Leopold Mozart

• 1. Introduction

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  Leopold Mozart spent the better part of his adult life in the shadow of a son he helped create. Born in Augsburg on the 14th of November 1719, he grew into a skilled violinist, theorist, and composer who published a violin textbook admired across Europe. Yet the Grove Dictionary entry on his life opens not with his own achievements but with a caveat about what came after: the recognition, in roughly 1759, that his children were prodigies capable of performing for the courts of Europe.

  Who was the man behind that recognition? Was he the devoted missionary his own correspondence suggests, or the controlling father that some biographers have portrayed? His violin treatise, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, made him famous in his own lifetime. His compositional output was vast: symphonies, oratorios, concertos, serenades, and novelty pieces that called for shotguns and bagpipes. But after 1762, he largely set all of that aside.

  The questions Leopold's life leaves open are the ones that still divide scholars: what did he sacrifice, what did he gain, and when the family's great story turned bitter, who was most to blame?

• 2. The Augsburg Years

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  Augsburg in the early eighteenth century was a prosperous imperial city, and it was there that Leopold's father Johann Georg Mozart worked as a bookbinder. The family's ambitions for their son ran toward the church; they had planned a career for him as a Catholic priest. Leopold apparently had other ideas. An old school friend later told Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in 1777, what those early years had been like: "Ah he was a great fellow. My father thought the world of him. And how he hoodwinked the clerics about becoming a priest."

  At the local Jesuit school, Leopold studied logic, science, and theology, graduating magna cum laude in 1735. He sang as a choirboy and appeared in student theater productions as an actor and singer. He became a skilled violinist and organist. He also developed a lasting fascination with microscopes and telescopes, a curiosity that said something about the breadth of his intellect.

  After less than a year at the St. Salvator Lyzeum, he withdrew and eventually moved to Salzburg, enrolling in November 1737 at the Benedictine University to study philosophy and jurisprudence. He earned a Bachelor of Philosophy in 1738. Then, in September 1739, he was expelled for poor attendance, having "hardly attended Natural Science more than once or twice." The future author of Europe's most widely read violin textbook was not, it turns out, a particularly diligent student.

• 3. A Career in Salzburg

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  In 1740, Leopold's professional life began in earnest when he became violinist and valet to Johann Baptist, Count of Thurn-Valsassina and Taxis, one of the university's canons. That same year he published his first musical work, six trio sonatas titled Sonate sei da chiesa e da camera, Opus 1, for which he did the copper engraving himself.

  Salzburg was not merely a charming provincial town; it was the capital of an independent state within the Holy Roman Empire, the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg. In 1743, Leopold secured a position as fourth violinist in the musical establishment of the ruling Prince-Archbishop, Count Leopold Anton von Firmian. His duties included composition and teaching violin to the choirboys of the Salzburg cathedral.

  He rose through the ranks: to second violinist in 1758, then to deputy Kapellmeister in 1763. There he stopped. Others were repeatedly promoted over him to the head position of Kapellmeister, and the Grove Dictionary attributes this stalled career at least partly to the long stretches of time the family's concert tours kept him away from Salzburg.

  On the 21st of November 1747, he married Anna Maria Pertl. The biographer Abert recorded that the two were "regarded at the time as the handsomest couple in Salzburg." They settled into an apartment on the third floor of Getreidegasse 9, renting from Leopold's close friend and frequent correspondent Lorenz Hagenauer.

• 4. The Violin Treatise

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  In 1755, Leopold sat down to write Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, a comprehensive treatment of violin technique and performance. The work appeared in print in 1756, the same year his son Wolfgang was born, and its reach was substantial. Two further German editions followed, in 1769 and 1787. It was translated into Dutch in 1766 and into French in 1770.

  The treatise made Leopold's name recognizable across Europe. His name began appearing in music dictionaries and pedagogical works around this time. Today, musicians interested in eighteenth-century performance practice still consult it, a measure of how carefully he had documented the conventions of his era.

  Scholars are divided on his standing as a composer. The Grove Dictionary noted that by 1756 his works circulated widely in German-speaking Europe. But the biographer Maynard Solomon argued that he "failed to make his mark as a composer," and Alfred Einstein judged him an undistinguished one. What no one disputes is his success as a teacher. The same discipline and analytical rigor that went into the treatise shaped how he approached the two pupils who would consume most of his adult life.

• 5. Prodigies and the Grand Tour

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  Around 1759, Leopold noticed that his daughter Nannerl, then about seven years old, had exceptional keyboard ability. He began giving her lessons. What happened next he could not have planned: the toddler Wolfgang began imitating his sister, first picking out thirds on the keyboard, then making rapid progress under his father's instruction.

  Leopold later called his son "the miracle which God let be born in Salzburg." The Grove Dictionary described the recognition as striking Leopold "with the force of a divine revelation," turning his sense of duty from that of a father and teacher into something more like a missionary's.

  By 1762 both children were ready to perform professionally, and the family set out on what became the Mozart family Grand Tour, appearing before aristocracy and public alike in Munich, Vienna, Pressburg (now Bratislava), Paris, the Hague, and London. Nannerl later claimed that Leopold "entirely gave up both violin instruction and composition in order to direct that time not claimed in service to the prince to the education of his two children." After 1762, his compositional activity shrank to revising earlier work; by 1771 he had stopped composing altogether.

  Whether the tours were financially worthwhile is disputed. The children often performed before large audiences and earned large sums, but travel was expensive and illness on the road produced periods of no income at all. Maynard Solomon believed the tours were ultimately profitable; Ruth Halliwell concluded that earnings generally only covered travel and living costs. The longest journey lasted about three and a half years.

• 6. Compositions and Their Range

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  A contemporary report written before 1757 listed what Leopold had already composed: many church items, a great number of symphonies, more than thirty large serenades, countless trios and divertimentos, concertos for transverse flute, oboe, bassoon, Waldhorn, and trumpet, twelve oratorios, theatrical items, pantomimes, and what the report called "a musical sleigh ride."

  Leopold was drawn to what he called a naturalistic feel. His Jagdsinfonie, a hunting symphony for four horns and strings, calls for actual shotguns. His Bauernhochzeit, or Peasant Wedding, incorporates bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy, a dulcimer, whoops, whistles, and pistol shots. The musical sleigh ride adds bells and whips to a full orchestra.

  His Cassation in G for Orchestra and Toys, sometimes called the Toy Symphony, became one of his most enduring pieces, though it has also been attributed at various times to Joseph Haydn, Michael Haydn, and an Austrian Benedictine monk. More substantial works include the Sacramental Litany in D major from 1762 and three fortepiano sonatas. Some of his output was mistakenly credited to Wolfgang during his lifetime, and some pieces attributed to him turned out to be Wolfgang's.

  Cliff Eisen, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on Leopold's symphonies, found in a Symphony in G major evidence of his "sensitivity to orchestral colour" and judged it to compare favorably with the work of virtually any of his contemporaries. Much of the output is lost, and how representative the surviving works are of the whole remains unknown.

• 7. Family in the Later Years

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  By 1773 the Mozarts felt prosperous enough to move to larger quarters: eight rooms in the Tanzmeisterhaus, once home to the recently deceased dancing master Franz Karl Gottlieb Spöckner, whose cousin and heir Maria Anna Raab became their landlord. The large room where Spöckner had given dancing lessons became the family's space for teaching, domestic concerts, storing keyboard instruments Leopold sold, and a recreational shooting game called Bölzlschiessen, in which family and guests fired airguns at humorously designed paper targets.

  Nannerl was in her early thirties and still living at home with her father when Wolfgang left permanently in 1781. She had a significant suitor in Franz Armand d'Ippold, with whom she was evidently in love, but she did not marry him. Biographers have speculated that Leopold blocked the match because he valued having her at home; Halliwell points out that no written evidence survives on the point and that we simply do not know.

  Nannerl married in August 1784, at age thirty-three, moving to the small rural town of St. Gilgen to live with her new husband, Johann Baptist Franz von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg, and his five apparently ill-educated stepchildren. Leopold remained deeply involved in her life from a distance: doing her shopping, engaging servants, relaying news, looking after the maintenance of her fortepiano, and encouraging her to stand up to her husband when he was unreasonable.

  In July 1785, Nannerl came to Salzburg to give birth to her first son and left the infant with his grandfather when she returned home. Leopold raised the child, whom he called Leopoldl, with the help of servants, sending Nannerl letters at least once a week that usually began with the sentence "Leopoldl is healthy." One repeated scene from this period captures something warm about Leopold: when the toddler had to be coaxed to bed, Leopold would pretend to climb into Leopoldl's bed himself, whereupon the boy would gleefully try to push him out and get in himself.

• 8. Leopold and Wolfgang

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  Wolfgang's departure from Salzburg in 1781 was not amicable. He chose to remain in Vienna rather than return from a stay with his employer Archbishop Colloredo, pursuing a freelance career that proved, at least for a time, genuinely successful. Leopold was strongly opposed. A harsh family quarrel followed, and Leopold was equally opposed when Wolfgang married Constanze Weber in 1782, giving his permission late, reluctantly, and only under duress.

  In 1785, Leopold visited Wolfgang and Constanze in Vienna at the peak of his son's career. On the 12th of February, he heard Joseph Haydn say, upon hearing the string quartets Wolfgang had dedicated to him, "Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name: He has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition." It was the last time Leopold saw his son.

  Later that year, when Leopold took Nannerl's infant son into his home, he did not tell Wolfgang. Wolfgang eventually learned of it from a mutual acquaintance and wrote to ask whether Leopold would care for his own two children while he and Constanze toured. Leopold refused, and his summary of that refusal, written to Nannerl on the 17th of November 1786, was pointed: he noted that Wolfgang had suggested he take the children, that Leopold could be left while the couple traveled, could "die," could "stay in England," and then he could "run after them with the children." The letter ends with the single word "Basta," meaning enough.

  Leopold's health began failing around this time. By the 4th of April 1787, Wolfgang had received alarming news and wrote to him, though he did not travel to Salzburg to visit. Leopold died on the 28th of May 1787. Wolfgang could not attend the funeral; the journey was too long. His feelings emerged briefly in a postscript to a letter to his friend Gottfried von Jacquin: "I inform you that on returning home today I received the sad news of my most beloved father's death. You can imagine the state I am in." Halliwell concluded that Leopold's death was equally devastating for Nannerl, who lost the steady support he had provided and had no replacement for it.