Mozart: A Life in Letters: A Life in Letters by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

maid, a few florins more or less don’t matter for her wages. She has complete control.
    The Mozarts arrived backin Salzburg on 29 November 1766. In less than eight months Wolfgang composed the first part of the oratorio
Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots
K35 and a passion cantata, the
Grabmusik
K42. His Latin school drama
Apollo et Hyacinthus
K38 was given on 13 May 1767. On 11 September he left with his sister and parents for Vienna, ostensibly to help celebrate the wedding of Archduchess Josepha to Ferdinand IV of Naples; Leopold may also have hoped for an appointment at court, or at least some significant commissions. His plans were waylaid by a smallpox epidemic.

15. Leopold Mozart to Lorenz Hagenauer, 30 January 1768, Vienna
     
    Something for you alone!
    It’s now time to give you a fuller and clearer account of our circumstances – whether fortunate or unfortunate, I do not know – and to hear your kind opinion. If money is man’s sole source of happiness, we are doubtless to be pitied because, as you know, we have spent so much that there is little apparent hope of our being able to recover it. But if health and skill in knowledge are man’s greatest possession, then – God be praised – we are still well off. We have survived the greatest and most dangerous storm; by God’s grace we are all well, and my children have certainly not forgotten anything but, as you’ll see, have made even greater progress.
    Nothing, I know, will be more incomprehensible to you than how it is that our affairs have made so little progress. I’ll explain this to you as best I can, although I must omit things that cannot be entrusted to my pen. That the Viennese, generally speaking, have no desire to see serious and sensible things and have little or no idea about them, but want to see only foolish stuff, dancing, devils, ghosts, magic, buffoons, Lipperl, Bernardon, 1 witches and apparitions is well known: their theatres prove this every day. A gentleman, even if he is bemedalled, will clap his hands and laugh till he is almost breathless at some bawdy harlequinade or silly joke, but at the most serious scene, the most moving and beautiful action, and the wittiest turns ofphrase, he will talk so loudly to a lady that honest people cannot understand a word. That is the main reason. The domestic arrangements at court, which I cannot describe here, are such that they have many consequences that it would take too long to explain here or to illustrate by means of examples. And this is the second reason. From these two reasons spring any number of oddities, because everything depends on pure blind chance but more often on some appalling baseness, which is not, however, typical of everyone, or even on some extremely brazen and daring boast. But to come to our own affair, many other adverse incidents have taken place. On our arrival, we had no choice but to obtain an entry to the court. But Her Majesty the Empress no longer maintains her own orchestra and goes neither to the opera nor to see plays: her way of life is so unworldly that it is impossible for me to describe it. 2 She referred us to the emperor, but as this gentleman absolutely loathes anything that might entail any expenditure, it took him a long time to reach a decision; meantime there was the sad event concerning the young princess and all the others incidents that you already know about from my letters. On our return from Moravia, we met their highnesses without really expecting to, for hardly had the empress been told what had happened to us in Olmütz and that we had returned when we were told the day and hour when we should appear. But what was the use of this astonishing kindness, this indescribable affability? What did it produce? Nothing but a medal which, it is true, is beautiful, but so worthless that I do not even care to put a value on it. She is leaving everything else to the emperor, who enters it in his book of things to be forgotten and no doubt thinks that