Marrying Mozart

by Stephanie Cowell

  “Yes,” replied Constanze, but she was aware only of Herr Schantz’s hearty laughter from the other room.

  Some minutes later Sophie appeared at the door. “They’re beginning to play a game,” she cried impatiently. “Come on.”

  In the large room the chairs had been pushed to one side but for a red velvet one in the center. Sophie held her arm and spoke in her ear in a ticklish whisper. “They’re going to measure the women’s calves with a ribbon and see which one’s the plumpest. They guess beforehand, and make wagers; they cast lots to see who does the measuring.” It was an old game Constanze had seen played once years before in her own house; her father had done the measuring, and her mother had stood by frowning. It will be Johann, she thought, who will measure. He will touch my leg. Her breasts, laced not quite so flat this evening, seemed to rise and grow warmer.

  The dice were rolled, and the winner cried out. She closed her eyes. It is Johann, she thought, but when she opened her eyes, it was Alfonso’s prodigy, Henri, who stood with the scarlet ribbon dangling in his hand, swinging it to and fro before the many guests who crowded around.

  One by one the women were pulled laughing to the chair, crossing their legs at the knee, lifting their skirts, their petticoats, and, last of all, their plain white shifts. The men jostled and whistled. Sophie went directly and, pulling up her garments, exposed her white light wool hose; Henri knelt before her and wound the ribbon around the fullest part of her calf. With a pen he marked her initials on the silk and dangled it high.

  Lastly, Constanze was pulled forward to the chair. She glanced up at all the interested faces, then gathered up her various layers until her white hose were bared. She felt Henri’s hand on her calf, and gazed down at his golden hair indifferently. Everyone in the room was looking at her. Then he held up the dangling ribbon in triumph, and people broke into applause. She had won, and she stood, her skirts fallen again into place. She smiled at everyone, and yet saw only the fortepiano maker. Then he was at her side, holding out a glass of wine. “For the pretty leg,” Johann Schantz said with a wink. He was slightly drunk, and the few white strands in his dark hair glittered in the candlelight. “For the pretty little girl.”

  Now the red velvet chair was moved to the side of the room as well and a flautist began playing a country dance. She flung herself into the steps, moving quickly around the room, as all the women did, from partner to partner, but he did not dance with her. He never seemed to reach her; he was always on another side. There was Sophie, oblivious, shrieking with laughter, but he was so far away.

  And then he was quite near her. “I’ve brought you a little lemonade,” Johann said, as Constanze rested for a moment with her hand on a chair back. “You dance well. I never knew you had such gifts, Mademoiselle Weber.” Then, bending down, he murmured in a voice that stirred the soft curls above her ears, “Come, my dear, I have something to show you.”

  Walking softly down to the shop below, with its dark shapes of unfinished instruments, he held her hand. By the tall cabinet for strings and parts, he drew her closer. He bent down to her, and his mouth was terribly warm and smelled of wine. She had never been kissed on the lips by a man before. Her whole body grew warm as his fingers and then his mouth moved beneath her bodice to one nipple. So this was what had swept Aloysia away; this was the thing that made women throw off all resolution. It was the end of feeling such loneliness, of being the one not chosen, of living in silence.

  He was panting and rubbing himself against her. His groin was hard. He pushed up her skirt and petticoats, and explored high above her knee under her drawers. “Yes,” she stammered. “So it’s ‘yes’ then?” he replied. His fingers touched the soft hair between her legs, and she gasped; he put his free hand over her mouth. “Ah, you wild kitten,” he whispered. “I have wanted you since you first walked into my shop.”

  He pushed her back onto the table, and some materials fell to the floor. Vaguely she felt something sharp under her back, and heard the pounding of dancing on the floor above them. He was pressing against her; as she lay in shock and joy, feeling his weight, she managed to murmur, “But what does this mean, Johann? Will you leave your wife and run away with me?”

  “What I wouldn’t do for you!”

  The street door opened abruptly, and a few men came in, dragging a great bass in its case. She rolled to the side, pulling down her skirts. Without his warmth above her she felt naked and alone. He had stridden forward to greet his new guests, his voice hearty, hand extended; in her confusion she backed up, began to pick up some bits of ivory from the floor, and then dropped them. Quickly she ran up the steps to the room with the half-empty plates and the wine bottles. And where was he? Half of her had been torn away. And then there he was, coming up the stairs with his friends.

  From a corner his wife stared at her, and Constanze stood between the woman’s hard eyes and the man’s broad laughter. It was as if he were a different person than the one who had almost taken her virginity downstairs on the table with the instrument parts pushing into her back. Her virginity—dear Lord! She moved among the others, wondering if everyone could see on her face what had happened. Except for Frau Schantz’s bitter look, no one seemed to notice her at all.

  Sophie was shaking her. “It’s time to go,” her little sister whispered. Sophie’s breath was also full of wine and cakes, and she swayed a little and burst into embarrassed giggles. “I’ve made a fool of myself! Someone twice my age tried to feel my breasts. I think I’m drunk. We promised we’d be home by ten. Alfonso is also drunk; I don’t know how his wife will get him home. I find these evenings confusing; convent life must be easier. May I hold on to your arm. Dearest Stanzi, I am quite ...”

  They supported each other down the stairs, past the many instruments in the shadows and out into the spring evening. Sophie put her hand over her mouth. “I’m going to be sick,” she gasped.

  “Rest here awhile.”

  “We’ve got to be home. Blessed Saint Anne, Stanzi, someone’s coming.”

  They turned as best they could and made out Alfonso’s golden-haired prodigy hurrying after them. He approached them in a nice trot, his face openly good-natured, and said, “Let me walk with you! What were the others thinking! You should not walk home alone.” His glance took in Sophie, but he was discreet and said nothing, only looked a little amused.

  Constanze let him take her arm, glancing worriedly at her sister on the other side of him. Whatever he said, she heard little. She thought only of the dark instrument workshop, the smell of unfinished wood, the glimmering black and ivory keys, the oddly coiled strings, the feel of the fortepiano maker as he pressed close, the sound of dancing above. What could she make of the kiss, and the hand groping above her garter? What wouldn’t I do for you, he had said. And now there was Sophie, cautiously putting one flat shoe before the other, babbling about the evening. The sooner she goes to a convent, the better, Constanze thought. I ought to join her. I’ll have to confess this.

  Sophie’s chatter grew indistinct, and they walked in silence for a while until they saw the green dome of Peterskirche rising stolidly above the tall houses. Constanze slipped her arm from Henri’s and curtseyed. “We can go from here,” she said.

  “May I come to call on you, mademoiselle?”

  “You may,” she said, distracted, taking her sister’s arm.

  He walked away, looking back every now and then to smile at them.

  For a moment, both girls leaned slightly against the dark window of a shoemaker’s shop, and Constanze slowly became aware that Sophie was staring at her. “Constanze Weber,” Sophie said, as if she had been asleep and just awoken. “How could I speak of myself! I had forgotten before I felt so sick. I saw you go downstairs with Johann Schantz, and your face when you came up again. Your lip looked odd, your upper lip. It still does. Did he bite it? Tell me, tell me.”

  “Oh God, do you think others saw it, too?” Constanze whispered, fingers to her lip. “No one will notice at home,
will they? I’ll tell you, but you must swear on your hope of salvation that you’ll tell no one. He kissed me; he touched me. There was another me suddenly, wanting to get out, and he knew it. It was there when we arrived; it’s been there for months. I felt as if I wanted to fling off everything, abandon the way I’ve been all my life and be something else. But I’ve known for a time that I love him.” The last was spoken with sudden, solemn dignity as she gazed indifferently at a carriage and its horses trotting neatly through the streets. “Yes, for a long time.”

  Sophie cried, “I knew there was something! But Stanzi, he’s married.”

  “Yes, he is, but don’t you understand that I didn’t care? I didn’t care about anything, except when I ran upstairs I was suddenly afraid of ending like Aloysia, and having to marry. And yet what does it matter if we have love?”

  They were walking, and stopping, and Sophie stumbled and clutched her. As they came down the street that opened into Petersplatz, a priest out walking his little dog nodded at them. Sophie took several deep breaths, looking ahead of her, her narrow face gaining that sudden maturity that always amazed Constanze. “I think,” Sophie murmured, “that we should go upstairs as quietly as possible, and talk about all this in the morning. Don’t cry; I can see you’re about to. I’ll try not to be sick on the stairs. Oh, my head spins so!”

  In the darkness, they slipped off their shoes, mounted the stairs inside the boardinghouse by touch, and slept soundly until the middle of the next morning.

  They had hardly risen when they heard their mother’s voice from below. She was likely shouting at a boarder for letting a candle overturn and drop wax on the carpet, but dimly they heard their own names. Josefa was gone already. They ran out onto the landing and looked down the stairs at their mother’s red face.

  “I met Frau Alfonso at the market early this morning,” she cried. “You allowed a strange man to measure your legs? And drank so much wine that Frau Alfonso said you both behaved very loosely, that you plied her husband with more of it. Bad girls, bad, like your sisters. It is your father’s blood, not mine—your rash father who gave you no sense, only music!”

  Sophie leaned over the banister and called down, “It was only a game.”

  “Both of you will land where your sisters are and never marry, especially you, Mademoiselle Constanze. Your name will be as black as theirs.”

  Constanze stood speechless. What did her mother know? It seemed she was always trying to scoop her hand into Constanze’s heart, trying to pull out private thoughts, crumble them, throw them away. “We never ... ,” she murmured at last, but more words would not come.

  The girls ran back to their room, closing the door against the furious voice that rose up the stairs and likely carried under the door to any boarder who had not yet left for his work. Sophie barricaded the door with her own thin body, her normally placid face distorted with feeling. “Don’t give in to Mother,” she cried. “Don’t retreat; don’t let her take your laughter away. She will if she can, you know.” Yet Constanze felt all the passion and longing of last night close up within her and then wilt and blow away. She felt her face turn as plain and severe as those of her spinster aunts.

  “Be still, Sophie,” she whispered.

  But Sophie ran around the bed after her, shouting, “We had such a lovely evening. Why must she object to happiness? What does it matter what you did? Henri will come for you. He’s meant to; that’s why he ran after us. He’ll take you away from this place.” For the first time they stared at each other, each admitting how unhappy she was. They saw it in each other’s eyes from across the room.

  “And I need my slippers; where are my slippers?” the youngest Weber sister continued. “Aloysia never returned them. Why must she take everything? She already has everything. One of these days Josefa will go as well, and then there will be just us. I can’t bear to be here anymore, I can’t. I’m truly going to join a convent.”

  Constanze rushed to her, knocking over the dresses that had been flung on a chair and tripping on the shoes that were scattered on the floor, crying, “Sophie, don’t, don’t! What will I do without you? If you go, I’ll go, too. Love leads only to unhappiness.” They sat down on the floor amid the fallen dresses and sobbed, holding each other. Then Constanze broke away and sat down at the table. “I’m going to write to Johann Schantz,” she said, pressing her lips together hard between her words. “I like him best. I’m going to ask him to take me away.”

  “Do you want to do that, Stanzi?”

  “Yes, I know he loves me.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Wait, I think he did, or he was about to. I’d go anyplace to get away from here! You can come, too.” Constanze was already writing.

  “But this is madness. Would you? Would he? What about his wife? Where would you go?”

  “Anywhere.” The pen scratched furiously, and then Constanze signed the letter and threw it down. They looked at each other and listened.

  Below came the sound of Maria Caecilia climbing the steps, stopping once to catch her breath. They knew their mother stood outside their door for a moment without knocking, and then came the very soft scratch and the old low, tender voice, “Come, my chicks, my little fleas, there’s coffee and cake in the kitchen; everyone’s gone out and the house is quiet. Don’t you know, my loves, that I have seen life, that I want only the best for you whom I suckled and nursed and protected from this terrible world?”

  The girls stood and dried their eyes. Then, holding hands, they opened the door and joined arms with their mother. The three of them went down for coffee, talking of more ordinary things: gossip of the street, the price of veal, the concerts in the public gardens this summer, the dark moods of the kitchen girl who had recently come to help them. No further word was said about the gathering at the fortepiano maker’s house.

  January snow was falling heavily all over the city one evening some six months later as Mozart walked into the central hall of Prince Nicholas Esterházy’s winter mansion, and stood for a moment listening to the sound of the Prince’s orchestra in the allegro of a symphony. Many candles glittered in the crystal chandeliers. About him beautiful women, grease holding their curls in place, glanced at him and then looked away, barely nodding to his bow. Brushing the snow from his hat brim before giving it to the lackey, he did not enter the ballroom where the orchestra played but made his way through a few other large and beautiful rooms with their many guests, the invitation he had received dry in his vest pocket.

  In a small library, head bent over a book, was the elderly Franciscan monk Giovanni Battista Martini, maestro di capella from Bologna. Mozart bounded toward him. He remembered running down the rectory halls in Italy, music under his arm, when he was fourteen years old. Padre Martini had aged since then, and Mozart had heard the monk’s health was not good. “Padre Martini,” he cried. “I was overjoyed to hear you were in the city.”

  “Wolferl Amadé,” said the monk, his words light and a little breathy. “Let me look at you; it’s been many years since I’ve seen you. The distances that separate people are untenable to me. In heaven there will be no such distances.”

  He made room on the blue silk sofa by a tray of wine and glasses. “I looked with the greatest pleasure the other day at the offertory that you send me some years back. But tonight you have just missed your own wind sextet; the men were here, and have now gone on to play it elsewhere and make a florin or two. A gentle piece—bassoons, horns, and clarinets—you at your most tender. A friend of yours was among them, a towering young man, laughs loudly, big teeth. His name was Leutgeb, I think.”

  “The boor, the oaf! I know him from Salzburg,” Mozart said joyfully. “So the piece was well received? I gave it my best.”

  “As you always do. Your father writes me that he’s worried about you, but isn’t that the way of fathers? He told me you left the Archbishop’s service last spring, broke your chains and flew free. You’re eating decently, I hope? And where do you live?�
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  The sounds of the orchestra and the noise of people speaking came through the door. Mozart dropped to the sofa. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you! Where do I live? I have a room in a boardinghouse, but am there as little as I can. I need my own rooms; within a few months I expect I’ll manage it.”

  “Very good. So you have a decent amount of pupils? I met the Aurnhammer family before, whose daughter takes fortepiano lessons from you. They told me you gave an academy concert with her at their house, playing your new sonata for two pianos. They were looking for you.”

  Mozart shrugged wryly, taking a glass of red wine and studying the reflection of the candle within it, then stretching his legs and glancing toward the door. Then he felt so happy he could not keep still. “Ah yes, Mademoiselle Aurnhammer!” he cried. The side rolls of his pale brown, unpowdered hair glistened in the candlelight. “Mademoiselle Barbara Aurnhammer ... ,” he repeated, his mouth rosy and mischievous.

  The monk’s wrinkled face regarded him with interest. “The way she speaks your name makes me think she’s in love with you. Your father wrote there was a young woman; was it this mademoiselle?”

  “No, someone else.”

  “I will be discreet and ask no more. What a gathering tonight! Half good Viennese society is here, yes? You let yourself be known and make your way. With enough concerts, lessons to those who can afford them, commissions, and music published you will do well. That is the only way if you’re not willing to wear someone’s livery. You are on the brink of doing very well; I feel it. Yes, of course, here’s my blessing. I have always loved you, as many do, Amadé.” He glanced down at Mozart’s moving fingers and smiled. “And even now you can’t remain still.”