Adolf Heinrich Friedrich Schlichtegroll (8 December 1765 in

Waltershausen Waltershausen is a town in the south-western part of the district of Gotha in the state of Thuringia, Germany. Geography Geographic location Located on the verge of the Thuringian Basin just before the Thuringian Forest, Waltershausen is so ...

– 4 December 1822 in

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...

) was a teacher, scholar and the first biographer of

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 17565 December 1791), baptised as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition r ...

. His brief account of Mozart's life (6000 words) was published in a volume of twelve obituaries Schlichtegroll prepared and called ''Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1791'' ("

Necrology An obituary ( obit for short) is an article about a recently deceased person. Newspapers often publish obituaries as news articles. Although obituaries tend to focus on positive aspects of the subject's life, this is not always the case. Ac ...

for the year 1791"). The book appeared in 1793, two years after Mozart's death.

Sources

Schlichtegroll had never met Mozart. To obtain information about him, he consulted a friend of Mozart's in

Salzburg Salzburg (, ; literally "Salt-Castle"; bar, Soizbuag, label=Bavarian language, Austro-Bavarian) is the List of cities and towns in Austria, fourth-largest city in Austria. In 2020, it had a population of 156,872. The town is on the site of the ...

, Albert von Mölk, who in turn queried Mozart's sister

Maria Anna Mozart Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart (30 July 1751 – 29 October 1829), called "Marianne" and nicknamed Nannerl, was a musician, the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and daughter of Leopold (1719–1787) and Anna Maria Moz ...

("Nannerl").Eisen and Keefe, 337 Nannerl's written reply to his queries survives.Printed in Deutsch (1965); see under "1792" 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. Since none of these people was very close to Mozart after 1781 (the year he left Salzburg for

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

), Schlichtegroll's biography is weighted toward the earlier period (i.e. first 25 years) of Mozart's life.

Rival biographic traditions

Schlichtegroll's biography competed with another early work by

Franz Niemetschek Franz Xaver Niemetschek ( cz, František Xaver Němeček, links=no; pl, Niemeczek, links=no) (24 July 1766 – 19 March 1849) was a Czech philosopher, teacher and music critic. He wrote the first full-length biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozar ...

, which relied on the testimony of Mozart's widow Constanze. The Schlichtegroll biography is relatively harsh on the role Constanze played in Mozart's life, as might be expected given Nannerl's antipathy to Constanze; for details see

. According to the ''

Grove Dictionary of Music ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theor ...

'', "Constanze bought up and destroyed the entire edition of the ''Nekrolog'' (the publication containing Schlichtegroll's obituary), apparently disliking its portrayal of her."

Assessment

Some modern scholars take a dim view of Schlichtegroll's work.

Cliff Eisen Cliff Eisen (born 21 January 1952 in Toronto) is a Canadian musicologist and a Mozart expert. He was based in the Department of Music at King's College London. He studied at the University of Toronto and at Cornell University, and has taught at the ...

and

Simon P. Keefe Simon Patrick Keefe (born 24 December 1968) is a musicologist, author, and Mozart expert. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, Boston University and Columbia University. After being awarded his PhD in 1997, he was appointed to a lectur ...

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.

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.Clarke

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. * Eisen, Cliff and

''The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia''. Cambridge University Press. . *''

Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theo ...

'', online edition. Oxford University Press. *Schlichtegroll, Friedrich (1793) "Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart", in ''Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1791'' ecrology for the year 1791(

Gotha Gotha () is the fifth-largest city in Thuringia, Germany, west of Erfurt and east of Eisenach with a population of 44,000. The city is the capital of the district of Gotha and was also a residence of the Ernestine Wettins from 1640 until the ...

, 1793), ed. L. Landshoff (Munich, 1924); published as ''Mozarts Leben'' ozart's Life(Graz, 1974)

External links