On returning to Vienna Mozart was appointed kammercom positor to the emperor, with a salary of Boo gulden. In April 1789 he accompanied Prince Lichnowski to Berlin, where King Fred erick William II. offered him the post of kapellmeister, with a salary of 3,00o thalers (L45o). Though most unwilling to quit the emperor's service, he informed him of the offer. "Are you going to desert me, then?" asked the emperor; and the good natured Mozart remained, to starve. The emperor now commis sioned Mozart to compose another Italian opera, which was pro duced on Jan. 26, 1790, under the title of Cosi fan tutte. The libretto, by Da Ponte, was designed to give Mozart unlimited op portunities for mock heroics. The public seem to have seen the point of Mozart's delicious three hours of parody, but the run of the opera was stopped by the emperor's death on Feb. 20. The well meaning 19th century took Cosi fan tutte on a solemn estimate of the probability of its plot, and it did not come again into its rights until Richard Strauss produced it properly at Munich and inaugurated our better understanding of Mozart's irony.
In March, Schikaneder, the manager of a small suburban theatre, approached Mozart with a project for a fairy opera addressed cryptically to Freemasons, who were frowned upon by the empress, Marie Therese, and the Church, but of whose brother hood Mozart was an enthusiastic member. As in the case of Die Ent fiihring, he soon whirled Schikaneder off his feet and raised the fairy tale to sublime heights.
While he was working at Die Zauberflote a stranger called on him, requesting him to compose a Requiem and offering to pay for it in advance. The stranger's behaviour was so mysterious that Mozart, who was already out of health, came to take him for a supernatural messenger of death. Meanwhile he received a com mission to compose an opera, La Clemenza di Tito, for the corona tion of the new emperor, Leopold II. at Prague. He carried out this work piece-meal, night and day, in travelling coaches and dur ing rehearsals. The coronation took place on Sept. 6; the new empress called the opera "another German piggishness," but Metastasio's worst libretto had received better music than it de served ; and this was the swan song of opera seria. Die Zauber flote was produced on Sept. 3o and had a splendid run. But the Requiem still remained unfinished ; the stranger therefore made another appointment, paying a further sum in advance. Mozart put his greatest music into it, and became more and more convinced that he was writing it for his own death. When the stranger called the third time the composer was dead, and his terrified widow had induced Siissmayer to finish the score in an imitation of Mozart's handwriting. Stissmayer surely must have known how Mozart in
tended to carry out the Lacrymosa, of which he had only written seven bars. The rest of Siissmayer's work does him extraordinary credit. The mysterious messenger was afterwards found to be an emissary of a Count Walsegg, who wished to perform Mozart's Requiem as his own.
Mozart died Dec. 5, 1791, apparently from typhoid (which in Germany is called typhus) though he himself believed that he had been poisoned. Constanze broke down, and when she recovered and visited the churchyard his grave could not be identified.
Works.—The first period in Mozart's development must be taken seriously as beginning at the age of five and merging into the second somewhere about the age of 16 or 17. It was fortunate that the infancy of the sonata-forms (q.v.) coincided with the infancy of Mozart ; for in no earlier or later epoch could his juvenile work have had so normal a relation to the musical world at large. The little pieces composed by Mozart in his fifth and sixth years show an unswerving progress in which every step is represented, and the same mistake is never made twice, nor is a form once mastered ever repeated mechanically. The violin sonatas, written in London and Paris at the age of seven, are full of inventiveness, and technically as competent as most contempo rary works. Mozart's studies in strict counterpoint gave him the greatest mastery of choral music attained since Handel, and more than one movement of Church music, written before he was 15, deserves to take rank as a true masterpiece. There was a loss of freshness at the age of 15, especially in the numerous operas; but by this time the machine could run without effort, and the depths of the adolescent mind could mature in peace while the hand was reeling off coloratura arias. Lucio Silla is almost evenly divided between such automatic stuff and evidences that the boy of 17 was developing the cogency of a man. Some of its recitatives and choruses strike a solemn dramatic note hitherto undreamt of in stage music, except by Gluck. La Finta giardiniera contains Mozart's first concerted opera-finale and marks the be ginning of his dramatic vitality, just as the masses in F and D, written in the same year, mark the close of his first period as a composer of Church music. But we must beware of trying to assign periods according to art-forms; for in every year of his life Mozart practised all art-forms at once ; and his mastery de pends neither on method nor on inspiration. Some early violin sonatas assigned by Kochel to his 13th year really belong (as Wyzlewa and Saint Foix have shown) to his adolescence, and are full of the romantic pathos of C. P. E. Bach and J. Schobert.