In his classic study Ways of Seeing, John Berger prints the same image on two successive pages. He prefaces the first with ‘This is a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it’; the second iteration has a handwritten caption that reads ‘This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself’. Berger then continues: ‘It is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence’.Footnote ¹

I often mention this cautionary tale when I teach Beethoven quartets. The temptation to hear Op. 135 as ‘the last quartet Beethoven wrote before he died’ is almost irresistible, especially with the composer's own enigmatic caption ‘Muß es sein? Es muß sein!’ luring us to think of his impending death. Beethoven's parting shot also lends support to the standard framing of his career as having early, middle and late periods – a beginning, middle and end that satisfies the narrative cravings of biographers for well-rounded stories, with a mode of closure that proceeds as if inevitably from previous events.Footnote ²

As Christoph Wolff argues in his Mozart at the Gateway to his Fortune, these cravings have influenced the ways historians have understood the career of Mozart. Thus, it is not uncommon to read of Mozart's ‘late period’ or to search for intimations of mortality in the music of his last few years, especially in his decision to compose the Requiem. Wolff writes: ‘In the prevailing view, the endless artistic reservoir of innovative approaches unfolding in Mozart's music is accompanied by a conjectured sense of closure in his art toward the end of his life’ (xiii).Footnote ³ But if this kind of framing even distorts our biographies of Beethoven (who died in middle age at 58 and left behind myriad plans and sketches for future work), it makes nonsense when applied to his predecessor, who died at 35.

Wolff's book seeks to counter such tendencies by examining in detail the last four years of Mozart's career. Instead of allowing the death knell of 1791 to cast its gloom over these years, he takes the prospective of a young artist who had every reason to anticipate decades more of triumph after triumph. To be sure, Mozart was cut off in mid-trajectory by a sudden and fatal illness. Yet, as Wolff demonstrates, nothing in Mozart's work suggests a pessimistic downward spiral. Quite the contrary.

In December of 1787, Mozart was appointed Composer to the Imperial-Royal Chamber Music in the court of Emperor Joseph II (see the decree, pp. 74–5). Mozart understood this appointment as an important step in his ongoing rise to fame and glory. Indeed, Wolff takes his title from Mozart's own account of his position and future prospects in 1790: ‘I now stand at the gateway to my fortune’ (p. 7).

Although Mozart's job was in certain respects inferior to that of Antonio Salieri's with respect to title and salary (Composer to the Imperial-Royal Chamber Music as opposed to Kapellmeister, 800 florins compared with Salieri's 1200), it also had advantages.Footnote ⁴ For while Salieri had to spend much of his time with administrative matters, Mozart's post left him free to compose and travel as he liked, except for a few responsibilities in Vienna during Carnival; we might consider this as an endless sabbatical with full pay.

Why have other biographers given relatively little emphasis to this appointment? Perhaps because so as not think of the composer of Le Nozze di Figaro, the young genius who had suffered abuse from the Archbishop of Salzburg, subjecting himself to imperial patronage on the eve of the French Revolution. But Mozart certainly did not regard this appointment as subjugation. He cherished and banked on the prestige of his title – precisely the sort of acknowledgement his father, Leopold, had hoped for and had led his son to covet. He had attained such recognition at a much younger age than any previous composer, and even Haydn never held a comparable title. Moreover, the position guaranteed him a relatively high, steady income while allowing him to give full attention to outside activities: receiving commissions from other sources, producing concerts featuring his own virtuosic performances, and publishing. No wonder he trumpeted his success.

The four years following Mozart's appointment saw the creation of some of the most treasured compositions of the Western canon: symphonies 39 through 41, three concertos, the three da Ponte operas, Die Zauberflöte and La Clemenza di Tito, and dozens of chamber works (see the tables on pp. 25 and 26). This scarcely looks like the resumé of someone in his sunset years. To be sure, Mozart's rate of productivity fell somewhat during the year 1790. But, as Wolff shows, this relatively fallow year reflects the economic crisis Austria was experiencing because of its war with the Ottoman Empire (1788–1790), Mozart's need to attend to his growing family and the composer's extended trip in 1789 to Prague, Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin, intended to secure professional connections for the future.

Mozart was at the time begging for loans from his friend Michael Puchberg, but he explained that he needed this influx of cash only until he had made good on his numerous projects (see pp. 6–8, 32). Far from being the starving artist of legend, Mozart was one of best-paid composers of his time (p. 3); in the mid-1780s he had an annual income Wolff estimates conservatively at 4000 florins – that is, between $260, 000 and $340,000 (p. 30). If he had cash-flow problems, it was because he insisted on living beyond his means, indulging in the luxuries his aristocratic patrons flaunted. Moreover, he gambled (p. 30). As his sister remarked after his death, ‘his flaws were that he didn't know how to handle the money’ (p. 4), much like a rock star who somehow manages to fritter away millions. Yet when his widow, Constanze, died in 1842, ‘she left behind a major fortune of some 30,000 florins in cash, bonds, and savings accounts – all based on earnings from Mozart's music’ (p. 8). It was in the context of his letter to Puchberg that he put forward his sense that he was at the gateway to his fortune as a kind of collateral.

Wolff dedicates much of his book to setting forth in meticulous detail the workaday activities during the years 1788–1791. In this the project resembles Wolff's celebrated biography of J.S. Bach, which situates the composer in the material world within which he functioned.Footnote ⁵ Both books take artists who have been elevated by mythology to an invented realm and relocate them within the dense fabric of social history. In Wolff's hands, such demystifications actually make all the more astonishing the accomplishments of these composers. If we cannot account for their genius, we can at least trace their actions.

After setting forth the available information concerning Mozart's career between 1788 and 1790, Wolff turns to the music produced during this period. But the fact that Wolff resists labeling this repertory as ‘late style’ does not mean that he does not recognize profound shifts in the composer's modus operandi during these four years. He suggests that we call it instead the ‘imperial’ style: the result of Mozart's desire to satisfy the emperor's tastes and also the greater professional confidence his appointment inspired (pp. 84, 90–106). The second half of the book deals in detail with the ways Mozart's musical imagination developed in the years following his court appointment.

In part because the standing mythology holds him to have been sui generis, the interactions that influenced Mozart's compositional processes have not yet received the attention they deserve. Very much a part of the cultures in which he found himself, Mozart listened avidly to music of his contemporaries (including, of course, Gluck and Haydn). During his two-month trip to Northern Germany, he encountered prominent Protestant musicians, whose music had been relatively unknown to him. He probably had contact with Sara Levy, whose salon served as an intellectual center in Berlin; among those drawn to her gatherings were Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The year before Mozart's visit to Berlin, Madame Levy had commissioned and performed the last work C.P.E. Bach wrote before he died in 1788.

Moreover, Mozart became closely involved with circles devoted to the works of J.S. Bach. Prince Carl von Lichnowsky had an extensive collection of J.S. Bach's keyboard works, and groups of influential Bach devotees in Leipzig, Berlin, as well as Vienna, encouraged him to study the music of his increasingly idolized predecessor. In Wolff's words, ‘the impact of Vienna's Bach circle on Mozart, and by extension on the history of musical composition, can hardly be overestimated’ (p. 71). Mozart's immersion in Bach's music and intersections with patrons with a predilection for intellectual sophistication led him to inflect his galant style with contrapuntal complexity and greater attention to formal design. The apparent ease with which he tossed off his feats often masks the extraordinary effort that went into their creation. Recall the finale to the Jupiter Symphony and also the chamber music of this period. Mozart aspired to surpass the high standard expected of him as the Composer of Imperial-Royal Chamber Music.

Along with his concern for greater complexity came a change in compositional process. In 1780 Mozart had assured his father (who was worried that music promised for nearby deadlines seemed not yet to exist) that ‘everything has been composed, just not yet written down’ (p. 160). Examination of the scores from this period testifies to his ability to hold pieces in his head until he finally consigned them to paper. Fortunately for us, Mozart occasionally turned in the late 1780s to sketching – particularly for passages involving the thorny problems raised by his new approaches. This change of emphasis bequeathed us a treasure trove of material, for he left behind about 140 fragments.

In the final section of his book, Wolff analyses several of these fragments, paying close attention to the thematic ideas they convey and also to the contrapuntal and structural concepts already discernible in the measures or pages that remain. Many of these would have become the masterworks of the 1790s and even of the first decades of the nineteenth century; in Mozart's carefully kept thematic catalogue, he gives a beginning date of 1784 but leaves the closing date open not only with respect to decade but also century, indicating his assumption that he would still be alive and well after 1800 (p. 164). If Wolff's examination of these fragments makes us regret the composer's untimely death all the more, it also offers us a provisional window onto music we cannot hear in completed form but that bears witness to Mozart's ongoing experimentation in the musical art.

Judging from the list of previous publications included in this volume, Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune counts as the twenty-fifth book published by Professor Wolff. Many of these appear on the bookshelves of most musicologists and serious music aficionados, and this book – featuring Wolff's combination of meticulous research and musical insight – demands a place alongside his other masterpieces. Let's consider this a major contribution to Wolff's own Middle Period and look forward to a long and productive Late Style.