Marrying Mozart (12 page)

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Authors: Stephanie Cowell

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Historical, #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Biography & Autobiography, #Juvenile Fiction, #Biographical, #Siblings, #Family, #Sisters, #Music, #Genres & Styles, #Composers & Musicians, #Composers, #Classical, #Mannheim (Germany), #Composers' spouses

BOOK: Marrying Mozart
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Mozart stood up, stretched his aching back, and began to walk up and down the room. Then he noticed another letter to him standing by the washing bowl; the writer was his cousin in Augsburg. Their hosts must have brought it in. He felt the old stirring in his breeches and laughter rising in his chest. Tearing open the seal, he stood reading it with his hand over his mouth. By God, she was witty, sexy, and priceless, and next time he would have all of her. He would travel there somehow, and tear off her petticoats and her lace-trimmed drawers. Why not? She was willing.
And then what? They should both be compromised. He would have her to support as well, and perhaps a baby, and he could not even manage his mother, father, and sister, who always waited patiently for him. No, he could not manage it all. Then, turning to some words written small in the margin, he frowned, swore, and threw down the letter. What, had she ... he was breathless, and read it again. “I have a lover now,” it read. “So very sorry it wasn’t you, Wolferl. Waiting’s awful. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. My dull old father knows nothing; he’s never felt these things. Old people never could. You don’t mind so much, do you, old cousin? We’re best of friends.”
Mozart stood, staring straight ahead of him. Fury filled him, not only jealousy that someone he had thought of so much had not had time to wait, but that she had gone on to experience this thing and left him behind. He put the letter facedown on his flute quartet and continued his walk back and forth in his narrow bedroom. Why had he ever taken any pleasure with his cousin? Even if they had made love fully, she would have turned her attention elsewhere the moment he left the city. If he were to love someone, it should be a good girl. He stood quietly for a moment, remembering the voices of the Weber sisters as they sat together in the church confiding in him, and then their excellent singing, the one soprano darker and more sensual, the other high as an angel. They were good: nothing but virtuous and selfless thoughts passed their minds.
Josefa was too tall; he did not want a woman to tower over him—but there was Aloysia. He saw her, the line of her neck to her breast under the heavy cloak, the pretty open hand that floated on the air as she spoke, her beautiful eyes. That boor Leutgeb had played about with her feelings. Just last week Mozart had had a letter written from Salzburg from him.
Dear Mozart, dear idiot,
 
It’s over between Mademoiselle A. and me. I’m uncertain I want to pledge my future to a singer, even such a delicious little one. Not that I compromised her: only a kiss and a touch in the dark, and what is that? But mainly, old friend, my reluctance lies with the family. They have a huge pull on her. If I marry her, I’ll have the lot of them on my hands, and my grandfather’s shop in Vienna doesn’t sell that much cheese. They’re a heavy lot, particularly that mother of hers. The father’s a sort of crooked saint, kindliness himself, but with more goodwill than sense. I advise you, old friend, fall in love with some merchant’s wealthy widow. We don’t have much money, either of us. I have cheese, and you have genius. Forget love and look after money. Frau Weber does, believe me.
Mozart did not move. The words of the letter repeated themselves in his head until they faded before his memory of the two sisters in the church, their breath in the cold air, Aloysias chapped, pale lips, the elder sister’s bitten fingernails. Was not the world full of hopeful women, untouched, waiting? But what had it to do with him?
Yet what had happened in that room between the two of them when she had sung his song? What had happened and what had not? Mozart remained still but for his hands drumming on his music, thinking of her. What had been created between song maker and singer in that little parlor that night? Should he have followed her when she left the room? Had she intended it? No, of course not; she was simply too beautiful and good. Such women were to walk about shyly, and to be dreamed about. And besides, he knew her mother wanted a titled man of old family for the girl, and with her grace and charm she could likely have one. What had he to offer? And yet he was not half bad. He could have had his love affairs if he had wanted them, and yet he always drew back.
There was that confidential, drunken hour with Leutgeb in the beer cellar when the girls had come, and the hour after when he and the horn player had spoken so frankly of their hopes. Why hadn’t he told Leutgeb, whom he trusted, that he had never taken a woman to bed? “By Christ,” he murmured aloud in the room, “I couldn’t say that.” He was flushed even to think that the painted wallpaper of this pleasant room, the books, his coat thrown over a chair could have heard him.
He fell into his bed late that night, tossing his bedclothes to the floor. In the morning he sprang up naked from bed and stood shivering in the cold room; he threw on a dressing gown, uncorked the ink, and wrote hastily. “Mademoiselle Aloysia Weber, in all friendship, will you meet me at the Confectionery at three? Your servant in all respect, WA.M.” and sent it over by a boy.
She won’t come, he thought.
But she did.
Aloysia Weber floated across the Confectionery under the gold-and-white ceiling. In the mirrors around him, he saw her approaching in her dark cloak with the muddy hem, past the small marble tables and the sideboard heaped with cakes. She was so perfectly made he could have taken her under his arm and swept her away. By the time she reached him and made her curtsey, he was not sure who he had been before she entered the doors.
He bowed, and again she curtseyed; he seated her. Then he said as calmly as he had intended, “I have come up with a plan to solve your difficulties.”
“Tell me,” she said. “My father will be so grateful. No one helps us, no one, and here you are, yet a stranger to our family.” She leaned forward on the chair. In her throat, the unblemished flesh of an innocent girl not quite seventeen, was a hollow where her breath quivered. He could not take his eyes from it.
“We’ll give concerts together; we’ll tour all Europe.”
“Oh, could we? What are you saying? All Europe? With me singing and you playing as we did that evening in our rooms? Would we go to Paris? Oh Herr Mozart, would we give a concert even in Paris?” She could hardly speak the words; her white throat quivered. A loose thread from her dress lay against her collarbone.
“Yes,” he said, “Paris, of course. Why not? I’ve just begun to plan it in my mind. I’ll write many songs that show your voice off to the best effect. First we’ll tour Austria, and give a concert in Vienna; I have friends there who would help us. We would go to Venice, to Florence, to Rome, and then we would go to Versailles.”
“Versailles,” she murmured. The loose thread moved as she breathed. He could see her reflection in every mirror over the silver cake plates.
“Versailles,” he repeated. “Mademoiselle, I assure you on my honor that wherever you lift your voice in song, strangers will beg for tickets. I can do this, for my name’s known. I’ll take your father and Mademoiselle Josefa as well. We’ll return with so much gold your family will never have to worry again.” He spoke with deep assurance, though his heart beat strongly and he leaned so close across the table that he could see a few faint freckles across her cheeks. “And then, both the Viennese opera houses will want you to sing once they have heard you. There’s never been such a voice, they’ll say.”
“Paris,” she murmured. “Vienna. Can it be?”
“Without a doubt. Give me a few days, and I’ll come to lay plans more clearly.”
Aloysia could hardly find her voice, and when she did she put her hand on his. “We’ll all be so very glad,” she stammered. “My sister and I particularly. I will need a new concert dress, perhaps of pink brocade. Don’t you think a dress of that fabric and color would suit me particularly, Herr Mozart?”
After a few hours they emerged from the Confectionery, hands almost touching. She kissed his cheek and, in her dark cloak and little flat shoes, disappeared around the corner of a church, while he remained gazing after her, his hand to his face where her lips had touched it.
F
rau Mozart always unpacked her bags at once when she came from traveling, but this time she had gone to bed upon her return, and now morning had come with the cold day pressing outside the iron bars of the window. She had dreamed of her house plants, which she had left once more on the windowsills of her Salzburg home; she alone trimmed the dead leaves from them so lovingly, murmuring to them old Austrian endearments. But it was not in her own home where she awoke, rather in their hosts’ house in Mannheim, in which she now found no charm.
Her son had gone out.
Rising and pulling on her dressing gown, she began to walk up and down her room past the still-buckled traveling bags, starting to make the bed and then forgetting it, until at last she sank into the chair and began to write.
Dear Husband,
 
I have returned from my two weeks’ stay with you to a catastrophe. What else can it be? Your son. He did not wait for me to take off my cloak yesterday before presenting me with what he assumed I would take as good news: that he intends to go on concert tour with the impoverished Webers, particularly Mademoiselle Aloysia, with whom he is beginning to fall in love, but of course he denies that. Instead of finishing the Dutchman’s flute compositions, which will bring us money, or the piano/violin duets in honor of the Electress to win her goodwill, he does little but write songs for the mademoiselle. Indeed, he performed a concert with her at some estate, and gave her and her family
half the fee!
Now what will occur with our plans to leave soon for Paris, where he will surely find the great success he deserves? He cannot quite recall we planned it; he waves it off with a dismissing hand and goes back to explaining his new idea. The Webers! He hopes to create their fortune, but what, I ask you, of our fortunes? We will all end paupers, begging on the corners of Salzburg.
She looked up, hearing footsteps, quickly blew on the letter to dry it, and turned it facedown. There was her son at the door, hair ruffled wildly as if the wind had once more gotten the best of him. Once more, as he often did when not in concert attire, he looked like an unmade bed. What was she to do with him?
She said coldly, “Wolfgang, I didn’t close my eyes all night. I can only presume that you have come to your senses and thought better of the ridiculous proposition you set before me last evening.”
“What, Mother, how can you call it that,” he cried, coming close to her with his face full of affection. “I’ve arranged it all. The tour with the Webers will bring a great deal of money, enough for all of us.”
“You still intend to do that? Your own father will be beside himself when he receives my letter. Do you think just to post word that this unknown chit of a girl and her farmwife sister will be singing will be enough to fill hundreds of seats? You’re the only one whose name is known at all, and you yourself struggle for enough concerts and patronage. Your father goes about in such shabby garments he can barely show his face to the Archbishop (I couldn’t believe the state of his shirts, truly past mending) and now you propose to divide what you earn between us and them.” She turned to finish making the bed, threw up her hands, and covered her face.
Between her fingers, she said, “You haven’t the power to uplift them, and it will drag us further down.”
He pulled her hands away from her face. “Mother, I know voices,” he said. “Aloysia has the makings of a great singer. She could be one of the finest prima donnas in Europe.”
“What do I care about her abilities? She only wants what she can get from you, and I wouldn’t trust her, nor any of them. I knew it from the first moment I mounted those many flights of steps. ”
“You say that about someone I esteem so highly? You say that? Well, I’m going, I don’t know if I will be back. You’ve slandered her and wounded me.”
He ran out and walked the cold, windy streets for a long time, until he had lessons to give. By the time they were done, and his pupils had noticed his distraction, darkness had come. Going home was an impossibility. If only Leutgeb were here. All his friends had left the city for one reason or another; even Cannabich was traveling. It was likely the court would be moving to Munich.
A wet snow had begun, and he found refuge in a familiar eating place. He bought paper and borrowed pen and ink, then began to work on a piano/violin sonata.
“Master, we must close,” said the host, and Mozart looked around, startled to see everyone had gone but him, and the exhausted boy who was mopping the floor, leaning half asleep on the mop. He rushed out into the wet snow with his cloak open, and the host ran after him, crying, “Master, master,” and gave him the flopping, forgotten pages. Two slipped from the man’s hand and went blowing down the street. Mozart retrieved them where they had caught about a horse post, a little wet and blotted, and stood gazing at the melody under the gaslight. He wished that the eating house had not evicted him, or that he could have gone to some other quiet place where he could write more and forget his mother’s blanched face, the mournful eyes that accused him and spoke against his proud and imaginative plans.
He leaned against the door of a house.
So much had happened since his promise in the Confectionery. He had written two more songs for Aloysia, recalling the rare range and timbre of her voice, which extended from a few notes below middle C to the very highest range far above the treble staff, the E, the F, and the untouchable flicker of the G, which only the rarest of voices could reach. He was a musician, and he knew the quality of her voice: even in his love he knew the voices of both the older Weber sisters were rich and enviable.
And how the whole casual, warm family had welcomed him, but more than that, much more, had been Aloysias arms flung about him on those steps smelling of other people’s cooking, and her soft lips against his, and her little breasts pressed against his chest, and her tears of relief and joy at their sudden strange blurting of love for each other.
I didn’t see at first, Mozart, I didn’t know....
My God, she loved him. The most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and she loved him. It was as if she had been waiting for him all his life. Then she had drawn him upstairs to her family, into the room with the clavier, the burning fire, and a bottle of wine and a polished glass. He felt suddenly the contrast between the heaviness and bleakness of his dutiful life and the bright gaiety of the girls and their family, the clothes and music all thrown about, and good, kind Fridolin Weber’s welcome. He had been accepted as her suitor then; he had been accepted as her betrothed.

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