Mozart Contemporaries / The Weber Women
Agnes Selby, Guest Writer
Die WeberischeFraun - Those Weber women — is the derogatory way in which Mozart historians maliciously refer to Mozart's wife, her mother and her sisters. In this they are influenced by Leopold Mozart, whose fear of losing the power he had exercised over his son's destiny prompted him to hate the Weber women well before he met them. Although Leopold saw them in a different light when he finally met them in Vienna, German historians have attached great importance to his early, most prejudiced statements and added to them the venom of their own imagination.In 1945, in Mozart, His Character, His Work, the renowned German scholar and critic Alfred Einstein wrote with unscholarly prejudice:"the Weber family embodied the evil and demoniac element which he could never escape; which would never loosen its hold upon him even after death......"
Agnes Selby, Guest Writer
Die WeberischeFraun - Those Weber women — is the derogatory way in which Mozart historians maliciously refer to Mozart's wife, her mother and her sisters. In this they are influenced by Leopold Mozart, whose fear of losing the power he had exercised over his son's destiny prompted him to hate the Weber women well before he met them. Although Leopold saw them in a different light when he finally met them in Vienna, German historians have attached great importance to his early, most prejudiced statements and added to them the venom of their own imagination.In 1945, in Mozart, His Character, His Work, the renowned German scholar and critic Alfred Einstein wrote with unscholarly prejudice:"the Weber family embodied the evil and demoniac element which he could never escape; which would never loosen its hold upon him even after death......"