A miniature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) painted in 1782 by Joseph Lange (1751–1831). Lange was married to singer Aloysia Weber, sister of Wolfgang’s wife Constance (1762-1842). Mary Sabilla Novello, wife of English musicologist and publisher Vincent, met Constance in 1829, and reported to the Musical Times (August 8th, 1837) that whereas other portraits were hung about the room Constance kept this portrait “carefully in a case, and refuses to have it finished (it was left imperfect by Lange) lest some unlucky touch should spoil the divine expression.” More precisely, preparations had been made to work the miniature up into a bust-length portrait of her late husband at the piano, but Constance would not let the project go ahead.
Part 1 of 2
WHEN I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep:* it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most. Whence and how they come I know not: nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me, I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it, that is to say agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments, &c..
All this fires my soul; and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and refined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind; so that I can survey it like a fine picture, or a beautiful statue, at a glance.
* “An inimitable letter characterised by extraordinary contrasts” was biographer Edward Holmes’s assessment of the great composer’s reply to the inquisitive Baron V—. “Levity and sense, humour and melancholy, the most profound observations upon art and the happiest turns of thought, are here mixed up with incoherent eccentricity and irresistible nonsense.” The letter (of which this is only an excerpt) was also unusually long, as Mozart himself acknowledged. “Here, my best friend and well-wisher,” he ended, “the pages are full, and the bottle of your wine, which has done the duty of this day, is nearly empty. But since the letter which I wrote to my father-in-law to request the hand of my wife, I hardly ever have written such an enormously long one.”
Précis
Replying to an inquiry about his approach to composition, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart explained that his ideas came to him spontaneously in times of relaxed contentment. He would then impose order on them, humming all the while, until he had formed in his mind a finished picture of his piece, as if laid out on an artist’s canvas. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
A page from the autograph manuscript of Six Minuets K. 164 (1772), showing Minuet No. 6 in G. Mozart was just sixteen when he wrote these short dances. The family was based in Salzburg, but since 1762 Wolfgang and his father Leopold were often away on tour, and had visited England in 1763-64: see Leopold on How to Impress the English. By the 1770s, minuets were not the most up-to-date of dances, but Wolfgang had his own reasons for composing them. “Say to Fraulein W. von Molk” he urged his sister in a letter from Milan dated September 13th, 1771, “that I rejoice at the thoughts of Salzburg, in the hope that I may again receive the same kind of present for the minuets which was bestowed on me at a similar concert. She knows all about it.”
NOR do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell! all this inventing, this producing takes place in a pleasing lively dream. Still the actual hearing of the tout ensemble, is after all the best. What has been thus produced, I do not easily forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have my Divine Maker to thank for.
But why my productions take from my hand that particular form and style that makes them Mozartish and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so, or so large, so aquiline, or, in short, makes it Mozart’s and different from those of other people. For I really do not study or aim at any originality; I should in fact not be able to describe in what mine consists.
Précis
Mozart described the joy he felt in being able to hear in his mind a whole composition, not instrument by instrument but as a whole, though hearing it performed was even better. He never tried to be original, he said; the Mozart style, whatever that may be, was no more deliberate than the shape of his nose. (57 / 60 words)
