Mozart [antikvár]

FOREWORD I HAVE not evoked an imaginary Mozart j there is a real one. He exists for anyone to know, in his voluminous letters and in his still more voluminous works. After that it is necessary to have read the definitive biographies, and it is helpful to know the letters and memoirs of contemporaries. Then come the few slight gaps in documented history that the dogmatic biographers have bluntly avoided for lack of material of which to make footnotes and which the romanticizers have gilded and sugared into the preposterous eighteenth-century confection many think Mozart's life to have been. I have tried to chart an honest course between the two. I have also truly known Mozart j have, metaphorically, as Dr. Johnson said the biographer must,, "eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him." So I think I know what he looked like, how he spoke, what he did day by day. I have combined this knowledge of him with conscientious study of his known life, and have set down in a continuous record what I believe to have happened. If this seems an inadmissible procedure, I have not done it unauthorized. I am, on the contrary, indebted to a number of the foremost students of the subject who have read and criticized and endorsed my presentation, and who have been unquestingly generous with their own material. In places that every Mozart student must recognize, I have made what Mr. D. B. Wyndham Lewis calls "Legitimate Assumptions." Legitimate assumptions cannot fail to take shape in the mind of anyone who has worked and lived and laughed and grieved with a man long dead. The conspicuous instance of my conscientious reconstruction is the meeting in Prague of Mozart, Lorenzo Da Ponte, and Casanova, in 1787, when Don Giovanni was being written there. In 1926, two sheets of manuscript were found among some Casanova relics at Schloss Hirschberg, near Dux in Bohemia, where he died. These papers have been identified, are genuine, and bear in Casanova's handwriting some frag- xi