27 Jan 2016

Interrupted Cadences - Mozart

From Appointment, 7:00 pm on 27 January 2016

The young Mozart had two lucky escapes. What if he'd succumbed to smallpox in 1767 or died in the coach accident in 1770? And what if he'd lived beyond 1791?

John Drummond explores critical moments in the history of Western music when things might well have turned out very differently.

Mozart

Mozart Photo: Commons

The place is Vienna. The year is 1767.

It is here again, the terror against which there is no defence. The sickness that strikes where it will, killing some and scarring some. In France they call it ‘verole’; in Germany ‘Pocken‘; in Italy ‘vaiolo’; in England its name is the pox, or smallpox.

The smallpox virus has now officially been eradicated, but in the eighteenth century it was an all too common accompaniment to daily life. One of the difficulties was that by the time you realised someone was suffering from the disease, it was already spreading to someone else. You only knew you had it twelve days after you caught it. The first noticeable symptom was a high fever, which made you want to lie down. After three of four days of this, the rash appeared, usually on the face, the palms and the soles of the feet. Over the next week or so the rash turned into pustules. Again the fever returned, and this was the dangerous stage. If the pustules became infected, the consequences would probably be fatal; if not, recovery was possible, but the pustules would leave scars. These were the options that smallpox offered: death, or the disfiguring pockmarks that gave the disease its name.

Its arrival in a major city was always a cause for alarm. And Vienna was the most cosmopolitan city in Europe, a place crowded with every European nationality.

Smallpox came to Vienna sometime during the late summer of 1767, probably in early September. If the authorities knew of its arrival, they kept quiet, of course. No point in alarming people. No point in preventing travellers coming to Vienna - they brought the money that kept the city alive. No point in warning a family travelling to the city from provincial Salzburg, a violin teacher and his wife and two children. What was significant about them? No one outside the world of music had ever heard of Leopold Mozart, and most people within it had never heard of his wife Maria Anna. The children had gained a certain notoriety in the cities of Europe where they had displayed their prodigious musical talents, the girl named after her mother, was a highly talented keyboard player, and her brother, only eleven years old, was identified by many as some kind of genius, a rather frightening little boy who could perform musical tricks and feats that even the best trained professional musicians found difficult. Yes, little Wolfgang was regarded as something between a divine being and a freak, but only to the musicians who’d heard of him. To the policemen on the city gates on 15 September 1767 he was just a little boy with big blue eyes, and why should they warn him about the smallpox? Come on in, boy and the Weihburggasse is that way, sir. Have a pleasant stay...