father led also to fruitful attention to Catholic church music. And the whole spirit of the time moved him to constant effort in the field of purely instrumental music. Measured by achievements, his early period was almost equally significant in all three fields.
The family fortunes were largely dependent upon the Archbishop, in whose service Leopold Mozart had been since 1743. The earlier prelate, Sigismund, was interested in music, but chiefly on its sacred side. During his régime the father had long leaves of absence and the son some recognition at court, as in 1770, when he was made concertmaster. In 1771, however, Sigismund died and was followed by Hieronymus, a pig-headed, mean-spirited man, detested by his subjects and disliked by his equals. Under him the Mozarts were systematically snubbed and tantalized. In 1778 Wolfgang was reluctantly reinstated as concertmaster, but in 1781, at Vienna, he was dismissed with gross insults. Thenceforward he was thrown on his own resources.
Trusting to his éclat in high society in Vienna, Mozart hoped for work as teacher and composer and especially desired an operatic commission, as the Viennese stage was then probably the best in Europe. In 1782 his second mature opera, Die Entführung, had great success. But the Weber family was now living in Vienna and he had become engaged to Constanze, a younger sister of Aloysia. Her circumstances at home led to a hasty marriage, which, though in itself happy, involved innumerable troubles, for the wife had neither health nor skill in managing and the husband lacked steadiness of purpose and loved gayety overmuch. He was drawn hither and thither by random impulses, often suggested by indiscreet or designing friends. He gave lessons considerably, as to young Hummel and the Englishman Attwood, and to many who were only half in earnest. He often appeared as a virtuoso and always with great applause. The sale of compositions was less remunerative, especially in the absence of copyright protection. He had many friends and became infatuated with Freemasonry, but not all his incessant sociality was judicious or beneficial. His aggregate income was not small, as then counted, but he had no wit for economy, indulged in many follies, and fell deeper and deeper into debt. The last ten years were filled with a maze of occupations, great and small, but also with an equal maze of difficulties, under which at last his health gave way. He had a lingering hope for some court honor—a hope only partially met, late in 1787, by his appointment as private musician to the Emperor, virtually succeeding Gluck, though at less than half the latter's salary. In 1789 he visited Dresden, Leipsic and Berlin, where from patriotic motives he declined an offer to become royal choirmaster. In 1791 a conjunction of serious strains occasioned the brief, fatal illness. The circumstances of his death and burial were pathetic in the extreme, the interment being in the common grave of the city paupers. A romantic feature of his last days was the writing, upon a mysterious commission through an anonymous agent, of a Requiem which he himself believed to be for his own funeral and of which the true history was not known in full till about a century later.
Personally, Mozart was exceedingly vivacious, versatile and fascinating, full of droll humor, fond of all sorts of amusements, but capable, too, of acute mental judgments and of noble sentiments. In spite of his father's fidelity,
