Aftermath: reception and scholarship.

To judge by the more than normally laudatory tone of the obituaries and other tributes, Mozart's reputation stood high at the time of his death; although his music was frequently criticized as too audacious and complex, it was understood that he was an artist far out of the ordinary. In 1795, the Teutschlands Annalen des Jahres 1794 reported that ‘In this year … nothing can or may be sung or played, and nothing heard with approbation, but that it bears on its brow the all-powerful and magic name of Mozart’, and by the end of the century his music held centre stage across Europe. Many of the mature works were already well known during the 1780s: the six quartets dedicated to Haydn, published by Artaria in September 1785, were available in Paris as early as December of that year, and some piano concertos were performed regularly in London from January 1786 onwards. It was Die Entführung, however, that first established Mozart's fame and influence throughout German-speaking Europe. The opera had been given in more than 20 cities by 1786, and Goethe, in his Italienische Reise of 1787, wrote that ‘All our endeavours … to confine ourselves to what is simple and limited were lost when Mozart appeared. Die Entführung aus dem Serail conquered all.’ Most of the other mature operas were similarly well received. Both Figaro and Don Giovanni were widely performed, especially in German, while Così had received numerous performances by 1793; Die Zauberflöte was universally popular. La clemenza di Tito, on the other hand, was slower to gain public acceptance (except in England, where it remained the favoured Mozart opera until the second decade of the 19th century).

No doubt interest in Mozart's music was fuelled by his premature death and by stories concerning the Requiem that began circulating shortly afterwards. The earliest known account, published in the Salzburger Intelligenzblatt for 7 January 1792, already adumbrated what is by now a familiar tale:

Some months before his death he received an unsigned letter, asking him to write a requiem and to ask for it what he wanted. Because this work did not at all appeal to him, he thought, I will ask for so much that the patron will certainly leave me alone. A servant came the next day for his answer. Mozart informed the unknown patron that he could not write it for less than 60 ducats and then not before two or three months. The servant returned immediately with 30 ducats and said that he would ask again in three months and that if the mass were ready, he would immediately hand over the other half of the money. So Mozart had to write it, which he did, often with tears in his eyes, constantly saying: I fear that I am writing a requiem for myself.

This anecdote neatly summarizes the Romantic image of Mozart that was prevalent throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th, although numerous documented facts and other evidence contradict it. Mozart may have fallen ill as early as his visit to Prague in September 1791, but there is no sign of any protracted bad health that could have given rise to increasingly dark thoughts about his mortality and the work he was engaged on. Nor did the Requiem exclusively occupy his time: both the Clarinet Concerto k622 and the masonic cantata Laut verkünde unsre Freude k623 were completed in the autumn. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Mozart probably knew more about the commission than has generally been supposed.

In view of the specific details of the anecdote, which are of a sort unlikely to have been known to the general public so soon after Mozart's death, it may have originated with Mozart's inner circle: from the beginning, apparently, someone was determined to cast Mozart's life in a particular, and not entirely truthful, light (although see Clarke, I1996). It was only a small step from this first fabrication to a web of stories intended to promote various myths about the composer: that he was an ‘eternal child’, a social rebel, a libertine, a misunderstood genius, a helpless victim of professional conspiracies, or even an idiot savant who cared for nothing but his music (for a good summary, see Stafford, G1991). Much of the Mozart myth, including his alleged poverty and neglect in Vienna, as well as the jealousy of rival composers, was in place by 1800, when Thomas Busby wrote in the Monthly Magazine (London, December 1798):

Had not the almost uniform practice of courts long explained to mankind the principle on which they act, how difficult would it be to conceive, that that of Vienna could so little appreciate the merit of this extraordinary man, who looked to it for an asylum, and passed in its vicinity the last ten years of his life! the dispensers of royal favours, whose ears imbibe with such avidity the flattery that meanness offers, can neglect that genius which nobly refuses the tale of adulation; can stifle it with poverty, and even follow it with persecution.

Contradictory as the numerous biographical tropes surrounding the composer's life may at first seem, they nevertheless add up to a remarkably consistent picture of Mozart as an artist and personality distinctly outside the ‘norm’. And it was this notion of Mozart's lack of connection to the real world that set a course for Mozart scholarship – whether biographical, analytical or editorial – up to the end of the 20th century.

Even the earliest biographies took sides in the struggle to present an ‘authentic’ version of Mozart's life: Nannerl's account, dealing mostly with the Salzburg years, is included in the obituary of Friedrich Schlichtegroll (F1793), while Constanze's position was first put forward by Niemetschek (F1798); it is worth noting that Constanze bought up and destroyed the entire edition of the publication containing Schlichtegroll's obituary, apparently disliking its portrayal of her. A more substantial presentation of this side of the story is the biography by Georg Nikolaus Nissen, Constanze's second husband (F1828), which served as the main source for many later accounts, including those of Oulibicheff (Ulïbïshev) (F1843) and Holmes (F1845) (the year after the publication of Nissen's biography Vincent and Mary Novello met Constanze and Nannerl, both of whom talked about Mozart; see Medici and Hughes, G1955). The first important scholarly biography, embodying fresh research, appeared in the centenary year, 1856 – Otto Jahn's W.A. Mozart (F1856). Ludwig von Köchel's chronological thematic catalogue of Mozart's works, ahead of its time in scholarly method, appeared six years later.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Mozart scholarship was dominated by Wyzewa and Saint-Foix's highly schematic analytical and stylistic study of the works (F1912–46); Alfred Einstein, in particular, took over many of their conclusions in his edition, the third, of the Köchel catalogue (1937). Similarly important are Dent's pioneering study of the operas (J1913), Schiedermair's presentation of the letters (A1914) and Hermann Abert's revision of Jahn (F1919–21). Emily Anderson's edition of the letters, with revised editions appearing in 1966 and 1985, was published in 1938 (Anderson, A1938); although it remains the fullest English translation available, it has been superseded by the complete German edition of W.A. Bauer, O.E. Deutsch and J.H. Eibl (A1962–75). The sixth edition of the Köchel catalogue, published in 1964, included substantial new information but by the late 1990s was badly out of date; a more reliable guide to the authenticity, chronology, history and sources for Mozart's works is found in the prefaces and critical reports to the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (1955–91). The known documents relating to Mozart's life and works are collected in Deutsch's Mozart: die Dokumente seines Lebens (A1961, with supplements in 1978, 1991 and 1997).

Despite the dramatic increase in Mozart research in the late 20th century, and the renewed availability of numerous sources since the recovery in Poland of autographs lost during World War II, modern scholarship continues to rely on a limited range of material. This is especially evident in editions of Mozart's works, which are based almost exclusively on the autographs, for the most part ignoring, or at least undervaluing, contemporaneous manuscript copies and printed editions. This editorial stance has as much to do with past perceptions of Mozart as with modern notions of textual scholarship: the idea that his works were in some way ‘perfect’, and that transmission inevitably involves corruption, resulted in a misunderstanding of the essential nature of autographs as representing performance as well as the dismissal of some sources that were considered less important, including even Mozart's own performing copies. By the same token, the study of the autographs themselves was for many years limited by a Mozart-centred outlook. Between 1800, when the Offenbach publisher J.A. André purchased the bulk of Mozart's estate from Constanze, and the 1960s and 70s, when Wolfgang Plath published his important articles on Schriftchronologie, interest in these documents centred chiefly on the identification and chronological development of Mozart's handwriting. It was only in the 1970s that the watermarks began to be taken into account, in Alan Tyson's systematic and pioneering study, which gave rise to substantial revisions in the dating of Mozart's works. Since then, source studies have broadened in scope to include not only contemporaneous copies, but also Mozart's sketches (Konrad, E1992) and first editions of his works (Haberkamp, A1986). Nevertheless, much remains to be done.

Analytical studies in the 1980s and 90s also departed from traditional formal and Schenkerian models (although these have remained vital). Contextual, topical, rhetorical and genre- and gender-based studies have become prominent, not only in the operas but also in Mozart's instrumental music, chiefly the symphonies and concertos. These two orchestral genres in particular lie at the heart of performing practice studies, an important element of Mozart scholarship from the 1970s onwards. Biography, finally, has continued to command attention, displaying a wide range of concerns from the psychological (Hildesheimer, F1977, and Solomon, F1995, but see also Head, F1999) to the increasingly important contextual (Braunbehrens, F1986, Halliwell, F1998).

(Maria) Constanze [Constantia] (Caecilia Josepha Johanna Aloisia) Mozart [née Weber; later Nissen]

(b Zell, Wiesental, 5 Jan 1762; d Salzburg, 6 March 1842). Soprano, wife of (3) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and later of his biographer Georg Nikolaus Nissen. She was the third of four daughters of the bass, prompter and copyist Fridolin Weber, and thereby related to the composer Carl Maria von Weber (see Weber). She first met Mozart in 1777–8 in Mannheim; he fell in love with her elder sister Aloisia, who rejected him. Constanze moved with her family to Vienna in September 1779; from 2 May 1781 Mozart lodged with her mother, and on 4 August 1782 married Constanze in the Stephansdom. There were six children, of whom two, (5) Carl Thomas and (6) Franz Xaver Wolfgang, survived to maturity. During a visit to Salzburg, she sang one of the soprano parts in a performance at the abbey of St Peter of the Kyrie and Gloria of her husband’s Mass in C minor k427/417a (26 October 1783).

After Mozart’s death she was destitute and was allowed a pension of one third of his salary. She attempted to improve her financial position by arranging concerts with his works in various cities, herself singing in several of them. She organized several performances of La clemenza di Tito. In 1797 she had a vocal score of Idomeneo arranged from Mozart’s autograph and published by Breitkopf & Härtel, though without financial success, and in 1799 she sold his remaining manuscripts to the publisher André after first having them set in order by Abbé Maximilian Stadler and Nissen, who in part managed her affairs. Nissen was a Danish diplomat; she probably first met him in 1797 when he lodged in rooms in her house. They were married on 26 June 1809 in Pressburg (Bratislava) Cathedral. There were no children of this marriage. In 1810 the couple moved to Copenhagen and then, probably in 1821, to Salzburg, where Nissen collected materials for his biography. He died on 24 March 1826, however, before its publication: Constanze had it completed (by Johann Heinrich Feuerstein, who cheated her) and saw it through the press. Early 20th-century scholarship severely criticized her as unintelligent, unmusical and even unfaithful, and as a neglectful and unworthy wife to Mozart. Such assessments (still current) were based on no good evidence, were tainted with anti-feminism and were probably wrong on all counts. Mozart’s letters prove his devotion to her. Evidence about her dates mostly from after 1791; the travel diaries of Vincent and Mary Novello (1829) are especially revealing. Her diary (1828–37) and correspondence show a capable businesswoman (she died in comfortable circumstances) and devoted mother. But she was an unreliable witness and told many lies about the Requiem, whose completion she had organized: she was of course an interested party. Many of the myths surrounding Mozart’s death probably stem from her. Three portraits survive (the most celebrated from 1782 by her brother-in-law Joseph Lange; fig.15) and a fuzzy daguerreotype.