Mozart
A Life
Chapter OneLeopold Mozart
When Leopold Mozart died in 1787 at the age of sixty-seven, Lorenz Hagenauer's son, Dominikus Hagenauer, wrote in his diary that his father's late friend had been "a man of much wit and sagacity, who would have been capable of rendering good service to the State even apart from music," but that he "had the misfortune of being always persecuted here and was by far less beloved here than in other, greater places in Europe."1 By several accounts, Mozart's father was a hard man to like. Nissen wrote, "In Salzburg he was regarded as a sardonic humorist."2 His acerbic and dissatisfied nature was no secret to foreign observers either, among whom he acquired the reputation of being perpetually discontented. It is important to find the sources of this discontent, for it powered his restless, unrelenting search for fulfillment and thereby became central to his family's sense of purpose and obligation.
Leopold Mozart sprang from a family of artisans who had lived for generations in the South G ... read full excerpt from: Mozart ebook
