Marrying Mozart (20 page)

Josefa sank down into the sofa cushions, biting the edge of one finger. “She’s losing her mind,” she said over the fast notes of a Clementi sonata. “We’re led by a madwoman.”

Sophie curled close to her. “But Mama’s a terrible housekeeper; all she does well is cook. Who would take care of boarders?”

“Sophie,” said Constanze quietly as she stood before them, “I think we would. Girls, let’s not talk about it; let’s not argue. Maybe she’ll forget about it by tomorrow.”

No one brought up the subject at dinner that night.

The following afternoon, shortly after the four sisters had closeted themselves away in an empty room to pin a pattern to a length of pink brocade for a dress for Aloysia’s new role, they heard the sound of a man’s feet mounting the stairs. They listened as the footsteps passed the room in which they worked. Josefa stood up abruptly, put down the pins she was holding, and started for the door. “I won’t stand for it,” she said. “What would Papa say?”

First came the furniture movers, banging secondhand beds and wardrobes up the stairs; they brought tables, chairs, and hat stands. Two fat women who dealt in used sheets, pillows, and bed curtains followed, negotiating loudly with Frau Weber about the price; at one point they almost left in fury, carrying a dozen pillows in their arms. By the end of the week, the large house was stuffed with scratched furniture and mismatched linens.

The first three boarders moved in the next day: Hans Haussman, a silk merchant who at once complained about the meals; the cellist Giovanni Forza, who practiced scales in his room from four in the morning and stank of raw garlic; and a tall portraitist in his twenties, called Joseph Lange, who kept to himself. There were those sheets to change, shaving water to bring. Constanze was right in her assessment, for she and Sophie were pressed into service to help at meals, supplying knives, more ale, another helping of veal. Reluctantly, they became used to the despised strangers, lowering their eyes when near them, waiting to emerge from their own room when they heard one of the boarders in the hall.

Aloysia and Josefa would have nothing to do with the whole matter.

The men’s laundry was piled in a small stone room and attended to by a laundress who came twice weekly. Aloysia passed the dark room each day that early spring as she slipped into the still barren garden behind the house to study her music.

Once, she almost walked into the portraitist, Lange. “Ah, the air,” he said. “I can almost smell the linden blossoms already. Mademoiselle, there’s nothing more beautiful than Vienna in the spring.” He bowed to her slightly and she nodded curtly. As he went, she imagined she could detect the scent of linden blossoms in the air, until the linseed oil and paint smell that clung to the man’s coat erased it. Her father had tried painting for a time, Aloysia remembered. His easel was set up in the parlor when he decided he would paint portraits to supplement their income; only a total lack of ability had deterred him.

“
W
olfgang Mozart is a genius, young woman.” Those had been the Munich conductor Cannabich’s words to her when they met in the street after Mozart had returned to Salzburg. ”A genius, and a good kind man, loves you; never forget that.” The conductor’s face had been serious, and he had looked tired. The two of them stood by a bakery talking for a time, before he bowed to her and walked away.

Aloysia thought about their encounter that spring day as she sat on a bench in the garden behind their new house, writing a letter to her fiancé.

Mozart’s own rich and charming letters came regularly to Vienna. How many plans, schemes, determinations he had; how clever he was. But more than that, they gave her advice on the style and technique of her singing. She studied them. In the first weeks at the opera, when other sopranos had snarled at her and tried to edge her offstage or drown her delicate voice with their larger ones, she had despaired and he had understood; he pointed out her gifts and how she could use them to her best advantage. She had depended on her father’s teaching more than she knew, and now she depended on the young composer.

Aloysia hesitated, the letter unfinished in her lap.

Why didn’t he come? She wanted to go to masked balls and dance until the dawn, when the stars have left the sky and only the pale ghost of the moon remained, and she must, she should. She had been given a new role, and the audience had called her name: Aloysia, Aloysia.

“Dearest come quickly,” she ended the letter to him, but then forgot to mail it. Weeks later she found it under the garden bench, illegible from the spring rains.

H
ot summer lingered through September; dust lay over all the streets of the city, and, roused by carriage wheels or feet or a rug beater, it even drifted through the windows onto the strings of the clavier, which stood in the parlor of the second story.

Constanze had sat there almost all day copying music; now she stretched her aching back, rubbed her neck, and looked about her. She had the room to dust. After putting away her ink, she was taking the dust rag from her apron pocket when she heard the door open below and someone running up the steps.

Sophie flew through the door, her light, flowery summer dress reaching to her ankles, and threw off her bonnet. Her face was streaked with tears. “She’s gone; she’s gone. She left a letter on the hall table addressed to you, Josefa, and me. She’s gone!”

“Who? What?”

Sophie waved the letter in the air as if to shake the words from it. “Aloysia has run away with Lange, the painter.”

“Dear God,” cried Constanze.

They almost fell over each other rushing up the stairs. Lange’s room was stripped bare. The quiet portraitist had left nothing but his sheets neatly stripped from the bed, the smell of linseed oil, and, on the floor, a little splat of deep red paint, like blood of seduced virgins. They stared at it, holding hands. “Dearest mice,” the letter said when they unfolded it and held it between them. “You might as well know because I can’t hide it anymore. He came into the garden, and we went into the little shed. I don’t know what came over me. Oh, my loves, he worships the ground I walk on. I can’t live without him; I hardly know myself. And now I’m five months’ gone with child, which I didn’t plan, but what can be done? Be virtuous. I love you all with all my heart.”

Five months with child. They had teased her that she was gaining weight. Only Josefa, they now recalled, had looked down at her flustered sister wryly, a slight smile on the corners of her lips. Too many dumplings, too much bread and butter, Aloysia. Then the young singer had demanded her own room, where she could struggle to lace her corset away from curious eyes. Now they understood.

The three sisters and their mother barricaded themselves in the kitchen under the hanging pots, sitting around the bowl of rising dough and the onion skins left from making the stew. “Oh Aloysia, Aloysia,” Maria Caecilia said, rocking back and forth. “My darling, my sweet. First Josefa throws away the good name of Weber, and then our precious Aloysia follows. The slut, the whore! What will we do? What reputation can our family have left? And what of us, what of us? She’ll lose her work and be laughed off the stage. How will I pay for this house? What can we do?”

Constanze said quietly, “Perhaps she could marry him.” She spread the letter out again and read the whole of it, moving her lips quietly. “Here on the second page at the very bottom she’s written that they’ll marry. There, you see, Mama! We needn’t grieve. It’s perfectly respectable for a married woman to be with child.”

Caecilia Weber swept the onion skins aside. “Marry a portrait painter? Is that what I hoped when she once had a chance to be a Swedish baroness? I never truly intended her for Mozart. Oh, you don’t know what I have hoped for all of you, but mostly for her: my beauty, my enchantress, my darling girl. She looks just like I did in my youth, but I was good, I was dutiful. Why did God send me such daughters? Yes, he’ll marry her; there’s no hope for it. He must marry her and give me a settlement as well for the loss of her income. All the years to have supported her and bought her every pretty thing I could, and to be rewarded like this and find myself in poverty.”

Josefa walked back and forth before the simmering stew, arms crossed over her chest. “Mama, why are you always thinking of yourself? You never think of anything else; even when you thought of her, it was really only for you. All these months, it’s been, ‘Aloysia must have,’ ‘Aloysia must wear!’ Sew for your sister, do this and that for your sister; all of you, but Mother’s the worst. Aloysia’ll come back for her contract; she loves how people admire her when she sings.” Josefa stared at all of them, hands on the table near the blue beer pitcher. “I suppose you’ll expect me to support you all, even I, who was so condemned for my lover and may never have another, who will die a spinster, which would suit you
for certain
, Mama—keeping us all here with your dreams of finding men worthy of us.”

“Girl, be still or you’ll have a beating,” cried the mother.

Josefa rose to her full height; she had played a girl dressed as a soldier recently, and it had suited her. “And who’s to beat me, you weak, stupid, fat woman?” she cried. “Oh, I’m so very tired of all of you! You’ve always mocked me. You always favored her, all of you. Only Father understood me, and I thank God he has not lived to see this.” Fiercely, she seized the spoon and stirred the stew.

The presence of the boarders forced them to keep their voices down, but Josefa fled from the room, letting the door bang behind her. Constanze and Sophie slipped into the garden with vegetable peels for the compost heap; then, arms about each other, they fell exhausted to the bench. There Constanze raised her hands to her mouth and drew in her breath hard.

“But how can we have forgotten Mozart?” she said. “Oh Sophie, what will he say?”

O
n a table in their rooms in Salzburg, warm afternoon su shone on the music for a new wind sextet for oboes, horns, and bassoons, a divertimento to be played during the palace dinners. Near it Mozart had laid the letter that had come by post an hour before, the page with its few creases open before him. He picked it up, turned it over to where he had broken the seal, and then turned it back to read once more. The writing was not even hers, but Sophie’s; she wrote that Aloysia and Lange had returned to Vienna as man and wife, and were now living away from the family.

His father and sister found him sitting there.

“Let us at least eat,” said his father.

Slowly, after grace was given, the story came out. Mozart’s words were brief. He could almost not bear the compassionate looks of his sister, Nannerl, and his dry, spare father, and how their hands had reached out to hold his.

“Will you pass the pork? And the salt dish?”

“I’m afraid the radishes are very sharp, Father.”

“Nannerl, I’ll have them anyway.”

They ate in silence for a time.

“Those Webers,” Leopold Mozart said. “I’m not surprised. The father was a good man, but the girls run wild. A boardinghouse, a mother with pretensions. We must thank God on our knees that He didn’t let you become entrapped in that family.” He helped himself to bread, and did not look up from the buttering as he spoke. “I hope you now agree with me that you shouldn’t marry for a long time. Well, you were young, but you have been spared from a tragedy. Make your reputation; go slowly. I was nearly thirty when I married and knew more about the world than you, but then a woman like your good mother does not come along often. When the Archbishop takes you to Vienna next week on his state visit there, I hope you will not darken the door of those Webers. These radishes are sharp indeed.”

 

 

Much of the day’s journey to Vienna, Mozart sat with his fingers to his lips, staring from the coach window at the mountains and fields. The creaking conveyance that they had boarded before dawn was too full, and his fellow musicians pressed uncomfortably close, while someone’s leather bassoon case wobbled back and forth until it found a place leaning against his thigh.

In the midafternoon the horses stopped before St. Stephan’s Cathedral, called Stephansdom, and the nearby Palace of the Teutonic Knights, an old religious order where the Archbishop kept his Viennese residence. A footman showed Mozart to a narrow room with whitewashed walls and two hard beds, where the young man kicked his trunks into the corner. The only consolation was that he would see his old horn player friend Leutgeb, who was now settled over his grandfather’s cheese shop with his very pregnant wife and took part in the concert life of the city.

“We’re playing for a mass with the Archbishop tonight,” the cellist with whom he roomed said, unpacking his trunks and pulling forth his evening shirt. “I always enjoy when state business brings him here, but I must say, you don’t look very jolly. Aren’t you glad to be in Vienna, Mozart? Where are you going?”

“To the devil.”

In the halls he passed several servants and Count Arco, who bowed to him with a slight smirk. The Archbishop was in residence; the very walls with their somber portraits of long-dead knights and clerics should also bow discreetly in the direction of his large suite of rooms and innumerable lackeys, his private chapel, and, undoubtedly, gilded and heavily draped sleeping chamber. He would make his calls of protocol about the city, followed by his entourage of musicians, who would raise flutes to their lips and bows to their violins at his almost imperceptible nod.