The Scots who helped mould Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

IT is 1764 and we are in St Martin’s Lane in London where you can find the music shop of James Oswald. You should know all about him by now. Further up St Martin’s Lane, at a “Harecutter” called Couzin in Cecil Court, there is a middle-aged Austrian couple and their two children, in lodgings. The children’s names are Wolfgang and Marianne and their surname is Mozart.

Wolfgang is eight years of age and is already something of an international celebrity, notwithstanding the fact that his father is no more than a liveried musical servant to the Archbishop of Salzburg. He has extended leave to show off the talents of his son around Europe. They visit King George III and his Queen, in May and October. Wolfgang plays the violin, but not as well as his father; he composes, but not as his father would like him to for, no sooner is his father’s back turned by illness than Mozart’s sketches start into more ambitious fields; but above all he is a keyboard player, at which instrument he improvises on whatever tune is put in front of him.

But what then? Perhaps the King has a copy of the Twelve Serenatas composed by Oswald after his appointment as Chamber composer to His Majesty. Might he not have placed the parts on the music stands, for Wolfgang and Leopold on violins, and Oswald on cello, to perform? Not that Leopold mentions Oswald in his diaries of their visit to London – but why should he? Oswald was just a jumped-up servant like himself, not a Milord this or a Milady that and not, like John Abel and JC Bach, an imported musical virtuoso. No, Mr Oswald is a minor figure unworthy of note, until, that is, you hear his music.

A more likely encounter is with Lord Kellie, who was responsible for a major change in musical taste in London only three years before Mozart’s arrival there. This change is remembered as late as 1825 in Thomas Busby’s “Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes”: “Till the tumid extravaganzas of Stamitz and Lord Kelly were adopted, the elegant and well-conducted fugues of these [Boyce’s] sonatas continued to contribute to the bill-of-fare of every public concert and, as inter-act pieces, to be listened to with attention at the theatres.”

So when Mozart and his father did arrive, Kellie’s influence was already to the fore. By January 1765 the Mozarts have been in London for nine months. They are taking it all in. Going to the theatre, the opera, visiting the aristocracy, and generally showing off whenever they can. This is an expensive business trip, and the books have to be balanced. One must be seen in the right places and, for them all, it is also a feast of listening. What’s on? A major new production called The Maid Of The Mill, opening in Covent Garden on the 31st.

The Maid Of The Mill was a pastiche. JC Bach contributed two numbers, and many others were pressed into service – Pergolesi, Philidor, Jomelli, and even the late Elector of Saxony. But the honour of composing the Overture went to another aristocrat, namely Kellie. Now we don’t know that the Mozarts went to The Maid Of The Mill, but if they didn’t, they certainly missed out on one of the biggest and most important shows in town at the height of the season, so it’s my guess they did go.

Kellie’s first movement was the inspiration for a JC Bach Symphony in B flat, composed some years later – and old Bach’s son, JC Bach, will surely have been there too. After all, he had two numbers in the show. Now it is an accepted fact that JC Bach was an important influence on young Mozart. Not, mind you, that Kellie didn’t indulge in a bit of borrowing and re-working himself. It was par for the course in those days. It was how you learnt. You learnt by copying. That’s how little Wolfgang learnt. Could he have learnt from Kellie too? The opening of his 5th Symphony K22 is in B flat major like the Kellie and it was composed in December 1765, in the Hague, not long after he had left London. This seems to be the first time he used a Mannheim crescendo in a symphony and he does so in a very similar manner to that of Kellie. For his own last movement young Amadeus lifted the tune from a JC Bach keyboard concerto.

No close study of the whole of Kellie’s surviving output is available. Much of his music has yet to receive modern performances. So nobody has considered the possibility that Kellie was an influential figure in the development of the classical style, or specifically an influence on young Mozart.

hudi family portrait of Burkhardt, Katharina and sons Joshua and Burkat by Marcus Tuscher, 1742

KELLIE wasn’t the only Scot nine-year-old Mozart might meet in London. Mozart is a brilliant keyboard player and it is for his keyboard playing that he gets his public acclaim, more than anything else. What kind of keyboards? – well, spinets and harpsichords. The piano was only just about to burst upon the scene. So off he goes with his father on the 13th of May, 1765, to 33 Great Pulteney Street to visit Mr Shudi in his workshop and salerooms, for Mr Shudi makes keyboards. Leopold writes his name down in his diary: “Mr Tschudi Claviermacher in Pulteney Street neer Brewer Street”.

Mr Shudi is not a Scot. But his chief assistant and future son-in-law most certainly is. His name is John Broadwood and he is a third-generation joiner and cabinet-maker from Cockburnspath. He’s in his early thirties and has already been working for four years with Mr Shudi, who is now 63 and is looking for a successor, for his own son seems to have been more of a sleeping partner who eventually left the firm entirely in John Broadwood’s hands.

There were two great harpsichord makers in London at this time – Kirkman and Shudi. Why did the Scot, John Broadwood end up with Shudi? He must have had some kind of introduction. The answer is probably in the Prince of Wales feathers which Shudi displayed above his door. The Prince of Wales had been his patron. He had also been the patron of James Oswald whose music shop had been just down the road from the Mozart’s lodgings. The Prince of Wales was at odds with his father, George II, so Kirkman’s Royal coat of arms above his shop was a symbol of more than trade rivalry. People took sides in the royal wrangles. In those days it seems the Scots gravitated towards the household of the Prince of Wales. It is likely that Kellie would also have done so. After all, he had gone abroad to study music partly because his father had forfeited the family estates having come out with Bonnie Prince Charlie. So Kellie would probably have patronised Shudi rather than Kirkman. There were then, at least two likely Scottish sources of introduction to Shudi for an ambitious young Scot hoping for a place in the trade. We know that Mozart played a Shudi-Broadwood instrument on the 13th May at a concert promoted by the family themselves. Wolfgang had also tried out a Shudi harpsichord destined for Frederick the Great, and we shall see that he was later to play a Shudi-Broadwood instrument in Naples.

One of the sorrows of being a professional musician in the mid-eighteenth century was that you were largely dependent upon the favours of the aristocracy for your bread and butter, and you therefore had not only to put up with these people, but to cultivate them and learn to smile with gratitude when your reward for playing your socks off for two hours was a useless silver watch that no longer kept time. That happened to Mozart often enough; but not all the aristocrats were like that and, as a boy, Mozart could have learnt a lot musically from the Earl of Kellie – and a good deal else besides if Kellie’s reputation as a bon viveur does him justice.

A SCOTTISH aristocrat whom we know the Mozarts visited was, as Leopold has it, Mr MiLord March. The Earl of March, later fourth Duke of Queensberry, was a noted patron of musicians at his London house in Piccadilly, especially foreigners and singers, – when he was not betting and racing at Newmarket, in which he was no doubt joined by the Earl of Kellie’s friend, Lord Stanley, who owned the Oaks at Epsom. It was said of March that he had an ear for music and displayed great taste in a song, and a likely guest in his household (and one whom we know the Mozarts met) would have been the great castrato singer, Tenducci. Tenducci was a friend both of the Earl of Kellie and JC Bach. He was also keen on singing Scottish songs, just as JC Bach was keen on arranging them, so we may be pretty sure that the Mozarts will have heard something at least based on Scottish traditional music during their stay.

The Mozarts also visited Alexander Montgomery, 10th Earl of Eglintoun, who was a keen amateur musician. I don’t know the exact date of their visit, but Leopold Mozart has him on his list of people visited as Mr Milord Eglinton. In 1764-5, the 10th Earl was one of George III’s Lords of the bedchamber. He was a founder member of the London Catch Club (a Catch is a kind of part-song), which started life in 1761, and his cousin Hugh, later to become the 12th Earl, was also an amateur musician. Hugh was about 26 when the Mozarts were in London, but his duets for two flutes or violins date from rather later, as do his New Strathspey Reels Composed by a Gentleman and published by Nathaniel Gow in 1796. You see from this title that among the Scots, including the aristocracy, music was music before it was a social statement and, by the same token, the more aristocratic Minuet was favoured by many Scottish fiddlers – notably William Marshall.

Kellie’s Minuets were especially good, thoroughly varied, and apparently well-travelled, as shown by the one I mentioned a couple of weeks ago which appears uniquely in the Washington family’s papers. So it is entirely possible that Mozart heard a Kellie minuet or two during his London visit. But that’s enough of London. Next week we’ll be in Naples. We could be doing with the sun.