books
 
essays
 
poetry
 
art
 
music
 
gardening
   
home
interviews / profiles / critical studies  
facebook
 
events
 
publicity / contact


In My Good Books

Mozart's Vienna

James Fenton
copyright © 2006

Originally published in The Guardian
18 March 2006

We can learn a number of curious facts about Mozart's Vienna from Johann Pezzl's "Sketch of Vienna" (1786-90). Here we are told, for instance, that the poorer prostitutes, unable to dress up in any finery, would wait until after dark before appearing on the streets. Compared with their equivalent in other cities, they were not particularly importunate: "They don't grab at your arm or rush after you through the mud as happens in Paris; all they do in order to hook you is direct a fiery and inviting look towards you."

By 10 o'clock the girls had left the streets and all private houses were closed on the stroke of the hour. Get home later than that and you had to pay a surly porter to let you in. By 11pm, Pezzl tells us, "you can walk the breadth of the city and encounter hardly more than 50 persons as they creep out of a few taverns and coffee-houses". Vienna at night was astonishingly quiet and astonishingly safe from "thieves, pickpockets, marauders, etc".

However, between midnight and 12.30 the carriages of the aristocracy would return from supper at the great palaces. The rumble of their wheels would awaken the lowly citizen from his slumbers, and Pezzl asserts that "his modest better half [was] not displeased by it". That is to say, in the apartments of Vienna, where privacy must have been at a premium given the general overcrowding of the city, the nicest time to make love was when woken by, for example, Mozart's audiences going home. "Many a young Viennese," says Pezzl, "owes his existence to the nightly thunder of passing carriages."

Another thing we know about Mozart is that, while writing to his wife from Berlin on May 23, 1789, he experienced an erection at the thought of sleeping with her again. He says to Constanze, "Spruce up your sweet little nest because my little rascal here really deserves it, he has been very well behaved but now he's itching to possess your sweet [erasure in manuscript]. Just imagine that little sneak, while I am writing he has secretly crept up on the table and now looks at me questioningly; but I, without more ado, give him a little slap - but now he's even more [erasure in manuscript]; well, he is almost out of control - the scoundrel. I hope you will take a carriage and come out to meet me at the first postal station?"

It is charming that the unknown censor of this document took such care over a couple of possibly offensive words, but left the meaning of the whole passage intact. You might think that, for the biographer, such a description of sexual need would count as evidence of the composer's devotion to and physical attachment to his wife. Yet in a life of Mozart published not long ago it is quoted in the middle of a long disquisition on his supposed infidelities.

A description of Mozart by his hairdresser strikes one as characteristic. Mozart was blond and did not wear a wig. The hairdresser tells us that "as I was doing Mozart's hair one morning, and was just occupied with completing his pigtail, M. suddenly jumped up and, despite the fact that I was holding him by his pigtail, he went into the next room, dragging me along with him, and started to play the piano." The hairdresser is so admiring of the playing that he lets go of the pigtail.

The same source describes meeting Mozart in the street. He is on horseback. He rides a few steps, then takes a little board out of his pocket and writes down some music on it. This description (although the intention of the story-teller is the same - to give an image of a man preoccupied with composition) strikes one as uncharacteristic, because Mozart on horseback sounds rather wealthier than the Mozart at the back of our minds.

But when Mozart went to Frankfurt in 1790 he travelled in his own carriage, which one scholar describes as "the easiest, most comfortable and by far the most expensive way". Mozart adored his carriage. He writes: "My carriage - I should like to give it a kiss - is simply wonderful." He was a high flyer. He had heavy debts but he was not impoverished in these final years. That's what the evidence says, although of course the mythology says otherwise.

    
Recent Articles

17 May 2008
Thomas Hope

10 May 2008
Seaman's Secret Diary

3 May 2008
Creation of Canons

26 April 2008
Handel operas

19 April 2008
V&A's Hidden Artworks

12 April 2008
Coleridge & Faust

5 April 2008
Garden at Tresco

29 March 2008
Nazi leaders & Cranach

15 March 2008
On Rooms

8 March 2008
Metropolitan Museum in New York

1 March 2008
Bach's Passions

23 February 2008
Neoclassical Sculpture

16 February 2008
Saint Sebastian

9 February 2008
Origins of the Flower Trade

 

 

Read additional archived articles at jamesfenton.com

     
Notes


Selections from Johann Pezzl's "Sketch of Vienna" can be found in Mozart and Vienna, by HC Robbins Landon (Thames & Hudson).

   
     

 
books
 
essays
 
poetry
 
art
 
music
 
gardening
   
home
interviews / profiles / critical studies            
events
 
publicity / contact
Last update: 24 April 2010
Official Website Since 2005
  Text and Notes Copyright © James Fenton
Website Design Copyright © Ryan Roberts
Please read the disclaimer and email questions to the webmaster