Leopold Mozart was ultimate pushy stage father

It's Father's Day, and you're thinking about your own dad - that great guy who helped you build model planes and dollhouses, who patiently taught you how to fly a kite or make sandwiches with ingredients that never occurred to Martha Stewart.

Not all fathers are of the dear-old-Dad sort immortalized in Norman Rockwell paintings, however.

Consider the case of Leopold Mozart, one of musical history's most intriguingly complicated fathers. A composer, musician, promoter and (above all) the original stage dad, Leopold earned his immortality as the father of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - a parental role that filled him with pride, envy, frustration, adoration and a host of other emotions that never were fully resolved.

Leopold made Wolfgang into the family cash cow, shoving him relentlessly on transcontinental tours at an age when other youngsters learn to read and write; he also adoringly nurtured him, bragged about him and lived for the reflected glory of Wolfgang's almost incomprehensible musical genius.

Quite a guy, in fact: a megafather, one whose sense of his own role overpowered everything else in Leopold's life. And inescapably, a father whose smothering dedication created ill will where he least wanted it: in his rebellious son, who cast him off so decidedly that the discord was never healed in Leopold's lifetime.

Leopold would have been a minor footnote in 18th-century music history all on his own; he was a respected musician and the author of a "Fundamental Violin Method" that became the most influential violin treatise of its time; it was translated into French and Dutch as well.

The treatise was written just before the birth of Wolfgang in 1756, but only three years later, Leopold found his true vocation: the extraordinary talent of his own toddler. At 3, Wolfgang was listening to the clavier lessons of his older sister Nannerl, and imitating her at the instrument so successfully that he was mastering new pieces faultlessly within an hour's span by the age of 4 (learning a new minuet took only 30 minutes). At the same age, he began playing the violin and composed a clavier concerto that astonished Leopold and his friends.

Leopold told himself and others that it was his "duty to God" to publicize Wolfgang's prodigious gifts, especially before Wolfgang reached "an age and physical growth that would no longer attract admiration for his achievements."

The adoring Wolfgang, who declared that "right after God comes Papa," was happy to assent; besides, he loved to play and to meet people. He was a confident, spirited and (as one biographer put it) "outrageously bright" child who seemed never to suffer stage fright, even when playing for empresses and princes. Indeed, he hopped into the lap of the empress Maria Theresa at her castle in Schonbrunn, and "vigorously kissed her."

Wolfgang was just 5 when the family pushed off on his first concert tour, from Salzburg to Munich. At 6, much longer and arduous tours were undertaken, with Wolfgang performing several concerts a day as the carriage galloped from engagement to engagement. The 6-year-old was required to play the clavier, improvise, sight-read, sing and perform various tricks (such as playing on a keyboard covered with a cloth, and proving his absolute pitch by naming the notes of bells, clocks and pocket watches). The rewards began to pour in: gold-trimmed suits, snuffboxes, objets d'art and cold, hard cash.

Wolfgang paid a heavy price for all this touring. He was frequently sick, sometimes near death, from a succession of illnesses, from colds and scarlet fever to rheumatic fever and smallpox.

Jolting along the rutted unpaved roads in the rain, mingling with the crowds assembled for his performances, and occasionally speeding the family's progress through customs by beguiling the officers with his violin, little Wolfgang was lucky to survive those touring years. The stresses were constant: when Wolfgang was 7, the Mozarts took off on a tour that lasted three and a half years.

Nor was Leopold very sympathetic when his son got sick at just the wrong moment. After Wolfgang's dangerous bout with scarlet fever, Leopold wrote to one friend: "Hypothetically calculated, this adventure (the illness) has cost me fifty ducats."

Leopold's life was devoted to the conniving, strategizing and promotion involved in winning new audiences, admirers, commissions and jobs for his gifted son. Inevitably, as the high-spirited and intelligent Wolfgang grew older, he became more and more eager to cast off Leopold's suffocating control. When Leopold was required to stay behind in Salzburg in order to attend to his own affairs, the 21-year-old Wolfgang took off on another tour with only his easily-manipulated mother to accompany him.

"Leopold's influence receded with every league," Mozart biographer Maynard Solomon writes; Leopold was "stripped of his magic power . . . reduced to almost Lear-like apoplectic rages, post after post laying bare his new, fallen, and helpless condition. Wolfgang had suddenly spun out of his orbit and beyond his control."

That control, of course, would never return. Leopold's letters over the next several years are full of beseeching pleas for information, contact and love, but they also are full of threats and admonishments.

"I am heartily sick of writing so much," he declares in one letter; "in the past fifteen months I have, and to no purpose, almost written my eyes out of my head. Your head refuses to give up the idea of establishing yourself in Munich. Don't you understand that it doesn't accord with our interests?"

Wolfgang, in turn, was resentful of his father's financial control: "Where might I have learned the value of money since to this day I have had so little of it in my hands?" he writes. Well into Wolfgang's middle 20s, his father continued to keep his money, even commissions for Wolfgang's operas and his performance earnings. He never was allowed to keep a penny of all the money for which he toured and worked so assiduously, and he still was expected to pour his earnings into Leopold's coffers as a young adult. Leopold also kept Wolfgang's compositions, though the son frequently asked for their return.

Worst of all, Wolfgang was in love, with a young woman his father found quite unsuitable (though whether Leopold would have approved any romantic alliance is certainly questionable). Leopold was "affronted beyond measure" when his son finally married Constanze Weber.

Wolfgang still wanted his approval, especially when the couple's first child was born, but Leopold refused to come to Vienna for the christening, even after receiving a letter depicting Wolfgang "falling to my knees, folding my hands together, and, fittingly submissive, entreating you, my beloved father, to be godfather."

When Leopold died, he left all his money to Nannerl, dividing some personal property between the two siblings but leaving Nannerl all of Wolfgang's treasured musical scores. Wolfgang gave up all rights to the personal property and paid his sister to return to him his own scores.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Wolfgang's relationship with Nannerl turned distant. She had remained the "good daughter," so dutiful to Leopold that she actually gave him her firstborn son - also named Leopold - to raise. Nannerl and Leopold were hoping for another miraculous little Mozart, raised to greatness by the domineering grandfather who had done such a good job on Wolfgang.

It didn't happen. Little Leopold entered imperial service later on as a soldier, then joined the Salzburg army and finally became a customs officer. Did Little Leopold ever hear the tale of his virtuoso uncle speeding the family's way past customs officers along the Danube with an impromptu fiddle concert? We'll never know, but Leopold - always hoping to create a second Wolfgang - probably made sure that every pertinent story was told and retold.