Mozart's Last Aria (2 page)
December 1791
S
T
. G
ILGEN
, N
EAR
S
ALZBURG
A
s I returned from early Mass at St. Aegidius, snow screened the summit of the Zwölferhorn and layered the village in white silence. Approaching my door through the garden by the lakeside, I heard little Leopold picking out one of my brother’s minuets on the piano. I smiled that this should be the only sound on the shores of the Abersee that morning. The snowfall smothered all but the essential music that joined me to dear Wolfgang. I wondered if he was watching the same gentle drift cover the streets of Vienna at that moment.
In the hall, Lenerl took my fur and handed me a letter delivered by the village bailiff, who had returned from Salzburg late the previous night. I ordered a hot chocolate and pulled my chair close to the fire in the sitting room. I watched the snow gather in the window mullions, grinning each time the boy struck a false note in the drawing room.
The discordant tune was hardly little Leopold’s fault. The piano sounded ill enough when I played it. By the mountain lakes of the Salzkammergut, cold and damp had warped the instrument’s wood, made the keys stick, and moldered the hammer casings, so that a true note was rare enough. Even so the boy spent an hour each day at the piano, because he hoped to gratify me.
To tell the truth, it pleased me that my son played only as well as a six-year-old ought. My brother, of course, composed his first dance at six, and it had been my departed father’s desire to re-create that prodigy in my firstborn. But that was never my intention. I had come to resent the fact that true happiness was mine only when seated at the piano. Even when playing cards with friends or shooting a pistol at target practice, I moved the fingers of my free hand through an imaginary arpeggio, for if I didn’t I became distracted and irritable. The curse of the artist is to have the best part of one’s faculties occupied only with one’s craft. Friends and family skim your existence like a fisherman on the Abersee, while your real self is as inaccessible to them as the depths of the lake. But I had long since ceased to live the life of an artist, and I sometimes felt this preoccupation rather as a cripple might his useless foot.
I beat a rhythm on the letter lying in my lap. Perhaps it carried news of my brother. In the winter, it was hard to keep up with events beyond the snowbound village. The latest news sheet to reach us reported that Wolfgang had another original opera in production. Acquaintances returning from Vienna told me that his health wasn’t of the best. He was frequently sick, so I earnestly wished for tidings of his recovery in this letter. I felt sure I recognized the handwriting.
For Madame’s personal attention
Madame Maria Anna Berchtold von Sonnenburg
Living at the Prefect’s House
St. Gilgen
Near Salzburg
I read my name as if it belonged to a stranger. A collection of surnames, earned by marriage to the man working alone on his accounts in the study across the hall. These things, which ought to have distinguished me, served only to make me anonymous. Before Berchtold had brought me to this remote village—thus adding a geographical anonymity, too—I had a name that everyone knew and which I admit I still applied to myself in the privacy of these moments seated before the fire.
Mozart.
The memory of that name sounded in my head like a dream. The soft Z and disappearing T with which the French had pronounced it when we entered the salon of Louis XV at Versailles. The long English A I had noted from the mouth of King George’s chamberlain announcing us at Buckingham House.
Lenerl laid my hot chocolate on the table and curtsied. “Will there be anything else, madame?”
I lifted my chin to dismiss her.
It was deluded to muse on my family’s long-ago travels to Europe’s capitals. If I no longer bore the name, I had to acknowledge that even then I had been merely
a
Mozart. Only he had ever been “Mozart.” One might have addressed a letter in Milan or Berlin with that single word and it would have found my brother in Vienna. I had inherited the miniature watches and golden snuffboxes, gifts from delighted aristocrats in the time of our joint fame as touring child musicians. But my brother had retained
the name
.
To the people of this village I wasn’t a Mozart. Few of them had ventured farther than Salzburg, six hours’ journey away through the mountains. What could they know of the palaces of Nymphenburg and Schönbrunn where I had displayed my mastery of the keyboard, wandered the gardens, chattered with the king, worn clothes made for the empress’s children? The villagers’ lives didn’t extend beyond the church, the bathhouse where the surgeon pulled their teeth, and the stall by the lake where the sexton sold rosaries and devotional candles.
No one even called me Nannerl anymore, now that Mamma and Papa were gone. No one, except he who had been silent for three years. Though it had been unsaid in our last letters, I feared that the unpleasantness of our father’s testament, in which all the fruits of our early fame were bequeathed to me, had broken the bond with my brother, my dear Jack Pudding, my Franz of the Nosebleed.
These years without communication were, I assumed, harder for me to bear than for him. Were he to consider the painful task of writing to his sister in her simple marital home, there would be the distraction of a salon at which to perform, a ball to attend, a concerto to be scored.
I enjoyed no such diversions. Still, I delighted in the reviews of his operas in the Salzburg news sheets and subscribed to each piano transcription of his works, playing through them with wonder at his compositional development. Even my poor, restrained husband had failed to hide his tears when I sang “For pity’s sake, my darling, forgive the error of a loving soul,” from Wolfgang’s
Così fan tutte
. Throughout these years of silence, I comforted myself that one day he might visit our village and we’d play together once more.
I sang that aria as I slipped my finger behind the seal and unfolded the letter. It was from my sister-in-law, Constanze.
My song caught at a high G and transformed to a sob.
Your beloved brother passed away in the night of December 5
, she wrote.
The greatest of composers and the most devoted of husbands lies in a simple grave in the field of St. Marx. My fondest, most desperate wish is to join him there.
Constanze gave the dreadful details. Wolfgang had succumbed to “acute heated miliary fever,” which she explained meant that he had been afflicted with a rash resembling tiny white millet grains.
My chin quivered as I read her description of his last days, the swelling of his body, the vomiting and chills, the final coma before his death at one hour past midnight. He had been gone a week.
I crossed myself and mouthed a prayer that he should be delivered to the company of Christ. I pressed the letter to my breast and wept. “Wolfgang,” I whispered.
On the piano, my son stumbled through a French nursery rhyme,
Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman.
I had taught it to him one morning after I played Wolfgang’s marvelous set of variations on its theme. The simple melody stabbed at me. I bent over, pain sharp in my abdomen.
The piano went silent. Leopold’s small feet skipped across the hall. He entered the salon with his green jacket buttoned to his chubby chin and blew a kiss at the portrait of Salzburg’s prince archbishop on the wall because he knew it made me laugh. When he hugged me I pressed his face to my neck, for in that moment I couldn’t look upon features so like my brother’s had been in his infancy. I stroked his blond hair behind his ears.
“Would you play for me, Mamma?” he said. “My fingers are tired.”
“Tired? And it’s not yet eight in the morning. Will you have no energy to make mischief during the day?” I grabbed his cold little hands and blew on them.
He giggled. “
I’m
not tired. Just my fingers.”
“I’ll play for you in a little while, my darling. First, Mamma has a letter to read.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Your aunt Constanze in Vienna.”
Never having met my sister-in-law, the boy shrugged.
“Go and see if Jeannette is still sleeping,” I said. “It’s time Lenerl gave her breakfast.”
He grinned at the mention of his two-year-old sister and hopped up the stairs.
I closed my eyes. In my mind, I heard
Ah, vous dirai-je
through the dozen complex variations Wolfgang had composed, changes of tempo, legato to staccato, the running scales in the left hand ascending and descending the keyboard. I could feel my own touch light on the keys, see the manuscript, his delicate fingers scribbling the notes across the stave with his characteristic slight backward slant.
Upstairs, Jeanette protested her awakening, until Leopold tickled her into laughter, as he did each day.
I read on through Constanze’s letter. I skimmed the lengthy account of her sister’s desperate errands to priests and doctors, none of whom appeared to have helped my brother. It was far from clear that he had even received the final sacrament.
The letter wound back in time through the premiere of my brother’s new opera
The Magic Flute
, until I found myself with Constanze and Wolfgang in the public gardens of the Prater on a fine fall day in October. On that occasion, I read, Wolfgang had told his wife that he knew he would “not last much longer. I’m sure I’ve been poisoned.”
The cup shook in my grip. Chocolate slopped onto the rug. I laid the cup on the table so hastily that it caught against the saucer and overturned. My fingers smudged cocoa across the letter.
Constanze had been unable to shake Wolfgang from the dire perception that his death was preordained, she wrote. From time to time, he had recovered himself enough to describe his suspicions as temporary fancies. Yet he soon returned to the certainty that his end was coming—at the hands of a poisoner. It grieved Constanze deeply that her last months with Wolfgang should’ve been marred by this melancholia.
The letter gave a brief account of Wolfgang’s funeral at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, organized by his friend, the noted musical connoisseur Baron van Swieten. Constanze closed with a few sentences of condolence, though I sensed that she wished more to impress upon me her extreme suffering and assumed that I’d mourn little for the loss of my estranged brother.
I would’ve put the letter aside, but I noticed another page folded behind the others. A postscript on a smaller sheet of paper:
It may be that gossip shall reach you asserting your brother’s infidelity to me. I beseech you to place no faith in such slanders. On the day of Wolfgang’s funeral, his dear friend and Masonic brother Hofdemel slashed with a razor at the face of his wife, Magdalena, who used to receive lessons from your brother at their house behind Jews’ Square. Poor Hofdemel then took his own life. It has been spoken among some whose shame should be eternal that Hofdemel lost his mind in a fury of jealousy because of a romance between Wolfgang and Magdalena. Some have even asserted that the enraged Hofdemel murdered my beloved Wolfgang by poison. I urge you to reject all such scurrilous conjecture and to know that to his final breath your brother remained a most true and devoted husband and father.
A strange heat flared in my face and darkness crossed my sight. My agitation drove me from my chair. As I came to my feet, the fire crackled in the drafts from my skirt.
I looked into the gilt-framed mirror above the mantel. I saw only death in my pale skin. Wrinkles marked my eyes like the rings of a tree trunk, though signifying the onset of another winter rather than a new spring. Then there he was, clear in my face, rising out of the image of this woman in the last of her younger days—the wry lips of my brother, his prominent nose, and his quiet eyes. He watched me stagger away from the mirror, upsetting the table, smashing the cup of chocolate to the floor.
From his study, I heard my husband clear his throat in annoyance at the noise. I imagined the doctors indulging in the same gesture of impatience when my brother told them that he had been poisoned. He was, after all, someone who always made a fuss about minor injuries and ailments.
Surely Wolfgang had known something they had not. The symptoms may have suggested a “miliary fever,” but only to one who didn’t suspect foul play. Could this Hofdemel have been a killer? I forced myself to consider the reprehensible possibility that my brother’s selfishness, cultivated by the indulgence of the many who lauded his genius, may have overridden his moral scruples and led him into the sin of adultery.
As soon as I allowed any credence to the possibility of poison, I was struck by the number of other murderous suspects who occurred to me. Wolfgang never learned to deliver a politic opinion and was often frank and disparaging, so his killer might be a singer he scorned. Or a rival composer robbed of a commission by the greater artist. Then there was his uncouth little wife and her conniving Weber family, which had blackmailed my brother into marriage. I found it hard to imagine them as murderers, yet why was Constanze so determined that I should dismiss Wolfgang’s suspicion of poisoning as the delusion of a melancholic spirit?
Everything about Wolfgang’s life was extraordinary. Now I was asked to accept that his death had been so commonplace it could be explained by a doctor’s examination of a rash on his skin. I wouldn’t believe it.
Another glance in the mirror. I couldn’t look away. My eyes, like his, large and brown, a clear hazel. My cheeks, a little marked by pox, though less than Wolfgang’s had been. Were our faces entirely alike? What was solely mine of all these features? Not the mouth, with its thin lower lip and gentle, sardonic upward turn at the corners. That, too, resembled my brother.
As I stared into the glass, I discovered one thing new in this face, something I didn’t recognize as my own characteristic: I found it to be strong. Perhaps it was the same strength that had allowed Wolfgang to defy our father, leaving Salzburg to make his way as an independent composer in Vienna. I had never dared even to imagine that power and certainly hadn’t imitated it. Wolfgang’s defiance had pained me, because I was left alone in our dull provincial town, charged with the care of our father. Yet now I perceived that same boldness in my own gaze.