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| Beethoven playing for Mozart - 19th Century artist unknown |
Beethoven was known to be a promising keyboard player as he grew up in Bonn. His father (also a musician) had made some efforts to promote him as a child prodigy, after hearing about Leopold Mozart’s success with the young Wolfgang. He progressed quickly, and by his mid-teens was employed as Court Organist.
Then, in the Spring of 1787, aged 16, Beethoven visited Vienna as he explored his prospects as a professional musician. Mozart, now 31, had been established in Vienna since leaving Salzburg in 1781 and was famous - at a productive and relatively successful stage of his life. The Marriage of Figaro had been warmly received in Vienna and Prague, and Don Giovanni would be a success the next year. If Beethoven did have a chance of meeting with him and receiving some tuition or recommendations, he would surely have taken it.
Accounts of the possible meeting differ, and scholars treat them with scepticism. The 19th-century biographer Otto Jahn said that he had it “on good authority” that Beethoven had played to Mozart and impressed him with his improvisation, but he gives no actual evidence for this. (More credible is his claim that Beethoven heard Mozart play, because Beethoven's student Carl Czerny told him that Beethoven had described Mozart’s keyboard style, saying he "had a fine but choppy way of playing, no ligato."
A more detailed account is given by the contemporary musician Ignaz von Seyfried, who could be considered an informed witness, given that he claimed to have been a pupil of Mozart’s and conducted the premiere of Beethoven’s Fidelio. His memoirs are considered reliable in other matters, but sadly this story isn’t considered infallible. For one thing, he places the meeting in 1790, which must be an error. Anyway, he wrote:
‘Beethoven made a short stay at Vienna, in the year 1790, whither he had gone for the sake of hearing Mozart, to whom he had letters of introduction. Beethoven improvised before Mozart, who listened with some indifference, believing it to be a piece learned by heart. Beethoven then demanded, with his characteristic ambition, a given theme to work out; Mozart, with a sceptical smile, gave him at once a chromatic motivo for a fugue, in which, al rovescio, the countersubject for a double fugue lay concealed. Beethoven was not intimidated, and worked out the subject, the secret intention of which he immediately perceived, at great length and with such remarkable originality and power that Mozart's attention was riveted, and his wonder so excited that he stepped softly into the adjoining room where some friends were assembled, and whispered to them with sparkling eyes: "Don't lose sight of this young man, he will one day tell you some things that will surprise you!" ‘
It sounds a little romanticised – perhaps too much the story we would want to be true. But it’s certainly very possible that they met, and, if so, Mozart would surely have recognised something special in the young man about whom people were already talking as a great talent - although one biographer (Maynard Solomon) speculates that Mozart heard Beethoven play but rejected him as a pupil because of his own preoccupations.
After some weeks in Vienna, Beethoven returned to Bonn to see his mother, who was in poor health and died in July. The next few years would be arduous for him as he helped support his family after his alcoholic father’s departure from court service.
Mozart’s fortunes worsened after 1787, although in his final years he produced some of his greatest works. He conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute in September 1791, but was dead of an illness by the end of the year.
Beethoven returned to Vienna in 1792 after getting to know Haydn, with whom he went on to study. His friend and supporter Count Waldstein wrote to him: "You are going to Vienna in fulfilment of your long-frustrated wishes ... With the help of assiduous labour you shall receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands."
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