Marrying Mozart

by Stephanie Cowell

  “You’ll wait to see him,” Josefa said.

  “No, I must go home.”

  Darkness was beginning to fall as they approached their street; looking up, they saw one of the new boarders in his shirtsleeves, gazing out over the church and smoking his pipe. They walked into the entrance of the boardinghouse. As they began to mount the long dusty carpeted stairs, they saw their mother waddle from the kitchen. “Home at last,” she crowed. “Come, tell me about it; it’s bound to fail. Frau Thorwart says it’s too florid; I knew it.”

  Constanze gazed at her carefully. She frowned, and then turned to look back through the still open door toward the carriages rolling past the church. “I’ve been mistaken,” she said quietly. “I know it in my heart; I know it. I heard it in the music. It’s all wrong what people have said. I’m going to him.”

  “What!” her mother cried. “Are you mad? What of your reputation? Can I at least hope that you’re going to tell him good-bye?”

  “Mama,” shouted Sophie. “It’s not your concern.”

  Constanze ran through the streets. The lamplighters were now moving their ladders from lamp to lamp, and the beautiful stone houses glowed in the soft golden yellow light. Coming toward her were members of the opera’s audience, chatting about the music and the dresses, the jewels and the hair, about the Emperor and his party, who had all gone off to a great supper where there would be woodcock and fish and wine from the vineyards that surrounded the city. Would Mozart be home yet? It was less than an hour since the opera ended, and he likely was still receiving congratulations.

  The concierge was standing idly before the house in which Mozart’s rooms were located. The two women nodded to each other, and Constanze creaked open the heavy door and mounted the two flights of stairs.

  Mozart had just come in; his door was still ajar. He stood there in his red coat trimmed with silver lace, faint splotches of rouge still visible on his cheeks. He gazed at her, his expression blank for a moment, as if he didn’t recognize her. “Come in,” he said at last. “I didn’t think you’d be coming. I heard what you were told. Stanzi, it isn’t true. I never looked at your sister after I understood how much I loved you. You know that, don’t you? You believe me?”

  “Yes, I believe you.”

  “Thank God. I’m so tired I don’t know if I have words to defend myself, not tonight anyway. I’ve done it; I’ve done it. God was with me, and I’ve done it. But I saw—you were there.”

  He moved to her side and kissed her gently several times. Leaning against him, she murmured, “The concierge knows I’m here alone with you.”

  “And if she does? Do we care? Do we care what anyone thinks?”

  “No, not really. Not anymore. So many people were cheering for you tonight.”

  “I heard some of it. As I was leaving, the Archbishop’s man, Count Arco, came up to me. He said he hoped Salzburg would have the pleasure of hearing my opera soon. At first I didn’t even turn to him, and then I said simply, ‘You were speaking to me, monsieur?’ ”

  “I hope you kicked him. He’s owed it.”

  “I would have liked to, but he is, after all, a nobleman, and I’m as common as angels, as Sophie would say. Verbally I kicked him; that must suffice.”

  “I’m glad I came; I’m very glad. I couldn’t be happier, but now I must go.”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  They stood in the room holding hands, and kissing by the light from the street. He unfastened her dress buttons and kissed her neck and shoulders, and together they moved toward the rumpled bed. His ordinary clothes were thrown on it, and she felt the buttons of his day coat when she lay down. His mouth pressed against hers, and his hands untied her bodice. The lacing snagged. Her leg was entwined with his. They felt for each other, their hands exploring more secret places than they had before. He was clumsy, and she was shy. He entered her, and she cried out when he poured himself into her.

  Afterward, they lay gazing at each other in the near darkness. “You know,” he whispered, “after we’re married, we’ll take bigger rooms on the Graben itself, the best rooms. And musicians and actors will come. It will be like your old Thursdays, but at the end of the evening I won’t kiss your hand and go away but lead you to the bedroom.”

  Then he said seriously, “I never was with a woman before this. I hope I did well.”

  “I’ve never been with a man, but I don’t think it could have been better.”

  “We won’t wait for anyone’s permission,” he said. “We’ll marry. ”

  Dawn woke her, and she dressed rapidly, finding her hose curled under the bed, tying her petticoat over her shift, slipping on her bodice, lacing her skirt. She moved as softly as possible so as not to wake him. Mozart lay on his back with his arms above his head, his breath coming softly through his lips. She touched his lips and whispered in his ear. He sighed, moved to kiss her, and fell asleep again before doing so. The still gray light fell on the table containing his closed, bound opera score. She ran down the steps past the concierge, who was eating soup with a tin spoon as she surveyed the newly washed cobbles in front of the church and the faithful as they slipped inside for morning prayer.

  At home Constanze could hear the clatter of breakfast dishes. She was about to rush up the steps when her mother came from the kitchen, her face pale and angry. “You come here like a whore. You’ve been out all night with him, haven’t you? You know what he is, what all men are! I doubt he’ll marry you after having gotten what he was after, but if he does, even then I won’t come to your wedding.”

  “Then don’t come,” said Constanze simply, as she climbed up to her room, flung her arms around her younger sister, and told her everything.

  Nearly a month had passed since the premiere of the Turkish opera, which had been performed many times; on the strength of the opera’s success, several lucrative commissions, and a public concert that was already almost sold out, Mozart had taken rooms for himself and Constanze in the elegant Graben, where the world, or at least the most beautiful part of it, would pass daily beneath their windows. After predictions of hunger and infidelity, their mother came forward suddenly to help with the planning.

  Josefa and Sophie sat for hours in the sewing room embroidering flowers on the yellow satin wedding dress. The wedding was to take place at Stephansdom at three o’clock on a Thursday at the end of October.

  Then it was half an hour before the ceremony. Constanze, in her bedchamber and still wearing only her smock and petticoat, pulled away from Sophie and Josefa who were helping her dress and burst into tears. She had suddenly recalled being lost in the Mannheim market when she was about four years old, and wandering for what seemed like hours before her father found her sitting under the sausage vendor’s stall. And then she remembered the year everyone forgot her birthday. She sobbed, “I want Papa! How do I know what marriage will be like? Sharing everything with him the way I did with you, and besides, how do I know that he’ll still love me in a year or two?” She stared at both of them, tears streaming down her cheeks. “And now I’ve cried myself into ugliness; he won’t want me when he sees me.”

  Sophie held the wedding dress carefully folded over her arms like an offering. “Let me bathe your eyes,” she said. “All women feel this way just before they marry; everyone says it, not that I have any personal knowledge. Of course you want to marry him. Stop crying, for heaven’s sake.”

  “But if it’s horrible and wretched, I still have both of you. We could come back here as we once were, couldn’t we? Couldn’t we?”

  “Yes, my love,” Josefa replied. “We could, but do we want to? I don’t think you’ll want to come back anymore. Now, will you fasten your hose? Do you intend to be married in your bare feet? Blessed saints, look at the time! We’ll have to run all the way.”

  Constanze allowed her sisters to lace up the bodice and tie on the wide yellow satin skirt that opened over the petticoat. The embroidered flowers had been sewn with varying skill by the three of them.
Finally, Sophie lifted a white, broad-brimmed velvet hat from a box. “It’s Aloysias gift,” she said, turning it around admiringly. “It’s from Paris, truly made there. She’s the only one of us who could afford it. I pinned on the flowers. Oh come, wear it! I think she wanted you to be pretty today. Yes, she’ll be at the church. Just a little rouge: there! You’re the loveliest woman in Vienna. Now let’s go. Mother’s waiting as well, and if we don’t hurry she’ll be back here looking for that book of suitors, which I burned weeks ago. If I ever marry, it will just have to be for love.”

  Constanze’s hands were so cold she could hardly feel them. “Good-bye, room,” she murmured. “Good-bye, childhood,” and they went down the steps into the late October day.

  At the cathedral she saw everything through a lace veil worked with flowers. The man wavering at the door, red faced and smiling, was Alfonso, who was to lead her to the altar. As her sisters released her and she walked forward with him, she saw through the lace the interior of the huge Gothic church, and the faces of family and friends, including her father’s wretched brother, Joseph. Constanze saw her mother weeping, murmuring to those about her, “Well, all has turned out as I wished.” She thought an older man smiled at her, and wondered if it were Mozart’s friend Haydn. There was the violinist Heinemann, Father’s old friend, come from Munich to see the marriage, but where were Mozart’s father and sister? The blessing had come by mail the day before, but the father had not.

  By the altar she saw Leutgeb, grinning, hands clasped before him, but Mozart was nowhere to be seen. It was only when a burst of music came from the great pipes of the organ, and Leutgeb raised his eyes to the organ loft, that Constanze understood her husband was playing for her. When the music ceased, she heard his footsteps racing down the stairs from the organ loft.

  They both wept through the ceremony, particularly when they knelt for the first time as man and wife to receive holy communion. Everyone around disappeared then, so focused they were on each other. At the end he took her arm and together they walked through the group of friends and family.

  “And now, my Constanze,” he whispered, pressing her close, “we’ll be happy forever.”

  They held each other, laughing and wiping away their tears, waiting at the entrance of Stephansdom for the others to come sweep them away to the marriage supper.

  Sophie Weber, July 1842

  MONSIEUR NOVELLO SAID ADIEU TODAY FOR THE LAST time, and I sat awhile in the dim light of my room before calling for candles. In truth, I thought at times over the past year to tell him the few things I withheld, but in the end did not. I have burned the letters from Mozart to Aloysia, which I denied having. I looked at them only once, for they were too painful. In them he asked Aloysia many times why she couldn’t love him as he loved her. Constanze never saw them; there was no need for it. They would only have troubled her.

  “But were they happy always and forever?” Monsieur Novello asked me a few times that afternoon as he stood with his folded writing desk in his arms, taking leave of me. I had tried to explain it to him during some of our many afternoons together. There was passion, oh yes, that. There was a lot of gaiety, and then other times there were troubles because our beloved Mozart was not quite suited to this world. There were times when Constanze was furious at him and then forgave him. It was enough to see his little shoulders under his coat, his unshaven face, his hair, in performance concealed under a white wig, brown and rumpled. His hair smelled of candlewax. She told me this. There were several children. He died young; he was thirty-five and she merely twenty-nine when she lost him.

  Still I thought about Monsieur Novello’s question for a long time before going to bed. Ah, sir, with all your pages of notes and inky fingers! Who can truly know all that is between man and wife? Even they sometimes do not know, but it was sweet much of the time, and more than that one cannot ask on this earth.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  This novel is based on events in the life of the young Mozart.

  He was closely involved with the four Weber sisters, among them Aloysia, who broke his heart, and Constanze, whom he married. We know that he and his wife were close to Sophie (he always sent kisses in his letters to her) and that he wrote some of his greatest music for Josefa.

  Mozart had a hard time making a living in Vienna; acclaim for his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio began the short period during which he saw some prosperity. He indeed hid Constanze at the Baroness’s house to protect her from her unstable mother and was horrified that she allowed a young man to measure her leg. Though some of the dates of personal and musical events have been slightly rearranged for the novel, he really was physically kicked from the palace of his Archbishop. His close friend, the horn player Leutgeb, for whom Mozart wrote much of his horn music, also had a Viennese cheese shop. After his marriage, Mozart was quite kind and generous to his difficult mother-in-law

  The Englishman Vincent Novello came to Constanze (who by then had lost her second husband) in her old age in Salzburg to gather what he could from her of Mozart’s life. Sophie, also a resident of Salzburg, lived until eighty-three and was the last surviving sister.

  Stephanie Cowell

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