Mozart’s Professional Decline in Vienna

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s professional decline in Vienna is not a simple story of artistic failure: the play repeatedly sets his exceptional work against the meagre, unstable rewards it brings him. He can receive an imperial commission, write music Antonio Salieri recognizes as among the century’s finest, and gain a court appointment, yet still struggle to secure students, adequate pay, performances, and the support of influential patrons. His decline emerges from the gap between artistic value and the institutions that control access to work, money, and recognition.

Artistic Achievement and Uneven Recognition

The court initially entrusts Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with a comic opera in German, part of Joseph II’s wish to establish a national opera and hear works in German. The commission offers a conspicuous opportunity, but the play’s wider account of Mozart’s career makes clear that opportunity alone does not ensure security or lasting success. He is also shown asking for a stable position: when Count Orsini-Rosemberg prepares to leave, Mozart takes his arm, kisses his hand, and pleads for a place. He specifically hopes for a word of recommendation for the position of instructor to Princess Elizabeth. The gesture exposes how much his prospects depend on access to court intermediaries, not solely on composing ability.

The contrast sharpens in 1784 and 1785. Salieri says that he himself flourished and was considered the greatest composer, while Mozart wrote his finest piano concertos and string quartets. Haydn is reported to regard the quartets as unsurpassed, and Gottfried van Swieten to call the concertos sublime; Salieri insists that the works were scarcely heard or appreciated. Each concerto, in his account, was performed only once and then forgotten. By contrast, Salieri’s operas played widely and received applause. Mozart’s artistic achievement and his public standing therefore move on separate tracks: the music can be recognized as extraordinary by a few while failing to secure repeated performances or durable public attention.

Income, Patronage, and Court Employment

The material strain is made explicit by Constanze Mozart. She tells Salieri that the couple have neither money nor prospects, and that Mozart’s concerts do not pay enough. What he needs, she explains, is a dependable stream of pupils, especially pupils of distinction; she rejects the accusation that the household’s difficulties result from extravagance and asks Salieri not to disclose what she has told him. When she presses the need for a secure position at court, she points again to the opening for Princess Elizabeth’s music instructor and says that Salieri’s recommendation could secure it. Her account makes financial insecurity a practical problem of inadequate earnings and limited employment, rather than a consequence of deficient artistic activity.

Mozart later receives the court post that opens after Gluck’s death, but the appointment comes with a deliberately small salary. When Joseph II asks Salieri what Mozart should receive, Salieri proposes 200 florins rather than the 2,000 paid to Gluck, describing the lower sum as appropriate for smaller duties. The Emperor accepts the recommendation and thanks Salieri as Court Composer. The appointment thus gives Mozart an official position without providing income comparable to that of his predecessor. The institutional recognition is real, but its financial terms sharply restrict what it can do for him.

That same sequence brings a reversal for Salieri. After Mozart leaves, Salieri reflects that he has just damaged Mozart’s court career and yet is rewarded with his own most cherished wish: following Kapellmeister Bonno’s death, a royal decree names him First Imperial Kapellmeister of the court. The promotion places Salieri at the centre of the system that distributes court status and resources, while Mozart’s appointment remains modest. The contrast helps explain why Mozart’s professional fortunes cannot be measured by the mere fact of holding a court title.

Figaro: Restoration and Retrenchment

The career pattern also plays out through The Marriage of Figaro. Gottfried van Swieten condemns the subject as a vulgar farce, objecting to its servants, nobles, and disguises; Mozart defends his choice as an attempt to make an opera about real people in a real place. During the performance, the excised dance music leaves the dancers moving without orchestral accompaniment. Joseph II asks whether the silent interruption is modern, then orders Count Orsini-Rosemberg to restore Mozart’s music and insists that he wants to hear it complete. The Emperor’s intervention temporarily reverses the censorship and allows the disputed music to be heard.

That restoration does not secure the opera’s continuing place in the repertory. Salieri says he arranged, through the resentful opera director, for Figaro to be performed only nine times in the whole year. Mozart then announces that it has been withdrawn, with no prospect of revival. Salieri presents the public’s supposed distaste as a reason artists must accept the outcome gracefully, while audience complaints label the work too complicated, too heavy, and full of strange harmonies. In the play’s account, the opera’s limited run follows not just from reception but from Salieri’s deliberate intervention. The Emperor can reinstate a passage in one performance; that decision does not prevent the work from being pushed off the stage afterward.

Poverty, Masonic Support, and Isolation

The later reports reduce Mozart’s circumstances to a stark contrast with his earlier activity. Salieri asks whether Mozart earns money beyond his court post; the Venticelli say he earns nothing else and report that he is beginning to beg. They have heard that he wrote to twenty Masonic brethren, who are giving him money. Salieri realizes that this assistance may keep Mozart from starving and asks how he can bring that support to an end. The aid is both a lifeline and a source of dependence: Mozart needs private relief because the court salary and other earnings do not meet his needs.

The Masonic support is then compromised by a public breach. In the Lodge, Van Swieten rebukes Mozart for begging, saying that the institution was not created for that purpose and urging him to give concerts as before. Later, Van Swieten accuses him of exposing the Lodge’s rituals in a vulgar spectacle where everyone can see and laugh at them, and declares that Mozart has betrayed the Order. He refuses further conversation and leaves. Salieri watches Mozart turn away, then recognizes that the composer is now rejected by influential men. The rupture removes a source of fellowship as well as financial assistance; Salieri adds that Mozart did not even receive half the box-office receipts due to him for the opera. By this stage, court employment, performance income, patronage, and fraternal aid have all proved insufficient or precarious. The decline lies not in an absence of talent or work, but in the steady narrowing of the support on which a working composer’s career depends.