"Ever before my eyes"

Mozart was a miracle in a time of doubt. Plus the death of the Arch-Villain Voltaire!

Mozart wearing the Chivalric Order of the Golden Spur, bestowed by Pope Clement XIV

God is ever before my eyes. I realise His omnipotence and I fear His anger; but I also recognize His love, His compassion and His tenderness towards His creatures. He will never forsake His own. If it is according to His will, so let it be according to mine. Mozart, Letter to his Father (10/25/1777)

Leopold Mozart was a gifted teacher, musician, and composer. If history remembers him as a demanding father exploiting talented children, it must at the same time remember that no one had ever seen anything like little Wolfgang. At four years old, he suddenly began playing a clavier after observing his older sister, rapidly mastering the instrument to become the greatest virtuoso of his day.

He was composing music at age five and for the rest of his life almost effortlessly produced an endless stream of beautiful melody while always deepening his skill at composition. The fecundity of his musical imagination was so great that a common complaint of his contemporaries was that one beautiful idea was barely heard before another and then another took its place.

His father, Leopold, saw his son as a wonder sent by God to renew man’s faith at a time when the so-called Enlightenment was eroding it. It was his duty to bring this gift to the world, and the world has been richer for it. If he could make a pile of money doing it, so much the better. After taking the boy (age 7) and his almost-equally gifted older sister Nannerl (age 11) on their first tour, he would write that he had a duty to

proclaim to the world a miracle, which God allowed to be born in Salzburg. I owe this act to Almighty God, otherwise I would be the most ungrateful creature; and if ever I have an obligation to convince the world of this miracle, it is precisely now, when people ridicule anything that is called a miracle.

Wherever Wolfgang performed, people were astounded at this inexplicable marvel of the age, playing with the mastery of an adult, memorizing entire compositions after hearing them once, composing music of remarkable complexity on the fly.

A Benedictine monk wrote of the six-year-old Mozart:

He would play the most difficult pieces for the pianoforte, of his own invention. He skimmed the octave which his short little fingers could not span, at fascinating speed and with a wonderful accuracy. One only had to give him the first subject which came to mind for a fugue or invention; he would develop it with variations and constantly changing passages as long as one wished

The wonders only multiplied as he grew older, and even when he was no longer a child prodigy, his genius continued to flourish and evolve unabated until his premature death.

If there is some convincing explanation for this—the prodigality, the almost-effortless virtuosity, the endless flow of otherworldly beauty—other than a miraculous gift of God, no one has yet provided it.

Mozart and Voltaire

Thoughts of Mozart were prompted by Jan Swafford’s biography Mozart: The Reign of Love, which I recently finished. I found it excellent, with some reservations. While Swafford is a superb music writer, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and in this case that’s religion. This leads him on absurd paths as he tries to insist the obviously pious Catholic Mozart didn’t believe all those icky religious things and would have emerged as a hero of the Enlightenment had he lived past 35. The author regards a Mozart letter chortling over the death of Voltaire as the absolute nadir of his life, rather than a bit of boisterous black humor from a man whose correspondence is most famous for its endless scatological content.¹

In the letter, Mozart writes to his father: “the godless Arch-villain Voltaire has kicked the bucket–like a dog, so to speak–like a beast–so that’s his reward.” Swafford calls the passage shocking and suggests Mozart just wrote it to please his pious father. He adds that the image of Voltaire dying in agony was a “lie spread by the church.”

Voltaire was a caustic critic of the church and religion, but no atheist. Educated by Jesuits, he became a muddle-headed deist like many of the age, and despised Christians, Jews, and Muslims equally. The only thing that seemed to appeal to him was Confucianism, and he assumed that Christianity and the Bible would vanish under the influence of this new “age of reason.” He particularly hated clergy and the Catholic Church, writing that people must “crush this infamous thing.” Naturally, the Church condemned him.

Although accounts of Voltaire’s death are as varied as accounts of Mozart’s, both did indeed die in considerable agony. Voltaire dismissed bothersome church officials at the end, but allegedly enjoyed the company of Abbe Gaultier, recited the Apostles Creed for him, and, after waving away a full recantation, wrote out

“I have said my confession to [Gaultier]; and that if God disposes of me, I shall die in the holy Catholic religion into which I was born, hoping that God in His divine mercy will deign to forgive me all my errors; and that if I have offended the Church I beg forgiveness of God and of it.”

The statement was signed and witnessed.

This was not considered enough and the church wanted a full recantation, which he would not provide. Voltaire died May 30th, 1778 and was buried secretly at a monastery at Scellières. The idea, repeated by Swafford, of the “church” trying to steal his body and defile it is as much fantasy as the stories of Salieri murdering Mozart. Strangely, Swafford believes one fantasy and dismisses the other.

Samuel Percy, The Death of Voltaire (wax relief), late 19th century

The Death of Mozart

Mozart’s death was also a peculiar one, and made more trying for his family due to the draconian laws of Emperor Joseph II. When Joseph took full control of the Holy Roman Empire following his mother’s death, he immediately began issuing a stream of edicts design to conform the people to his ideal of an “enlightened” state. As he said:

“Everything exists for the state; this word contains everything, so all who live in it should come together to promote its interests.”

While ideas of freedom and tolerance danced in his mind, the sensibilities of ordinary people were of no concern at all, and a brutal paternalism sought to regulate everything from the length of church music to the particulars of burial. This last fact led to the rise of a persistent myth that Mozart died ruined and penniless because he was buried in a “common” grave.

In fact, Mozart’s last year was a triumph creatively and financially. He turned out one masterpiece after another, going from success to success and earning more than ever before.

Included among these were two religious pieces. The motet Ave verum corpus (“Hail, True Body,” K. 618, in D major), is a deep statement of Catholic and eucharistic faith composed for the Feast of Corpus Christi. The eucharistic street processions marking these days were banned under Joseph II, but restored by his successor, Leopold. In barely three minutes of restrained and sublime beauty, it evokes the suffering, glory, and promise of the paschal mystery, and while it might be the simplest and shortest among all his compositions, it is arguably the most profound.

The other piece was, of course, the unfinished Requiem, commissioned anonymously by someone eventually revealed to be an eccentric count and fellow-freemason named Franz von Walsegg. The mystery created a great deal of legend and counter-legend, but there is no question that, as his illness worsened, Mozart felt he was composing his own Requiem mass. He did not live to finish it, and somewhere in the middle of the Lacrimosa, we hear the last notes he ever put to paper. It was eventually finished by a student after the composer—small, sickly, and never robust—died on December 5th, 1791.

Some of Joseph II’s most unpopular decrees had to do with death and burial, and although they were being loosened, enough control was still in place to make Mozart’s funeral a trial. Joseph had decreed that all bodies would be given minimal ceremonies, sewed up in sacks, and deposited in common graves outside the city, with no monuments or markers. Though these laws were eventually rescinded, they still left few options for burial, and Mozart got the cheapest one: burial in a “common” grave. This likely meant a grave for commoners not a mass grave, but in any event his resting place was unmarked and is lost to time.

There is much more both Weird and Catholic in the life of Mozart, from his famous–partly apocryphal–memorization and copying of Allegri’s “secret” Miserere after hearing it in the Sistine Chapel, to his wrangling with Cardinals, papal honors, sacred music, and more, but I’d like to leave you with his own words, from a letter dated August 16, 1782, about his wife, Constanze:

For some time before we were married we had always attended Mass and gone to confession and received communion together; and I discovered that never had I prayed so ardently or confessed and received Communion so devoutly as by her side; and she felt likewise. In short we are made for one another; and God who orders all things and hence this too, will never forsake us.

Joseph Heicke, Mozart’s Death Coach, 1860.

This Present Darkness

1. Contrary to popular belief, Mozart was not a libertine. He took his faith seriously, and also had a well-placed terror of venereal disease after seeing a dear friend lose a piece of face to the disease. He loved only two women: one jilted him and he married the other. They were sisters. Amadeus is a work of fiction.