Vienna Nocturne (12 page)

The next day, John Fisher invited Anna to see
Hamlet
with him that evening at the Burgtheater. She accepted. The performance was in German. Joseph Lange, Aloysia’s husband, played the title role. Fisher sat next to Anna and the heat of him and the smell of his breath made her want to put herself away, but she remained calm and cordial.

“May I see you again?” he asked. “Tomorrow?”

She shook her head. “Tomorrow I’m singing for the Thun und Hohensteins.”

“Then I’ll join you.”

She flushed. Mozart would be at the Thun-Hohensteins’, and she had never heard him play. “It’s a private salon, Mr. Fisher.”

“I’ll be your guest. I can play my fiddle. I’ve played for the empress of Russia, I’m good enough for Thun-Hohenstein, whoever he is.”

He was annoyed. She pressed a hand to his arm and gave him a
tender, beseeching look. “Another day, Mr. Fisher. The day after next. I shall be all yours, the day after next.”

He narrowed his eyes. “But not tomorrow.”

“Not tomorrow.”

“You’re ashamed to be seen with me.”

She swallowed and said, “My dear Mr. Fisher, nothing could be further from the truth.”

The next evening, at the salon hosted by the Countess Thun, a woman whose beauty, taste, and elegance would have inspired poets of any age, Anna arrived alone. She had been invited there to sing, but it was as much a social occasion as a professional engagement, and she had been looking forward to it for a long time, even amid her personal turmoil. Mozart was already there when she arrived. He greeted her and then was pulled to another corner of the room. Anna was glad. She would not have known what to say to him. She looked forward to seeing him play because then she would be able to stare frankly. She had forgotten about his eyes and his paleness and slightness, forgotten the variety of his expressions, how they crossed so easily from cheerfulness to concentration. And then it was time for her to sing.

Aglow in her daffodil gown, the countess, an expert player, accompanied Anna in arias from Paisiello’s wildly popular adaptation of Beaumarchais’s play
The Barber of Seville
. Anna, somewhat to her chagrin, was conscious of trying to please and impress Mozart above all the rest. She
thought
he was attentive. She thought he must be pleased. And in these idle musings she forgot, for a moment, John Fisher’s breath. The room was large and had a pleasant acoustic. The countess played as well as any concert artist and the piano was a beautiful Stein.

After she sang, Anna returned to her seat in the gathering and with a shaking hand accepted a glass of sherry. Count Thun, the countess’s lucky mate, beamed at his wife, who moved so gracefully among her guests, every gesture simplicity, no more than it should
be and no less, her face open and kind, accepting the compliments of her listeners and remarking in low, lilting French (she spoke in French almost as well as German) how blessed they were to have a singer like Mademoiselle Storace among them. One could not help but recollect, seeing Anna and this gracious lady together, how the pert Rosina of
The Barber of Seville
became the melancholy, neglected Countess Almaviva of the second Beaumarchais play,
The Marriage of Figaro
. The Countess Thun, however, had no such impediments. There was not a better heart in all of Vienna, nor one more beloved, and thank God for her love of music.

Mozart arranged himself before the pianoforte and waited while the guests settled and seated themselves. He wore a red frock coat trimmed with gold thread. A froth of lace cascaded from his throat. He had brought no music. He would play a sonata from memory and then improvise for a time on any theme given to him.

The room seemed to grow smaller around him, the light in all corners to flicker and dim. He played almost without appearing to move, sitting at the piano with a quality of straightness born more from attention and relaxation than from any excitement or anxiety.

Anna had seen many virtuosi play. Wolfgang Mozart surpassed them all. He exhaled, and so many breathing notes unfurled from his unhesitating hands. He played as she had always wished to sing—how she imagined she might sing if she were not so excitable and striving, but selfless and assured, bound to music alone. His expression hardly altered. He looked as if he were listening to a soothing prophecy about the felicity of his children. His eyes, relaxed and open, took in the room and yet looked at nothing. The smile on his lips was scarcely there—a smile for himself, alone, because he felt no need to parade his emotions for their benefit. He would not distract them from his music, nor undermine the balance of its perfection with aping or sighs. He looked as noble and quiet as a physician tending a miraculously reviving child, and no one seemed to take more pleasure in his art, for all his equanimity of expression, than he himself.

When the sonata was over he turned to them all with lively good humor and asked for a tune on which to improvise. Count Thun, winking at Anna, proposed the theme from her most famous
Barber
aria.

“Too obvious!” cried Mozart. “Everyone will think I’ve planned it out beforehand.” But no superior alternative being found, he at last consented to the
Barber
theme.

There could be no question that he was making up the variations on the spot, finding novel and ever wilder ways of exploring and distorting the theme, every turn unexpected and yet wholly right-seeming, without pause or misstep. His resources of creation were as if bottomless. The theme was always there and always changing. Just when it seemed he had ventured too far, beyond recovery, there was the original melody again, Anna’s melody, waiting for him patiently at the end of the next corner, nearly the same as he had left it—nearly exactly the same—and yet deepened, made somehow more complex and reassuring, by the twists and convolutions, the permutations of key and rhythm and mode, to which he subjected it. Anna was wholly rapt. When he had finished she felt almost hollow with the transformation. Here was an intelligence, a perception, quite beyond her scope. It humbled and inspired, and made her want to sing her aria again, right now, so that she might show him what he had taught her—or else to never sing it again, because she could never be as good as he had suggested.

“Isn’t he marvelous?” asked the Countess Thun. She offered Anna a few savory pastries. “I told him he would have to go last, or my fingers would be paralyzed when I went to play with you.” She gazed around the room with benevolent approval. “He outdid himself tonight. Did you ever hear such an extensive improvisation in your life? At every change I felt my eyes gape wider and my heart rise still farther with I don’t know what—nervous excitement, joy, gratitude—sincere astonished gratitude.”

“I’m quite speechless,” Anna confided to the good lady. She smiled, feeling restored and happy. It really was easy in this moment
to imagine there was no baby and no John Fisher. They were all quite removed. Everything was whole again, restored, as it should be. Mozart’s playing had soothed her hot brain like sweet water. Where once there had been panic and confusion, there was now clarity, a peculiar, tingling calm. All would be well. She was almost sure it would be well. “I’d never heard him before.”

“What, my dear? Not in all these weeks? I’m surprised. I suppose you are prohibitively engaged. Well, you’re lucky you saw him tonight, because he’s leaving Vienna the day after next.”

“Leaving?” Anna looked around quickly and saw him by the whist table, conversing patiently with a dowager.

“Tragically so,” said the countess, following Anna’s gaze, “and the more loss for the rest of us. He and his wife will visit his family in Salzburg.”

“For how long?”

“Oh, some weeks, I’d think.” The countess’s smile deepened. “I see you’re disappointed. I felt quite the same when he told me. I am one of Herr Mozart’s greatest admirers and because of that, I get foolish notions that I can claim him for my own. But he is a free man and may do as he likes. You’re lucky to have heard him tonight, at his best!”

A little later Mozart came nearer and Anna could speak to him at last. She congratulated him and saw how happy and proud he was, how well he spoke of his wife. She tried to explain how moved she had been by his playing, and how he had changed her perception of an aria she knew so well. She felt suddenly shy, yet also as though he understood her. Last night she’d seen
Hamlet
with John Fisher’s breath upon her. Now that was forgotten. She was herself again, at peace.

“Do you,” she asked hesitantly, “did you hear it all at once? I mean, when you heard me sing, were all the other variants already in your mind?”

He laughed and shook his head. “I make it up as I go. That’s the fun. Can I do this thing? Is it too far? Oh,
now
it’s too far and I’ll
have to scramble to find my way back. And now is anyone bored, anyone nodding off? Yes? Better speed up, better get louder, range round the highs and lows, modulate, go backward and upside down and stick the ass on its head, and then isn’t this a sad little thing now, let’s do that again, and then add it to this one, like so, and softly softly softly, and here we are back to the theme again in minor and the tune is like a thread through all of it, guiding me through it like a maze, you know. If I lose it I’m finished! It must be at the heart, my heart. Everything spins around it. You see? But there’s no plan. If there were a plan it’d be a travesty. I’d have to call it something else.”

His face was rosy with pleasure and his hands, as he tried to let her see into his mind, drew vague excited pictures in the air. He looked into her eyes with such brightness and unreserve it was like watching a breaking sun along the sea. Anna nodded and nodded again and told him she did the same sort of thing when she was singing, or at least tried to. They were comrades, then. It relieved her that he had not been thinking of her directly when he played—it had been vain of her to hope for that, his thinking of her. No, it was all much simpler than that. He had been at play. He had allowed the rest of them to see into his amusement. And it was this play, this risk, that made him so extraordinary.

The first time Anna saw John Fisher perform, at a private concert, he sought her out with his eyes at every pause or interval. He was as fine a violinist as any she’d heard, next to her brother and poor drowned Thomas Linley. His face in meditative concentration became softer, younger, and more open, and his arrogance, his slight tendency to swagger, became, in performance, natural and called for. His hands as they worked the burnished instrument were graceful and gentle and light. Had they been otherwise they would have elicited no music.

By Lidia’s calculations Anna was two months gone with the baby, but it stayed quiet and small, as if it was aware that it must not be known.

John Fisher was a well-spoken gentleman and a fine musician. He had been friends with Anna’s father in their youth. Her mother had always wished for Anna to marry a man from the British Isles and it would not perhaps be surprising to others that Anna was obedient in this wish.

She saw Lidia when she could, in parks or cafés. Lidia wanted Anna to run away but Anna said it was impossible. Lidia blamed herself for the pregnancy.

Anna and Fisher read plays and made music together, and went to concerts and had picnics. In mid-August Mrs. Storace had tea with Fisher and told him that her daughter was willing and there must be no delay, lest her honor be compromised. He, although somewhat surprised, admitted that a brief engagement would be agreeable to himself as well.

“Miss Storace,” he said abruptly one afternoon shortly thereafter while they were strolling in the Prater. “I think you the sweetest lady I’ve ever set eyes on.” He drew to a halt and clasped Anna’s hands.

She did not like him. She wished she were anywhere else. His cheeks were fat and his eyes so sharp and blue. He spoke quickly, as if afraid she would flee before he had finished. The sun in his face gave him an unattractive scowl. His hands, from either nervousness or heat, were bathed in sweat. She held them as lightly as she could and hardly took breath.

“You enchant me,” he said. “I have remembered you, all these years. I loved your father.” His eyes flooded with tears, and she thought distantly that he was more emotional a man than had first appeared. “I know I’m almost a stranger to you,” he continued. “I know you could have any man you liked. By God, I know.” This was hardly the case—no true gentleman would ever wed a girl who went on the stage. “But I love you,” Fisher went on. “I would do anything, anything, dear Miss Storace, to have you.” His damp hands squeezed her own. He scowled into the sun. “But why don’t you speak?” he cried. “Miss Storace, why do you turn such a look of blandness on my heart? Won’t you consent? Won’t you make me the happiest of men and be my bride?”

The blood had drained from her face. She waited a moment for someone to rescue her. But there was no one.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, Mr. Fisher, I will.”

“My darling,” he said, seizing her tightly. “
John
. You must call me
John
. My darling!”