Friedrich Schlichtegroll
Adolf Heinrich Friedrich Schlichtegroll (8 December 1765 in
Sources
Schlichtegroll had never met Mozart. To obtain information about him, he consulted a friend of Mozart's in Salzburg, Albert von Mölk, who in turn queried Mozart's sister Maria Anna Mozart ("Nannerl").[2] Nannerl's written reply to his queries survives.[3] Nannerl also contacted Johann Andreas Schachtner, an old Mozart family friend from the time of Wolfgang's childhood, and he replied with a kindly letter filled with anecdotes and memories, which Nannerl duly forwarded; Schachtner's remarks also survived and can be read today.[3]
Since none of these people was very close to Mozart after 1781 (the year he left Salzburg for Vienna), Schlichtegroll's biography is weighted toward the earlier period (i.e. first 25 years) of Mozart's life.[2]
Rival biographic traditions
Schlichtegroll's biography competed with another early work by
Assessment
Some modern scholars take a dim view of Schlichtegroll's work. Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe vividly depict him as the first in a long and dubious tradition:
the tradition of depicting Mozart as a strange mixture of angel and beast, Tamino and Papageno: sublime where his music was concerned, but pathetically inadequate in worldly matters.[5]
Bruce Cooper Clarke, who has compiled an extensive web-posted commentary on Schlichtegroll's work, assesses him thus:
The debt posterity owes to Friedrich Schlichtegroll is mixed. On the one hand, because he asked questions not long after Mozart had died and offered the prospect of publication, Mozart's sister and others who were acquainted with the composer were led to put something of their remembrances in writing, reminiscences that otherwise might never have been recorded. On the other hand, through his handling of these materials, Schlichtegroll gave a powerful start to the formation of an "eternal-child" myth that, despite its irrelevance and wrongheadedness, has intruded ever since on every effort of Mozart biography to see its subject whole.[6]
Notes
References
- Bruce Cooper Clarke, "The annotated Schlichtegroll". Complete German text with extensive English annotations and commentary.
- Deutsch, Otto Erich (1965) Mozart: A Documentary Biography. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Quotes only a brief section of the Nekrolog obituary, but includes all of Nannerl's report to Schlichtegroll.
- ISBN 978-0-521-85659-1.
- Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, online edition. Oxford University Press.
- Schlichtegroll, Friedrich (1793) "Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart", in Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1791 [Necrology for the year 1791] (Gotha, 1793), ed. L. Landshoff (Munich, 1924); published as Mozarts Leben [Mozart's Life] (Graz, 1974)
Further reading
- Solomon, Maynard(1995) Mozart: A Life. Harper Collins.
External links
- Richard Hoche (1890), "Schlichtegroll, Friedrich von", Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (in German), vol. 31, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 484–487