Marrying Mozart (25 page)

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.

J
anuary 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?”

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.”

“I can’t, it’s true!” Mozart laughed happily.

The symphony had ended, and the sound of applause carried through the rooms. Mozart listened for a moment, his face brightening more. “That’s Joseph Haydn’s work,” he said. “I know his style.”

“Yes, Joseph Haydn, an extraordinary composer. But you don’t know that when he asked the Prince if I might come this evening, he asked for you as well. He is our host Prince Ester-hazy’s kapellmeister, and knows your work very well. You’ve written how much you admire his quartets. Why even now—”

“He’s here and asked for me?” Mozart leapt to his feet.

At that moment, Joseph Haydn appeared at the door. Mozart knew him at once from a portrait he had seen, though he was older now, perhaps fifty years. “But it is you who were conducting!” Mozart said, hurrying forward, almost stammering. “Herr Kapellmeister, had I recalled that surely it was you conducting, I would have gone into the ballroom to hear you. I know your work. I have been longing to meet you for many years, Herr Kapellmeister.”

Bowing, Haydn took the young composer’s hand in both of his, and looked curiously into his face. “So you are Salzburg’s Wolfgang Mozart. I know your music as well; I borrow scores of it when I can’t hear it played.”

Closing the door slightly so that they could retreat a little from the noise of the other guests, the three men sat down under the shelves of books and a portrait of Emperor Joseph. In his excitement Mozart could hardly remain still; he rocked back and forth slightly with a great smile on his face.

Haydn was more quiet; his arm lay across the curved sofa back. “So you now live here in Vienna,” he said. “You know, as a little boy, I was a chorister here at Stephansdom. I sang like an angel, but when my voice broke, they turned me into the street. I cannot say if being a musician is more difficult than other professions ; it’s the only one I have known.”

“Are you here for long, sir?”

“For the winter, as I sometimes am with my patron. But I’ve been wanting to say this for a time, to write you. I’ve studied a score of your
Idomeneo
, so rich and deep, too much perhaps for those who wished to be amused. That quartet, and the prince’s line:
‘Andrò ramingo, e
solo’
—I’ll wander forth and alone. I wept. I am sorry it was not successful, and yet I feel it’s with an opera that you will finally come to notice. Perhaps one not entirely so
seria
, eh? Not so very tragic in tone, but one that expresses the joy and the sadness of life, so entwined. Neither just one or the other.”

“Herr Kapellmeister, yes! That’s what an opera could be, and I could write one if I knew it would have a production, if such a commission came to me. I long for such a commission.”

Haydn opened his eyes wider. “But here’s good fortune, you see! I was just speaking before with the court opera’s director, Count Orsini-Rosenberg, and he told me he’s looking for a new work. The Grand Duke of Russia is planning a state visit to Vienna in the autumn, and they want something to appeal to him.”

Mozart leapt up, began to move quickly about the room, then came back to Haydn, his face a little flushed. His fingers drummed on the scarlet fabric of his coat. “Can this be true? I’ve tried for an introduction and have written twice, but he’s not answered my letter.”