In 1784, he banned extravagant funerals and to save space and decay ordered people to be buried in sacks in communal graves, designing a reusable coffin that opened to drop the body into the grave. The Viennese so hated this that Joseph sparked funeral riots. ‘He had no idea whatever of the art of government,’ wrote Casanova, who met him, ‘for he hadn’t the slightest knowledge of the human heart.’ But, for musicians, Joseph was a boon: he lived for music, himself playing clavier and cello, and adored Italian comic opera.
In 1781, Mozart, now twenty-five and court organist in Salzburg, was ordered by his master the prince-archbishop to meet him in Vienna for the celebrations of Joseph’s accession. Mozart could not wait to rid himself of the prince-archbishop who, jealous of his minion, screamed at him. Mozart, small, thin, with large eyes and a nimbus of blond hair, was outraged by the prince-archbishop’s arrogance: ‘my body was trembling all over, and I staggered about the street like a drunkard’. Mercifully sacked, ‘my main goal now is to meet the emperor … I’m determined he should get to know me. I would be so happy if I could whip through my opera for him and then play a fugue or two, for that’s what he likes.’ By December, Joseph had invited Mozart to play in a piano competition and was backing his career as pianist and as composer of concertos and of operas, starting with
In a city of music, favoured by a music-crazy emperor, Mozart bubbled with ideas. ‘The music reigns supreme,’ he wrote. Just as he had once written about sex and shitting, now it was all about music as he describes how he wrote his opera: ‘Now about Bellmont’s [sic] aria in A Major. Oh how anxious, oh how passionate? Do you know how I expressed it? – even expressing the loving, throbbing heart? – with two violins playing in octaves.’ Mozart, whose amorous instincts had been restrained by a terror of venereal disease ever since seeing a childhood friend afflicted with syphilis, was boarding with a musical family, the Webers, whose nineteen-year-old daughter Constanze he fell in love with. They married happily and had six children, losing half of them. Mozart was heartbroken when their first boy died: ‘We are both very sad about our poor, bonny, fat darling little boy.’ He never stopped flirting, but as he wrote to a playboy friend, ‘Don’t you think the pleasures of unstable capricious love affairs don’t even come close to the blessing of true affection?’ Walking in the Augarten, spotting Mozart and Constanze japing around, Joseph strolled up and teased them: ‘Well, well, married three weeks and fisticuffs already.’
It was at the premiere of the opera that Joseph supposedly said, ‘Too beautiful for our [Viennese] ears, my dear Mozart, and a monstrous quantity of notes,’ but the emperor admired and supported Mozart. He was joking, as he often did, about cloddish Viennese audiences, though earlier he had said that Mozart ‘has only one fault in his pieces for stage, and his singers have often complained of it, he deafens them with his full accompaniment’.
At the premiere of his D-minor Piano Concerto, Joseph waved his hat and shouted, ‘Bravo, Mozart!’ It was mutual. ‘There’s no monarch in the world, I’d prefer to serve than the emperor,’ said Mozart, ‘but I shan’t go begging for a post.’ His real frustration was that Joseph had appointed an Italian composer, Antonio Salieri, six years older, as imperial chamber composer, blocking his way. Salieri’s operas were more successful than Mozart’s. Joseph backed both composers; when Gluck died, Joseph promoted Salieri to
Yet the Habsburg dreamed of conquest. Joseph outmanoeuvred old Frederick to negotiate a new alliance with Catherine the Great, planning to attack and partition the Ottoman empire. The Romanovs had always aspired to conquer Constantinople, which they called Tsargrad – Caesarcity.* Their plan depended on Britain and France being distracted in America.
Instead of defying the rebels at Yorktown, Cornwallis was trapped there. When the Royal Navy tried to rescue him, the French defeated it in Chesapeake Bay. On 19 October 1781, Cornwallis surrendered to Washington.* Fersen helped with the negotiations while enjoying the Americans. ‘The women are pretty, amiable and available,’ he wrote. ‘That’s all I need.’ Louis and Antoinette had much to celebrate. Three days later at Versailles, she delivered a dauphin, heir to the throne. This time only ten people were allowed to attend the birth – and Antoinette feared it was another daughter until the king said, ‘Monseiur le Dauphin requests permission to enter!’
