Joseph Lange

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Lange was born in Würzburg in the Holy Roman Empire on the 1st of April 1751, and he died in Vienna on the 17th of September 1831. He spent eight decades on earth, threading his way through the world of Viennese theatre and amateur painting. Today he is best remembered not for his roles on stage but for a small portrait he painted of his brother-in-law, a portrait that Constanze Mozart later called "by far the best likeness of him." That brother-in-law was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  Who was the man behind that famous image? How did a working actor from the Holy Roman Empire end up at the centre of Mozart's personal world? And what became of a painting that started as a miniature roughly 19 by 15 centimetres and ended up unfinished on a larger canvas for reasons nobody fully recorded? Those questions run through the life of Joseph Lange.

• 2. A Life on Stage

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  Lange's career placed him squarely inside Viennese theatrical life at a time when Vienna was one of the most vibrant musical cities in Europe. The tenor Michael Kelly, writing in his reminiscences of 1826, called Lange an "excellent comedian"; that is, a player of comedy. Kelly knew the Vienna scene intimately, having spent the early years of his own career there as an opera singer.

  Lange appeared in at least two of Mozart's works in the 1780s. In 1783 he performed in a piece Mozart composed for Carnival, a "Masquerade" catalogued as K. 446. The work was a pantomime with music built around the traditional figures of the Commedia dell'arte. Lange took the role of Pierrot while Mozart himself stepped out of the composer's chair and played Harlequin.

  Three years later, in 1786, Lange appeared in Mozart's opera Der Schauspieldirektor. He took the spoken role of Herz, a character whose name means heart. His wife Aloysia sang one of the two primary soprano parts in the same production, the role of Madame Herz.

• 3. Marriage Into the Weber Circle

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  Lange's first marriage, in 1775, was to Maria Anna Elisabeth Schindler. Her father, Philipp Ernst Schindler, was a miniature painter and director of painting at the Viennese porcelain factory, a connection that may well have encouraged Lange's own interest in painting. Maria Anna died on the 14th of March 1779 of pneumonia.

  On the 31st of October 1780, Lange married Aloysia Weber, a successful soprano. He took on a significant financial obligation along with the marriage; that same year he agreed to support Aloysia's widowed mother, Cäcilia, with an annual payment of 700 florins.

  Two years later, in 1782, Mozart married Aloysia's younger sister Constanze in Vienna, and the two men became brothers-in-law. The written record preserves several occasions on which the Mozarts and the Langes spent time together, both as couples and as individuals. Both men were also Masons, a shared affiliation that further knitted their social worlds together.

• 4. The Portrait That Survived

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  Lange painted his portrait of Mozart in 1782-83, not long after Mozart joined the family by marriage. The work began as a miniature, roughly 19 by 15 centimetres in size, showing only Mozart's face. It was only in March 2009 that the musicologist Michael Lorenz became the first person to establish this origin clearly.

  At some point the small painting was affixed to a larger canvas. The apparent intention was to show Mozart seated at a piano, but the enlarged painting was never completed. What survives is an unfinished image, with Mozart's face painted in careful detail and the rest of the composition still waiting for a hand that never returned to it.

  Constanze Mozart, interviewed in old age by Vincent and Mary Novello, said that this portrait was "by far the best likeness of him." That judgement, from the woman who knew Mozart's face better than almost anyone, has kept Lange's name attached to Mozart scholarship ever since. Lange also painted a small portrait of Constanze herself in 1782, which was later enlarged, and during Leopold Mozart's visit to Vienna in 1785 he drew a portrait of Mozart's father as well, though that drawing has since been lost.

• 5. Later Years

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  By 1795, Lange and Aloysia were living apart. From around 1800 onward, he lived together with a woman named Therese Koch, and the two had three daughters.

  In 1808, Lange published his autobiography. He continued to paint well into his old age, never fully stepping away from the amateur practice that had produced his most enduring work. He died in Vienna on the 17th of September 1831, eighty years after his birth in Würzburg. The unfinished portrait of Mozart, which he began in 1782-83 as a tiny miniature no larger than a sheet of notepaper, remains the image most often reproduced when people reach for a face to put to the name of the composer.