Mozart's Women

by Glover, Jane

  He described the wedding, and their happiness, and he continued to send his father Constanze’s affectionate greetings, as he always had. And he ended as if this was a completely normal letter: he declared that the outer movements of his ‘Haffner’ symphony, K385, should be played ‘as fast as possible’ (this was a clear indication of his energy in those momentous days), and casually reported that Gluck had loved Die Entführung and had subsequently invited him and Constanze to lunch. But this was not a normal letter. Wolfgang had taken a major decision against the wishes of his father, and Leopold had finally lost the battle. At the end of Die Entführung, the Pasha Selim says to Belmonte, ‘Nimm deine Freiheit. Nimm Constanze’ (Take your freedom. Take Constanze). Wolfgang had taken his Constanze, and was at last free of his father.

  THE EXCITEMENTS AND upheavals of their courtship continued throughout the first year of marriage for Wolfgang and Constanze. In the space of nine months they lived in no fewer than four different apartments – all of them admittedly within a few hundred yards of each other, but the constant uprooting cannot have allowed them to feel particularly settled as yet. There were still problems with Frau Weber, who could reduce Constanze to tears quite easily. By the end of August, only a few weeks after their wedding, Wolfgang resolved not to let his wife visit her mother any more, unless they were compelled to celebrate a birthday or name-day of one of the family. (Constanze’s two unmarried sisters, Josefa and Sophie, were still living at home.) And there was constant pressure from Leopold to bring his daughter-in-law to Salzburg. Despite protestations that they could hardly wait to see Leopold and Nannerl again, Wolfgang and Constanze procrastinated continually. At the end of August Wolfgang was citing the uncertain movements of the Imperial Russian visitors as his reason for not yet being able to settle on a date. In October, ‘the most profitable season in Vienna’38 was just beginning, when people wanted lessons and concerts – and indeed it was in this month that Wolfgang did finally get to perform Die Entführung for the Grand Duke Paul, for whom the whole project had originally been conceived. By mid-November, Wolfgang was blaming the weather and, for good measure, Constanze’s ‘severe headache’39 for the delay. A week later he finally admitted that they could not come until the spring ‘for my pupils positively refuse to let me go’.40 And, the best reason of all, Constanze was now pregnant.

  The newly-weds were in fact extremely happy. Despite all the upheavals, they took great strength from each other’s love, from their good connections, and from Wolfgang’s burgeoning popularity among music patrons. They had extremely good friends, especially the Baroness Waldstätten and her new lodger Josefa Auernhammer. And now that Wolfgang was happily committed to Constanze, he could forgive Aloysia for the heartache she had caused him: the Langes and the Mozarts were regular visitors in each other’s houses. Joseph Lange would in due course paint his sister-in-law, and begin though not finish the most powerful of all the portraits of Wolfgang. A second daughter, Philippina, had been born to the Langes in September; indeed, Aloysia and Constanze must have continually supported each other through their many confinements. (There was barely a time when one or other of them was not pregnant: between them they had twelve babies in ten years – not counting any possible miscarriages.) In January 1783 Wolfgang and Constanze were temporarily lodged in the Klein-Herbersteinhaus in Wipplingerstrasse, a generous apartment loaned to them by Baron Raimund Wetzlar, another good friend. There were two large and empty rooms adjacent to this apartment, so one night the Mozarts gave a private ball in them, lasting from six in the evening until seven the following morning, to which they invited all their friends. In describing this event to his father and sister, Wolfgang declared it would be impossible to name all the guests, but he did pick out the Baroness Waldstätten, his generous landlords the Wetzlars, his Salzburg friend and best man Franz Gilowsky, a crowd of people from Die Entführung including the librettist Johann Stephanie and his wife, and the Belmonte, Johann Adamberger, and his; and of course the Langes. In the same letter, Wolfgang asked his father to send his Harlequin costume (was this something he had acquired in Venice, when they were there in 1772?): it was Carnival time, and Wolfgang felt liberated. Pregnancy or no, the Mozarts were enjoying themselves.

  The richness of the Mozarts’ new Viennese acquaintance, and especially Wolfgang’s rapprochement with Aloysia, gave him new waves of compositional energy. He was discovering that the piano concerto, played and directed by himself, was a marvellous new medium for concerts. Over the winter of 1782–3 he wrote three of them, K413 (387a) in F, K414 (385p) in A and K415 (387b) in C, plus a new rondo in D, K382, as an alternative ending to his earlier D major concerto, K175. And he remembered to send these, or news of them, to his sister, ever sensitive to her passionate need for all his piano music.

  Wolfgang also wrote some more spectacular arias for Aloysia. The first of them, the rondo ‘Ah, non sai qual pena’, K416, was for a big concert in the Mehlgrube in January 1783, and here Wolfgang thrillingly renewed his musical partnership with the artist who had so inspired him five years earlier. Again he wrote for every facet of Aloysia’s remarkable voice, her controlled cantabile singing, her high tessitura (this time he took her up to F in alt), her brilliant coloratura and her dramatic interpretative powers, this time portraying a grieving lover who vacillates between tenderness and desolation. Wolfgang’s stretching too of tonal relationships gave the Mehlgrube audience music of an intensely new and modern vocabulary. Both he and Aloysia undoubtedly made their mark that evening. Two months later, in the early stages of her third pregnancy, she sang the aria again at a concert of her own at the Burgtheater. She also included their first collaboration from Mannheim, ‘Non sò d’onde viene’, K294 (so there were no insuperably uncomfortable memories there), and he conducted his ‘Paris’ symphony and played his D major piano concerto with its new rondo. Gluck was in the audience, and was so delighted with the concert that he again issued lunch invitations, this time to both the young couples, the Mozarts and the Langes. Leopold must have been impressed with that report, and even more so by that in Wolfgang’s next letter, when he described his own concert, attended by the Emperor, no less: ‘But what pleased me most of all was that His Majesty the Emperor was present and, goodness! – how delighted he was and how he applauded me!’41 Again Aloysia was one of the soloists, and the whole concert was an enormous success. With Wolfgang’s burgeoning concert activity, and an expanding circle of brilliant musical and theatrical acquaintance (he mentioned in passing to Leopold the new poet in town, ‘a certain Abbate Da Ponte’42), he was energized and inspired.

  But above all Wolfgang was loving his new private happiness. If he left the house before Constanze had arisen, he wrote little notes for her:

  Good morning, dear little wife! I hope that you have slept well, that nothing disturbed you, that you haven’t got up too hastily, that you are not catching cold, that you are not bending or stretching, that you are not angry with your servants, that you don’t fall over the threshold in the next room. Spare yourself household worries until I return. Only may nothing happen to you! I am coming at – o’clock etc.43

  He reported regularly and proudly to Leopold and Nannerl on the progress of Constanze’s pregnancy. In January he described his ‘little wife who is quite plump (but only about the belly)’.44 In April, Constanze was ‘in such excellent health and has become so robust that all women should thank God if they are so fortunate in their pregnancy’.45 And in May he wrote contentedly from the Prater, where they were enjoying marvellous spring weather, after eating lunch out of doors: ‘My whole company consists of my little wife who is pregnant, and hers consists of her little husband, who is not pregnant, but fat and flourishing . . . For the sake of my dear little wife, I cannot miss this fine weather. Exercise is good for her.’46 They had just moved house again, for the third time in five months, and now had a first-floor apartment in the Judenplatz. And it was here that their first child was born, on 17 June 1783. He was named Raimund Leopold, aft
er their generous landlord and of course the child’s grandfather.

  The anxiety and excitement of childbirth brought about another important reconciliation with the Weber family, for Constanze’s mother was involved. As she nursed her daughter and new grandson, Frau Weber was forgiven for her preposterous past. Wolfgang’s letter of 18 June has all the elation and exhaustion of every new father:

  Congratulations, you are a grandpapa! Yesterday, the 17th, at half past six in the morning, my dear wife was safely delivered of a fine sturdy boy, round as a ball. Her pains began at half past one in the morning, so that night we both lost our rest and sleep. At four o’clock I sent for my mother-in-law – and then for the midwife. At six o’clock the child began to appear and at half past six the trouble was all over. My mother-in-law by her great kindness to her daughter has made full amends for all the harm she did before her marriage. She spends the whole day with her.47

  Never one to avoid describing the most basic bodily functions, Wolfgang went on to confide his anxieties about breast-feeding:

  From the condition of her breasts I am rather afraid of milk-fever. And now the child has been given to a foster-nurse against my will, or rather, at my wish! For I was quite determined that whether she should be able to do so or not, my wife was never to feed her child. Yet I was equally determined that my child was never to take the milk of a stranger! I wanted the child to be brought up on water, like my sister and myself. However, the midwife, my mother-in-law and most people here have begged me and implored me not to allow it, if only for the reason that most children here who are brought up on water do not survive, as the people here don’t know how to do it properly.

  And three days later his report on his newly extended family (sandwiched between accounts of writing some more arias for Aloysia, and of possible plans for a new opera) was equally, joyfully, explicit:

  Thank God, my wife has now survived the two critical days, yesterday and the day before, and in the circumstances is very well. We now hope that all will go well. The child too is quite strong and healthy and has a tremendous number of things to do, I mean, drinking, sleeping, yelling, pissing, shitting, dribbling and so forth. He kisses the hands of his grandpapa and his aunt.48

  Truly, Wolfgang and Constanze were extremely happy: ‘Little Raimund is so like me that everyone immediately remarks it. It is as if my face had been copied. My dear little wife is absolutely delighted, as this is what she has always desired.’49

  Little Raimund’s other aunt, Aloysia, was also around the Mozart household a great deal in these days. She was about to appear in Anfossi’s opera Il curioso indiscreto at the Burgtheater, and Wolfgang was to write two arias especially for her, to be inserted into Anfossi’s score. (This was quite normal practice, when a singer for whom a role had not been written went into a production.) In different ways, both these arias, ‘Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio!’, K418, and ‘No, che non sei capace’, K419, again confirmed the astonishing musical partnership of Wolfgang and Aloysia. Now writing for her without the pain of deep personal involvement, Wolfgang could reach to the extremities of her superb facility and of their shared emotional experience, and produce music of utterly breathtaking distinction.

  The text of ‘Vorrei spiegarvi’ (by an unknown librettist) complies with a common enough formula:

  Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio!

  Qual è l’affanno mio;

  Ma mi condanna il fato

  A pianger e tacer.

  (I should like to tell you, oh God

  what is troubling me,

  but fate has condemned me

  to weep in silence.)

  But Wolfgang’s setting sent it to Olympian realms. His choice of key, A major, is interesting, for that is so often associated with seduction in his music; and indeed the partner that he gave to the voice, an obbligato oboe, is also often the instrument of seduction. So it is almost as if this sad little text has become a love duet. And again Wolfgang exploited Aloysia’s famously controlled slow singing, her emotional involvement with text, and her phenomenal high register; and he produced what is arguably his finest ever aria. Together with the flashier brilliance of ‘No, che non sei capace’, these two arias inevitably eclipsed the rest of Il curioso indiscreto. According to Wolfgang, Anfossi’s opera ‘failed completely with the exception of my two arias . . . which did inexpressible honour both to my sister-in-law and to myself’.50 The combined family triumph caused some jealousies on the Viennese musical scene, and both Wolfgang and Aloysia were wary of their ‘enemies’, especially, in Aloysia’s case, of a new young singer in town, the eighteen-year-old ‘Mlle Storace’. Little did Wolfgang realize, when he first mentioned her in a letter to Leopold in July 1783, that Nancy Storace too would become an important and much-loved member of his circle.

  But all these excitements continued to delay the promised family visit to Salzburg. Leopold and Nannerl had still not met Constanze, and once again Leopold began to accuse Wolfgang of having no intention of coming at all. Undoubtedly, both Wolfgang and Constanze were extremely nervous of this obligation, Wolfgang for political as well as family reasons – it was now over two years since he had got himself kicked out of Salzburg service, and he had no idea how he would be received there – and Constanze for the sheer ordeal of meeting her troublesome in-laws for the first time. She did at least have two young allies in Salzburg. Heinrich and Gretl Marchand were the children of Theodor Hilarius Marchand, director of the German Court Theatre at Mannheim and then Munich, and the Marchands had known the Webers in Mannheim. When Leopold had come with Nannerl to Munich to hear Idomeneo in 1781, he too had met the Marchands, and had offered to take the two children back to Salzburg and teach them. (Almost certainly, Leopold had been looking for the next generation of educable prodigy.) Now aged fourteen and fifteen, Heinrich and Gretl were living in the Tanzmeisterhaus with Leopold and Nannerl; and when Wolfgang and Constanze wrote a series of letters assuring his father and sister that they really would come to Salzburg, Constanze wrote a little note too to Gretl. As Vienna emptied for the hot summer, the young Mozarts could delay their visit no longer. Tearing themselves away from their six-week-old baby, whom they left with a foster-mother, and bidding farewell too to Aloysia, who was heading off to Frankfurt to sing the role of Constanze in Die Entführung, they left for Salzburg at the end of July. Wolfgang had not been there since November 1780, nearly three years earlier.

  AGAIN BECAUSE OF the absence of letters in the three months that Wolfgang and Constanze spent in Salzburg, there is little information as to how this much-anticipated visit went. The chief chronicler, as always, was Nannerl, who continued laconically to record in her Tagebuch the basic facts of her daily activities – teaching commitments, visits, visitors, church attendance, weather reports and so on. These do however reveal that she and Wolfgang to an extent resumed their sibling relationship. Once more Wolfgang purloined the diary and made his own entries, gently (and not so gently) ridiculing her unemotional shorthand by improvising on it: ‘Went walking in the Mirabellgarten at seven o’clock as one goes walking in the Mirabellgarten, as one goes walking, went walking as one goes. Looming threat of rain, but never rainfall, and gradually – the heavens smiled!’51 Some of Wolfgang’s contributions seem to follow Nannerl’s voice so exactly that she might almost have been dictating to him at his side. Others are emphatically in his own voice and style, as ever full of puns, anagrams, puzzles and jokes. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Wolfgang was reverting to childhood innocences and exuberances with his sister.

  It is likely, given the months of build-up, that poor Constanze received a cool welcome from Leopold and Nannerl. But it does seem nonetheless that every proper effort was made to entertain her. Nannerl’s diaries record sightseeing outings in carriages, many visits to other people’s houses in Salzburg, and, most especially, enormous amounts of music-making in the Tanzmeisterhaus. There were, after all, six musicians actually living there, including the gifted Marchand children; and many of the Salz
burg Court musicians also came regularly to take part – as they always had.

  As in most family gatherings, especially when members are possessed of a distinct emotional volatility, there were inevitable strains and personality clashes. Years later, Constanze described to some English visitors one of those musical evenings. They were singing the quartet from Idomeneo, and Wolfgang became very upset: ‘he burst into tears and quitted the chamber and it was some time before she could console him.’52 Since the quartet focuses on Idomeneo’s son Idamante having to take his leave of his father who has been behaving quite irrationally towards him, and involves too the princess Ilia whom he loves but who politically is his father’s enemy, there must have been layers of potential for poignant distress on all sides. But these musical occasions afforded great pleasure too, and for Nannerl especially this must have been another precious time. Wolfgang probably wrote his piano sonatas in C, K330 (300h), in A, K331 (300i), and in F, K332 (300k), in those Salzburg months, and she would have been among their first interpreters. But the main musical event of the visit came right at the end of it: a performance of Wolfgang’s new and enormous Mass in C minor, K427 (417a). The chief soloist was Constanze.

  The genesis of this unfinished but major church composition is a little unclear, as two slightly different stories were told, one by Wolfgang and the other by Constanze. Wolfgang’s version had appeared in a letter to Leopold in January 1783, when parental pressure was again being applied as to the precise date of their visit to Salzburg. Refuting the accusation of not intending to come at all, Wolfgang cited a half-finished Mass as evidence that they would indeed come, with the implication that he had always planned to bring his wife, and a Mass written for her and in honour of her, to Salzburg: ‘The score of half a Mass, which is still lying here waiting to be finished, is the best proof that I really made the promise.’53