Mozart and Palladio

Could Mozart and Palladio not have met?

Like many of the greats, they too met: of course, not physically, not historically. More precisely, it was Mozart who met Palladio, during his visit to the city that had adopted the Paduan stonemason, when he had been his contemporary.

It happened 253 years ago, on March 14, 1771.

Mozart is concluding his very successful tour in Italy, obviously together with his father Leopoldo.

Wolfgang is in fact 15 years old, and already famous. The trip, the first of three on the peninsula, visits Milan, Rome, Naples, Bologna, Turin among others, in a blaze of recognition. Italy, still in its stubborn fragmentation, knows how to appreciate art and is more generous with the prodigy musician than the imperial court.

Works had been commissioned from him, concerts were continuous, money and prizes had been collected.

The pope awarded him the order of the Golden Spur, despite Mozart having transcribed Allegri's Miserere from memory, not yet published but owned by the Sistine Chapel.

The Mozarts arrive in Venice for the carnival, guests of the Corner family. And it is very likely that it was during a dinner at Palazzo Corner that they received an invitation from the bishop of Vicenza, Marco Giuseppe Cornaro, to stop in the Palladian city on their way home, between Padua and Verona.

The bishop gives the teenager a beautiful snuffbox, which with a certain probability could be the same one that a now penniless Mozart will use twenty years later, already at the end of a life full of genius and recklessness.

But let's go back to the years of his youth, and the meeting with Vicenza.

Leopold writes that he "has to stay two or three days" in the Berica city because his Excellency will not let them "pass without stopping to eat at his place".

We don't know what Mozart did in those two days, between 14 and 16 March, in our Vicenza. We know that the father writes: "Tomorrow, the 15th, we will stay here in Vicenza, not without reason." If this reason had to do with the extraordinary architecture of Palladio, as a Goethe who knew the Mozarts noted a few years later, we can only imagine.

We like to think, in any case, that a Mozart encountered the stone music of another genius in the history of art, recognizing and enjoying the sublime in its harmony.

As can only be done in person.

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