Mozart's Berlin journey

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart's Berlin journey began on the morning of the 8th of April, 1789, when the composer climbed into a carriage in Vienna beside Prince Karl Lichnowsky, an aristocratic patron who was also a fellow Freemason. The ride was free. Mozart had no money for it otherwise.

  By the late 1780s, Mozart's concert income had dried up. He was borrowing from friends, including a merchant named Michael Puchberg. Operas had not covered the gap. The trip north through Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin was not a tour of triumph. It was a search for work, for an audience, for a king.

  Two questions follow Mozart every mile of this journey. Would Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, who was said to be eagerly awaiting him in Potsdam, actually receive him? And would the journey pay off enough to ease what his letters called a very worrisome financial situation?

• 2. The Dresden Detour

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  They reached Dresden on the 12th of April, two days out of Prague, and settled into the Hotel de Pologne. The hotel itself became the first stage.

  The following morning, Mozart played chamber music there with the organist Anton Teyber and the cellist Anton Kraft. Among the works performed was the String Trio, K. 563. His friend Josepha Duschek, who had traveled from Prague to Dresden, sang arias from The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. Mozart accompanied her at the keyboard.

  The day after that brought a command performance before Elector Friedrich August III of Saxony and his wife Amalie. The nine-year-old cellist Nikolaus Kraft, son of the Anton Kraft from the hotel concert, joined that session. Mozart played the Coronation Concerto, K. 537, a work he had only recently written. The Elector's reward was a snuff-box containing 100 ducats.

  Two more encounters filled out Dresden's itinerary. On the 15th of April, Mozart lunched with the Russian ambassador, Prince Alexander Beloselsky-Belosersky, then submitted to an informal contest with the organist Johann Wilhelm Hassler, testing skill first on organ, then on piano. The day after, Mozart visited the consistorial councillor Christian Gottfried Korner, a friend of Friedrich Schiller. Korner's sister-in-law, the artist Dora Stock, sketched Mozart's portrait in silverpoint on ivory board. It may have been the last portrait made of him during his lifetime.

• 3. Bach's Church in Leipzig

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  On the 18th of April, Mozart and Lichnowsky departed for Leipzig, arriving two days later. Mozart spent three days in the city.

  The Thomaskirche drew him first. Johann Sebastian Bach had served as music director there for decades, and Mozart had become a devoted admirer of Bach's music during his early years in Vienna, largely through the influence of the scholar Gottfried van Swieten. Standing at the organ of that church, Mozart improvised. The cantor Friedrich Doles, who had studied under Bach himself, and the organist Karl Friedrich Gorner worked the stops of the instrument for him.

  On what was probably the same occasion, the choir of the Thomasschule performed Bach's motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV 225. Mozart was so taken by the piece that he copied it out by hand from all the separate choral parts.

• 4. The King Who Was Not Waiting

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  Back in Prague, before he had even left the city, Mozart had received encouraging news from the oboist Friedrich Ramm, who was traveling in the opposite direction from Berlin. Ramm told him that Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia, was eagerly awaiting him in Potsdam.

  Mozart arrived in Potsdam on the 25th of April. What greeted him was not a royal welcome. A court document recorded his arrival in dry bureaucratic terms, noting that a man who declared himself a Kapellmeister from Vienna wished to lay his talents at the King's feet and was waiting to learn whether His Sovereign Majesty would receive him. The King's response, scrawled in the margin, was to redirect Mozart to Jean-Pierre Duport, the director of the royal chamber music. According to the scholar Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart was not on good terms with Duport.

  In what Maynard Solomon reads as an attempt to improve that strained relationship, Mozart composed, on the 29th of April, a set of nine piano variations on a minuet by Duport, catalogued as K. 573. No royal audience came from it. There is no solid evidence that Mozart even remained in Potsdam during the weeks that followed.

• 5. Glory Without Pay

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  On the 8th of May, Mozart returned briefly to Leipzig. Four days later, he gave a concert at the Gewandhaus.

  The program was entirely his own music: the piano concertos K. 456 and K. 503; two scenas for soprano, K. 505 and K. 528, sung again by Josepha Duschek; the solo piano fantasy K. 475; and two symphonies whose identities were not recorded. Following the custom of the time, the opening symphony was split across the evening, its first two movements opening the concert and its final two playing before the intermission.

  The concert had been organized on short notice and was poorly attended. Mozart wrote home about it on the 16th of May. In his own words, "from the point of view of applause and glory this concert was absolutely magnificent but the profits were wretchedly meager."

  Lichnowsky left Leipzig in mid-May, and from that point Mozart traveled alone. He lingered until the 17th of May, partly to stay near a circle of friends that included Johann Leopold Neumann, his wife, and Duschek. He also told Constanze that horses for hire were scarce, slowing his departure.

• 6. The King Received Him

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  Mozart returned to Berlin on the 19th of May. That same night, he apparently attended a performance of his own opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the city theatre. Local newspapers did not mention his presence.

  The account of what happened that evening came much later, published posthumously in 1856, in the memoirs of Ludwig Tieck, the German literary figure who had been born in 1773 and was not quite sixteen years old at the time. Tieck's memoir describes how, arriving early to an empty theatre, he found a small, restless man in a grey overcoat moving through the orchestra pit, looking carefully through the sheet music on the stands. The two fell into conversation about the orchestra, the theatre, the opera, and the taste of audiences. The stranger spoke of Mozart's operas with deep admiration. When Tieck said he loved those operas, the man replied, "that is very good of you, young man." Only after the stranger was called away to the stage did Tieck learn who he had been speaking with.

  On the 26th of May, Mozart performed before the King and Queen at the royal palace. He reported to Constanze that he received an award of 100 Friedrichs d'or, which he valued at around 800 florins, as well as commissions for six string quartets and a set of six easy piano sonatas intended for Princess Friederike.

• 7. Debts and Loose Ends

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  Mozart left Berlin on the 28th of May. He traveled south through Dresden, reached Prague on the 31st of May, stayed until the 2nd of June, and arrived home in Vienna at midday on the 4th of June.

  The financial reckoning followed. It emerged that Mozart owed money to Lichnowsky, possibly accumulated during the journey itself. The debt came to 1,415 florins. Prince Lichnowsky pursued the matter legally and won a judgment against Mozart in October 1791, only weeks before the composer died.

  The 1789 trip was also the first journey Mozart had taken since his marriage to Constanze in 1782 on which she did not travel with him. He wrote to her regularly in the early weeks. Many of those letters subsequently disappeared, which led the biographer Maynard Solomon, writing in his 1995 Mozart biography, to argue that Mozart had been conducting an affair with Josepha Duschek, whose own travels through Germany that spring repeatedly overlapped with his. Solomon pointed to the pattern of missing letters and the timing of the two musicians' movements as his evidence. The musicologist Bruce Alan Brown has examined the same material and rejected Solomon's conclusion. The question has not been resolved to the satisfaction of most scholars.