Mozart's Last Aria (20 page)

Schikaneder would no doubt have dropped to the floor had he been playing the Don. Pergen had no need to mime a descent into Hell—he was already there. His eyes darted between the emperor and me. His palm dropped a pool of sweat onto the lid of the piano. His skin was as white as his periwig.

The emperor’s companions lifted their hands, waiting for his signal to applaud. But when Leopold rose from his chair, he hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his frock coat.

Schikaneder leaned into a practiced bow. He looked about, perplexed by the silence. Swieten beckoned me to rise from the piano.

I reached out my hand to Pergen, as the baron had told me I must. The room was empty of all sound, except Pergen’s shivering breath.

“Take it,” the emperor said. “Take his hand.”

Pergen shook his head.

“I command you.” Leopold’s eyes, which had been hidden by sagging skin, grew wide and powerful. “It is the will of your emperor.”

Pergen dropped toward my hand. I thought he might kiss it, but then I saw that he was collapsing. He fell at my feet.

“Forgive me, Mozart,” he cried. “Forgive me, oh God, forgive me. Please.”

His words seemed not to be generated by a voice, but rather by the tearing of a voice, as if his soul were ripped from his throat. He grabbed my ankles and wept over my shoes. Wolfgang’s shoes.

“Do you confess to the murder of Maestro Mozart?” the emperor said.

“I confess it, and I beg forgiveness before his dreadful ghost. Go to your rest Mozart, and let me have mine.” Pergen’s fingernails drove into my legs. I stepped back, but he followed me on his knees. “I beg forgiveness of my God.”

“You’d better implore that of
me
,” the emperor said. “Take him away.”

The chamberlain swung back the door. Two whiteuniformed guards entered at a jog. They took hold of Pergen under his arms, hoisted him to his knees, and, without turning their backs on their sovereign, dragged the weeping man from the room. So limp was he that one of his shoes slipped off. The emperor picked it up and tossed it to his chamberlain.

He turned to Swieten with regret and disgust around his tight mouth. “It gives me no pleasure to see my loyal servant dragged from the room,” he said, “nor that he should be driven to madness.”

The baron dropped his head. “Nonetheless, your Majesty—”

“Nonetheless, Pergen made a grave error in ordering the death of Maestro Mozart.”

“It wasn’t his only error, your Majesty,” I said.

My clothing gave me a shield, like a mask at a ball or a costume at Carnival time. If my words displeased the emperor, they were uttered from a mouth not my own, because I wore the suit of a dead man. “Count Pergen saw revolution in my brother’s innocent membership of the Masonic Brotherhood. And in the message of equality at the heart of the beautiful opera Wolfgang wrote with Herr Schikaneder.”

The emperor’s eyes flashed toward the actor, who bowed with a discomfited grin.

“If you persecute these good Masonic brethren, your Majesty, you’ll drive them into cooperation with your enemies,” I said.

Leopold raised a thin eyebrow. Even in my disguise I found it hard to endure his penetrating stare. I was almost compelled to confess Wolfgang’s mission to Berlin, as though I had made the journey myself.

“Count Pergen has displeased me of late,” the emperor said. “He urged me to undo many of the reforms of my dear brother Joseph’s reign. Without enthusiasm, I did roll back certain important measures. But no more. That’s at an end.”

Swieten smiled and would’ve spoken. The emperor’s frown halted him.

“Let no one make further demands of me. You’d do well to remember . . .” He hesitated. “ . . . Madame de Mozart, that I must be on guard against threats to my crown.”

“Of course, your Majesty. But they don’t come from my brother’s opera.”

“Count Pergen’s policies shall, indeed, be reversed.”

I thought of the Grotto. “Might it be possible to grant permission for a new Masonic lodge? To honor my departed brother. A lodge in which women are allowed entry to the Brotherhood?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Madame, you exceed the bounds of propriety. You’d do best to retire from the room and put on appropriate clothing. You’re not really Mozart, after all.”

“Oh, but I am.” I took my three-cornered hat from the lid of the piano and set it on my head as Swieten had shown me. “I certainly am.”

With a bow, I went toward the exit. I shared a glance with Swieten. His eyes posed a question. Now that I had resolved the mystery that had brought me to Vienna, would I remain? With him? It was the life I had always wanted. Yet I had married Berchtold in the Lord’s house, and hadn’t Pergen’s collapse shown me the consequences of betraying God’s law? I caught my lower lip between my teeth. The chamberlain hurried to make way for me.

The door closed behind me. Pergen’s other shoe lay on its side on the carpet, a memorial to the man who once strode with such confidence along this hall.

As I walked down the stairs and into the courtyard, I was pleased that this should be the last performance at the Imperial Palace by a Mozart.

Chapter 35

G
od is my light. But when I entered the cemetery of St. Marx, I felt He was also a shadow cast over the world. He draws us all toward eternal darkness.

Clouds blew across the sky, streaked silver by the obscured sun. The lace bonnet I wore on my newly shorn hair thrashed against my brow in the wind. Fallen leaves skittered over the path, tapping like rain against a windowpane. Crows flew in low loops.

Everything in the graveyard was in motion. No one could’ve convinced me that even the dead lay indifferent and still in the earth. I sensed they were barging each other for a plot closer to Wolfgang, so they might hear his music.

Now that the mystery of his death was settled, I wished to pray over my brother’s body. Within ten years, the tombs of St. Marx would be plowed over, the ground reused for new corpses. It would be as if Wolfgang had been interred in a mass grave, his bones intermingled with hundreds of strangers. I wanted to touch the earth directly above him while I still might.

I left Lenerl at the foot of the hill. The walk was steeper than it appeared. My breathing seemed as heavy as the wind bending the birches. The graves were arranged twenty ranks deep on the hilltop, the newer burials at the back, farthest from the path. Someone moved at the rear of the rectangle of tombs.

A woman rose from her knees, her head bowed under a veil. She pulled her black cape around her thin shoulders and crossed herself.

I went along the muddy path. The wind dropped. The hilltop was silent. The woman heard my boots in the puddles. She turned.

The breeze started once more and caught her veil. Magdalena’s scars shone with tears in the stark light.

“Do you weep for my brother?” I asked her, when I reached the grave. “You should know that he rests more easily than he did yesterday.”

She looked down at a low mound of earth. A square of parchment nailed to the simple wooden cross bore his name. It rattled like the leaves in the wind. “He rests,” she said. “That much I envy him.”

I stepped toward her, but she lifted her hand to stop me.

“I repent every moment I was with him,” she said. “I took such pleasure in it, but what did it bring? Only the madness of my husband. He took Wolfgang’s life and his own, and he left me disfigured.”

“But I already told you at Gieseke’s funeral, it wasn’t your husband who killed Wolfgang.”

“Yes, it was. It was Franz.”

“Let me explain. I know the whole truth now.”

“You can’t know.” She reached under her veil to wipe her tears, careful not to rub at her scars. But she flinched anyway. “Franz tolerated the closeness of my relationship with the maestro, because of the—the benefit to my health.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You saw me suffer a fit at Gieseke’s funeral. The falling sickness. It was a frequent affliction, until I learned to play Wolfgang’s music.”

“His compositions are very calming to me, too.”

“More than calming. They’re better than any physician’s medicine. Without them it’s as though I’m a madwoman.”

She trembled. I wondered if she was about to succumb to another fit, but it was only the wind shivering her.

“To protect you against this sickness,” I said, “your husband paid for the expensive services of a famous composer as your music teacher?”

“The maestro respected my talent,” Magdalena said. “He invited me into his company more and more, because he valued my musical ability. It didn’t matter to him that I was a woman. But Franz became jealous. He believed I was having an affair with Wolfgang.”

“I’ve heard that rumor. But please let me speak. I’ve come from the palace where—”

“That’s why Franz agreed to work for Count Pergen.”

I stared through the veil at the gashes on her desperate face.

“My husband was an agent for the police minister. He poisoned Wolfgang during a meeting of their Masonic Brotherhood.” She plucked a leaf from a lilac bush behind the grave, rubbed it with her thumb, and let it drop. “For this treachery he received payment from Pergen.”

The lavish apartment where I first met her, I thought, paid for with secret bribes.

“How do you know this?” I said. “How can you be sure?”

“After Wolfgang died, Franz gloated. He told me he had taken revenge for my infidelity. He felt he had triumphed.”

“Then he attacked you?”

“No. I told him that he was mistaken. I had been the maestro’s pupil and nothing more. He didn’t want to hear it, but I insisted. He saw what he had done. He cried out that he had been duped. That he had murdered a genius.”

“Duped? By whom?”

“He asked me to forgive him.” She sobbed. “That’s all he asked.”

“But you refused?”

“How could I excuse such a terrible thing? He destroyed the greatest gift God ever gave to mankind. He obliterated all the unwritten music Wolfgang would’ve created.”

“So he decided to kill you and to end his own life.”

“He went wild. He slashed me. Then he cut his own throat. I watched him die.” She pointed along the row of graves. “He’s buried over there, but I haven’t stood before his tomb as I stand here now. I must do penance for the part I played in the maestro’s death.”

I wondered if Franz Hofdemel had given signs of his jealousy. Perhaps she might’ve persuaded him earlier of her innocence. She must’ve been so drawn to Wolfgang’s astonishing gifts that they blinded her to the simple needs of her husband. Now she repented.

Blindness, penitence.

I stepped closer to her. “It was you.”

She frowned.

“Of course,” I said. “The riddle Wolfgang wrote at the end of one of his last sonatas. ‘She repents her blindness as she is always penitent. At the keyboard her notes run riot like demons cast out. I will be with her as a brother in the halls of Paradise, at her side as always I’ve been, though not as my father intended.’ ”

Magdalena shook her head. “Me?”

“Penitent, as Maria Magdalena is always portrayed. You shared her name. In the Holy Bible she was possessed, but Jesus cast the demons out of her. Wolfgang did the same thing for you, soothing your fits with music. He chose you to be at his side as Jesus chose Maria Magdalena. He did it despite the disapproval of his apostles—his brothers.”

“A riddle?”

“Scribbled on a manuscript. Listen, ‘At her side as always I’ve been, though not as my father intended.’ Not as the wife our father would’ve wanted for him, but as an equal companion in his new Masonic lodge.”

“A Mason? Me?”

“Wolfgang intended to start a new lodge that would admit women, on the basis of special character and talent. You said he valued your talent as a pianist. You were to be the one who would join him in his new venture.”

Magdalena laid a hand over her breast and stared at the heavy, damp earth on Wolfgang’s grave.

“Your husband couldn’t grant himself absolution,” I said. “Perhaps now that you know how Wolfgang felt about you, you can at least forgive yourself.”

She turned to me. Her scars were black beneath the veil. “Madame, I don’t agree. About the riddle.”

“But you
must
see?”

“I do,” she said. “Surely it refers to you.”

She went along the line of graves, past the spot where her husband was buried.

I watched her descend the path to the graveyard gate. The muscles of my face hung as if stricken with some wasting disease. The wind rustled the lilac bush. I turned my back against the cold gust and gazed at Wolfgang’s grave. He had written the riddle at the end of a sonata dedicated to me, to “my Nannerl.”

“ ‘I will be with her as a brother in the halls of Paradise,’ ” I whispered, “ ‘at her side as always I’ve been, though not as my father intended.’ ”

What had my father intended? For me to marry a provincial official who provided a comfortable home. But not for me to display my accomplishment as a pianist, to earn a living by my music. That was what Wolfgang had wanted. He had seen how it grieved me that I was ignored while he took all the accolades. He had wanted me to have what he had.

We had been apart so long, it seemed impossible that he had been so concerned with me at the end. Yet now it struck me that Constanze, Fräulein von Paradies, and Magdalena Hofdemel had told me Wolfgang often spoke of my talents, up until his final days. I recalled how I had walked home from early Mass in the snow, before I learned of his death. I had wondered whether the same snow fell on him so far away. All that time we had thought ourselves estranged, yet we were bonded to each other as if we shared the same soul.

I wiped away a tear. It seemed to freeze on my fingertip.

Wolfgang’s new lodge had been for me. A magic kingdom of music and love and equality, like the ones we invented for each other on those long, playful coach rides when we were children. My brother and me, our talents complementing each other but not competing. Together in our Grotto.

The wind caught the parchment on Wolfgang’s cross. Its edges stuttered against the wood. I kissed my finger, and laid it over his name.