18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Re: Leopold Mozart about meeting Amalie in Aachen

[selenak]

Heh, and I am again amused.

Learn from this, church choirs and church organ players everywhere. You, too, could have a musical prodigy or two listening among the mass visitors, so you better play/sing well!

Heeee! :D

Leopold seriously is the first person I've seen use the "King IN Prussia" instead of "of Prussia" designation as late as 1763.
...at least he didn't refer to him as the Margrave of Brandenburg? But that's for fellow monarchs to do, I guess. *looks at MT and Louis XV*

And yes, of course there was no money in 1763. I remember a passage from Lehndorff's diaries where he reports Amalie being put out because Fritz wouldn't permit her to mint her own coins to help with that problem. Otoh, Lehndorff also reports Amalie's spontanous deeds of generosity in the war like giving the jewelry she was wearing to Madame de Maupertuis so the later could travel to her dying husband, and at any rate Prussia's lack of available cash is not the fault of Leopold Mozart, travelling musician, or his kids, and he's facing far more serious consequences if he isn't able to pay the innkeepers than the sister of the King IN Prussia who will hardly get arrested.

idk, seems like Leopold made the right decision here, even if we in salon regret the absence of such a concert :) It does sound like child!Wolfgang was adorable :D (And could have played old-fashioned music, right?)

Musical programm: I'll see whether I can hunt down Melchior Grimm's famous description of the Mozart family Paris concert, because I suspect he'd list individual pieces. And yes, presumably the selection would have gone to standard favorites rather than the latest experimental music; HOWEVER, what are favorites in 1762/1763 Austria could already have been too modern for Fritz. One word: Gluck.

idk, seems like Leopold made the right decision here, even if we in salon regret the absence of such a concert :)

Well, yes. Leaving aside the relative shortage of cash in 1763, first of all, Leopold wasn't actually born in Salzburg. He was from Augsburg, which was a freie Reichstadt, which made him an HRE citizen and also the citizen of a town which at that point already had a Protestant majority (though the Catholic minority was still powerful, too), and going south instead of north as a young man in search of a working place as a musician was presumably a choice based on where he liked to live, which wasn't in Protestant Prussia (even if there was toleration of Catholics). Secondly, if rebellious growing up Wolfgang clashed with Prince Bishop Colloredo, can you imagine how he'd have clashed with Old Fritz? And thirdly, Vienna during Joseph's reign really WAS, as Salieri says in Amadeus, the city of music, the one where all the hottest musicians amd composers were or went to, and Berlin due to Fritz' insistence on the musical taste of his youth could no longer compete, while Paris was for a while still in the running (not least because Marie Antoinette had brought Gluck and his opera innovations to Paris, which meant current French music was more modern than Fritzian French music) and of course had a lot of other aspects going for it, but then the French Revolution made it too dangerous to live there for quite a number of artists. Also, to return to 1763, by going to Paris and then London instead, Leopold exposed his kids to a far greater variety of cultural influences and people than he would have if he'd gone to only starting to recover from the war Berlin.

In conclusion, both from a 1763 and from a wiser with hindsight perspective, Leopold made the right call. But it's still a shame no Fritz-meets-Mozart event ever happened!

Meanwhile, have old Goethe in 1830 (two years before his death) stunning young Eckermann, who was his Boswell, by casually mentioning having seen young Mozart during that concert tour across Europe. In 1830, Mozart truly already a classic and of another age, and so to a younger person like Eckermann the realisation Goethe had seen Mozart as a child (when he, JWG, was fourteen) was like you'd feel if a contemporary casually mentions having met Churchill.

Mittwoch, den 3. Februar 1830

Bei Goethe zu Tisch. Wir sprachen über Mozart. »Ich habe ihn als siebenjährigen Knaben gesehen,« sagte Goethe, »wo er auf einer Durchreise ein Konzert gab. Ich selber war etwa vierzehn Jahre alt, und ich erinnere mich des kleinen Mannes in seiner Frisur und Degen noch ganz deutlich.« Ich machte große Augen, und es war mir ein halbes Wunder, zu hören, daß Goethe alt genug sei, um Mozart als Kind gesehen zu haben.

(BTW, this passage is also impressive because unlike us, neither Goethe nor Eckermann had access to the internet or even the Frankfurt newspaper archive so they could look up when exactly child!Wolfgang was in Frankfurt, how old he was and how old young Goethe was. And yet this statement is correct - Goethe was fourteen, and Mozart seven when the Mozart family gave that concert in Frankfurt am Main. That he mentions the hair and the sword tells you something about what was still standard in Austria - dressing children in adult get up, complete with wig and wardrobe, and young Wolferl after the visit in Vienna had some discarded wardrobe of the young archdukes to dress up in - was already looking somewhat quaint for the citizens in Frankfurt, otherwise young Goethe wouldn't have remembered it as unusual.)

(Goethe, btw, adored Mozart's music, especially "The Magic Flute", and his standard reply when asked whether he could see "Faust" becoming an opera was to say only Mozart could have done it, but alas...)

Re: Leopold Mozart about meeting Amalie in Aachen

[cahn]

Otoh, Lehndorff also reports Amalie's spontanous deeds of generosity in the war like giving the jewelry she was wearing to Madame de Maupertuis so the later could travel to her dying husband

Amalie! <3 Gosh, I need to get back to German practice and read Lehndorff...

and he's facing far more serious consequences if he isn't able to pay the innkeepers than the sister of the King IN Prussia who will hardly get arrested.

Hee. I must say I laughed at this.

One word: Gluck.

RIGHT. Fritz, why must you be this way?

and so to a younger person like Eckermann the realisation Goethe had seen Mozart as a child (when he, JWG, was fourteen) was like you'd feel if a contemporary casually mentions having met Churchill.

Me: Goethe met EVERYBODY!

neither Goethe nor Eckermann had access to the internet or even the Frankfurt newspaper archive so they could look up when exactly child!Wolfgang was in Frankfurt, how old he was and how old young Goethe was. And yet this statement is correct - Goethe was fourteen, and Mozart seven when the Mozart family gave that concert in Frankfurt am Main.

That IS impressive, and I wonder if that means that it made a really deep impression on Goethe.

(Goethe, btw, adored Mozart's music, especially "The Magic Flute", and his standard reply when asked whether he could see "Faust" becoming an opera was to say only Mozart could have done it, but alas...)

Ohhhhh now I really want this :P