Friedrich Schlichtegroll

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Friedrich Schlichtegroll published the first biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1793, just two years after the composer died. The account ran to roughly 6,000 words, tucked inside a volume of twelve obituaries Schlichtegroll had assembled under the title Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1791 - "Necrology for the year 1791." There was something quietly peculiar about this debut: the man who introduced Mozart to posterity had never once met him. How do you write the life of someone you never knew? What gaps did that distance create? And what did the people who did know Mozart choose to say, or choose to leave out? Those questions shadow every page Schlichtegroll ever wrote on the subject.

• 2. The Salzburg Network

  ›

  To gather his material, Schlichtegroll turned to a friend of Mozart's named Albert von Mölk, who was based in Salzburg. Von Mölk reached further into the Mozart circle and consulted Mozart's own sister, Maria Anna Mozart, known to her family as Nannerl. Her written reply to his queries still exists. Nannerl went a step further and contacted Johann Andreas Schachtner, an old family friend who had known Wolfgang since childhood. Schachtner sent back a warm letter stocked with anecdotes and personal memories; that letter also survives and can still be read today. What neither Nannerl nor Schachtner could fully supply was a picture of the adult Mozart. Both had drifted out of close contact with Wolfgang after 1781, the year he left Salzburg for Vienna. The biography that emerged from these exchanges tilts heavily toward the first twenty-five years of his life, the Salzburg years that his Viennese acquaintances were never asked to address.

• 3. A Rival and a Destruction

  ›

  Schlichtegroll's obituary was not the only early account competing for authority over Mozart's legacy. Franz Niemetschek produced a rival biography drawing on the direct testimony of Mozart's widow, Constanze. The two traditions pointed in opposite directions when it came to Constanze herself. Because Nannerl harbored a deep antipathy toward her sister-in-law, the Schlichtegroll portrait treated Constanze harshly. Constanze's response was dramatic. According to the Grove Dictionary of Music, she bought up and destroyed the entire edition of the Nekrolog, apparently disliking its portrayal of her. That act of suppression tells its own story about how fiercely the people closest to Mozart guarded the right to shape how he would be remembered.

• 4. The Eternal-Child Myth

  ›

  Scholars Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe identify Schlichtegroll as the first in what they call a long and dubious tradition. That tradition depicted Mozart as, in their words, a strange mixture of angel and beast, Tamino and Papageno: sublime where his music was concerned, but pathetically inadequate in worldly matters. The image lodged itself in the culture and proved extraordinarily hard to dislodge. Researcher Bruce Cooper Clarke, who compiled an extensive annotated commentary on Schlichtegroll's text, offered a more balanced verdict. Clarke acknowledged that Schlichtegroll's inquiries prompted Nannerl and others to commit their memories to paper at a moment when those memories were still fresh, preserving reminiscences that might otherwise never have been written down. Clarke also argued, however, that Schlichtegroll's handling of that same material gave powerful momentum to the "eternal-child" myth, a myth Clarke described as irrelevant and wrongheaded, yet one that has intruded on every serious effort of Mozart biography ever since.