Johann Christian Bach would bear no excuses, accept no remonstrance.
He would send his carriage to fetch me as the sun went down, I would be bundled up and cared for and returned safe and sound and victorious to Thrift Street after dinner with the Earl of Thanet and his wife at Dean Street. It was to the advantage of all: young Mozart would bask in the performance of his symphony, the audience would whet its appetite with a preview of what awaited them at Nannerl and Wolfgang’s benefit concert of February 21, and Carlisle House and our hostess, Mrs. Cornelys, would be enchanted that the surprise guest had shown up after all.
His voice was firm and persuasive in the midst of the bedlam rising all around us: Nannerl’s sobbing because her fever was to blame for ruining this chance to consolidate our family fortune, my Papa insisting that it was an absolute Unmöglichkeit, impossible, impossible, the boy may catch his death of a cold and we are running out, dear friend, of black powder, Maman entreating her dear Leopold to reconsider, and of course, of course, my own shrill entreaties, not to mention Porta, who was offering coffee to our guest while the housemaid, Hannah, imperturbably made the rounds with morning scones, just out of the oven.
Papa was relenting, I could sense it.
It was the snuffbox pledged by Lord Thanet that did the trick, the promise of that gift if I pleased him enough when I played after dinner as they sipped their liqueurs. Another one, that we could place next to the silver snuffbox I had received from the Comtesse de Tessé at Versailles just last year. Lord Thanet was beckoning with it, was almost in the room with us.
“But can it not be another night?”
No, alas, Milord was leaving tomorrow for his Scottish estates and had no sure date of return.
“And it is gold, you say?”
Inlaid with gold, in and out. For the lad if he performs well, as he usually does.
“Oh he will, he will, he will perform better than he ever has. Blindfold my Wolfgang, cover the keys of the piano, ask Milady to pick any tune and watch him improvise a whole sonata on that theme—all this and more, as you well know, Herr Bach.”
So it was agreed?
“You say you will bring him back at night, in the dark, when the cold is most devious, when ice lurks dangerously, no, it cannot be, we cannot risk our treasure for this one piffling chance, he is delicate and requires constant attention. You must understand, sir, today is February second. It is a heavy date in this family. Two of our boys, little Leopoldus and our own Carolus, both, both, were taken from us by God sepa rately, on this very date, one of them, our first-born, sixteen years ago, the other, it has been exactly thirteen years since he—a portentous day, dear Kapellmeister Bach, for our sole surviving male heir to venture forth into the storm.”
Perhaps the Presto was over, perhaps we were back to the Andante or something even sadder, a Requiem for my hopes, a funeral for my dreams?
Maman intervened.
“Let us discuss this no further. If your concern, Leopold, is for the heavy burden I carry, concern yourself no more, dear husband. It is Woferl and his future that we must consider. The boy shall go.”
“And the cold, so late at night, upon his return, the cold, the cold?”
My mother touched my loving Papa lightly on the sleeve and turned, much to my glee, to my savior: “If it does not inconvenience you, Herr Bach, the boy could sojourn with you till tomorrow. I know your housekeeper well and she will make sure he is amply provided for. And in the morning, after breakfast, you can play the pianoforte with him, as you have intended for some time, a way for both of you to spend some pleasant hours improvising a tune or two. As long as you bring him back in time to attend Sunday Mass, dear sir.”
My friend Christel winked at me and announced that, of course, Madame had shown once again her wisdom and that he had not dared to offer such hospitality for fear that it would occasion even more resistance. It was a most excellent solution—by tomorrow morning the blizzard would have waned and the ice in the streets thawed out and he would deliver me personally to my amorous and affectionate par ents so young Mozart could go to Mass, a need that he, as a devout Catholic, understood all too well.
And then my sister chipped in, please, please, Papa, do not trim our Wolfgang’s wings, joined by my own pleas, and that was enough—along with the golden snuffbox!—to corner Leopold Mozart.
That very afternoon he relinquished me into the tender mercies of Kapellmeister Bach with the frequent admonition to make sure I was not disturbed by marauders and scoundrels and false friends, bloodsuckers and worthless fops—the lad has a heart that is far too kind and mild—so please, dear sir, do not let him out of your sight.
How could the magnificent Johann Christian Bach keep me in his sight? Not even if he had been endowed with the thousand eyes of Argo. He was busy, he had his own patrons and admirers and pupils to placate and entice, no sooner had he completed the last compasses of the Minuetto of his latest opus than he was engulfed by a flock—or was it a swarm—of well-wishers, many of them demanding where they might purchase copies and engravings of the works they had just heard, as well as the latest six sonatas for violin and clavichord, not overly difficult on the fingers, they pleaded, so that their candid daughters would not be frustrated when they played the pieces at home.
I did not envy him the adoration.
He deserved that and much more.
His winks toward me were enough to make him the most deserving individual on the face of the earth. Winks of complicity that had commenced that morning and persisted through our carriage ride in the early evening all the way to Carlisle House in the midst of the falling softness of the snow, and had transformed themselves, during the mean dering soirée, into musical winks, so subtle that not even the most discerning of the cognoscenti and habitués could have picked them up, not even his confrere and soul mate Abel, whose own suite for cello had opened the night.
Maestro Bach had organized his part of the session as a dialogue with me, almost an homage. Once the audience had gluttonously enjoyed my Symphony in E-flat Major, he had presented his own composition in the same key, as if we were associates rather than master and protégé, the Lar ghetto and Minuetto a reminder that I need not always end with a Presto. And then, to top the evening off, his Symphonia Concertante in C Major, inverting the order of the movements I had just entranced the public with—it had to be on purpose that my mentor opened with an Andante and then graduated to his own jolly Allegro, a tactful way of tell ing me that I was on the right track, boy, but there is still much you need to learn, lad, listen and follow me into fame, fame and a big fat purse.
How carefully he had left intricate clues for me, where I should press forward next, how the winds should interweave and then distance themselves from the strings and then come together again, spurring me to not let myself be held back. Oh, I was ready to learn and imitate, but that was . . . not enough, not enough. I hardly dared allow the thought to sur face, something—could it be?—was missing in the Maestro’s nocturnal offering. I did not yet know what and would not have volunteered to tell him if I had managed to articulate it to myself—something had been eliminated from his pleasant harmony, no, not eliminated, for to eliminate an emotion it must first have been expressed. The London Bach did not himself know that a certain depth was lacking, he might never know it. If there was infinite sorrow in his work it was due to what he suspected was awaiting him at the top of the mountain but could not reach and feel in all its glory, whereas I could, I could feel that infinitude, that sorrow, that gloria in excelsis. Oh, I had plumbed it in my own Andante, far less complex and elaborate than his but speaking more directly to the elusive Paradise we were both seeking.
His work was light, it was consoling, it was cheerful, it was congenial—but perhaps too much so. Too gay. The consolation had been decided before the grief had been given its time and space, the consolation was there, already guar anteed and ordained, when the piece began and was effortlessly recovered, still there, at the end. It had not changed in the interval. More disquieting yet: it had not changed me.
That was merely a child’s intuition. Unarticulated then. Thirteen years later, when he and I were to meet again in Paris in more spectral circumstances, when I had seen, alas, what I had always yearned to see and yet feared, when I had seen minute by minute someone die, someone so dear, so close—when the London Bach and I met again, well, by that time I knew what was missing in his music, what my own music was already achieving, though, once more, I did not tell him this in Paris, not because I was unable to articulate it but precisely because I could, because it was enough to let my art speak for itself, my music would indicate the distance between a surface and an abyss, between a surface and the dark and luminous air stirring the stars.
There is nothing wrong with surfaces, I have skated on them often and pleasantly enough, but I was not willing to dwell there, a point there was no need to hammer home to Maestro Bach. I loved the man and he was gracious to me in return. The first truly illustrious composer to recognize me, someone whose opinions I truly valued. Not a duke whose clumsy fingers and amateurish mind slaughtered the viola da gamba while commanding entertainment. Not a prince who disbursed florins for dances that were lovely enough trifles but forgotten as soon as they had been pounded out by feet and waved into oblivion by swanlike arms. Not an Archbishop who vaunted my music because of the prestige it gave to his court.
Johann Christian Bach: someone who understood, re ally understood, and could teach me much that I myself ignored and also force me to realize all that he could never teach me, that, alas, I would never be able to teach him, that I could teach no one, unless . . . unless someone like me were to come along, is perhaps waiting for me back in Vienna when I return from Leipzig, hoping I will take him under my wing, young now, as I was then, be generous with him, as Christel was with me in London, as my Papa had always been. Will I recognize that new genius if he crosses my path? Has he even been born yet? Will he ever be born? What had Johann Sebastian thought of his own son? Did he fathom that neither this Christel nor any of his other lads would ever reach the heights and depths of his own extraordinary work? Did my own father fathom this already about me back in 1765? Did it matter to him? Did it matter to me? Only inasmuch as I have often prayed that my own dear estranged Papa never came to comprehend his own deficiency before he died, that he died in peace.
Not that all of this—in fact, hardly any of it—was in my mind that night. Only that Johann Christian had earned the right to be the center of the milling crowd, just as I merited this interlude of solitude, alone in my corner, enjoying the first unguarded evening of my existence.
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