Mozart vs Clementi, Mozart vs Bachmann, and Mozart in America

In early Nov 1766, as the Mozart family neared the end of its long European tour of 1763–1766, 10-year-old Wolfgang engaged in a contest on the organ with 12-year-old prodigy Joseph Sigmund Eugen Bachmann. The only known source documenting this event is a short biography of Bachmann published by Johann Friedrich Christmann in the Musikalische Korrespondenz in Nov 1790, twenty-four years after the fact, but probably based on information provided by Bachmann. Christmann’s article seems to place the contest in Babenhausen, very far out of the Mozarts’ way on their journey home. In 1948, Ernst Fritz Schmid argued persuasively that the contest must instead have taken place at the pilgrimage church in Biberbach, directly on the Mozarts’ route between Dillingen and Augsburg, and Biberbach has come to be universally accepted as the actual location of the duel.

However, Schmid overlooked Christmann’s own correction published in the Musikalische Korrespondenz in May 1791, which already placed the contest in Biberbach, probably based on a correction conveyed to him by Bachmann himself. Our commentary on Christmann’s correction unravels Schmid’s ungrounded speculation on the background of the encounter, and it presents a little-known account from 1762 of the (allegedly) miraculous cure of Mozart’s gravely-ill aunt Maria Anna Mozart, following an appeal to the “Herrgöttle von Biberbach”, a depiction of Christ on the cross in the church in Biberbach.

The piano duel on Christmas Eve 1781 between Mozart and Clementi in the presence of Emperor Joseph II and Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna of Russia is one of the most famous events in the lives of both musicians, but its documentary sources have not been carefully evaluated. The anecdote we present here stems from Mozart’s friend Giuseppe Antonio Bridi, who sang Idomeneo in the 1786 production of that opera in Vienna. Bridi’s anecdote about the duel has long been dismissed by scholars, but it is, in fact, the earliest published account to describe the contest in any detail: it appeared in 1827, the year before Mozart’s own description of the duel was first published in Nissen’s biography. Bridi’s account is consistent with Mozart’s, but he includes details that Mozart omits. According to Bridi, the duel was the result of a wager between Joseph and the grand duchess, with Joseph championing Mozart and the grand duchess Clementi. Bridi also writes that Mozart, when his turn came, improvised variations on a theme from the sonata that Clementi had just played, his Sonata in B-flat, op. 24/2. Our commentary re-evaluates all of the known documentary sources on the duel and sketches a new account collating the most reliable sources.

We have also added a brief anecdote from Bridi to the end of our entry “Paisiello and Idomeneo”: Bridi writes that Mozart sometimes composed so quickly that he needed at least two copyists to keep up with him. Minor modifications have also been made to our entry (8 Oct 1782) on the visits of the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia, in order to make that entry correspond to our new one on the Mozart-Clementi duel.

The two earliest documented performances of Mozart’s music in the United States have been known since Oscar Sonneck’s classic Early Concert Life in America, published in 1907. Both took place during Mozart’s lifetime: a piano sonata, almost certainly performed by Alexander Reinagle, at a concert in Philadelphia on 14 Dec 1786; and a “Duett” for piano and violin in New York City on 6 Oct 1789, again with Reinagle almost certainly on the piano. Neither performance is included in Dokumente or its supplements. Reinagle emigrated from Britain to America in mid 1786, and he may have performed relatively recent works by Mozart brought or imported from London.