Mozart's Women

by Glover, Jane

  As Wolfgang now approached the punchline, his tone dropped from oration back to conversation. ‘But who is the object of my love?’ he asked. ‘Do not be horrified again, I entreat you. Surely not one of the Webers? Yes, one of the Webers – but not Josefa, nor Sophie, but Constanze, the middle one.’ And then, almost as if hearing the shrieks of protest, he launched into an encomium of Constanze, beginning with distinctly uncharitable (as with poor Josefa Auernhammer) dismissals of her sisters:

  In no other family have I ever come across such differences of character. The eldest is a lazy, gross perfidious woman, and as cunning as a fox. Mme Lange is a false, malicious person and a coquette. The youngest – is still too young to be anything in particular – she is just a good-natured, but feather-headed creature! But the middle one, my good, dear Constanze, is the martyr of the family, and probably for that very reason, is the kindest-hearted, the cleverest, in short the best of them all.

  And when he went on to describe Constanze, he did so with an almost detached practicality, hoping again, perhaps, that this would appeal to Leopold:

  I must make you better acquainted with the character of my dear Constanze. She is not ugly, but at the same time far from beautiful. Her whole beauty consists in two little black eyes and a pretty figure. She has no wit, but she has enough common sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother. It is a downright lie that she is inclined to be extravagant. On the contrary, she is accustomed to be shabbily dressed, for the little that her mother has been able to do for her children, she has done for the two others, but never for Constanze. True, she would like to be neatly and cleanly dressed, but not smartly, and most things that a woman needs she is able to make for herself; and she dresses her own hair every day.

  (That last attribute of Constanze’s may well have been an unkind little dig at his own sister, for Nannerl never could dress her hair.) And after all this detail, Wolfgang’s eulogy concluded, like so much of his music, with the simplest of phrases: ‘I love her and she loves me with all her heart. Tell me whether I could wish for a better wife?’

  Before Wolfgang could learn Leopold’s reaction to this veritable bombshell, it was necessary for him to write another long, and somewhat less calm, letter. The Vienna gossips were making their mischief, and Leopold had heard all sorts of unflattering stories about Wolfgang, about his standing in Viennese society, and about his love for Constanze Weber. On 22 December Wolfgang began a letter which took him at least four days to complete, and in it he attempted to demolish all that had been said against him.27 The ‘arch-villain’ who had been spreading these ‘disgraceful lies’ was one Peter von Winter, a violinist in the Mannheim–Munich orchestra, who was at the time in Vienna. Chief among the stories that got back to Leopold were that Constanze was a slut (‘luder’); that her mother and her guardian Herr Thorwart had tricked Wolfgang into signing a pre-marriage contract whereby he would marry Constanze within three years or otherwise pay her 300 gulden a year; and that Wolfgang himself was out of favour, even ‘detested’, at Court. With the same simmering rage that had permeated his letters during the crisis of his Salzburg dismissal, Wolfgang denied all these fables. Although Frau Weber had spoken up for him, Herr Thorwart had indeed made him sign a preposterous pre-marital contract, because he too had been told stories by ‘certain busybodies and independent gentlemen like Herr Winter’. Once more in his conversational mode, Wolfgang asked his father:

  What other course was open to me? Nothing in the world could have been easier for me to write. For I knew that I should never have to pay these 300 gulden, because I should never forsake her, and that even should I be so unfortunate as to change my mind, I should be only too glad to get rid of her for 300 gulden, while Constanze, as I knew her, would be too proud to let herself be sold.

  But then, with true operatic flourish, Wolfgang drew Constanze herself into the narrative: ‘But what did the angelic girl do when the guardian had gone? She asked her mother for the document, and said to me, “Dear Mozart, I need no written assurance from you. I believe what you say,” and tore up the paper.’ (So Leopold could see that Constanze had a mind of her own, and was clearly more than the demure martyr that Wolfgang had previously described.)

  Wolfgang went on to dismantle the stories about his unpopularity at Court: ‘If you really believe that I am detested at Court and by the old and new aristocracy, just write to Herr von Strack, Countess Thun, Countess Rumbeck, Baroness Waldstätten, Herr von Sonnenfels, Frau von Trattner, enfin, to anyone you choose.’ And for his nonchalant coup de theâtre, he produced his star witness: ‘Meanwhile let me tell you that at table the other day the Emperor gave me the very highest praise, accompanied by the words “C’est un talent, decidé!”’

  Wolfgang then dealt with Winter’s labelling of Constanze as a slut:

  Of all the mean things which Winter said, the only one which enrages me is that he called my dear Constanze a slut. I have described her to you exactly as she is. If you wish to have the opinion of others, write to Herr von Auernhammer, to whose house she has been a few times and where she has lunched once. Write to Baroness Waldstätten, who has had her at the house, though unfortunately for a month only because she, the Baroness, fell ill. Now Constanze’s mother refuses to part with her and let her go back. God grant that I may soon be able to marry her.

  And, almost as a coda, he added a fascinating insight into the character of Leopold’s informer, Winter himself:

  There is one thing more I must tell you about Winter. Among other things he once said to me: ‘You are a fool to get married. Keep a mistress. You are earning enough money, you can afford it. What prevents you from doing so? Some damned religious scruple?’ Believe now what you will.

  For all Wolfgang’s passionate protestation and eloquent explanation, Leopold, entirely predictably, would have none of it. In the weeks and months that followed, many heated letters were exchanged between Vienna and Salzburg. Only those of Wolfgang have survived, but the content of Leopold’s can again easily be surmised by the manner in which Wolfgang had to deal with them. Gradually he changed his tactics. He continued to write about other matters – people he was seeing, music he was playing, stories from Vienna’s society; but he never failed to include news of ‘my dear Constanze’ and expressions of his longing for Leopold to meet her. He also brought Nannerl into the campaign, confiding in her, sending her significant little gifts from Constanze (two caps which Constanze herself had made), and, from himself, his fantasy and fugue in C major, K394 (383a), for clavier, which he claimed was written because Constanze had begged him to write a fugue:

  My dear Constanze is really the cause of this fugue’s coming into the world. The Baron van Swieten, to whom I go every Sunday, gave me all the works of Handel and Sebastian Bach to take home with me (after I had played them to him). When Constanze heard the fugues, she absolutely fell in love with them. Now she will listen to nothing but fugues, and particularly (in this kind of composition) the works of Handel and Bach. Well, as she had often heard me play fugues out of my head, she asked me if I had ever written any down, and when I said I had not, she scolded me roundly for not recording some of my compositions in this most artistic and beautiful of all musical forms, and never ceased to entreat me until I wrote down a fugue for her. So that is its origin.28

  This was indeed a clever move on Wolfgang’s part, to show Nannerl (and therefore Leopold) that Constanze was not merely a good housekeeper and cap-maker, but had extremely sophisticated musical tastes. And meanwhile he persuaded Constanze herself to write to Nannerl too, a somewhat stilted and formal letter, with the aim of creating a bond between the two women in his life. Occasionally in his letters to Leopold he included messages (about fashions, for example) from Constanze to Nannerl. And once he even let Constanze finish his own letter, as he had to rush out. He had certainly inherited, or at least observed, some of his father’s manipulative skills, as in that first half of 1782 he tried to defuse all the Salzburg resistance to his m
arital plans.

  At some point in the midst of all this, tensions arose between Wolfgang and Constanze themselves and their betrothal was broken off. The high-spirited Constanze went again to stay with the Baroness Waldstätten. The Baroness, who was in her late thirties and lived apart from her husband in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, was an extremely good friend to the young couple. In April 1782 there had been a lively party at her house, at which several of the ladies present, including both Constanze and the Baroness herself, had allowed a young man to take a ribbon and measure the calves of their legs. When Constanze returned home, she regaled her sisters and Wolfgang with a gleeful account of the party. Wolfgang was appalled, and said so. There was a major row: she told him she was doing no more than everyone else was doing, and announced (not for the first time) that she would have nothing more to do with him. Wolfgang was heartbroken, and now wrote Constanze the most careful of letters. Still firmly, almost prudishly, sticking to his opinions about propriety, he begged her to change her mind about dismissing him: ‘I (to whom it means more than it does to you to lose the object of my love) am not so hot-tempered, so rash and so senseless to accept my dismissal. I love you far too well to do so.’29 He gave her a rather obsessive little lecture about her honour (again not dissimilar to something Leopold might have produced), and discarded the poor Baroness, aged thirty-eight, as ‘already past her prime’. But he concluded with passion and tenderness:

  If you will but surrender to your feelings, then I know that this very day I shall be able to say with absolute confidence that Constanze is the virtuous, honourable, prudent, and loyal sweetheart of her honest and devoted MOZART.

  As in any marriage, there must have been countless occasions such as this for Wolfgang and Constanze. She certainly held her own in argument, and gave him as good as she got. But their genuine devotion to each other invariably pulled them together again, and reconciliation was always sweet. This particular row can even be detected in the composition of Die Entführung, which was still on Wolfgang’s desk. In the quartet at the end of Act II, the two pairs of lovers, Constanze and Belmonte and their servants Blonde and Pedrillo, fall upon each other as the men come to rescue their sweethearts. But almost immediately the men accuse the women of having been unfaithful to them, Constanze with the Pasha Selim, Blonde with his servant Osmin. Constanze and Blonde are appalled, and painful consternation descends on the four of them. Blonde hits out at Pedrillo in her rage, and Constanze sorrowfully asks Belmonte, ‘Ob ich dir treu verblieb?’ (Do you have to ask if I have been true to you?). Blonde complains to Constanze that Pedrillo does not trust her, and after two bars of orchestral tension, Constanze replies by telling her of Belmonte’s doubts. After two more orchestral bars, Pedrillo declares that Blonde must love him if she hit him; but, without waiting for his two bars, Belmonte comes straight in with ‘Constanze ist mir treu, Daran ist nicht zu zweifeln’ (Constanze is true to me, there’s no doubt about it). Forgiveness and reconciliation – two of the vast themes of this apparently light-hearted singspiel – transform the lovers’ tensions into rapturous joy, and Wolfgang’s musical portrayal of this whole scene has the authentic ring of real human experience.

  Die Entführung aus dem Serail was at last performed on 16 July 1782, at the Burgtheater. It was a huge success, and subsequent performances were packed out, in spite of ‘frightful heat’,30 as Wolfgang reported to Salzburg. By now he was enormously busy, not only with his opera but with other commissions (a symphony for the Haffner family, and an arrangement of Die Entführung for wind instruments), and often worked through the night (‘I must just spend the night over it, that’s the only way’31). He remembered rather late to send name-day greetings to Nannerl for 26 July, but, still longing for his family’s endorsement of Constanze, persuaded her to add her own rather self-conscious message to his. By 27 July Wolfgang was desperate to be married, and once again asked Leopold directly for his blessing:

  Dearest, most beloved father, I implore you by all you hold dear in the world to give your consent to my marriage with my dear Constanze. Do not suppose that it is just for the sake of getting married. If that were the only reason, I would gladly wait. But I realize that it is absolutely necessary for my own honour and for that of my girl, and for the sake of my health and spirits. My heart is restless and my head confused; in such a condition how can one think and work to any good purpose?32

  But by the next post all he received was a ‘cold, indifferent’ letter from Leopold, ignoring his reports of the sensation that Die Entführung now was, not even having bothered to look at the score of it that Wolfgang had sent him, chiding him for not having finished his symphony for the Haffners, and accusing him of making enemies of the musical profession, as ‘the whole world declares’. Wolfgang was furious: ‘What world, pray? Presumably the world of Salzburg, for everyone in Vienna can see and hear enough to be convinced of the contrary. And that must be my reply.’ And now his pleas to his father were more urgent, more impatient:

  You can have no objection whatever to raise – and indeed you do not raise any. Your letters show me that. For Constanze is a respectable honest girl of good parentage, and I am able to support her. We love each other – and want each other. All you have written and may possibly write to me on the subject can only be well-meaning advice which, however fine and good it may be, is no longer applicable to a man who has gone so far with a girl. In such a case nothing can be postponed. It is better for him to put his affairs in order and act like an honest fellow! God will ever reward that. I mean to have nothing with which to reproach myself.33

  If there were tensions between the generations in the Mozart family, they seem to have been present in the Weber family too. In those scorching days of a Vienna summer, Constanze had again flown from her mother’s house to the safe haven of the Baroness Waldstätten’s in Leopoldstadt, where she could presumably see Wolfgang in privacy. But Frau Weber was enraged by this arrangement, and even threatened to send the police to fetch her back. Poor Sophie, Constanze’s younger sister, had to bear the brunt of all this, and when a servant was sent to deliver some music to Wolfgang, she included a tearful message to let Constanze come home. This, with or without Leopold’s blessing, probably pushed Wolfgang into extreme action. He wrote to the Baroness to tell her of Frau Weber’s threats (‘Are the police in Vienna allowed to go into any house?’34) and to ask her advice. Should they not just go ahead and get married?

  On 2 August Wolfgang and Constanze went to confession and Communion together; on the following day their marriage contract was signed and witnessed. And on 4 August, in the presence of Frau Weber and Sophie, Constanze’s guardian Herr Thorwart, Wolfgang’s boyhood friend and best man Franz Gilowsky (now a surgeon in Vienna) and a district councillor, they were married at St Stephen’s Cathedral. It was an emotional occasion: ‘When we had been joined together, both my wife and I began to weep. All present, even the priest, were deeply touched, and all wept to see how much our hearts were moved.’35 And afterwards the Baroness Waldstätten put on a magnificent feast for them at her house, ‘more princely than baronial’. Wolfgang’s present to his wife on their wedding day was a small gold watch, the first one he had been given in Paris as a child. She wore it for the rest of her life, regardless of others presented to her in later years. (When, in her late seventies, Constanze was visited by an English couple, Vincent and Mary Novello, she showed them the watch. She wore it ‘at that very time in her bosom’, and it was still ‘going remarkably well’.36)

  And so the deed was done. Just after the wedding Wolfgang heard again from Leopold, still refusing to give his blessing and complaining now that Constanze was only after the Mozart family money, about which Wolfgang had probably misled her. Wolfgang replied calmly and with strength: ‘You are much mistaken in your son if you can suppose him capable of acting dishonestly. My dear Constanze – now, thank God, at last my wife – knew my circumstances and heard from me long ago all that I had to expect from you.’37