Marrying Mozart

by Stephanie Cowell

  Four singers stood together on the stage and began the great quartet. “Andrò ramingo, e solo”—I’ll wander forth and alone. He marked the tempo. The strings played exquisitely. His soul left his body.

  Aloysia sat embroidering by the window of her home a week later at dusk, green silk thread in a soft neat roll on the table beside her. Mozart stood quietly in the doorway, studying the slope of her white neck down to the slight swell of her breasts. She was humming a bit of his opera.

  He thought, I must memorize her perfectly as she is now, with the strand of silk about her finger, and her embroidery of French court children held on her lap near her stomach where our real children, hers and mine, will one day grow. He had been walking about the city for some hours, starting for the house, then turning back again.

  She sensed him then, and, jumping up at once, came toward him with open arms. “Is it true?” she murmured, looking at his bowed head. “C’est terrible! Mon Dieu! It can’t be; it can’t be.”

  “But it is,” he said. “Idomeneo’s been withdrawn after three performances, and I’m told it won’t travel; it’s too difficult to perform with its orchestration and staging. And old-fashioned, not likely to catch on. ‘Too deep, too dark, too difficult. Too good,’ Cannabich said, ‘dear Mozart, you are too good.’ Can that be my fate, Aloysia, to be too good? To never quite be what people want?”

  He gazed at Fridolin’s clavier, his fingers moving against his breeches; sighing, he hung his head. One of his side curls was badly rolled. He sagged against the doorjamb. “My love, I can’t hold any longer,” he said at last. “I can’t borrow any more money from home, and the opera fee must go to repay what I have already borrowed. I must return for a time to the Archbishop’s service in Salzburg. I would marry you now and take you with me, but you’d be as unhappy there as I will be. Stay here with your sisters.”

  Her voice rose passionately. “I want to go with you!”

  “Hush, I know. Oh God, to be an hour without you, my love!”

  She lay her head against his shoulder, slowly stroking his ear. Once she shuddered; he felt it down her back. Her voice was unsteady as she put her words together. “It won’t be forever, Wolfgang. You’ll find a better position with an opera house where I can sing.”

  “Yes, I will find it; I must. Within several months I’ll have obtained something else; all my friends are looking for me. Then we’ll be together as man and wife, and I’ll write great music for you. This I swear on my mother’s soul.”

  “Don’t be uneasy on my behalf, Wolfgang! I’ll wait forever. Per sempre,” she repeated in Italian, standing up straight. Her small breasts heaved. For always ... mio tesoro, amore mio! My treasure, my love. He could hardly break away from her kisses then. He thought to take her on the sofa amid the dusty, soft, worn cushions; he thought to lock the doors and take her, pushing up her skirts. At least there was this simple thing between man and woman, so achievable and immediate. Desire rushed through him; he jerked his head back, grasping her hand so hard it whitened. She would allow it (every part of her body cried yes), but if she swelled with child before he had a good position, what would they do?

  “Good-bye,” he said, kissing her many times.

  “Wolfgang, don’t go.”

  He ran down the stairs, but voices called from the window. He looked up to see Aloysia, Josefa, Sophie, and Constanze standing at the window, the curtains pushed back. The younger sisters were weeping; they likely had also heard about the operas cancellation and felt bad for him. Per sempre, she had said, and there had been tears in her eyes as well. Wolfgang, don’t go. He would never forget it.

  His earliest memories were of his father lifting him into bed during some fever, and his father’s spare frame, bones hardy under his blue wool coat, holding him so that they almost melded. For years they had been inseparable as they journeyed from city to city all over Europe. His father placing him before harpsichords to play, watching from a short distance as he performed, carrying him away again—a little boy who was sometimes eager, sometimes curious, sometimes quiet. His father, leaning over him as he wrote his first childish compositions, later holding the splotched music paper to the light, breathing a sharp sigh. His father standing by a window in Vienna, combing his son’s small white wig, which caught the sunlight.

  And now Leopold Mozart was waiting for him again, as he always had.

  The rooms were not the ones where Mozart had been born—some years ago the family had moved across the river—but the furnishings were arranged in the same way. He’s near sixty, Mozart thought as he pressed his lips to the stark cheek. Still, his father was not much changed.

  Mozart glanced about. On the wall was the portrait of himself and his sister; his legs dangled from the clavier bench. He was very young, very charming with his silky wig. On the windowsill, best placed to catch the sun, were his mother’s plants. The edges of some of the leaves had turned brown. He drew in his breath hard.

  “God bless you, my son—a safe journey?”

  “Nothing unexpected; we did not overturn.”

  His father groaned, “My God, your mother—even after this time I hope it is not true, that surely she must come up the steps after you. I have had masses said.”

  Mozart looked about uncomfortably, then murmured, “Father, father.”

  For a moment Leopold Mozart covered his face with his hands.

  Mozart said, “Lord give us patience, Father, to bow to His will; she’s in His hands now, having gone to her just reward. But Father, you’re well? God grant it you are well, and my darling sister?”

  “As well as can be expected.”

  Mozart put down his bags. On a shelf were the very same six porcelain plates with pictures in blue of milkmaids frolicking in some field; one showed a crack where it had been carefully mended. His father had pushed it off the table in a fit of anger years before ... or had it been himself? He could never recall for certain which one had done it, perhaps both; then he saw his mother’s reproachful shoulders as she knelt to gather the pieces and he heard his sister’s weeping. Nannerl wept easily. They were careful not to make her cry. Where was she this day?

  “Ah, my son, here’s the letter from your great uncle. Here, where it says, ‘Your wife’s among the angels,’ etc., etc. He sends his love to you. He asked if you were eighteen yet. He forgets things. He loved your dear mother, the angel. And another one here of condolence from your old friend Padre Martini from Bologna, that great musician and man of God, who taught you when you were fourteen.”

  The delicate, almost translucent, slightly wrinkled hands sifted through the papers until Mozart thought him like an old monk. Well, now he would sleep in a celibate bed.

  “I wanted to show you—”

  “But there’s time for that, Father.”

  “... the letter announcing—”

  “But there’s time, there’s time!”

  The apartment door opened, and Mozart’s older sister, Nannerl, rushed toward him with her market basket on her arm, crying, “Oh, Amadé!”

  He murmured, “I’m so sorry, my love. What can I bring you but myself?”

  She clung to him for some moments, and then broke away, wiping her face. “I’ll put away the cheese,” she said.

  He heard her in the kitchen. When he thought of Nannerl, as he did almost daily wherever he was, he recalled both the patient, tender older sister of their childhood tours, waiting with clasped hands until he had finished playing his music, as if content to stand there always, and the woman she was now, sitting by the window copying music. It was not that she had no beauty, but that she had no light. She would take care of their father, of course; but without her mother she felt utterly weakened. She had written that to him. She’s put aside her youth entirely now, he thought as he heard her opening the kitchen cupboards. She’s put it away as something too extravagant for her own use, wrapped it carefully in tissue paper and laid it away. And that was Mother’s old gray-flocked dress she was wearing, the
one Mother always wore to church.

  They ate the familiar dishes at supper, and, when the sweets appeared at the end, Leopold leaned forward and spoke the words he had been keeping back throughout the whole meal. “Wolfgang.”

  “Father.”

  “Are you listening?”

  “I am, yes.”

  “I’ve smoothed the path for your reconciliation with the Archbishop; he expects you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll go speak with him.”

  “I trust you have left your affections for Mademoiselle Weber in Munich.”

  “Indeed not, Father; I intend to marry her.”

  The next day he dressed in his best coat and walked over the bridge to Getreidegasse, the street where he had been born, then with the river Salzach on his left, turned up Goldgasse until it opened to the Domplatz and the Archbishop’s stately Residenz. Mozart’s father had been a church musician in Salzburg for some thirty-five years, serving the late kindly Archbishop and, more recently, this one. Mozart thought suddenly, My father knows many aspects of music: the toil, the diligence, the exactitude. But the ecstatic love of it eludes him; he does not trust it. And what is it to trust music and the deep feelings it pulls from you?

  The tapping of shoes on the marble floor announced Count Carl Arco, the chamberlain, a thin, fussy young man with a bad complexion and much lace at his throat. “We expected you earlier, Mozart,” he said. “His Holiness is at dinner. Never mind, come in; you’ve already put him off by being late.” He dropped his voice to a low warning. “Your absence this year and a half has not sat well with him. I speak in friendship, of course. My aunt sends her condolences on your loss.”

  He opened the door and whispered to the footman, who sang out the visitor’s name.

  At the end of a very long, polished table that could have easily dined twenty and was loaded with platters of meat and noodles, Hieronymus Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg, was eating alone. His Grace looked up, fork in his hand, and grunted, then began to cut a smallish piece of meat into even smaller bits. He drank two or three thoughtful sips of wine, and the footman hurried forward and refilled the glass. The mouth was small, rosy, feminine.

  Mozart said, “Your Princely Grace, it is my joy to greet you.”

  “As you say it I will take it, but I am surprised you did not come these twelve months sooner. So the prodigy has soon discovered how difficult the world can be, eh? Full of false promises, dangled hopes that you ran after in your youth. I’m happy though to see you return. I bear no grudge.”

  Mozart bowed again. “Your Grace,” he said, his voice echoing across the plates of food. He stood, having been offered no chair. “You know how I and my family have honored you, and how much I honor you for all these years my father has been happy in your service.”

  “Your father is a good man.”

  “If I might know the duties expected of me ...”

  “Why, much the same as your father’s: to train the choir of men and boys, to write church music and whatever other small pieces I may need, to play violin in the orchestra during church masses as you did when you were in my service before. I am in need of a violinist.”

  “I beg you, Your Grace, to be released from that duty. I am but a tolerable violinist. I assure you that my talents could be better used elsewhere.”

  “As I have specified, but what have you in mind?”

  As some servants came to clear away the meats and bring the stewed fruit, Mozart braced his hands on the far end of the table where he stood. His voice was clear if respectful. “Your Grace,” he said, “it would be to the honor of Your Grace to improve the music of this court. I am thinking first of a full and first-rate orchestra, not the small one we have at present. If we could perhaps have an orchestra here to your honor, and, with it, to make an opera house, renowned singers would come. I could compose for you in the Italian or German school. I have brought my music portfolio to show you some examples.”

  “What? But I do not like opera,” said the Archbishop without raising his head from his fruit. “I’ve no use for these things. I need a violinist in my small chamber orchestra for masses and a composer for brief liturgical music, and it is that for which I engage you, perhaps later to promote you to the post of court organist. An opera, pah! What, to have my court flooded with licentious Italians all shrieking away?” All the time he spoke, he lifted spoonful after spoonful of the fruit to his mouth.

  “Do you understand how lenient I and my predecessor have been with you and your father?” the Archbishop continued. “Allowing you both in the old days, and more recently, to spend years away from my service trying your skill in the world? But the world is a rougher place than you can know, and you return here to the protection of my court. I will have you, but I will not permit any more wanderings. Be content. Do not look higher than God has meant you to look.” He paused for a moment. “Will you serve me?”

  “I shall, Your Highness.”

  “Your voice is faint. I have not quite heard you.”

  “I shall serve you, Your Highness.”

  With that, Mozart left as quickly as he could; once away from the palace, he began to walk more rapidly, and then almost to run toward the river, past carriages. All the time he repeated hotly, and in half voice: “I am Mozart. I am Mozart!” He wanted to cry it to the trees... and where is all my music? Now people looked at him as if he were crazy. He ran past the slow procession of wagons, carriages, supplicants, priests, and visitors moving toward the Residenz, muttering, “I am Mozart, and someday all will know it. No, I am not crazy. I am Mozart.” By the time he crossed the bridge he was shouting. Two priests passing him, followed by a bevy of choir-boys, shook their heads. Flushing, he went on his way, swinging his music portfolio, through the city that was his birthplace.

  I now fell again over Munich that first day of December, gradually filling the crevices of the houses, and piling high where cold pigeons huddled above the doors of the Residenztheater in which Mozart’s opera had been given so briefly. It clung to the hems of the somber cassocks of priests who hurried to mass, and it weighed down the black skirt of Sophie Weber as she mounted the creaking wood stairs of her family’s building, heavy basket on her arm.

  The little parlor, with its portrait of Fridolin, still draped with a sagging and long-dried garland of dark leaves, was deserted; music was piled on the table nearly a foot high. When one of the sisters wanted to find a certain piece to give a clavier lesson or to sing at a wedding, she would scatter the pile across the table and then gather the pieces together carelessly. The deep red sofa still had a tear from their move from Mannheim a year and a half before; no one had bothered to mend it. It had been spring when Mozart had departed for his work in Salzburg, and with the dissolution of the Thursday musicales, the house was devoid of any masculine presence. I’ll be back for your fourteenth birthday, he had promised Sophie, but that would come within two months, and his letters to them made it seem unlikely. What his letters to Aloysia said, Sophie did not know. There was no further mention of suitors, and their mother’s book was no longer anywhere to be found, though one day the girls had torn the house apart looking for it. Still there were letters back and forth from Thorwart, who was now in Vienna, and the four sisters dreaded that their mother still had her plans. The two younger girls had long decided that whoever their mother chose would be quite dreadful, no matter what his lineage, and that anything that divided them as much as a city would be unthinkable.

  Sophie heard her sisters’ voices from the kitchen. “Where’s that girl? Didn’t she come in with the bread? Sophie, where are you?”

  Aloysia, Josefa, and Constanze were sitting as close to the fire as they could without singeing their long skirts. Josefa’s long, thick back bent slightly as her needles roughly poked the hose she was knitting. Aloysia raised her face from embroidering a purse. “Is anything happening outside?” she asked.

  Sophie put down her basket, wiped her nose, and cleaned off the moisture that had formed on
her spectacles. “It’s three weeks to Christmas. And they captured a thief; I saw it posted.” She began to unpack the meat, which was wrapped in an old bit of music for a mass.

  “Mon Dieu, you think the strangest things are newsworthy. You’re concerned the poor man left a needy family. What else?”

  “I saw a poor little kitten crying in the snow. I should have taken it home with me. Maybe I’ll go back and see if it’s still there.”

  Aloysia dropped her embroidery to her lap and turned toward her youngest sister, her face flushed with the fire. “You’ll do nothing of the sort; you know cats make me sneeze. Anyway, it’s time you’re back; we’ve been waiting for you for our morning coffee. Mother’s gone out.”

  They were drinking their coffee when they heard the jangle of the house bell below. Aloysia pushed away her cup and ran to the parlor window, from which she could see the snowy hats of two men standing by the house door, one heavy and of medium height, the other somewhat scrawny even under his coat. “It’s Uncle Thorwart,” she quietly called back to the kitchen. “He’s come from Vienna; Mama said he might.” Thorwart’s appointment by the court to be their male guardian had worn further on them; he had at first made detailed budgets for them, limiting sweets, firewood, chemises, and rouge. It was only when he found none of the girls would speak to him that he relented, but he still looked at them, breathing heavily through his mouth, as if to say, Mark my words, it will turn out badly for you! (Constanze had confided to Sophie that perhaps she had been mistaken about his brushing against her breasts; the hall was narrow, their parents’ friend a big man. She had stood gazing at Sophie, blinking and doubtful.)