by Glover, Jane
But, for all that Wolfgang had put on an extremely brave face while he remained in Munich, he could not even attempt to disguise his utter misery in his letters home.
I arrived here safely on the 25th, but until now it has been impossible for me to write to you. I am saving up everything until our happy and joyous meeting, for today I can only weep . . . I have naturally a bad handwriting, as you know, for I never learnt to write; but all my life I have never written anything worse than this letter; for I really cannot write – my heart is too full of tears.16
In fact it was his cousin, the ‘Bäsle’, who comforted him. She came to Munich from Augsburg, as he had asked her, and drew him back into whatever playful world they still managed to create together. When at last Wolfgang returned to Salzburg in early 1779, he needed her help, as well as that of Nannerl and his old Salzburg friends, to try to erase Aloysia from his mind. As he settled reluctantly into his unchallenging job at Court, he probably imagined he would never see her or her family again.
FOR THE WEBERS, 1779 was to be a momentous year. In the late summer, Aloysia, not yet twenty years old, was engaged by the Burgtheater in Vienna, and the whole family moved with her from Munich. The Burgtheater had been the official home of opera and drama in German since 1776, and Aloysia made her auspicious debut there in September 1779, as Hännchen in the singspiel Das Rosenfest von Salency (with music by a conglomerate of composers, including Philidor). It was the start of an extremely distinguished career in Vienna’s theatres. But, within weeks, this exciting new chapter in the family’s lives was tragically interrupted. On 23 October Fridolin Weber died, aged only forty-six. The four daughters were put under the guardianship of Johann von Thorwart, an Austrian Court official who controlled the finances at the Burgtheater. Aloysia continued to be the main provider for her widowed mother and sisters.
It was in her first season at the Burgtheater that Aloysia met the twenty-eight-year-old German actor Joseph Lange. Extremely good-looking and with a famously mellifluous speaking voice, he had been working in Vienna since his debut (like Aloysia, at the age of nineteen) in 1770. He would develop into one of the finest actors of his generation, playing Hamlet and Romeo among many other roles and becoming an enormous favourite with the public. He was also a highly gifted painter, and was often commissioned to do portraits, and representations of theatrical scenes. In 1775 he had married an eighteen-year-old singer, Anna Maria Elisabeth Schindler, but she died, aged only twenty-two, in March 1779. Six months later, Aloysia Weber joined the company at the Burgtheater, and within a year she and Joseph Lange were married, on 31 October 1780. (She was pregnant at the time: her first child, Maria Anna Sabina, was born just seven months later, on 31 May 1781.) The pre-marriage contract between them, probably drawn up by her guardian Thorwart, guaranteed an annual contribution of 700 gulden from Joseph to his mother-in-law. Aloysia was to bear him six children.
Marriage and childbirth did not in any way curtail Aloysia’s career. She and her husband remained central to the competitive intensity of Vienna’s theatrical scene. From 1781 she was drawn into fierce rivalry with Vienna’s favourite soprano, Caterina Cavalieri, five years her senior. Cavalieri was the protégée, and the mistress, of the Court composer and future Kapellmeister, Antonio Salieri. And it is very likely that Aloysia’s sisters, too, were somehow involved in musical and theatrical activities. Josefa, the eldest, was taking singing lessons from the most sought-after teacher in the city. Vincenzo Righini (born in the same week as Mozart) was brought from Italy by Joseph II in 1780, to be the singing master to Princess Elisabeth of Württenberg (fiancée of the Emperor’s nephew Francis) and also director of the Italian opera company. If Josefa was studying with him, so perhaps were Constanze and even Sophie. Certainly the seventeen-year-old Sophie was employed as an actress in the 1780–81 season at the Burgtheater. So despite the shock of Fridolin’s death, within a year the Weber family had pulled itself together and found its way to the heart of Viennese musical and theatrical life.
It was into this heady milieu that the troubled Wolfgang tumbled in the summer of 1781. As his employment with Archbishop Colloredo gradually collapsed, he found increasing solace in the company of the Webers. By 9 May he had moved in with them, as he reported rather carefully to his father: ‘Old Mme Weber has been good enough to take me into her house, where I have a pretty room.’17 He was still unsettled by the close proximity of Aloysia (now in the final stages of her pregnancy), and not exactly generous about her choice of husband; but he was nonetheless greatly comforted to be among old friends at such a difficult time. He wrote to Leopold on 16 May:
What you say about the Webers I do assure you is not true. I was a fool, I admit, about Aloysia Lange, but what does not a man do when he is in love? Indeed I loved her truly, and even now I feel that she is not a matter of indifference to me. It is therefore a good thing for me that her husband is a jealous fool and lets her go nowhere, so that I seldom have the opportunity of seeing her. Believe me when I say that old Mme Weber is a very obliging woman and that I cannot do enough in return for her kindness.18
Leopold’s reaction to Wolfgang’s new domestic arrangements can only be imagined, as all his letters from this period are lost. But he must have been in the firm grasp of apoplexy. His son was not merely in the process of throwing away his whole livelihood, and thereby bringing disgrace upon Leopold himself, he was also living in a household consisting of a widow and her three young, unmarried daughters – a family furthermore whose earlier association with Wolfgang had led only to devastating loss followed by months of agonizing uncertainty. Although the naive Wolfgang cannot really have hoped for a smooth ride, he was deeply distressed by the force of Leopold’s thunderous opinions: ‘I do not know how to begin this letter, my dearest father, for I have not yet recovered from my astonishment and shall never be able to do so, if you continue to think and write as you do. I must confess that there is not a single touch in your letter by which I recognize my father!’19
But scandalous whispers were travelling from Vienna to Salzburg and of course reaching Leopold’s ears. Wolfgang, it was rumoured, far from pining for Aloysia, was now deeply involved with another of the Weber girls. Was he even planning to marry her? Wolfgang was furious, and attempted to stamp firmly on these ‘entirely groundless reports’, on 25 July: ‘Because I am living with them, therefore I am going to marry the daughter. There has been no talk of our being in love. They have skipped that stage. No, I just take rooms in the house and marry. If ever there was a time when I thought less of getting married, it is most certainly now.’20 He did admit that he was now thinking of moving to different lodgings, but he had mentioned the possibility in an earlier letter and done nothing about it. And, to be sure, there was some fire beneath this smoke. Although Wolfgang never actually specified which of the girls was now enchanting him, it is clear that something was going on: ‘I will not say that, living in the same house with the Mademoiselle to whom people have already married me, I am ill bred and do not speak to her; but I am not in love with her. I fool about and have fun with her when time permits . . . and that is all.’ He added, with a flurry of true defiance, ‘If I had to marry all those with whom I have jested, I should have 200 wives at least.’ And in fact he continued to lodge with the Webers (‘such friendly and obliging people’) until early August. They looked after him extremely well, waited meals for him, and allowed him to come to the table ‘without dressing’. He felt completely at home.
But in due course, Wolfgang did yield to pressure and move out. First he took a highly unsuitable room in a dismal, rat-infested house, found for him by the Auernhammer family, whose talented daughter Josefa was taking lessons from him. This grim interlude did at least supply Wolfgang with a not unhelpful diversion for Leopold’s obsessive antipathy towards the Webers. Josefa Auernhammer fell in love with him. Wolfgang was merciless in his account of it all in his letters home, beginning with a cruel description of his pupil:
If a painter wante
d to portray the devil to the life, he would have to choose her face. She is as fat as a farm-wench, perspires so that you feel inclined to vomit, and goes about so scantily clad that really you can read as plain as print: ‘Pray, do look here’. True, there is enough to see, in fact quite enough to strike one blind; but – one is thoroughly punished for the rest of the day if one is unlucky enough to let one’s eyes wander in that direction – tartar is the only remedy!21
And he continued: ‘But, what is worse still, she is sérieusement in love with me! I thought at first it was a joke, but now I know it to be a fact . . . Throughout the town people are saying that we are to be married, and they are very much surprised at me, I mean, that I have chosen such a face.’
In fact Josefa and Wolfgang became and remained good friends, and this heartless account of her infatuation may well have been a gross elaboration of the truth, and a smokescreen to conceal Wolfgang’s continuing relationship with the Webers. For by the beginning of September he had left his filthy room and found better accommodation in the Graben. It was literally round the corner from the Webers’ house.
Throughout this difficult summer of exchanges with his father, Wolfgang was careful to maintain contact with Nannerl. Knowing that his letters home would also be read by her, he would include her in his plans and offer the most enticing possibilities. ‘My sister too . . . would get on much better in Vienna than in Salzburg,’ he wrote on 18 May. ‘There are many distinguished families here who hesitate to engage a male teacher, but would give handsome terms to a woman.’22 (This was probably an astute observation.) And when he wrote directly to her, his letters were sweetly and quite cleverly composed to appeal to everything she loved. On 4 July, with the greatest affection, he offered to get hold of as many different ribbons for her as she wanted. Knowing her enthusiasm for the theatre, he described his own pleasure at attending plays. He continued to enquire obliquely about her admirer (Franz d’Ippold), and he kept her informed of his compositions for the clavier, promising ‘of course’ to send her anything new. If this was a calculating letter, designed largely to keep his sister on side, it was certainly a good one.23
But even as Wolfgang dug his heels in and fought off Leopold’s onslaught of diatribe about his new arrangements, his spirits rose dramatically in that summer of 1781. By no means flung into the wilderness as a result of his severance from the Salzburg Court, he was in fact attracting rather a lot of attention. He was often to be found in princely halls and patrician salons; Viennese society was intrigued by the brilliant renegade from Salzburg. Through the Webers’ activities at the Burgtheater, he made contact with Johann Gottlieb Stephanie, a playwright and librettist who at the time was in charge of German opera there. Wolfgang had tried to interest him in his unfinished singspiel, Zaïde, and, although Stephanie rejected it, he did keep Wolfgang in mind for other projects. In late July it was announced that the Grand Duke Paul of Russia, son of Catherine the Great, would visit Vienna that September (sent by his mother, needing allies against the Turks, to further her links with the Habsburgs). There was a flurry of artistic activity in preparation for this great visit, and Stephanie thought of Mozart. Wolfgang wrote to Leopold on 1 August:
Well, the day before yesterday Stephanie junior gave me a libretto to compose . . . The subject is Turkish, and the title is Belmonte und Konstanze, or Die Verführung aus dem Serail. I intend to write the overture, the chorus in Act I and the final chorus in the style of Turkish music . . . The time is short, it is true, for it is to be performed in the middle of September; but the circumstances connected with the date of the performance and, in general, all my other prospects stimulate me to such a degree that I rush to my desk with the greatest eagerness and remain seated there with the greatest delight.24
In the following weeks, Wolfgang was completely absorbed in this exciting task. It was exactly the break that he had hoped for, and for many reasons one of the most fulfilling and successful commissions he ever had. First, there was its subject-matter. Stephanie’s libretto (based on a play by Bretzner) was the story of a rescue, whose climax was marked by a monumental gesture of forgiveness. (A young Spanish nobleman comes to the Turkish seraglio of the Pasha Selim to rescue his beloved, together with her English maid and his own servant. As they are all recaptured, the Pasha Selim magnanimously pardons and frees them.) This was not only relevant with regard to the Grand Duke Paul, for the Turks were basically seen as the enemy. It was also entirely appropriate for his host, Joseph II, who wanted something in German, that espoused his Enlightenment values of courage, reconciliation and forgiveness. The opera certainly became an enormous success with the public, and was revived in many cities, countries and languages for the rest of Wolfgang’s lifetime and beyond. And it also marked a quite extraordinary confluence of two tributaries of his life, the personal and the creative.
It is always dangerous to try to draw parallels between a composer’s output and his own story. Some artists do reflect their circumstances in their creations, but in general Wolfgang was not one of them. There are countless examples in his music (the ‘Jupiter’ symphony, for instance) of the greatest exuberance actually being the product of an exceptionally desolate time for him. But here the parallels between art and life are too striking to be irrelevant or coincidental. Wolfgang received his commission for Die Entführung aus dem Serail (as the title became) just as his heart was opening to the Weber girl who would in due course become his wife. Her name, and that of the opera’s principal character, was Constanze. He wrote his opera and oversaw its preparation and rehearsal in the months in which he tried to persuade his family of the suitability of his choice of bride. Die Entführung had its premiere on 16 July 1782; and just over three weeks later, on 4 August, Wolfgang and Constanze were married. Both literally and figuratively, her hand is in this ground-breaking score; and his heart, his strength of feeling for her, is in every bar of it.
AS HE WAS writing Die Entführung aus dem Serail, K384, Wolfgang sent his father progress reports. By 22 August, just three weeks after Stephanie had brought him the libretto, he had finished the first act, and soon he was ready to send Leopold some of it. What he dispatched was a copy of the first aria sung by the character Constanze, ‘Ach, ich liebte, war so glücklich’ (I was in love, and so happy), and it had been written out by Constanze Weber. Leopold cannot yet have known whose handwriting it was. Can it even have crossed his mind that Constanze, the daughter of a professional copyist, was involved in such tasks? Was Wolfgang trying another little ploy, to show how musically literate, and practically supportive, this particular Weber girl was? In his next letter, Wolfgang went into great detail to explain his compositional procedure, which he knew would fascinate his father. His analysis of the young nobleman Belmonte’s first aria, ‘O wie ängstlich, o wie feurig/Klopft mein liebefolles Herz’ (How eagerly, how ardently my lovesick heart is beating), perhaps tactfully avoids describing its heart-stopping opening, where Belmonte breathes the name ‘Constanze!’ and then ‘dich wiederzusehen, dich!’ (to see you again!) over the gentlest of string chords. But his explanation of his musical decisions is thoroughly eloquent of his own state of mind as he wrote this music, with his future wife beside him.
Let me now turn to Belmonte’s aria in A major, ‘O wie ängstlich, o wie feurig’. Would you like to know how I have expressed it – and even indicated his throbbing heart? By the two violins playing octaves . . . You see the trembling – the faltering – you see how his throbbing breast begins to swell; this I have expressed by a crescendo. You hear the whispering and the sighing – which I have indicated by the first violins with mutes and a flute playing in unison . . . This is the favourite aria of all those who have heard it, and it is mine also.25
The visit of the Grand Duke Paul of Russia was delayed: he did not actually arrive in Vienna until November 1781, by which time all plans for entertaining him had been through many different phases. Die Entführung was not produced until the following summer, and Wolfgang’s musical energies w
ere diverted into many other projects, including teaching and performing. In late December he took part in a famous piano contest with Clementi, in the presence of the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna. (He won.) He also entered into an agreement with the publishing firm of Artaria, and his first Viennese publication at the end of 1781 was a set of six violin and piano sonatas. He dedicated these to Josefa Auernhammer, who was also his partner in the first performance of his sonata for two pianos, K448 (375a): she had indeed become a good friend. But throughout these latter months of 1781, Wolfgang’s relationship with Constanze developed intensely, and by December he knew he had to take the first, perilous step of informing Leopold. On the 15th, he wrote his father a long and extremely careful letter, almost symphonic in its carefully argued construction, with its contrasts of pace and tone, its serious message enlivened by flecks of humour and ribaldry. At one of the most crucial points of Wolfgang’s personal life, his stream of consciousness flowed from reservoirs of passion and tenderness. Like so much of his musical composition, this letter emerged with an effortless but immaculate sense of formal structure.26
It began normally enough, listing various pieces of music he was sending to Salzburg, and then complaining about Salieri, to whom he had recently lost out (Salieri had been preferred over him as teacher to the Princess of Württenberg). These two items of business – a slow introduction, really, to the allegro argument that was to follow – led to an admission: ‘I am very anxious to secure here a small but certain income . . . – and then – to marry!’ Imagining the paternal consternation at this point, Wolfgang’s tone quickly became conversational: ‘You are horrified at the idea? But I entreat you, dearest, most beloved father, to listen to me. I have been obliged to reveal my intentions to you. You must therefore allow me to disclose to you my reasons, which are, moreover, very well founded.’ And then came his ‘reasons’, three of them, carefully ordered and explained. The first, quite simply, was physical. ‘The voice of nature speaks as loud in me as in others, louder perhaps than in many a big strong lout of a fellow.’ But he could not bring himself to ‘fool about with whores’, despite the fact that ‘to err is natural enough in a man’. Second, he argued, his disposition was ‘more inclined to a peaceful and domesticated existence than to revelry’. And this was almost certainly true: however much he loved a party and good company, he had had twenty-five years of ceaseless travel, upheaval and hyperactivity, and now needed a still point in his turning world. His third reason was that he really needed someone to look after him, his ‘belongings, linen, clothes and so forth’: this had always been done for him (by his mother or sister, he meant), and without that supervision he was spending too much money (an argument bound to hit home with Leopold). He concluded therefore that he would ‘manage better with a wife’, with a ‘well-ordered existence’; and for good measure he added his touching observation, ‘A bachelor . . . is only half alive.’