Wolfgang Mozart at the age of seven, accompanied by his father, Leopold Mozart, and his sister, Nannerl.
Engraving by De La Fosse after Carmontelle (1764)
Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart
By HERBERT F. PEYSER
NEW YORK
Grosset & Dunlap
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1951 by
The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York
Mozart’s earthly career was so poignantly short yet sofilled with incalculable achievement that the author of thisbooklet finds himself confronted with an impossible task.He has, consequently, preferred to outline as best he couldin the space at his disposal a few successive details of a lifethat was amazingly crowded with incident, early triumphs,and subsequent crushing tragedies, rather than to consider(let alone evaluate) the staggering creative abundances themaster bequeathed mankind.
It is scarcely necessary to disclaim for this thumbnailsketch any new slant or original illumination. If it moves anyreader to renew his acquaintance with the standard biographiesof the composer or, better still, to deepen his artisticenrichment by a study of modern interpretations of contemporaryMozart scholars like Alfred Einstein, and BernhardPaumgartner, its object will be more than achieved.
Printed in the United States of America
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
If the Mozartean family tree was nothing like the prodigioustrunk of the Bachs it was still not without striking features.There were Mozarts in South Germany as far backas the end of the sixteenth century; and as remotely as thethirteenth the name stood on a document in Cologne. To besure, various spellings of Mozart existed in those distanttimes. It appeared as “Mosshard,” “Motzhart,” “Mozert,”and in still other variants. Bernhard Paumgartner, Directorof the Salzburg Mozarteum, thinks it derived from the oldGerman root mod, or muot, from which came the word Mut(courage). Be this as it may, German “Mozarts” were anythingbut exceptional a couple of hundred years beforeLeopold Mozart or his son, Wolfgang, came into the picture.In Augsburg there was an Anton Mozart who painted landscapes“in the manner of Breughel.” Another Mozart fromthe same town, one Johann Michael, was a sculptor, who in1687 moved to Vienna and became an Austrian citizen.
But of all these “Mossherts,” “Motards,” and the rest, onlyone, the mason apprentice David Motzert, born in the villageof Pfersee, close to Augsburg, really belongs to our story.The Augsburger Bürgerbuch of 1643 mentions him and setshis fortune at 100 florins. By his marriage with the JungferMaria Negeler he was to become the great-great-grandfatherof the creator of Don Giovanni. In the fullness of timeDavid’s grandson, Johann Georg, abandoned the occupationof his forebears for that of a bookbinder. His second wifeblessed him with two daughters and six sons. One of thesesons, Franz Aloys, gained a kind of immortality as the fatherof Maria Anna Thekla, Wolfgang’s cousin, the “Bä