Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Mozart gloried in recognition, but he needed the commission and likely believed that the truth would eventually come out. Indeed, by the time the completed Requiem was delivered, after Mozart’s death, everyone knew who it was for and who had written it. The count is said to have been angry but was perhaps placated by the fact that the composition increased in value with Mozart’s death.

  While at work on the Requiem in November of 1791, Mozart became sick quite suddenly. His symptoms included swelling of the hands and feet, high fever, rash, and intense sweating. His body became so bloated and painful that he could barely move. Constanze provided light cambric cloth to her sister Sophie, who sewed a new dressing gown that Wolfgang could put on without sitting up—he just held out his arms so the robe could be slipped on and tied behind his neck with a ribbon. Even in such a state, he claimed to be delighted with his sister-in-law’s clever industry and declared himself happy to wear the new gown.

  In his last weeks, Mozart worked on the composition from his sickbed, poignantly aware that he was penning a requiem as the potential imminence of his own funeral mass became more and more real to him. It is not overly romantic to believe that this gives the work much of its power and urgency. There are passages of the Requiem that might be overlaid with sections of Mozart’s death letter to his father—sweet, restrained harmonies that welcome death as a consoling friend. But these are just moments. The music rises and twists into darker moods and fearsome crescendos. The music of the Requiem is never ugly. It proclaims Mozart’s foundational faith in beauty and harmony while embracing gloom, shadow, even fright, with forthrightness. He is more honest in his music than he could ever be in his letters.

  And again it sounds apocryphal, but it is nevertheless true that Mozart continued to work with all the dwindling strength of his mind, body, and spirit to complete the Requiem as he lay dying. He could not have helped but recognize (and weep over) the symbolic significance, and yet his motive was in part practical. When the work was done, Constanze could collect the handsome second half of the commission. He worked with the guilt of a man who knew he should have done more.*

  Mozart could not sit fully upright; the score was spread all over his bed, across his bloated belly. On the working manuscript, his last notes were scrawled in an ill and quivering hand. Unlike the scene in the movie Amadeus, Salieri was not there taking dictation on how the Requiem should be completed. It was Wolfgang’s good friend the composer Franz Xaver Süssmayr who finished the work after Mozart’s death, with the maestro’s instruction in his head and in a passably Mozartian manner. Naturally, purists criticize—there are errors of harmony and an occasionally glaring mismatch of style. Even so, most modern conductors prefer Süssmayr’s attempt over those that came after.

  Mozart died on the fifth of December. His symptoms were consistent with rheumatic fever, but a deadly streptococcal infection was sweeping Vienna at the time, and modern scholarship suggests that this is what killed him, perhaps preying on a system already weakened by the fever. It is almost certain that the medical treatment of the day hastened the hour of death. Mozart was let for over two liters of blood in the days just before his passing, and immediately before he died, he was wrapped in cold compresses.* Constanze’s younger sister Sophie had argued that the compresses would be a shock to her brother-in-law, now delirious and barely conscious. They were applied by the doctor over her objections, and Mozart died soon after. Sophie’s bedside recollections are the only extant first-person account of the event, and they have the ring of truth, though her remembrance that Mozart died with the timpani part of the Requiem upon his lips seems a stretch. The physical details at the time of death—the severity of the bloating, the stench, the discoloration and projectile vomiting—all of this was suppressed for years, believed to be unfitting to the reputation of a great composer. But listening to the Requiem, we can find all these things. Ugly, feared, redeemed in the whole.

  The fact that Mozart was buried in a common grave and at a service with no mourners present has long been taken as a disparaging comment upon musical Vienna—a society that first overlooked and then spat upon its most gifted composer at the hour of his death. But the circumstances of Mozart’s funeral were entirely in line for those of the middle class after the reforms of young Emperor Joseph II, who, in a frenzy of enlightened rationalism, worked to overturn the extravagance of previous generations, invoking a sense of practical simplicity and propriety in funerary matters. Bodies of respectable citizens were laid out in the church (St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in Mozart’s case), then wrapped in a linen shroud and, within two days of passing, transported in a reusable coffin to a graveyard outside the central city and there buried in a common grave of six to twelve bodies, each doused with lime to prevent stench and the spread of disease. Mozart himself was a supporter of such reforms.*

  The Mozarts were not well off at the time of Wolfgang’s death, but any notion of a “pauper’s burial” comes from a misunderstanding of the customs of the very particular time and place. Myth has been heaped upon myth. In 1856 the Vienna Morgen-Post published an excerpt from a memoir by someone named Joseph Deiner, a man who claimed he was present at the funeral. The author had a dramatic winter tempest rain down on Mozart’s small funeral cortège.

  The night of Mozart’s death was dark and stormy; at the funeral, too, it began to rage and storm. Rain and snow fell at the same time, as if Nature wanted to shew her anger with the great composer’s contemporaries, who had turned out extremely sparsely for his burial.

  In fact, records from the time report mild weather and just an occasional light mist on the day of the funeral, but the tale of a poignant storm was gleefully adopted by biographers and remains strong in the popular imagination.

  To say that Vienna forgot Mozart or metaphorically spat upon him in the manner of funerary arrangements is to ignore the gracious outpouring of attention in his honor that marked the following days and months in Vienna and beyond. There were notices in the papers across Europe. On December 10, Emanuel Schikaneder joined others to arrange a funeral Mass in St. Michael’s Church near the Hofburg, where completed portions of Mozart’s Requiem were performed. In Prague, there was a grand memorial service with a full orchestra and chorus, and there were said to be several thousand in attendance.

  Like any good Mozart pilgrim in Vienna, I slated an entire day for the exploration of St. Marx Cemetery, where Mozart was buried two days after he died. When I was confirming directions at the tourist information center (I am an obsessive confirmer during travel), the gentleman behind the desk told me I would take the 71 tram outside the central city to the Landstrasse District. He wrote this down and handed me the paper with a little smile that struck me as odd. The people of Vienna are helpful and friendly, but restrained, not at all smiley. When I was buying tickets to a local music performance, the ticket seller switched from German to English to talk to me before I’d said a word. “How did you know I was American?” I asked. “Because you smiled at me,” he said. He laughed and added, “Don’t worry, it’s nice. We don’t mind.” Later a volunteer docent at the tram museum explained the tourist information worker’s smirk. Joseph II’s reform required that all burials take place beyond the city’s main wall for sanitary purposes, and this cemetery was created to fit this edict, opened as a burial place in 1784. For the last hundred years, the tram line from the city center to the cemetery has been the same—the 71. To “take the 71” is a colloquialism for dying, sort of like “kick the bucket.”

  It was a cool, sunny October morning. I was in love with Vienna; I was in love with Mozart; I scoffed at my jet lag; I couldn’t wait to board this tram. It took me past ornate government buildings, through fancy neighborhoods, into less-fancy neighborhoods, past tract houses, and eventually to a vast industrial area that looked dark and gray, even in the sun. Here the tram stopped, and the driver, whom I’d pestered about letting me know where to get off, glanced at me and tipped his head toward the open door. “Cemetery?” I a
sked. He nodded; other passengers nodded. I slowly disembarked. The stop was in the middle of a busy highway with traffic rushing both ways on either side of the bus shelter. I tried to orient my tourist’s map and decided to head uphill, though every direction would take me along a speeding, dirty, multilane expressway. I followed the local people, who seemed to know how to cross the street without dying, consulted my map again, and walked tentatively northward. Soon there was no one. Who would walk here? It was just me and cars.

  After about fifteen minutes of walking, wondering, and consoling myself with the uplifting traveler’s perspective that I was, at least, somewhere, if not where I’d hoped to be, a bald man dressed all in biker-style black came toward me. I mustered my courage. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” “Leetle,” he answered, lifting his thumb and forefinger to show me the measure of just how little, in fact, he knew. No light showed between them. “St. Marx Cemetery?” I ventured. “This St. Marx!” He was jubilant. He pointed to the big green highway overpass sign, and indeed it read ST. MARX. Hmm. “Cemetery?” He looked confused. “Dead people?” I offered. Nothing. “Dead.” I dropped sideways as if dying. I let my tongue loll out of my mouth and my eyes roll back in my head. “Dead.” “Oh!” he yelled. “Friedhof!” Yes! Friedhof! How had I let myself be so lousy a tourist as to leave the apartment without the word Friedhof? We almost jumped up and down together. “Friedhof! Yes, yes!” He pointed up the hill and around the corner. We shook hands warmly, and I walked on. Eventually I found myself skirting an endless concrete wall. The highway was still wide and busy, but buildings seemed to be farther apart, and perhaps there was a residential district ahead in the area that seemed to have sun rather than gray hovering over it. But I saw no graveyard. When a young woman walked by pushing her fancy German baby stroller, I asked, “St. Marx Friedhof?” and in precise, heavily accented English, she told me that it was just ahead, perhaps ten more minutes. “Are you searching for Mozart?” “Um, yes, actually.” “He is just up the central road in the cemetery grounds, turn left at the iron cross.” I thanked her and wondered if, at any moment, I would be joining a stream of Mozart pilgrims, all of us lining up to turn left at the cross. But no. I finally found the tall brick archway, its iron gate ajar. I walked through. A graveyard quiet descended, and I was in another world, completely alone.

  I had heard that the cemetery was reclaimed and restored in the 1970s, so I was expecting a pretty, parkish place. Instead, there was something much better. The upkeep appeared to involve just a quick and occasional mowing around the central road, as the woman had called it—more of a wide, stone-strewn path. Beyond this were acres of graves, all of them a hundred and fifty years old, two hundred, more. They were surrounded by ancient tangled pines, chestnuts, maples. Weedy grasses grew among the rows and rows of grave markers, all green with moss and lichens. There were angel heads and devil wings and statues of little girls gazing up into the face of God. All of them were losing heads and limbs; the words on the markers were often too worn, too crumbled, to read. There were demons and gargoyles and the hushed whispers of spirits. There were also birds—chickadees, and English robins, and arguing crows. (Vienna is very urban; there are not many trees. Though I dutifully carried my little binoculars everywhere, I had seen very few birds—suddenly I was surrounded.) To my mind, this cemetery was the quietest, most magical, most beautiful, most haunted place in all of Vienna. Eventually I did see a few other people, graveyard wanderers, just here and there. But solitude was easy to come by, even at the memorial of the cemetery’s most famous inhabitant. Just as the woman with the stroller had told me, up the hill I found a small, old, iron sign, with an arrow pointing left and the word MOZARTGRAB. Another twenty yards or so, there was the memorial. I gathered fallen chestnuts and dropped them into my pockets as I approached the circle of raked pebbles and a lackluster stone.

  No one knows where Mozart is actually buried. To save space, and to allow for the turnover of graves every ten years (bones were haphazardly dug up and replaced with new bodies), Joseph mandated that there be no gravestones on the actual graves in his new cemetery. Instead, individual grave markers were lined up along the fence, often some distance from the place of burial. Seventeen years after Mozart was buried, with interest in his biography growing, Constanze and her new husband tried to locate the gravesite, but no one could tell them anything. Gravediggers waved their shovels in the general direction of the area that Mozart was rumored to lie. There is a skull held by the Mozarteum in Salzburg that early gravediggers claimed they had removed from Mozart’s grave, but their story has been discredited. Modern sleuthing has revealed nothing more.

  In the general vicinity of Mozart’s burial place, there was once a granite memorial with a larger-than-life-size statue of a mourning Muse, but this was moved in 1874 to the Zentralfriedhof, the central municipal cemetery, to stand alongside the memorials for all the other great composers buried in Vienna—Beethoven, Schubert, Salieri, Brahms, Strauss, Schoenberg, and many more. A ghostly garden of musicians. The statue is beautiful, and the cemetery is well kept, but it is far busier with tourists than St. Marx. I much preferred the haunted, gothic silence of the smaller burial ground.

  Now the gray had lifted, and the day was all sun and birds. But the preternatural stillness of the graveyard was palpable, simultaneously beautiful and eerie. I walked over to Mozart’s memorial and sat down at the base of the stone. There was a pillar inlaid with a marble plate that said, simply, W. A. MOZART 1756–1791. Leaning on the base of the pillar was a pale carved cherub, perhaps half my height. His waist was wrapped in a loose cloth, and he held the end of it in one hand, maybe to keep it from falling off. His other elbow leaned on the pillar, his head in his hand. I crouched to look up at his face, expecting it to capture a sense of loss, of sadness, or perhaps a wistful listening to the music of the heavens. But this cherub conveyed none of these things. His attitude was completely disaffected, aloof, almost annoyed, as if to say, Seriously? I have to stand here forever and it’s not even his grave? The cherub’s feet were covered, this day, in blooming pink begonias and a recent offering of cut yellow roses, just beginning to wilt. I laughed at the plight of the cherub.

  And yet Mozart has been honored at this exact place for more than two hundred years. Even though the original memorial was moved, true Mozart devotees make their way here, to St. Marx. Thousands upon thousands have visited; at this very spot, there have been millions of prayers and dreams of music and personal wishes and raising of faces to heaven in search of Mozart’s spirit. This graveyard does in fact somewhere cradle the dust of the maestro’s bones. And yes, I felt something. A spirit, a rush, a presence. A sadness. A consolation. The breeze lifted my hair and set it back down again. My imagination ran happy and wild.

  The disgruntled cherub at Mozart’s memorial, St. Marx Cemetery, Vienna. (Photograph by the author)

  By the time Star died, the Mozarts had been forced by financial constraints to leave their beloved Domgasse rooms and move to smaller apartments outside the town center. Their new lodging was on Landstrasse, not far from St. Marx Cemetery, where Mozart would be buried. While planning my journey to Vienna I dreamed of a little pilgrimage I would make, walking somber and peaceful and wistful, from the graveyard to the site of these lodgings. Here I would sneak about the grounds, or if the current owner was home and seemed kind, I would ask whether I might walk in the garden. I was sure that after all my thinking and imagining about Star’s funeral, I would somehow intuit which tiny patch of garden was the likely gravesite of Mozart’s starling. So I had to laugh at my disillusionment when I discovered that the place where I’d originally disembarked the tram—the industrial area with its giant buildings decorated with the logo of a prominent mobile phone company—was just the place the Mozarts had lived when Star died. No old houses. Not even new houses. Not a shred of earth. Just concrete and cars and a wasteland of industry as far as the eye could see.

  Even so. It was silly. It was a flight of fancy, I knew. B
ut the chestnut trees in the graveyard were so old, so twisted, so lovely. The autumn chestnuts on the ground around Mozart’s memorial were so round, so glowing brown. Mozart had been buried in this earth for ten years or so before what was left of his bones had been raked aside to make space for new bodies. Mozart’s body could have nourished these trees. These chestnuts in my pocket, to my mystical mind, bore an authentic connection to his physical presence on earth, and the fruitfulness of his work beyond that life. It is not such a strange notion—a material continuance, a sense of life after death that is both poetically mystical and fully earthen. Rachel Carson articulated this sensibility in her article “Undersea,” published in a 1937 issue of the Atlantic Monthly: “Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality… Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.”

  Clutching my Mozart-imbued chestnuts, I asked Siri to help me find the exact address of the Mozarts’ Landstrasse apartment. I stood on the sidewalk, scanned the wires, and hoped starlings would appear. They would provide psychological closure, and a tidy ending for this book. But none did. I thought I might at least enjoy a quiet moment of contemplation here on the concrete, but now my tram, the 71 death tram, was fast approaching. There wouldn’t be another for more than half an hour and I was hungry. Quickly, rashly, joyfully, I pulled the roundest and fattest chestnut from my pocket, kissed it, and tucked it into a corner of the sidewalk. Star’s new grave marker, as accurate, at least, as Mozart’s. With a strange energy, I jumped on the bus.