Mozart's Last Aria (6 page)
O
n Jews’ Square, lawyers and petitioners headed for the massive Court Chancellery, where Magdalena Hofdemel’s husband had worked. Its pink stone glistened in the morning rain like that poor woman’s wounded skin. I crossed the square toward the private houses on its southern side.
A clarinet played somewhere before me. An aria of Wolfgang’s composition. My brother had written the piece to showcase the virtuosity of his friend Stadler on the bass clarinet. As I listened, the melody dropped below the E at the bottom of the range of most clarinets, down to a low C.
The tone of the instrument was like the song of an enormous, magical bird. I followed the clarinet to a narrow house and up the stairs.
Stadler answered my knock himself. He wore a brown waistcoat and a rough blanket across his shoulders. He held his bass clarinet in one hand. His finger was still depressed on the key of the last note he had played.
He edged backward, hesitating to invite me inside but unable to turn me away.
“
Guten Morgen
, Herr Stadler.” I passed him, unlacing the neck of my cloak.
“You’d better keep it on,” he mumbled.
I tipped my head. “Do you mean for me to leave, sir?”
“You’re welcome, of course. I didn’t intend to sound ungracious,” he said. “It’s a bit cold in here, I mean. The maid was too sick to come the last few days. I’ve had no fire and—”
“Never mind. We have work to do.”
He shut the door, leaning against it and pushing home the bolt, as though he was afraid someone might burst into his rooms behind me.
“Did you forget our rehearsal? For my performance for tonight,” I said. “The concerto?”
“No, of course not. The C major.”
I smiled. “Where shall we—?”
“I keep a clavichord in the studio. Please.”
He led me to a high-ceilinged room overlooking the Court Chancellery. The walls were painted to resemble white marble.
I played a few simple triads on the clavichord. Its metal tangents struck the iron strings with a sound that was sharper, spikier than the hammers of the pianoforte I had grown accustomed to playing. The white sharps and flats stood out like strips of ice against the black keys. Still, it was well-tuned.
I warmed my fingers with a brief scale, and played a minuet by Emanuel Bach.
As I played, Stadler moved closer to the clavichord. He sat on the edge of an embroidered stool, fingering the keys of his clarinet, eager to join in the music.
When I had finished, he laid his hand on the body of the clavichord with reverence. “If you dressed in the red suit Wolfgang wore for all his concerts, we’d be able to have him back. You look just like him. You play just as he did, too.”
In Stadler’s deep brown eyes I glimpsed his enjoyment of my performance. The pain returned to them quickly, as though he had remembered that the red suit wasn’t mine to wear, after all.
“Let’s get to the concerto.” He worked his lips on the reed of his instrument. “I’ll play the orchestral line, so that you may refresh your memory of the piece.”
We played through the opening movement. At first I watched Stadler for signs of his approval. But soon I was absorbed with the music, its joyful piano part, and the melancholy of the woodwinds as Stadler figured them on his clarinet.
We finished that movement. Stadler wiped his lips with his forefinger. “Good. Just the right tempo. Many people play it too fast. Now for the Andante.”
“You know, when my father first sent me the score of this movement, I thought it had been copied wrongly.”
“The unusual counterpoint?”
“Exactly.”
“When I think how Wolfgang could manipulate an orchestra, tease us and make us examine new horizons without our quite knowing it—well, that’s when I see the difference between my kind of talent and his genius.”
“This movement makes me think of a dream.” I played the melody of the piece as I spoke. “It’s andante, walking speed. As though you were sleepwalking through the dream. There’s a little dissonance. But it always returns to a tone of serenity.”
Stadler brandished his clarinet with enthusiasm. “That’s it. If you were dreaming in your bed you’d be safe. Sleepwalking, though, you’re never sure where you are.”
“Wolfgang gives us these dissonant moments, as though the security of a warm bed were slipping away from us.”
“But he brings us back to the resolving key.”
“To sleep. Calm and restful.”
Stadler’s smile was wide. “You have it, you really do.”
He lifted his instrument to his lips and went into the orchestral theme that introduced the movement. I closed my eyes for the piano solo. I imagined it wasn’t I who played. I was listening to Wolfgang.
When we finished, Stadler rocked on his stool. “I remember when he debuted this piece. That must be six years ago now.”
Six years in which I hadn’t seen my brother, years when he had surpassed all other composers. The last three of them, years in which we hadn’t communicated. Stadler averted his eyes. The warmth of our musical collaboration was gone.
“I didn’t forget him, Herr Stadler.”
“Naturally.”
“I had his music, even if I didn’t have him.”
He tapped at the keys of his clarinet.
We played through the concerto again in full. He was distracted this time. When the music was over, he stared at my hands on the keyboard with such agitation that I hid them behind my back.
To escape Stadler’s glare, I turned to the window. The hood of a woman crossing the square lifted in the wind. I was reminded of the gust that had caught my own cloak outside the Collalto Palace.
“Who was the gentleman I saw you with yesterday?” I asked.
Stadler laid his clarinet across his knees. “What?”
“A tall gentleman. A nobleman, in fact, by the crest on his coach,” I said. “You spoke with him as he departed. I think he went toward the Hofburg.”
Stadler coughed. His reluctance was evident. He whispered, “The Baron van Swieten.”
Swieten had been my brother’s greatest patron at the palace since Wolfgang’s arrival in Vienna a decade before. He had often written to me of him. “Tell me about the baron?”
“What’s there to tell? He was born in Holland. He came here as a boy, when his father was ordered into the service of the late empress as her physician. He’s close to the emperor.”
“Shall I meet him tonight? At the concert?”
Stadler rapped his knuckles on the clavichord. I sensed he wished he had chosen a different soloist after all. “It’ll be hard to miss him. He commands—”
“Attention?”
He shrugged.
“Love?” I asked.
Stadler looked at me curiously. “Respect. He commands respect.”
I remembered the way the baron’s gaze had fallen upon me in the square, the moment when I had thought he would speak to me.
“Did he recognize me?” My voice had an unseemly eagerness. Stadler rubbed his nose. Perhaps he had heard it.
“The baron asked me if the person he saw could be Wolfgang’s sister. I told him it was.”
He stood. “Perhaps you’d like something to drink, madame? The air is cold, but your exertion at the keyboard shall have put you in need of sustenance.” He tried for joviality and kindness. But the discomfort in his voice was like an ill-tuned string, the sound that would be heard above all others.
“Very kind, thank you.”
He excused himself with relief and went through the apartment to the pantry.
I wandered across the room to Stadler’s desk. Sheets of music in my brother’s hand spread over its slanting surface. A concerto for clarinet and orchestra in A major. Wolfgang had signed and dated the manuscript only a few months ago. It would’ve been one of the last pieces he wrote.
I took up the sheets, reading across the orchestral and solo parts of the first movement. Wolfgang must’ve written it for Stadler, because it required the low tones of his friend’s bass clarinet.
Stadler called from the kitchen. “I can find only brandy, madame.”
So absorbed was I by Wolfgang’s beautiful composition that the loud voice startled me. I went to the door. “Very good, Herr Stadler. Brandy will do just fine.”
As I returned to the desk, I noticed that the score had lain on top of a souvenir book, Stadler’s record of friends and visitors to his home. It was open to a page marked with a few lines of script and a signature. The same signature as the one on the music I held.
The text was in English. I recalled what Schikaneder had said about the Masons, writing to each other in the language of England in token of their Brotherhood’s origins.
To my dear Stadler, whose clarinet is a magic flute to free mankind and promote higher feelings. Never forget the brother (you know what I mean) who loves you from his heart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The signature was followed by two triangles drawn one beside the other.
The brother.
Indeed I did know what that meant. Stadler had admitted that he was Wolfgang’s Masonic brother. Schikaneder had told me about the triangles Masons drew as signs between each other.
I traced my fingers across my brother’s handwriting.
You know what I mean.
His suggestive, winking voice. I flipped the pages, looking for another message from Wolfgang.
Two more triangles caught my eye. They concluded a note by a different writer, though in the same language. It was on the most recent page of the book to have been used, dated only a day before.
Be industrious. Flee idleness. Your sincere friend and brother, the Baron Konstant von Jacobi.
On the facing page, another note in English. Signed by the Prince Karl Lichnowsky, followed by two triangles. Constanze had named Lichnowsky among Wolfgang’s Masonic brethren. Here was the proof in the prince’s own hand.
I would’ve examined the book further, but I heard Stadler returning. I laid the concerto over it and pretended to read through the score.
“Some brandy to revive us both, madame.” Stadler came in with two tumblers.
I realized that I hadn’t turned the pages of the souvenir book back to the one signed by Wolfgang. I hoped Stadler wouldn’t notice.
My pulse picked up. The strange signs in the souvenir book. The fear that my intrusion would be discovered. I took the cup of brandy and drank.
“It brings some color to your cheeks, anyway.” Stadler laughed.
I flushed and laid my hand on the desk. “I was enjoying this concerto for clarinet, Herr Stadler. It’s wonderful.”
“I premiered it in Prague less than two months ago. A great success. I couldn’t have imagined then—” Stadler picked up the score. He hesitated.
His glanced hovered on the souvenir book. I was sure he had noticed that its pages had been turned. He hummed the opening theme of the concerto. “Couldn’t have imagined then what a disaster was to come with Wolfgang’s passing.”
He put the manuscript on the desk. “Enough of such things. No more disasters await us. After all, I’ve heard you play now. Tonight’s concert shall be a triumph. Don’t you think?”
“I’m sure of it, sir.”
As I crossed Jews’ Square I glanced from under the hood of my cloak. Stadler stood in his window. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. When he saw me, he bowed and retreated from the light.
A
s the afternoon light faded on Rauhenstein Lane, I halted my exercises at Wolfgang’s piano and listened to my sister-in-law singing in the next room. An aria of my brother’s composition, about the pain of love. He wrote it during their courtship, for a character in his opera who bore his future wife’s name. Now she practiced it for the concert at the Academy, to raise funds for the family that had lost him.
“Sorrow dwells in my breast,” she sang. Her ascending trills made me grasp at the shawl covering my chest. Her technique was exceptional, but it had been more than fine breath control that inspired Wolfgang to write such music for her.
On the sole occasion when Wolfgang had brought Constanze to Salzburg, I had been cold to her. I might’ve blamed the influence of my father, who had thought her a poor match for his only son. But in truth I had been jealous of their love and companionship—things which had been denied to me. I saw now that I had overlooked her talent as a singer. Perhaps this wasn’t all I had neglected to notice in her.
She came to the door, with little Karl behind her skirts again. Her smile bore a touch of apprehension that reminded me how soon we were to perform. “The carriage will be ready shortly,” she said.
We negotiated the narrowness of Bäcker Street toward the University Square, our carriage rocking over the cobbles. Constanze’s thin shoulder bumped against mine.
“Tell me about life in St. Gilgen, sister?” She watched the passing houses as though searching for something in the courtyards beyond their arched entranceways. “Is it peaceful, out there in the mountains?”
I wondered if there was something about Vienna she wished to escape. Maybe only the painful memory of her husband’s death.
“There are seven children in the house. My five stepchildren are quite unruly,” I said. “The boys are little liars whom my husband refuses to discipline. In her studies, the eldest girl has no application. My home is no more peaceful than the Graben during the hour when all the rich Viennese promenade.”
“But it must be delightful to have so many children around?”
“My husband’s children from his first wives lack concentration. I tried to teach piano to the twelve-year-old, but she couldn’t focus. She won’t brush her teeth or eat when she should. She runs about the house, screeching. It’s all so irregular. My husband is a good man, but he’s unconcerned with the education of his children—something I consider to be paramount and, of course, to be handled competently only by the parents.”
She mumbled something into her hand, but it was inaudible over the horses’ hooves on the cobbles.
“What was that?” I said.
Constanze’s black eyes rested on me with a frankness that was blank and terrible. “I said, you sound like your father.” She returned her gaze to the window.
I loved my father and believed him to have been a warm parent, but I hoped I was a more forgiving educator. I saw that Constanze had been hurt by his rejection of her marriage. I decided not to reason with her about Papa’s true character. Better to concentrate on my performance. Inside my fur ruff, I let my fingers trip through the Allegro which begins the Concerto in C.
Our driver turned into the square beneath the austere towers of the Jesuit Church, where my father once conducted Wolfgang’s Dominicus Mass. We drew up before the classical façade of the Academy of Science.
The tall windows on the upper floor illuminated the Corinthian columns to a rich cream. Where the lights were brightest, there would be the hall. It ran across several of the windows and would surely hold a large crowd. My breath was quick, but not with nerves. I was expectant, excited to play before such an audience once more.
Stiff from the drafty carriage, Constanze stamped her feet. She inclined her head toward the entrance and took my arm.
Inside, we halted at the bare stone and whitewashed walls of the stairs. Constanze stared up the steps, as though they would be too far for her to climb.
“I’ve never sung his music when he wasn’t there to applaud,” she whispered.
Her tiny hand clawed my upper arm. “It was surely not for his applause alone that you sang,” I said.
In the mellow flickering of the stairwell lamps, her black eyes swam with tears. We went up.
As we reached the first landing, I noticed Stadler at the top of the stairs. He circled a man of aristocratic bearing who lifted his chin so high he seemed almost to be examining Stadler’s cropped hair, though he otherwise ignored him. Both men looked dour and sullen. I supposed that ought not to have been a surprise. It was a concert in support of a dead man’s impoverished family, after all.
Rushing skirts gained on us. “Stanzerl, wait, my darling.”
A small woman with a rounded face and cheeks red from the cold came to our side, her chest and neck wrapped in fur. From the resemblance in the wide black eyes I saw that this was one of Constanze’s sisters, and by the easy resonance of her voice I judged her to be Josefa, who had appeared as a soprano in the Vienna premiere of Wolfgang’s
Don Giovanni
. She kissed Constanze, then laid her cheek against mine. She touched my shoulder and gave a mournful look.
“My dear, my poor, poor dear,” she said. “We must bear up. We simply must.” She shook her head and led us up the stairs with a dramatic gasp.
Constanze raised an eyebrow.
Her sister approached the gentlemen at the top of the steps, extending her hand for a kiss, exuding the emotional exhaustion of the demonstratively bereaved.
Stadler bowed to Constanze and took her hand. When he kissed it, her skin was pale against his flushed features. He gave an edgy, apologetic glance to the man beside him, before reaching out a hand to introduce me. “The Prince Lichnowsky,” he said, with another bow.
One of the men who drew triangles in Stadler’s souvenir book. Lichnowsky lowered the lids of his eyes in acknowledgment of Stadler’s introduction. He was about thirty, dressed in a simple black frock coat of velvet and a vest of gold thread. His clothing gave off a scent of rosewater, but on his breath I detected a strong odor of the rolled tobacco leaves known as Sevillas.
“Would Madame de Mozart do me the honor of accompanying me into the concert hall?” Lichnowsky bowed and took my hand. He moved as though his limbs were hinged like the puppets in the emperor’s marionette theater at Schönbrunn.
He led me through white double doors into a lavish hall. Pink and gray marble rose in a stucco relief up the walls, to give the effect of classical columns. The Grecian figures of the ceiling fresco represented the academic disciplines studied at the university.
The hall filled with the conversation of perhaps four hundred people. Many were of the highest society, holding themselves on their upright chairs with a listless rigidity that reminded me of the kings and queens for whom I had played as a girl. I noted much greater animation among those who wore plainer attire. These were probably wealthy merchants. Wolfgang had often said that aristocrats no longer had sufficient funds for household orchestras and so he had gathered groups of businessmen to support his concerts. These had come tonight to show that the pleasure of his music hadn’t died with him.
Lichnowsky guided me to the front row. He bowed from the waist to some of those seated around us.
Everyone on the front row shifted to see who had arrived. Except one man. The Baron van Swieten stared ahead, silent and still. Looking sideways toward his seat at the center of the first row, I scrutinized him, unseen.
He was a broad man. His frock coat was embroidered with silver on a frosty gray fabric. His hands rested on a silver-topped stick that he held upright, its tip on the marble floor. Perhaps a decade older than me, he had very black hair. The shadow of his beard was thick on his cheeks and chin.
Swieten ignored the chatter around him, gazing at the piano with a look of puzzlement and pain. I had the impression he was trying to will Wolfgang back into existence so that he might hear him play once more. He bore himself with the air of one so powerful that he was used to having his wishes granted. His stare intensified, vexed to find this single, profound desire beyond his command.
Lichnowsky touched my elbow and gestured to my seat.
When we settled, the prince spoke so softly in the direction of the elaborate crystal lantern beside the stage that at first I failed to understand he was addressing me. “I consider myself to have been a close friend of your brother, madame,” he said. “As close as is possible between two men of such different station, you understand.”
“No doubt my brother was mindful of the honor you did him, my prince.”
“I might even say I was his companion. We traveled together.”
Wolfgang took to the road only when he was assured of paid recitals at the end of his journey, so I admit that I forgot to whom I was speaking. “You performed with him?”
Lichnowsky’s eyebrow quivered in annoyance. Like all aristocrats, he thought of the public performance of music as a task fit only for servants. “We made a trip to Berlin together,” he said.
“Rather a long journey.”
“Which brought us into close companionship.”
I recalled that Magdalena’s husband had lent my brother money for that trip. I wondered why he had needed extra funds, if he had traveled with a prince.
“My brother went to Berlin in search of a position at the court of the Prussian king. May I ask why you went?”
“My family has estates in the Prussian province of Silesia. There were some rental issues to resolve.”
“Do your estates take you to Berlin often?”
“Not at all.” Lichnowsky spoke so sharply that, in the orchestra, a double bass player and two cellists looked up from their tuning in surprise.
The prince waited, to be sure that the musicians had returned their attention to their instruments. “I suppose I could’ve avoided the trip had it been solely to manage my estates. I chose to accompany Wolfgang for other reasons.”
“As a brother Mason?”
He faked a cough, to disguise my words.
I would’ve questioned him more, but Maestro Salieri, the court composer, entered the hall from an antechamber. The orchestra rose.
Salieri acknowledged the applause. The room grew quiet. Salieri gathered himself, his mouth tight, his eyes full of suffering. He raised his arms and began the Allegro vivace of Wolfgang’s last symphony.
It was the first time I had heard it. It carried me away with a complexity and majesty I hadn’t encountered in his earlier symphonies.
By the time Salieri drove his arms high to end the fugue of the Molto allegro finale, all power had drained from my body. I had known my brother as a prodigy, then as a man of extraordinary talent at the keyboard who possessed a sensitive compositional technique. Until this moment I had failed to comprehend the staggering extent of his gifts.
My mouth opened and I cried low, while those around me rose to applaud. When he had been merely my brother, I had mourned Wolfgang’s death. Now that I saw him as a man of such stupefying musical genius, I felt his loss so much more greatly. It was this which kept me in my chair, shivering.
Lichnowsky regarded me in puzzlement, as though embarrassed by my emotion. “Madame?”
I brushed a finger below my tearful eyes and smiled. I wished to divert him, to alleviate his discomfiture. I touched his wrist. “You were telling me about the trip to Berlin. How was the journey?”
“Wolfgang and I went slowly to Berlin, by way of Leipzig. Your brother made a study there of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.” His lip twitched and he stroked his nose. “We progressed to Berlin and attended upon the king of Prussia at the Sanssouci Palace. It’s a most delightful place. The gardens are the best of it. While we waited, we walked through the terraces and into a pleasant grotto behind a waterfall.”
“A grotto?”
He faltered over my interruption. “Quite so. A little cave. A cool place to sit during the hot summer months. The king was also constructing an Egyptian garden, with statues in the pharaonic style and mystical pyramids.”
I slipped my hand into the pocket of my dress and touched Wolfgang’s note. The Grotto. I closed my eyes.
The prince leaned toward me. “Are you unwell?”
Applause, once more.
“Your sister-in-law is about to perform,” he said.
Constanze sang “Ah, I was in love,” and her sister followed her with a virtuoso aria that, Lichnowsky informed me, she was performing in
The Magic Flute
at Schikaneder’s theater.
But I heard little. I was overcome with confusion. Lichnowsky’s mention of a grotto in Berlin, Stadler’s fury over the letter, Gieseke’s strange numerical rant. I tried to slow my thoughts. I needed to clear my mind before I performed.
My fingers were crooked and cramped. Staring at them, I feared I’d disappoint the audience. As a girl, I had often waited to perform while Wolfgang ran through his tricks and delighted everyone, playing blindfolded and improvising on demand. He frequently went on so long and to such acclaim that there was no time left for me to play. I would watch, downcast, as the dukes and princes wandered away to their dinners without hearing me. I wished that this would be my fate today. One after the other, Vienna’s best musicians displayed their interpretations of my brother’s genius. Soon I was to demonstrate that the name of Mozart might attach to mediocrity, too.
Mademoiselle von Paradies completed her recital of a piano sonata by Wolfgang in B-flat major with a vigorous cadenza. She came to her feet, breathing hard, defiant and triumphant. Her rolling, blind eyes seemed to seek me out in the audience.
As the applause for Paradies subsided, the orchestra tuned up once more. Maestro Salieri bowed to me, gesturing toward the piano.
I stared at him, my vision out of focus, a chill in my belly. I had never been frightened in front of an audience. Neither was I now. I was scared of Wolfgang. What would he think of me?
My legs shook. I would not stand. I heard the coughing and muttering of the spectators as though I were listening with my head submerged in a washbowl.