Mozart and the London Bach: Allegro

Cover of Allegro by Ariel Dorfman, Other Press, 2025. Image source: Bookshop.org

Historical novelists set themselves a doubly difficult task: they must create not only an engaging fictional world, but one that is plausibly of a specific past time and place. This sets up two pitfalls which many historical novels fail to avoid: the first is characters whose function is all too clearly to explain things to the readers that the author assumes they do not know, and the second is jarring anachronism.

Indeed, over-explanatory characters are doubly problematic: they not only stretch our credulity, they are also almost always anachronistic. People take for granted the world in which they are living; they don't bother to explain it in detail to one another, because there's no need. When arranging a meeting with someone we might say "Text me when you arrive"; we wouldn't say "Alert me to your arrival by transmitting a short message from your personal handheld wireless communication device to my own."

Which brings us to some early passages from Ariel Dorfman's Allegro, a novel narrated from the point of view of none other than Wolfgang Mozart.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart attributed to Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni, ca. 1763. Image credit: Mozarteum, Salzburg. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Here are the remembered thoughts of the nine-year-old Mozart one February morning during his family's stay in London in 1765:

Today I would hear Maestro Bach present my symphony, the inaugural offering of so many—I could already envisage a long stretch of similar works ahead of me, I was already finishing the second and the third, I would start next week on the fourth symphony—today was the day, tonight the night. Oh, molto allegro my outlook, like the first movement of my first symphony, very joyful and buoyant. . . (p. 12)

But then he learns that his father Leopold is ill and so none of the Mozarts will be able to attend the concert. A letter dictated by his father is dispatched to

my protector, Baron Johann Christian Bach. . .Please ask Concert Master Bach to forgive our absence this evening at Carlisle House and at dinner later at Dean House, King's Square Court, where he and Herr Carl Friedrich Abel reside. . .The Allegro Molto's buoyancy had lapsed into the mournful strains of my Andante, a somber second movement that denied the playfulness of the first one. . . (pp. 13–14)

Would Mozart explain to himself the meaning of molto allegro and andante? Would Leopold inform J.C. Bach of his own address? And finally, the tempo indication of andante is "moderate" or "at a walking pace"; it doesn't necessarily imply "mournful" or "somber." I would call the second movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 1 "stately," "measured," or "reflective" rather than "mournful," but of course, musical affect is in the ear of the auditor:

https://youtu.be/gPDK9IE921Y

The performers are The English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock.

Wolfgang's fears of missing the première of his symphony turn out to be groundless: Johann Christian Bach comes in his carriage to take Mozart to the concert. Afterwards, Wolfgang is approached by a stranger:

. . .in a voice so squat that only he and I could harken to it, he scooted a question at me: "Can you keep a secret, Master Mozart?. . .You must swear that you will tell no one of this conversation," the man continued. "Save for one man, save for the London Bach, Johann Christian Bach, son of the incomparable Johann Sebastian, deceased these fifteen years," and his eyes scurried in the direction of the Kapellmeister, still standing close to the podium receiving congratulations for his own newest Sinfonia Concertante, written exclusively for this subscription series. (p. 9)

As you may have noticed, this passage is discordant in several ways:

• it's over-explanatory: Wolfgang knows perfectly well who "the London Bach" is and who his father was, and so doesn't need to be told by the stranger. And the information that J.C. Bach wrote music for the subscription concert series that he and Abel organized is extraneous.
• it's anachronistic: Johann Sebastian Bach would not be generally thought of as "incomparable" until the 19th century revival of his music. At this time he would more likely have been considered a somewhat old-fashioned, "learned" composer. Wolfgang's six sonatas for clavier and violin or flute had been dedicated the previous fall to Queen Charlotte with the words (probably written by Leopold), "With your help, I shall become as famous as any of my great countrymen; I shall become immortal like Handel and Hasse, and my name will be as famous as that of Bach." As Heinz Gärtner writes in his biography of Johann Christian, "less than a decade after Johann Sebastian Bach's death, when people talked about 'the famous Bach,' they did not mean the cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig; he had been virtually forgotten by then." There was only one famous Bach in London in the 1760s, and it was Johann Christian, not his father. [1]
• it includes some odd word choices. "A voice so squat": one meaning of "squat," according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is "hidden from sight; quiet, still." It's a stretch to use a term referring to someone trying to avoid being seen to describe a soft voice, and especially so since the meaning "quiet, still" dates from a dialect first recorded in the mid-19th century, a hundred years or so after this scene is supposed to take place. "Scooted a question" is also strange: all the meanings of "scoot" in the Shorter Oxford refer to physical movement, not to rapid or sudden speech. And "his eyes scurried in the direction of the Kapellmeister" again applies a metaphor of displacement in space to something that happens while both Wolfgang and his interlocuter are rooted to the spot, not to mention the disturbing mental images that are conjured if we take the metaphor literally.

A few pages later we witness Wolfgang waking up: "With one bound I was out of bed, jerked upright and in motion before my eyes draped themselves open. . ." (p. 12). To drape something, of course, is to cover it, not reveal it. Dorfman published the novel in Spanish a decade ago, and since no translator is credited, presumably he is the one who rendered it into occasionally awkward English.

Johann Christian Bach by Thomas Gainsborough, ca. 1776. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Oh, and one more thing. At the very beginning of the novel Dorfman offers an Author's Note: "In Allegro all musical offerings, dates, characters, and public events, with some minor exceptions, are factually true. Their existence may be consulted in the historical record." Well, I consulted the historical record about the very first scene of the first chapter, the première of Wolfgang's Symphony No. 1 at a Bach-Abel concert on 2 February 1765. I found that "there is no evidence that Wolfgang Amadeus appeared at the Bach-Abel concerts." [2]

The first performance of his first symphony likely took place at a concert organized by Leopold on 21 February 1765 at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. A notice in the Public Advertiser announcing a "Concert for the Benefit of Miss and Master Mozart" stated that "all the Overtures will be from the Composition of these astonishing Composers, only eight years old." [3] (Wolfgang's sister Nannerl was 13, and he was 9.) Stanley Sadie notes that "the term [overtures] is interchangeable at this date, in England, with 'symphonies.'" [4] It seems unlikely that Wolfgang's first symphony would have been given to J.C. Bach to perform three weeks earlier. And J.C. Bach would not have been present at the Mozart's 21 February concert, as he and Abel were giving another concert in their series on the same evening.

Nannerl, by the way, is virtually absent from the novel, although she performed along with Wolfgang, and was the copyist for his compositions. She even may have played a role in the structure of the first symphony. She later remembered,

In London, when our father lay ill and close to death [in the summer of 1764], we were not allowed to touch the clavier. So, to occupy himself, Mozart composed his first symphony with all the instruments, above all with trumpets and drums. I had to sit by him and copy it out. As he composed, and I copied, he said to me: 'Remind me to give the horns something worthwhile to do'. . . [5]

Maria Anna (Nannerl) Mozart attributed to Pietro Antonio Lorenzoni, ca. 1763. Image credit: Mozarteum, Salzburg. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

In his description of Symphony No. 1 (we don't actually know in which order Mozart composed his early symphonies), Sadie notes that "there are no trumpets and drums as specified by Nannerl—unless, as is not uncommon, the parts for those instruments were separately written out [and have been lost]. . .Conceivably, the four-note horn phrase beginning on bar 14 [of the second movement] could be a consequence of the reminder from Nannerl; this pattern (in C major, C–D–F–E) is heavy with significance for the later Mozart, most famously in his last symphony but elsewhere as well." [6] (The horn phrase begins around 0:24 in the YouTube recording by The English Concert linked above, and recurs at least twice more in the first 2:45.)

Allegro is framed as a mystery. A man's reputation is at stake, and Wolfgang is asked to effect a reconciliation, or at least a meeting, between J.C. Bach and the son of the oculist John Taylor. Taylor, whom Samuel Johnson is reported to have called "an instance [of] how far impudence could carry ignorance," operated on the eyes of both J.S. Bach and Handel. [7] In both cases, Taylor's treatment resulted in his patients' partial blindness becoming total; in Bach's case, it likely contributed to his death a few months later.

Mezzotint of John Taylor by John Faber Jr, after Paul Ryche (Riche), 1756. Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG  D40851. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

The choice of Bach and Handel (and hundreds of other unfortunates) to undergo an agonizingly painful procedure that they must have known would almost certainly fail is the "mystery" which Allegro attempts to solve. But is any reason other than their utter desperation needed? In proffering an unconvincing explanation for these tragic real-life events, Allegro reminded me too often of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus—a comparison which from me does not constitute praise.

Ultimately Allegro leaves us with Wolfgang's homily: "'I think the answer is always music. I think we must seek answers there when we are most lost, most bereft'" (p. 201). But for me music does not provide answers, but rather poses insoluble questions.

Perhaps the best thing about the novel is its concluding "Playlist Companion to Allegro" of the music that "inspired the author as he wrote and that accompanied the characters as they lived their real and fictional lives" (Author's Note). Any opportunity to explore (or renew acquaintance with) the music of Mozart, Handel, J.S. Bach, J.C. Bach, and Carl Friedrich Abel is recommendable; if only Dorfman's novel were more so.

From the playlist, the first movement, andante, of J.C. Bach's Sinfonia Concertante in C major, C 36a, performed by The Hanover Band conducted by Anthony Halstead. The cello solos may have been played originally by Abel:

https://youtu.be/dHYBns6DtYI [the first movement ends at 10:55].

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1. Heinz Gärtner, John Christian Bzch: Mozart's Friend and Mentor, translated by Reinhard G. Pauly, Amadeus Press, 1994, p. ix. 
2. Christoph Wolff and Stephen Roe, "Bach, Johann [John] Christian," Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.6002278196 (subscription required).
3. Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart, A Documentary Biography, Stanford University Press, 1965, pp. 41–42.
4. Stanley Sadie, Mozart: The Early Years, 1756–1781, W.W. Norton, 2006, p. 69.
5. Quoted in Sadie, p. 65. After Nannerl produced a clean copy of the full score, Leopold later wrote out the orchestral parts.
6. Sadie, pp. 82-83.
7. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Second Edition, Revised and Augmented, Vol. 3, 1793, p. 184. https://archive.org/details/lifeofsamueljoh03boswuoft/page/184/mode/1up