Marrying Mozart

by Stephanie Cowell

  “Now,” Mozart said, “I present a challenge to Mademoiselle Aloysia in the presence of her family. Mademoiselle, I heard you say last night in the carriage that you can read all music at sight. Very well! I’ve written this song for you from a text by Metastasio, and if you can read it straight off without an error, you may have it. If not, I tear it up.”

  A flurry of voices rose up, a few hands drawing her closer. “Amusing; he’s likely made it difficult. Aloysia, stand behind him to see the notes clearly. The light’s poor; who’ll hold the candle?”

  For a moment Aloysia could not remember the boast she had made coming home in the carriage, expansive with her success and the quickly drunk wine, and flush with the odd sensuality of sitting almost knee to knee with this intense young man who had ridden in the gondolas of the Venetian canals. Whatever it had been, now she had to make good on it, or be shamed that she had not been taught music well enough.

  Mozart adjusted the music so she could see it better, then he beckoned for Sophie, who held a candle for her sister, to step closer.

  He played the first bars.

  Aloysia sang the opening line of the recitative in a small, tremulous voice, as if she had never sung before anyone, but by the tender melodic line of the andante sostenuto, encouraged by the nods of the others, who saw she had made no mistakes so far, she began to gain courage.

  “Non so d’onde viene quel tenero affetto

  Quel moto, che ignoto mi nasce nel petto”

  She knew music; she had heard it as she was curled within the womb and after she lay swaddled in her cradle. By the first gentle spill of sixteenth notes and the sustained high Bb that followed shortly after, she felt those about her stir with admiration, and her voice took on an authority of its own. Forgetting everything but the music before her, she sprang into the allegro agitato. Her voice opened like a heart in love, and she became one with the notes. Dresses, cake, muddy hose fell away as insignificant. She sang as if she had never sung before. She stood erect, one hand at her side almost imperceptibly beating time. The song returned to the first tempo, and her silvery voice rose in glittering scale to the high Eb. Mozart’s hands on the keys flashed, lifting her up. She was not reading the song; she became it.

  When the last trill rang out to the dark corners of the room, beyond the piles of old music and the empty wineglasses, she stood poised, startled and motionless. “The purity of that voice,” someone said. For a moment she had been in another world. Vaguely, she felt her hand taken and someone’s dry kiss above it. She withdrew it distractedly, as if someone had mistakenly taken up something that belonged to her. There was a strange desire to cry. Could the song be over? Could it have ended and left her?

  Everyone was clapping; Sophie’s arm was about her waist.

  The words with their melody repeated themselves in her mind; she moved her lips, drawing a little close to the clavier as if she would begin again.

  “Non so d’onde viene quel tenero affetto ...”

  (I don’t know from whence comes this tender affection ...)

  Mozart stood up clapping as well, but she looked at him as if he were a stranger. What had he to do with this moment? What was she thinking? The notes were his. Still, without her voice, weren’t they but dry marks? Yet how could it be? She stood confused. Was it his song? Or was it hers?

  “Mademoiselle,” he said, “you’ve won the wager. The song’s yours. I’ll orchestrate it so that you can sing it in concert, and all who hear it will be as amazed as we are here today.”

  She felt a moment’s fierce tenderness for him. He looked at her. For a moment nothing was ordinary, and she reached for his warm hand. Oh, she thought, come with me. Yet they were pressed in on all sides, and there was her father being the dear fool, calling in a loud voice for the best three remaining bottles of wine to be dusted off and brought at once. How could he think of wine at this moment?

  With that the music stopped within her, and she knew herself to be only a sixteen-year-old girl in a stuffy parlor. Could she have so quickly lost the mystery of those moments and the happiness of the singer when she becomes the song and touches eternity? But family and guests were all pressing about them, candles tilted and dripping wax. “Mind the candle,” Josefa cried, receiving the wine bottles from her father.

  Now she was being hugged by all, aware of how intensely a few of the men looked at her, even Thorwart, who was called uncle by the girls even though he wasn’t really a blood relative. There was the self-contained composer, his left hand still resting soundlessly on the keys, also looking steadily at her. If she embraced him, she would regain the moment. Slip away, her eyes said; slip away and come with me. Come with me, dear Wolfgang Mozart. Her heart was beating very fast.

  She left the room as a string trio began, escaping to the unmade beds and scattered clothing of her shared bedroom, even closing the door a little, but not all, so that she might hear the composer’s footsteps following her down the hall. The door from the parlor creaked softly, and she opened hers. In the shadow she saw a man walking softly under the portraits of long-dead Weber ancestors posing in their horrible dull garments.

  She lightly ran forward the few steps and felt her hands caught by another’s; they were not Mozart’s supple hands, but wider, meaty ones. It was Leutgeb who had followed her. “Do you know what happens to kisses not given?” he said softly, looming above her. “They become sorrow, like words never spoken. You are the most beautiful girl in the world, and your voice is like that of an angel.”

  Lifting her face, she allowed him to kiss her mouth. And as he kissed her, she felt all the magnificence of the song return.

  Some minutes later she straightened her dress and slipped back into the parlor, where the second movement of the string trio had just begun. She could see her father’s good head nodding as he played his violin.

  Sometime after the song had been sung and acclaim was yet ringing about the parlor for Aloysia, Josefa Weber slipped from the room to hide on the cold hall steps. She had observed her sister’s departure, and shortly after it Leutgeb’s; now Josefa sat with her arms hugging her chest. Why had she made up with her before? Here in their very own parlor Aloysia had taken the prize of admiration, while Josefa’s own voice was larger and more passionate, able to make the very pictures on the wall tremble and the candle flames waver. She could have sung equally well at sight, but, not having been asked to enter the competition, she was vanquished. Oh, it was always this way, always since Aloysia’s birth.

  Josefa remembered peering over the cradle at the very tiny fragile child who, anxious relatives muttered, hovered between life and death. For weeks following Aloysia’s birth Josefa had stumbled over kneeling aunts whispering over their rosary beads. The child lived, and, from shortly after that time, everything changed.

  Josefa had been the darling of her parents for three and a half brief years of life as an only child. Later, even after it seemed Aloysia would live, it was Josefa who was the first to read, the first to have a music lesson, the first to sing to aunts and grand-mothers as she stood on a chair and was held steady by her adoring mother, and then, dressed in her childish best, the first to sing to her father’s musical friends on Thursdays. Suddenly, though, there was another songbird, a higher, lighter, purer voice, yanking at her dress as she sang, almost pulling her from the chair. At the age of seven Josefa had had enough; she pushed her sister down ten minutes before guests arrived, and had then been slapped for it. Friends who had first lifted Josefa into their arms now exclaimed playfully at her weight, and they lifted tiny Aloysia instead. The younger girl darted like a sparrow; she was more appealing. And yet Josefa loved her small sister as something finer and sweeter than she could ever be. Hadn’t there been that day at the menagerie so long ago to prove it forever?

  The tiger, behind the slats of its wood, wheeled cage, was old and lethargic. Josefa and Aloysia had approached the cage hand in hand, each drawn by the other’s courage to go forward. Were they six and nearly
three? Aloysia wore a little crushed bonnet, and the few feet to the heavy wood cage seemed very long as they pulled each other closer. Then the beast roared. He rose, glaring at them, and swiped one paw through the bars. Aloysia stood petrified, some inches away from the great curving claws; someone was shouting, but before the large keeper could reach them, Josefa yanked her baby sister’s limp arm and pulled her away so fast that Aloysia tumbled in the dust. Josefa was shaking so hard she had to lean against the wall. Still trembling, she picked up her sobbing sister and dusted her off. Was it minutes, hours, before their parents found them? “Why didn’t you protect your little sister?” her mother had cried later. “You know you have to take care of her; how could you let her go so close?” Her father’s voice had replied angrily, “It’s not the girl’s fault, Caecilia; she saved her.” Josefa still recalled the sensation of his mustache against her cheek as he knelt and held her close.

  Now, years later, she sat on the landing outside her family’s apartment, trying to keep her tears within. She could hear that the trio was done, that now someone accompanied a violin. Then everyone called for a duet, and the cry went up, “But where’s Josefa? Where’s our Josefa?” That was her father’s voice calling, “Where’s my girl?”

  The door creaked open, and Sophie emerged, blinking, onto the landing. “Josy?” she murmured.

  From the shadows the eldest sister held her breath. The love in the smallest sister’s voice sounded again. Josefa could not bear to hear Sophie’s questioning plea and leapt to her feet. “I was too warm inside,” she said. “That’s why I left.”

  Inside she crossed, smiling, to Aloysia. The sisters each wound an arm about the other’s waist and, lifting their faces, sang purely and truly as if nothing had occurred at all: as if one had not been fondled in a dark hall under the small dour portraits of their ancestors, and the other had not fled to the stairs to confront her unhappiness. Their voices rose in thirds to the top notes, glistening off the low flames of the candles and echoing about the empty wine bottles. Then another magical evening came to a close, and the guests reluctantly began to depart.

  The parlor was empty, the music of Mozart’s song lay on top of a pile of other musical scores, and the four sisters gathered close on the two iron bedsteads. Wooly, worn nightgowns pulled down over their drawn-up knees, their faces scrubbed free of rouge, the girls climbed bare-legged from bed to bed and shared a cup of cold coffee while Sophie foraged through the remaining one and a half layers of chocolates in the painted wood box. She had just finished a marzipan enclosed in dark bitter chocolate and flavored with a hint of strawberry.

  “Don’t eat them all.”

  “I only had six.”

  “Oh, how can you all be such pigs!” Aloysia said. “You’ll be fat and won’t have fashionable figures, no matter how tightly you lace your corsets!”

  Laughter burst out, quickly followed by a sharp admonition from their mother in the next room. Father had a headache; Mother was taking care of him. Then Constanze turned to her smaller sister and whispered, “They’re almost asleep; don’t wake them. Sophie, did you manage to steal it?”

  Wiping her fingers on the quilt, Sophie reached under the bed and, with a crooked smile, drew out from under her pile of clothes the leather-tooled book of suitors.

  Aloysia sat straight up in horror. “You shouldn’t have taken that,” she whispered sharply. “You know Mother doesn’t want us to touch it.” She put the coffee cup carefully on the dresser and reached for the book, but Sophie rolled away.

  Constanze said, “Why shouldn’t she touch it? You did the other night. I saw you.”

  “It was the first time she said I could enter possibilities, and I looked at only the one page. Where did you find it tonight? She moved it; I looked. Well, I did look.”

  “Why, to enter that horn blower’s name?” whispered Josefa. “Sophie found it under the flour barrel.”

  “You’re not supposed to open it! There are things in it that are private! It’s Mother’s.”

  “I am going to open it!” Sophie said. “Shh! Be quiet! We’ll just look at it tonight, and I’ll tiptoe and put it back. It’s her plans for our futures, and we have a right to know her plans.”

  Sophie, Constanze, and Aloysia gathered closer, Aloysia with some confusion in her face, the same expression she had been wearing ever since disappearing down the hall earlier that evening. Her lower lip, thrust forward, gave her a look between childish and arrogance, and she cast a resentful look at Josefa, who sat with arms folded.

  Sophie turned the pages carefully, holding the candle close. A bit of glowing wick flew off and landed on a page, and she pressed it out with her fingers and rubbed at the mark. It had been several days since Constanze and Sophie made plans to steal the book this very evening. “It is our futures,” Constanze had said. Josefa had sworn to have nothing to do with the plan, and even now she sat a little apart, rubbing her big bare feet with their large toes and looking disapproving. Her dark hair fell uncurled down her back to her waist, making her inquisitive face seem even longer.

  The early pages were crammed with sketches of dresses that had been fashionable twenty years before, and a number of old family recipes. A curious printed invitation to a ball fell out, along with some bit of fabric. They turned the pages more rapidly now, past family accounts meticulously kept and then abandoned, until they reached the names of possible suitors; then they looked mischievously at one another. The first of these pages listed the names of tradesmen, the names of their fathers, and their approximate yearly income.

  “Oh, these are from some time ago,” Constanze whispered. “Look, the ink’s faded. Will you all be still? Look, here’s Weidman. I remember him, but he’s married now and has three sons. Here’s Lorenz Holsbauer: something odd happened to him. I think they made him go for a soldier; he was in some kind of scandal.”

  “How do you know?” Josefa asked, moving closer to look over her sister’s shoulder.

  “I notice things. You don’t. You’re always reading philosophy or Rousseau.”

  “I notice what’s important, not nonsense. Don’t let the wax drip! When were these written? I wasn’t even twelve years old. Matthias Aldgasser. Oh, dear God, Matthias! He became a priest, had to, because he preferred ... don’t listen, Sophie. He preferred—”

  “What did he prefer?” the youngest girl cried, bouncing on the mattress.

  “Hush, or we’ll stuff a pillow over your face. He was ... there was a scandal. Never mind; it would corrupt you to know.”

  “I’m already corrupted having stolen the book,” Sophie said. “I’ll have to make my confession and do penance, say at least a full rosary on my knees on the stone church floor. Don’t push, Aloysia.”

  “I’m not,” Aloysia whispered. “I don’t think we should be looking at this at all. You could bunch a shawl under your knees, Sophie. And since when are you interested, Mademoiselle Maria Josefa?”

  Still they turned more pages. “Ah, this list is more recent,” Josefa said. The rest of their small room was now in shadow, with the shapes of their hanging dresses and hats like the ghosts of their lives watching over them. Josefa glanced toward the mirror, where she could see only the reflections of their dark faces and the sputtering light of the candle.

  Constanze pulled the quilt over her knees. “Even if they are more recent, half these men are married already. The decent ones are snatched from the shelves as fast as fresh bread in the market, and the ones left we wouldn’t want to rub bare feet with under a quilt.”

  “They’d be rubbing something more than that!” Josefa whispered with a smile. “Sophie, did you eat the very last marzipan chocolate?”

  “Will you be still?” Constanze ran her finger down a few more pages. “Why, now it becomes fantastical!” she murmured seriously. “Look here. Here’re her plans for you, Aloysia; your name’s on the top of the page. Here’s the name of a Swedish baron. She can’t be serious. Where does she get such ideas? Sweden’s very cold
in winter, and they say the days are only a few hours long. You wouldn’t be able to borrow things from us, Aly, if you lived so far away.”

  Aloysia wound her curls around her fingers. “I wouldn’t need to borrow anything if I married a baron. And it’s not as if she got the name from a book she read. The Baron visited here some months ago; he may have been at the court concert last night as well, but I couldn’t see everyone’s face when I was concentrating on the sixteenth notes in the duet. And Mama described him only once, rather vaguely. Did you steal this book just to tease me? Perhaps you don’t care what you do, but I care very much! I’d have all the dresses I wanted then, all of them!”

  “And what about Monsieur Horn Player Leutgeb, Mademoiselle Go-Hide-in-the-Dark?”

  Aloysia pulled the book away so suddenly they heard the page tear, and all four looked down at it in horror. Constanze rummaged in a box under the bed until she found some paste, and they mended it as neatly as they could, heads together, fingers smoothing the page as if it were a holy relic.

  Aloysia’s eyes shone with tears again even as they finished. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll tell her I ripped it accidentally. Or maybe she won’t notice. Put it back under the barrel carefully. Leutgeb’s nothing to me. I don’t like everyone knowing my thoughts; you can’t know them anyway. You couldn’t understand them. You’re not me. You haven’t my reasons. And I will marry well, and you’ll be fortunate if I let you visit me!”

  She withdrew under her quilt, turning away from them a little, and did not look up when Constanze came back from returning the book to the kitchen. Though she closed the door as quietly as possible, her bare feet creaked the boards.

  “Safely back?” one girl whispered.

  Constanze nodded grimly. “Is there a chocolate with sweet chestnut paste?” she asked, her long loose hair falling over the box like a benediction. “The candle won’t last but a minute more.”