Georg Nikolaus Von Nissen - Nissen's Biography of Mozart

Nissen's Biography of Mozart

Nissen's work attempted to achieve a compromise between Niemetschek's and Schlichtegroll's point of view. He attempted to document everything that had been written about Mozart so far and to deliver an accurate description of Mozart's life based on primary sources, namely the letters of the Mozart family. Also, he had a direct witness as a source, his wife Constanze Mozart, who committed Mozart's inheritance to him.

Nissen deserves credit most of all for his efforts to collect all documents concerning Mozart, starting with the Mozart family's letters and including commemorative coins and monuments. Admittedly, he treated the written sources rather generously and edited some passages, especially from Mozart's letters. (For one instance of Nissen's bowdlerizations, see Aloysia Weber.) However, he did so not to deform Mozart's image, but because of "biographical respect". In the foreword to his biography he explains:

There is a need for a lot of selection to extract something attractive and characteristic in the letters, which can be offered to the public, without harming the fame and the esteem of the name-human. ... One desires not to, one must not show one's hero publicly in the way in which he portrayed himself in evenings of familiarity. By all truth, one can harm his fame, his esteem, and the impression of his works.

Later biographers often attempted to revert Nissen's "biographic respect", not because of disrespect for Mozart, but for the sake of scholarly accuracy.

Another possible source of inaccuracy in the biography is Constanze. According to Maynard Solomon, she "had developed an interest in exaggerating Mozart's generosity, poverty, and lack of recognition, and so, in Nissen's biography, she validated many false reports--primarily those originating with Friedrich Rochlitz--bearing on such matters, including those alleging that he was taken advantage of by impresarios, publishers, and fellow musicians."