Titans of History (39 page)

Even the skeptics realized that no trickery lay behind the child's precocity. By the still tender age of thirteen, Wolfgang was an artist of unrivaled musical understanding, of whom Johann Hasse (1699–1783), one of the era's eminent composers, was said to have remarked that “he has done things which for such an age are really incomprehensible; they would be astonishing in an adult.”

Mozart's versatility was astounding. He wrote chamber music, operas, symphonies, masses; he virtually invented the solo piano concerto, and his use of counterpoint was as revelatory as his limpid melodies and subtle harmonic shifts. He composed with legendary speed—his magnificent “Jupiter” symphony, No. 41 in C Major, was written in a mere sixteen days, and he reportedly composed the overture to his opera
Don Giovanni
on the night before the work premiered. The range of his genius only increased over the years—from the exuberant violin concerti of his teens, dazzling operas such as
The Marriage of Figaro
and
The Magic Flute
, and masterpieces in late Classical style such as the Clarinet Quintet from 1789. His death at thirty-five left the musical world with the perpetual enigma of what might have been, had this sublimely talented composer lived to old age.

Fellow composers never wavered in their recognition of his genius. To Josef Haydn (1732–1809), the musical elder statesman of the time, he was “the greatest composer … either in person or by name,” while the “magic sounds of Mozart's music” left Franz Schubert (1797–1828) awestruck. The public response was more capricious. Some judged his last three symphonies “difficult,” and other works were criticized for being “audacious” or too complex. But he was held in high regard at the time of his death, and today layman and professional alike recognize what one conductor has described as “the seriousness in his charm, the loftiness in his beauty.”

Mozart's princely patrons were less deferential. Perennially short of money, Mozart's frustration at his lack of independence and his pitiful wages often led to stormy relations. From 1773 he was engaged to compose at the Salzburg court, but in 1781, summoned to produce music for Emperor Joseph II's court in Vienna, he was angry to find himself in the role of a servant, with a correspondingly meager salary. He angrily demanded his release, which was—as he wrote in a letter of June that year—granted “with a kick on my ass … by order of our worthy Prince Archbishop.”

Throughout his life, Mozart displayed the same mix of playfulness and seriousness that shines through his music. He was an affectionate child, and his difficult relationship with his domineering father led him to constantly seek approval: visiting Vienna, the six-year-old Mozart apparently jumped into Empress Maria Theresa's lap for a hug. The adult Mozart, always physically small, retained this childlike manner in his willful extravagance, his open and sometimes crude sexuality and the distinctive, scatological humor that had led the teenage Mozart to write to his first love: “Now I wish a good night, shit into your bed until it creaks.”

The composer for whom, as he put it, composing was the only “joy and passion” was no solitary genius. While in later years his relationship with his father deteriorated, his love for his wife,
Constanze, was abiding—despite Leopold's disapproval. Nevertheless, after Leopold's death in 1787 Mozart, now permanently in Vienna, went through a period when he composed less. Fearing poverty, he produced a stream of begging letters to patrons, acquaintances and his fellow Freemasons. While never destitute, Mozart had to rely on income from teaching and performances of his works. He lived beyond his means, having a weakness for fashionable clothes while also paying off debts to friends and publishers.

Mozart's last composition, the Requiem that became his own, is surrounded by mystery. Legend has it that Salieri, a jealous fellow composer, poisoned Mozart as he worked frantically on this composition, which had been anonymously commissioned by letter. But an acute attack of rheumatic fever (and a noble patron intent on passing off Mozart's compositions as his own) is probably nearer the truth. Even so, Mozart's modest burial—although not quite the pauper's of repute—sealed the myth of the neglected genius.

1758–94

That man will go far, he believes everything he says
.

Comte de Mirabeau on Robespierre at the outset of the Revolution

Maxmilien Robespierre was the prototype for the modern European dictator: his sanctimonious vision of republican virtue and terror, and the brutal slaughter he unleashed in its name, were
studied reverently by the Russian Bolsheviks and helped inspire the totalitarian mass killings of the 20th century. Known as the Sea-green Incorruptible, his name has become a byword for the fatal purity and degenerate corruption of the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution of 1789 and climaxed with the execution of King Louis XVI on January 21, 1793. The Terror illustrated not only the corrupt dangers of utopian monopolies of “virtue,” but how ultimately such witch hunts consume their own children.

Born in the Artois region of northern France, Robespierre's family was financially secure, but his childhood was not a happy one. His father was a drunk and his mother died when he was just six. Nonetheless, the young Maximilien won a place to study law at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and soon made his name as a populist, defending the poor against the rich.

Like many of the other young professionals who were to drive the French Revolution—such as the fanatical lawyer Louis de Saint-Just (later nicknamed the angel of death) or the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat—Robespierre eagerly absorbed the theories of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notion of a “social contract” held that a government had to be based on the will of the people to be truly legitimate.

Although fussy about his appearance, often wearing the powdered wigs associated with the profligate aristocrats of
ancien régime
France, Robespierre—with his weak voice, small stature and pallid complexion—did not cut an imposing figure. But as the comte de Mirabeau said of him at the outset of the Revolution: “That man will go far; he believes everything he says.”

In the wake of the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, the event that triggered the Revolution, Robespierre aligned himself politically with the far left. As the representative for Artois in the Constituent Assembly, set up in July 1789 to decide on a new
constitution, he became closely involved with the radical faction called the Jacobins, rivals of the more moderate Girondins. His ideas gained a sympathetic hearing among the Parisian bourgeoisie, and he rose swiftly, in 1791 becoming public accuser (giving him the power of life and death over all citizens, without recourse to trial or appeal) and then first deputy for Paris a year later.

An implacable paranoia about potential enemies of the Revolution haunted him and in December 1792, when Louis XVI was brought to trial, Robespierre—a fierce critic of the king—insisted that “Louis must die, so that the country may live.”

Above all, it was as a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety that Robespierre forged his bloody reputation. Set up by the National Convention in April 1793, this was a revolutionary tribunal invested with unlimited dictatorial powers. Robespierre was elected a member in July 1793 and swiftly instigated the so-called Terror. Tens of thousands of “traitors”—ostensibly those who had expressed sympathy with the monarchy or who thought the Jacobins had gone too far in their relentless pursuit of “enemies of the people”—were rounded up without trial and lost their heads on the guillotine. In reality, anyone Robespierre counted an enemy was liquidated, the apparatus of the state ruthlessly employed to silence them. Robespierre himself personally ensured that his rivals Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins were executed in April 1794.

Robespierre and his allies turned their attention to growing opposition to the Revolution in Lyon, Marseilles and the rural Vendée in western France. After more than 100,000 men, women and children had been systematically murdered on Robespierre's orders the revolutionary general François Joseph Westermann wrote in a letter to the Committee: “There is no more Vendée. I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the
women … exterminated. The roads are sown with corpses.” For Robespierre, revolutionary virtue and the Terror went hand in hand. As he put it in February 1794: “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.”

Increasingly alienated by his tyranny, the National Convention turned decisively against him when he accused them of a conspiracy to oust him. A warrant was issued for his arrest and he retreated to his power base at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. As troops entered the building to seize him, Robespierre, surrounded by his henchmen Georges Couthon, Louis de Saint-Just, Philippe Le Bas, and François Hanriot, tried to commit suicide but instead shot himself in the mouth, leaving his jaw hanging off. Bleeding heavily, and howling in agony, he was quickly taken away and finished off at the guillotine, suffering the fate of so many of his opponents before him.

Some see Robespierre as one of the founding fathers of social democracy, his revolutionary excesses occasioned by his championing the cause of the people. Many more though view him as a hypocritical despot whose terror was the precursor of the totalitarian butchery of Hitler and Stalin in modern times.

1758–1805

Before this time tomorrow, I shall have gained a peerage, or Westminster Abbey
.

Horatio Nelson, on the eve of the Battle of the Nile (1798)

Horatio Nelson was one of the most daring naval commanders in history, who, through a series of stunning victories, assured British supremacy at sea during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He was adored in his own day, despite a complicated and very public love life, and has been celebrated ever since as the man who, by defeating the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar in 1805, saved Britain from invasion. His death at the moment of victory wins him a special place in the pantheon of British military heroes.

When Nelson was thirteen, his uncle, a naval captain, took him to sea aboard the
Raisonnable
. For the next eight years Nelson learned the trade of a naval officer in the West Indies and on an expedition to the Arctic. He first saw action in the American War of Independence, and by the age of twenty-one he was captain of the frigate
Hinchinbrooke
. He was brave and often impatient; this endeared him to some but could make him unpopular.

When war broke out with Revolutionary France in 1793 Nelson was sent to the Mediterranean. He lost his right eye during the siege of Calvi in 1794, having been hit in the face by stones thrown up by enemy shot. In March 1795, as captain of the sixty-four-gun
Agamemnon
, he took a leading role in taking two French ships.

The arrival of Sir John Jervis as commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet was very useful to Nelson, for Jervis gave him free rein to exploit his natural abilities as a leader. During the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, Nelson was at the head of the boarding party that took the Spanish ship
San Nicolas
and then the larger
San Josef
. It was unprecedented for an officer of Nelson's rank to throw himself into the heat of battle in such a manner, and he lapped up the public admiration that followed his success, along with the knighthood and promotion to rear admiral.

Despite Nelson's personal fame, morale amongst the ordinary seamen of the Royal Navy was low, and 1797 saw mutinies in British waters. Nelson was given command of the
Theseus
and once again led raiding parties from the front, dragging his crew's spirits up by sheer force of character—something that became known as the Nelson Touch. While attempting to storm the town of Santa Cruz, Tenerife, Nelson was seriously wounded, and his right arm had to be amputated. In 1798 he won a stunning victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. Although massively outgunned, the British fleet blew up the massive 120-gun
L'Orient
and took or sunk ten more ships of the line and two frigates. “Victory is not enough to describe such a scene,” wrote Nelson, soon to be Baron Nelson of the Nile. All of Europe was watching, and the anti-French coalition was boosted immensely by the performance of the Royal Navy.

Between 1798 and 1800 Nelson spent much of his time in Sicily in the arms of Emma, Lady Hamilton, a liaison that caused great scandal, as the young Emma Hamilton was married to the elderly British envoy to Naples. Lady Hamilton bore Nelson a child in 1801, on the same day that Nelson learned he was to be posted as second-in-command of the British fleet off the coast of Denmark. In April the British demolished the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. During the battle, when his commander, Vice Admiral Parker, raised
a flagged signal for a withdrawal, Nelson famously ignored the order by placing his telescope to his blind eye.

Nelson was made a viscount, and in 1803 he was sent back to the Mediterranean as commander-in-chief of the fleet there. Much of 1804 was spent chasing the French fleet back and forth across the Atlantic—a pursuit that captivated the British public. On his return to London, he was mobbed in the street wherever he went.

In 1805 Nelson achieved his apotheosis. On October 21 he engaged the combined French and Spanish fleets, under his archenemy Admiral Villeneuve, off Cape Trafalgar. He took twenty-seven ships to engage thirty-three enemy vessels, signaling by flag to his own men “England expects that every man will do his duty.” Five hours of fighting began at noon, and, thanks to Nelson's bold and ingenious tactics, by 5 p.m. the British were comprehensively victorious. But early in the battle Nelson had been hit by a musket shot, which punctured his lung and lodged in his spine. He died at 4.30 p.m., allegedly whispering to a comrade officer, “Kiss me, Hardy.”