Mozart on The Road

by Jonathon Brown

My first long-playing record of the music of Mozart was a compilation of piano and chamber music entitled "Mozart on tour"; the front cover carried an unsigned imitation of an old map of Europe, complete with elaborate fancy compass, picturesque hills and mountains, a cherub strumming a harp - and a zigzag of red lines tracing the routes of Mozart's travels. In the late 1960s this was deeply frustrating, one whole stretch of the itineraries, to Prague or Dresden and Leipzig, being then cut off to ordinary travellers by the Iron Curtain. How strange it seemed that Mozart's Europe allowed travel I could not easily follow two hundred years later.

All that has changed and we can now trace his footsteps. The itineraries stretch from London to Naples and from Paris to Prague and Berlin. Born in Salzburg in 1756, Mozart was on tour at an early age, the relatively short journey from Salzburg to Munich being his first, in chilly January 1762, followed by a grander effort in September the same year, to Passau and on to Vienna. Mozart's father was showing off his 6-year-old virtuoso son with such success that the profits from the Vienna trip inspired him to set off in 1663 on a trip of over three years' duration, to Munich, Augsburg - his father's native town - Mannheim, Frankfurt, Coblenz, Aachen, Brussels, Paris, London, Lille, The Hague, Amsterdam, Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zürich, Donaueschingen and home by Munich. Even Bob Dylan's roadies would want a rest.

In late 1769 he undertook his great Italian tour, as before in the company of his father Leopold, whose letters give a well-observed and characteristic, often frank description of the towns and cities they passed through and performed at; for these were concert tours in which however much there was now an educational aim - young Wolfgang met and heard many of Europe's greatest musicians - there was just as strong a financial incentive in showing off the astonishing prodigy. As a child Mozart charmed wherever he went and as an adolescent flirted with just as much charm. Throughout his life he took pleasure in a certain restlessness, after a youth spent so much on the road, so much so that one biographer suggests the frequency with which he changed addresses in Vienna - eleven times in the last nine years of his life, some voluntary moves, some not - was a substitute for travel on a wider scale.

Moreover, he worked on the move, not only letter-writing but also composition, finishing and copying in the evening what had been jostlingly scrawled in the carriage by day. Travel and temporary accommodation gave him as it were the excuse to reach within himself for the privacy and inner concentration that brought forth such an outpouring of inspiration. Any break in the pattern of performances and introductions, gifts, compliments and medals, was used for composition, often of course with the local forces in mind - be they the especially good horns in London or an astounding soprano in Mannheim....

Where his father tended in his letters to report of the sites and places seen - one town 'horrid, old-fashioned, tastelessly built' for instance - Wolfgang's letters are all about the people and the music. Landscape and sights scarcely figure, as if looking out of the window was an unnecessary distraction. An account of the excesses of a wine-tippling gluttonous monk at Bologna, in a letter of 21st August, 1770, on the other hand, is as good a vignette as any ever penned, ending with a strangely modern idea: 'He may, of course, be following some sort of diet.' Mozart adds drily, 'But I do not think so.'

The journeys were made by carriage on what we would now take to be the 'old road', almost all replaced by the slick snaking motorways that ensnare the whole continent. This rhythm of travel is a reward in itself and I for one prefer to take, say, three days for the journey north from Naples, taking the old road, stopping haphazardly at eating-houses and inns, savouring (like Leopold if not his son) the sights and sites, than to stream uniformly in ant-like regularity along the autostrada. It may not have occurred to you to do so, but try. Such an adventure - even better accompanied by volumes of father & son's letters, for instance - or with the diaries of Berlioz as well! - renews our fascination with all the local flavours that lurk at every turn across Europe, be it in food or the shape of the roofs, in the farming or the accent.

Here from Salzburg is the itinerary of that one Italian tour they made:

Salzburg (departure 13th December, 1769), Innsbruck, Rovereto, Verona (here they met Locatelli, the great violinist), Mantova (in mid-January), Cremona, Milan (they were happy here to be given the first warmed beds of the trip), Lodi, Parma, Bologna (meeting the castrato Farinelli at his mansion outside town), Florence (arriving 30th March to find the town full of English), Rome (arriving 11th April); the onward leg to Naples was delayed - reports of marauding brigands dissuaded them from departure; but by 8th May they were on the road for Naples, staying there till 25th June, taking in Pompeii, Herculaneum and some excursions along the coast. Their return followed a different path: Rome, Florence, Pisa, Genova and on to Milan which while he completed the opera Mitridate became a base for excursions to Venice for the Carnival, Padua, Vicenza, Verona to the east and Turin to the west. Their home-coming was on 28th March, 1771.

It is fair to say that Mozart was the first truly European composer. These travels gave him direct knowledge of many national styles and local traditions out of which emerged a fresh-sounding cosmopolitan gait. Bach had had contact with the Italian style and renaissance music often betrays fascinations that have come from travelled glimpses of other styles than the composer's local tradition, but it is with Mozart that a sort of universality appears. Other artists have travelled widely - Goethe for example - but in Mozart we can sense this European influence in its earliest manifestation.

Moreover, when we hear what he has to say in Naples, for instance, or London (1764-65), whether meeting royalty or inn-keepers, we are aware that so many clichés about national character are centuries old. In London was already set today's endearing pattern of internationalism - in music alone then home to J.C.Bach and Handel - mixed with a hearty fickleness to fashion, requiring Leopold to emphasise the prodigy's imminent departure to keep up ticket sales towards the end of their stay; as well as a taste for charities, Mozart giving a benefit concert in favour of a new maternity hospice, 'a way to earn the love of this very special nation'. Dare we quote Wolfgang then, on Naples? 'As regards the impertinence of the rabble, I am not sure that Naples does not outdo London...'

We may be sure, however; for where do we go today for punk rock?

© Jonathan Brown. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.