Fellow composers never wavered in their recognition of his genius. To Josef Haydn (1732–1809), the musical elder statesman of the time, he was “the greatest composer … either in person or by name,” while the “magic sounds of Mozart’s music” left Franz Schubert (1797–1828) awestruck. The public response was more capricious. Some judged his last three symphonies “difficult,” and other works were criticized for being “audacious” or too complex. But he was held in high regard at the time of his death, and today layman and professional alike recognize what one conductor has described as “the seriousness in his charm, the loftiness in his beauty.”
Mozart’s princely patrons were less deferential. Perennially short of money, Mozart’s frustration at his lack of independence and his pitiful wages often led to stormy relations. From 1773 he was engaged to compose at the Salzburg court, but in 1781, summoned to produce music for Emperor Joseph II’s court in Vienna, he was angry to find himself in the role of a servant, with a correspondingly meager salary. He angrily demanded his release, which was—as he wrote in a letter of June that year—granted “with a kick on my ass … by order of our worthy Prince Archbishop.”
Throughout his life, Mozart displayed the same mix of playfulness and seriousness that shines through his music. He was an affectionate child, and his difficult relationship with his domineering father led him to constantly seek approval: visiting Vienna, the six-year-old Mozart apparently jumped into Empress Maria Theresa’s lap for a hug. The adult Mozart, always physically small, retained this childlike manner in his willful extravagance, his open and sometimes crude sexuality and the distinctive, scatological humor that had led the teenage Mozart to write to his first love: “Now I wish a good night, shit into your bed until it creaks.”
The composer for whom, as he put it, composing was the only “joy and passion” was no solitary genius. While in later years his relationship with his father deteriorated, his love for his wife, Constanze, was abiding—despite Leopold’s disapproval. Nevertheless, after Leopold’s death in 1787 Mozart, now permanently in Vienna, went through a period when he composed less. Fearing poverty, he produced a stream of begging letters to patrons, acquaintances and his fellow Freemasons. While never destitute, Mozart had to rely on income from teaching and performances of his works. He lived beyond his means, having a weakness for fashionable clothes while also paying off debts to friends and publishers.
Mozart’s last composition, the Requiem that became his own, is surrounded by mystery. Legend has it that Salieri, a jealous fellow composer, poisoned Mozart as he worked frantically on this composition, which had been anonymously commissioned by letter. But an acute attack of rheumatic fever (and a noble patron intent on passing off Mozart’s compositions as his own) is probably nearer the truth. Even so, Mozart’s modest burial—although not quite the pauper’s of repute—sealed the myth of the neglected genius.
ROBESPIERRE
1758–94
Comte de Mirabeau on Robespierre at the outset of the Revolution
Maxmilien Robespierre was the prototype for the modern European dictator: his sanctimonious vision of republican virtue and terror, and the brutal slaughter he unleashed in its name, were studied reverently by the Russian Bolsheviks and helped inspire the totalitarian mass killings of the 20th century. Known as the Sea-green Incorruptible, his name has become a byword for the fatal purity and degenerate corruption of the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution of 1789 and climaxed with the execution of King Louis XVI on January 21, 1793. The Terror illustrated not only the corrupt dangers of utopian monopolies of “virtue,” but how ultimately such witch hunts consume their own children.
Born in the Artois region of northern France, Robespierre’s family was financially secure, but his childhood was not a happy one. His father was a drunk and his mother died when he was just six. Nonetheless, the young Maximilien won a place to study law at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and soon made his name as a populist, defending the poor against the rich.
Like many of the other young professionals who were to drive the French Revolution—such as the fanatical lawyer Louis de Saint-Just (later nicknamed the angel of death) or the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat—Robespierre eagerly absorbed the theories of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notion of a “social contract” held that a government had to be based on the will of the people to be truly legitimate.
