyclopediaCliff Eisen — Cambridge University Press — 2006