Mozart in Italy

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart in Italy is the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who walked into one of the world's most demanding musical arenas and walked out a commissioned opera composer. Between December 1769 and March 1773, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his father Leopold made three separate journeys south across the Alps, into a land that had been the birthplace of opera for more than two centuries. What drew them there was not simply artistic hunger. Leopold Mozart, a career court musician who had never quite risen as high as he believed he deserved, saw Italy as the stage on which Wolfgang could be recognised, and on which both of them might finally land the kind of prestigious appointment that had eluded them elsewhere. The journeys delivered something richer than either could have imagined for Wolfgang, and something bitterer than Leopold was willing to admit for himself. Wolfgang left Italy holding a papal knighthood, memberships in two of the country's leading philharmonic societies, and three completed operas that had each been cheered by audiences at Milan's Teatro Regio Ducale. Leopold left without the court appointment he had wanted more than anything else. How father and son navigated triumph and frustration across those four years, and what it cost each of them, is the heart of this story.

• 2. Why Italy, Why Now

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  Leopold Mozart had spent the years since 1747 as a musician in the Archbishop of Salzburg's court, rising to deputy Kapellmeister by 1763. He was ambitious, organised, and keenly aware that his children's gifts were a currency with a short window of exchange. Between 1763 and 1766 he had taken the whole family on a grand tour of Northern Europe's major cities, beginning when Wolfgang was seven and his sister Nannerl twelve. That tour had accomplished Leopold's aim: the children were famous, and their musical education had advanced dramatically. A subsequent stay in Vienna that began in 1767 went less well. A smallpox outbreak killed the Archduchess Maria Josepha and forced the family to flee to Bohemia, where Wolfgang contracted the disease anyway. When they returned to Vienna, the children had aged past the novelty that had made audiences gasp. Leopold also fell into a dispute with the court impresario Giuseppe Affligio over Wolfgang's first opera, La finta semplice, and managed to damage his relationship with the eminent court composer Christoph Willibald Gluck in the process. He left Vienna in January 1769 with a reputation at court for being importunate and difficult. By then, Nannerl had turned eighteen and Leopold considered her education essentially finished. His attention turned entirely to Wolfgang, and to Italy. Mozart's biographer Stanley Sadie described Europe's opera houses as "the late eighteenth-century composers' honeypots", and Italy was where opera lived. Leopold wanted Wolfgang to absorb the music of Venice, Naples, and Rome firsthand, to master the Italian language, to study with the country's finest masters, and to be seen by the patrons who controlled the most coveted commissions. Archbishop Siegmund Christoph von Schrattenbach, Leopold's employer, had to approve the plan, and he did so in October, granting permission to travel and a gift of 600 florins. Wolfgang was given the honorary title of Konzertmeister, with a hint that a salary might follow on his return.

• 3. Across the Alps

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  On the 13th of December 1769, Leopold and Wolfgang left Salzburg carrying testimonials and letters of introduction. The most valuable was an introduction to Count Karl Joseph Firmian of Milan, described by those who knew the city as its "King" and widely regarded as an influential patron of the arts. The route took them through Innsbruck, south over the Brenner Pass, through Bolzano and Rovereto, and on to Verona and Mantua before they turned west toward Milan. Leopold had planned to fund the journey through concert proceeds, just as he had financed the grand tour, but the winter crossing of 350 miles proved punishing. He wrote home about unheated inn rooms, complaining of "freezing like a dog, everything I touch is ice". Weekly costs were running at around 50 florins, and early concert receipts were modest. Leopold, who had openly boasted about the grand tour's profits, now adopted a different tone, writing: "On the whole we shall not make much in Italy... one must generally accept admiration and bravos as payment." Verona offered the first extended pause, two weeks during which Wolfgang gave a well-reviewed concert on the 5th of January 1770 and had his portrait painted, most probably by Giambettista Cignaroli, in a commission arranged by Pietro Lugiati, the Receiver General for the Venetian Republic. The Mantua stop that followed included a concert at the Accademia Filarmonica designed to test the boy's sight-reading, improvisation, and performance skills. A press notice recorded that the audience was "dumbfounded" at this "miracle in music, one of those freaks that Nature causes to be born". Prince Michael of Thurn und Taxis, however, communicated through a servant that he had no wish to meet them. Historian Robert Gutman suggests the Prince, knowing of the Affligio episode in Vienna, wanted nothing to do with musicians who did not know their station. The Mozarts arrived in Milan on the 23rd of January.

• 4. Firmian, Martini, and the Milan Commission

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  Count Firmian received father and son with genuine warmth and gave Wolfgang a complete edition of the works of Metastasio, Italy's foremost dramatic poet and librettist. Over a series of concerts hosted at Firmian's palace, attended by many of the city's notables including Archduke Ferdinand, Wolfgang composed a set of arias drawn from Metastasio's texts. The arias impressed everyone present. Firmian responded by commissioning Wolfgang to write the opening opera for Milan's next winter carnival season, the fee set at around 500 florins plus free lodgings during composition and rehearsal. It was exactly what Leopold had hoped might happen. The Mozarts left Milan on the 15th of March, heading south, with fresh letters of recommendation from Firmian and a return date already fixed for the autumn. The southern leg of the journey brought Wolfgang into contact with two figures who would shape him differently. In Bologna, their letter from Firmian introduced them to Count Pallavicini-Centurioni, who arranged a palace concert for the local nobility. Among the guests was Giovanni Battista Martini, the foremost musical theorist in Europe and the era's greatest expert in Baroque counterpoint. Martini received the young composer and tested him with fugal exercises. Leopold was eager for extended engagement with this celebrated teacher, but the schedule was too tight for more than a meeting; he arranged to return to Bologna over the summer for a proper period of study. Before leaving they also met the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček, whose opera La Nitteti was then in preparation. Musicologist Daniel E. Freeman later concluded that Wolfgang's approach to writing arias shifted fundamentally during the Bologna summer, brought into closer alignment with Mysliveček's style. Wolfgang would draw on La Nitteti as a source of motives for his own Mitridate, re di Ponto, and the two composers would maintain a close association until 1778.

• 5. Rome, Naples, and a Papal Honour

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  Florence offered a reunion with the Grand Duke and future emperor Leopold, who remembered the Mozarts from Vienna in 1768 and asked after Nannerl. In Florence they also found Pietro Nardini, a violinist they had met at the outset of the grand tour, and through Nardini they encountered Thomas Linley, an English violin prodigy who was Nardini's pupil. Leopold observed that the two boys made music together "not as boys but as men". Gutman noted that "a melancholy Thomas followed the Mozarts' coach as they departed for Rome on the 6th of April". The two never met again; Linley died in a boating accident in 1778 at the age of twenty-two. Rome had been preceded by five days of wretched travel through wind and rain, staying at inns Leopold described as disgusting, filthy, and without food. But Pallavicini's letters delivered what they promised: meetings with the Cardinal Lazaro Opizio Pallavicino, Prince San Angelo of Naples, and Charles Edward Stuart, Pretender to the British throne. The Mozarts also visited the Sistine Chapel, where Wolfgang heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere, a complex nine-part choral work that had never been published. Wolfgang wrote it down from memory afterwards. To reach Naples the party joined a convoy of four coaches, since travellers through the Pontine Marshes were regularly threatened by brigands. They arrived on the 14th of May. The concert they gave on the 28th of May brought in around 750 florins, though Leopold declined to state the exact amount. Wolfgang attended the first performance of Niccolò Jommelli's Armida abbandonata at the Teatro di San Carlo and, while impressed by both the music and the staging, found it "too old-fashioned and serious for the theatre". An invitation to write an opera for the next San Carlo season was declined because of his prior Milan commitment. After visiting Vesuvius, Herculaneum, Pompeii, and the Roman baths at Baiae, the Mozarts made a rapid 27-hour return journey to Rome. There, Wolfgang was granted an audience with Pope Clement XIV and invested as a knight of the Order of the Golden Spur, a distinction that would follow him for life.

• 6. Mitridate and Its Triumph

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  Bologna in the summer of 1770 was where Wolfgang studied counterpoint with Martini and prepared for the most important test of his career so far. On the 9th of October he sat for examination at Bologna's Accademia Filarmonica, offering the antiphon Quaerite primum regnum, K. 86/73v, as his entry piece. Gutman judged that the attempt was uncertain, the polyphonic form unfamiliar, and that under ordinary conditions it would not have passed; but Martini was present, offered corrections, and apparently paid the admission fee himself. Wolfgang was admitted, adding this membership to the one from Verona. From Bologna the pair pushed north to Milan, arriving on the 18th of October, ten weeks before the first performance of Mitridate. The opera's libretto, by Vittorio Cigna-Santi, had not been what Leopold expected; he had anticipated Metastasio's La Nitteti and got something different. Trouble arrived with the singers. Quirino Gasparini, who had composed an earlier setting of the same subject, attempted to persuade the prima donna Antonia Bernasconi to replace Wolfgang's arias with his own. Leopold reported the effort's failure with poorly concealed satisfaction: "Thank God, that we have routed the enemy." The principal tenor, Guglielmo d'Ettore, was more persistent, demanding that his arias be rewritten repeatedly and eventually singing one of Gasparini's settings in Act 3, an insertion that remained in the published score. Rehearsals began on the 6th of December. When the recitatives were run through, Wolfgang's mastery of Italian diction was evident, and the instrumental rehearsals impressed everyone present. On the 26th of December Wolfgang directed the first public performance from the keyboard, dressed in a scarlet coat lined with blue satin and edged with gold. The audience demanded encores. At the close they cried "Evviva il maestro!" The opera ran for twenty-two performances. The Gazetta di Milano praised the work and noted that the young composer was not yet fifteen years of age. The arias sung by Bernasconi, the paper added, "vividly expressed the passions and touched the heart." There would be no further performances of Mitridate until its revival at the Salzburg Festival in 1971.

• 7. Ascanio, Hasse, and a Damning Letter

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  The second journey, launched in August 1771, was to Milan for the wedding of Archduke Ferdinand and Princess Beatrice of Modena. What had been commissioned as a serenata had grown into the full-length opera Ascanio in Alba. Wolfgang shared lodgings with an assortment of musicians, a situation he described to Nannerl as "delightful for composing, it gives you plenty of ideas!" Working at speed, he finished Ascanio just in time for the first rehearsal on the 23rd of September. The wedding celebrations placed Ascanio as the secondary entertainment, behind the opera Ruggiero by Johann Adolph Hasse, who was seventy-two years old and one of the most celebrated composers in Europe. Hasse's opera received the Empress Maria Theresa's praise, but its general reception was lukewarm beside the enthusiasm that greeted Ascanio. Leopold wrote home with barely contained delight: "Wolfgang's Serenata has so crushed Hasse's opera that I can't describe it." Hasse himself was gracious and is said to have remarked that the boy would cause all others to be forgotten. Leopold extended the stay in Milan in the hope that this success would earn Wolfgang a royal appointment. His overture to Archduke Ferdinand was passed to the imperial court in Vienna, where it reached the Empress. Her reply to the archduke was devastating. She described the Mozarts as "useless people" whose appointment would debase royal service, and added that "such people go around the world like beggars". Leopold never saw that letter; the Mozarts had already left Milan, disappointed but still telling themselves the matter was not over. Meanwhile, the day after their return to Salzburg, Archbishop Schrattenbach died. By the 14th of March 1772, Count Hieronymus von Colloredo had been elected as his replacement, a compromise candidate acceptable to Vienna. Colloredo paid Leopold's withheld salary and authorised Wolfgang's Konzertmeister payment, but then looked outside the Salzburg court entirely for his new Kapellmeister, selecting the Italian Domenico Fischietti, who was younger than Leopold. Any realistic hope of advancement in Salzburg was gone.

• 8. Lucio Silla and the End of the Dream

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  The third and final Italian journey, which began in October 1772, was the most fraught. The carnival opera for Milan's 1772-73 season was Lucio Silla, with a text by Giovanni de Gamerra revised by Metastasio. The premiere on the 26th of December was a near-disaster: Archduke Ferdinand arrived two hours late, the principal performers quarrelled, and added ballet sequences stretched the evening until two in the morning. Despite all this, the run recovered. On the 9th of January 1773, Leopold reported that the theatre was still full and that the premiere of Giovanni Paisiello's season entry had been postponed to give Lucio Silla more time; the opera ran for twenty-six performances. While waiting in Milan for a response to his application to Grand Duke Leopold I of Tuscany, Wolfgang composed the string quartets K. 155/134a through K. 160/159a and the motet Exsultate, jubilate, K. 165. Leopold went so far as to send his wife coded letters instructing her to tell people he was immobilised by severe rheumatism, while assuring her privately that he was in good health. He was buying time. The negative reply arrived on the 27th of February 1773. The Grand Duke's reasons are unknown, though his mother's opinion of the Mozart family may have played a role. The Mozarts left Milan on the 4th of March and reached Salzburg nine days later. Neither of them set foot in Italy again. Maynard Solomon, in his assessment of the journeys, characterised them as Leopold's "finest hour" and perhaps his happiest, while also noting the failure at their core: Wolfgang had been taken in by opera, knighted, admitted to academies, and schooled by the continent's greatest theorist, yet no Italian court wanted him on its payroll. Wolfgang himself remained in Colloredo's Salzburg employ, growing steadily more dissatisfied, until his dismissal from the Archbishop's retinue during its stay in Vienna in 1781. Leopold, never promoted from vice-Kapellmeister, stayed with the court until his death in 1787. The commissions that had once flowed so freely from Italy never came again.