by Glover, Jane
Constanze’s version of the story is somewhat different, and she told it twice. First she informed Georg Nissen, as he planned his Mozart biography in the 1820s, that the Mass had been ‘solemnly promised for his wife when her confinement was happily over’.54 She repeated this in 1829 to her English visitors, the Novellos: the Mass was written ‘in consequence of a vow that he had made to do so, on the safe recovery after the birth of their first child – relative to whom he had been particularly anxious.’55 And in fact both these stories can go together. Wolfgang had probably always planned to write something for Constanze, which, like the music he wrote for her sister Aloysia, would show both of them off in an excellent light. During Contanze’s pregnancy, when like any first-time expectant father he was nervous about the outcome, he vowed to finish the Mass when mother and baby were both doing well. And although in fact Wolfgang never did complete it (he must have drawn on his earlier church music for that first performance in Salzburg), its vast conception and ‘tailor-made’ solo writing for Constanze are spectacular indicators of his great love for his new wife, of his awareness of the music that she both liked and could sing, and incidentally of his great desire to show the whole of Salzburg just how versatile his writing now was.
Certainly, the C minor Mass is quite unlike any other church music of its time. It has double choruses (in the ‘Qui tollis’ and Sanctus) and mighty choral fugues (‘Cum sancto spiritu’); its solo writing is often florid and ornate; the orchestral forces required are large (strings, oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, timpani and organ) and in addition there is some very prominent solo instrumental writing. All this flew in the face of current practice, for in Vienna Joseph II had restricted church music with instrumental accompaniment to the Court chapel or St Stephen’s Cathedral: everywhere else the music had to be plain and congregational. And in Salzburg, Archbishop Colloredo had applied his own constraints, demanding the elimination of complexity (there were to be no fugues) and virtuosity (no solo sections), and decreeing that no Mass should last longer than forty-five minutes. In the C minor Mass, Wolfgang broke all these ‘rules’, almost as if he were deliberately defying his former employer. What he seems to have conceived here is an enormous work balancing old-fashioned polyphony in the style of Bach or Handel, whom he and Constanze both so admired, with more modern solo writing, and an overall orchestral sonority which would thrillingly fill St Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, where he knew the Mass would be performed.
Wolfgang never wrote beyond the capabilities of his performers (unlike Beethoven), but always challengingly stretched them to their limits. Judging by the solo writing in the C minor Mass, Constanze must have been a gifted singer with many of the same attributes as her sister Aloysia. This is not particularly surprising, since all four Weber girls had been excellently taught by their father, and their technique was exceptionally secure. And in preparing his wife for this very special, and exposed, performance, Wolfgang wrote some exercises for her, training her technique for the sort of music she would now be required to sing. The first glimpse of Constanze comes in the opening Kyrie movement, when ‘Christe eleison’ is given to the soprano solo. Like Aloysia, Constanze must have possessed a voice with a wide range and easy coloratura: despite the general solemnity of this music, its execution is always impressive and commanding of attention. In the next solo movement, ‘Laudamus te’ in the Gloria, he developed this: again both extremities of Constanze’s register were exploited, and the coloratura writing was confidently and radiantly expanded. But the heart of Constanze’s performance, for indeed it is the heart of any Mass setting, was the ‘Et incarnatus est’ in the Credo. Although Wolfgang’s surviving music is incomplete, the vocal line together with solo instrumental parts for flute, oboe and bassoon are all extant, and the resulting aria has the same slow, controlled virtuosity as has the music that he had written for Aloysia, and, at the same time, a phenomenal sense of tranquillity and reverence. Constanze’s vocal range evidently lay a little lower than her sisters’ (where Aloysia, and indeed later Josefa, would go to F in alt, Constanze never went beyond a C), but she shared many of her family’s traits, and Wolfgang had written to her strengths.
Wolfgang’s new Mass was rehearsed in the last week of his Salzburg visit, and performed in St Peter’s Abbey (significantly not the Archbishop’s Cathedral) on 26 October, the night before he and Constanze were to leave. All his friends and ex-colleagues from the Salzburg orchestra were involved, and the Archbishop tactfully stayed away. Nannerl’s typically succinct diary entry merely recorded that the performance had taken place, and that her sister-in-law had sung. But she and her father must have been overwhelmed by the sheer depth and versatility of Wolfgang’s compositional range. Although the C minor Mass is unfinished, inviting speculation that the lasting impression of this first performance was one of disappointment, no musician could fail to respond to it with anything other than joyous wonder. The Salzburg visit had had its tensions, but it is tempting to suggest that it ended, literally, on a high note.
And so Wolfgang and Constanze came to the end of their stay. As they left the Tanzmeisterhaus, Constanze rather boldly asked Leopold if she could have one of the many gifts that Wolfgang had received on his earliest travels, but this was refused. Acceptance of Wolfgang’s wife evidently did not extend to over-generosity with mementos. Wolfgang would never return to his birthplace, nor see Nannerl again. On the journey home they stayed for a few days in Linz, where Wolfgang wrote rather stiffly to his father and sister: ‘My wife and I kiss your hands, ask you to forgive us for inconveniencing you for so long, and thank you once more for all the kindnesses we have received.’56 They were however made to feel extremely welcome in Linz, where the Thun family (relations of a good Viennese patron) showered them with generous hospitality. Wolfgang returned this by giving them a concert; and, as he had no symphony with him, he simply wrote them a new one (the ‘Linz’, in C, K425), ‘at breakneck speed’.
When Wolfgang and Constanze eventually arrived back in Vienna, there was terrible news. Their baby son Raimund had died on 19 August. For weeks they were both absolutely devastated. In an otherwise normal letter of news and business on 10 December, Wolfgang could not refrain from including the heartrending line: ‘We are both very sad about our poor, bonny, fat, darling little boy.’57 For Constanze especially, this must have been a bitter and utterly desolate homecoming, after a not particularly happy trip. She would have needed the support of her family at such a time, and it does seem that there were happy and productive reunions with the Webers. Aloysia’s career was going from strength to strength. She was about to set off on a tour of several months, but before leaving, she was to perform in an opera for her benefit, and she loyally chose Die Entführung. She and her brother-in-law continued to bring great credit to each other. And, almost as if to redress the sororial balance in the family, Wolfgang closed his letter of 10 December with a postscript to Nannerl:
We both send Nannerl
(1) a couple of boxes on the ear
(2) a couple of slaps on the face
(3) a couple of raps on the cheek
(4) a couple of whacks on the jaw
(5) a couple of smacks on the jowl
(6) a couple of cuffs on the mug.
With his wife’s sister, his discourse was now one of sublime music. With his own, it was one of childish banter.
But 1784 was to be a much better year for the Mozarts. They began it by moving to a spacious apartment in a brand-new building on Graben, built and owned by the proprietor of a prominent Viennese bookshop, Johannes Thomas von Trattner. Trattner’s wife Maria Theresa was a pupil of Wolfgang’s, and the two families had become good friends. Almost immediately Constanze became pregnant again, so she and Wolfgang renewed their hopes of expanding their family. And, without stepping out of their new residence, Wolfgang could expand his musical activities too. The Trattnerhof, as it was now known, housed a private hall in which concerts could be given, and Wolfgang seized on this
opportunity to mount three subscription concerts there, in March 1784. He collected an impressive list of 178 subscribers, which he sent in its entirety to Leopold, and wrote a new piano concerto for each of these concerts (those in E flat, K449, B flat, K450, and D, K451). As he was also taking part in other people’s concert series, he seemed to be performing almost daily. But he still remembered to send these new concertos to Salzburg, thoughtfully advising Leopold and Nannerl that ‘the E flat concerto . . . can be performed a quattro without wind instruments’58 – that is, Nannerl could play it at home in a chamber version with single strings. He continued to try to maintain good relations between Nannerl and Constanze: ‘My wife sends her love to my sister and will dispatch a smart fichu by the next mail coach. But she is going to make it herself, as it will be somewhat cheaper and much prettier.’59 Constanze was practical with her hands, and Wolfgang lost no opportunity to praise her sterling domestic attributes. He also shared with Nannerl touching details of Constanze’s pregnancy (‘she finds it difficult to remain seated for long, because our future son and heir gives her no peace’60), knowing perhaps that, like most women, Nannerl would want to know every stage of its development.
IN FACT NANNERL’S interest in matrimonial bliss and new babies, in that summer of 1784, was somewhat closer than vicarious. At last, she herself was about to get married. Her future husband was not her great admirer from recent years, Captain d’Ippold, who, despite having continued to appear in her diary’s list of callers at the Tanzmeisterhaus throughout the visit of Wolfgang and Constanze, had suddenly faded somewhat from the picture. In April 1783 she had recorded in her diary the death of one Jeanette Maria Berchtold. Just sixteen months later, on 23 August 1784, she married this young woman’s widower, Johann Baptist Franz von Berchtold zu Sonnenberg.
Like Captain d’Ippold, Berchtold was considerably older than Nannerl: he was now forty-eight, she just thirty-three. He had been married twice already, but had lost both his wives in childbirth. The first, Maria, died producing her ninth child in ten years, and the second, Jeanette, giving birth to her second in two years. Of these eleven babies, five survived, four from Maria and one from Jeanette; and in marrying their father Nannerl took on these stepchildren as well. It was a tall order; and so was the subsequent domestic upheaval. By a quite extraordinary family coincidence, her new husband was now Pflege (Prefect) of St Gilgen, as her own maternal grandfather had been. Nannerl probably retained early memories of her grandmother Eva Rosina, who had lived with them in Getreidegasse until her death in 1755, when Nannerl was four. She was now to move to the very house in St Gilgen in which Eva Rosina had given birth to her own mother Maria Anna, beside the peaceful waters of the Abersee. The symmetry of this arrangement probably appealed considerably to Nannerl’s ordered mind.
But it was indeed a major change of lifestyle. From her routine in the Tanzmeisterhaus as companion to her ageing and not altogether easy father, as teacher, caretaker and chaperone to their young protégés Heinrich and Gretl Marchand, and as a highly skilled musician at the heart of regular musical and social events among her wide circle of long-standing friendships, Nannerl was uprooted and transported to a tiny village at the edge of a lake. In August, when she married her husband and settled into her grandmother’s old house, the countryside would have been dazzlingly beautiful, and the cool air from the lake a welcome relief from the often stifling humidity of a Salzburg summer. But as autumn and then the cruel months of winter set in, awareness of what she had exchanged for this rural idyll must have hit her very hard. In effect, she had escaped from the clutches of one bullying man into those of another, for, after their initial contentment, Berchtold seems to have drawn away from his younger wife and responded less than sympathetically to her needs. Her stepchildren were hostile and unruly; she had problems acquiring servants in the village, and even greater problems keeping them (good relations with her servants had never actually been her strong point). And, most painful of all, she was completely isolated from any musical activity. Her father had generously given her a fortepiano as a wedding present. But as the cold weather arrived, and the snows effectively cut off this small community, her instrument could not cope with the icy dampness, and became unplayable. Nannerl had inherited her mother’s courageous resourcefulness, and applied herself doggedly to her new tasks. Her lifelines to the outer world were her regular weekly correspondence with her father; the supplies that he sent her via her husband’s official messenger (a local man who delivered documents from St Gilgen to Salzburg) or with a woman who brought glass from Aich to Salzburg; and, most especially, news of her brother’s musical life in Vienna.
Wolfgang seemed genuinely delighted about his sister’s marriage. He may also have been astonished by it: in his letter to her of 21 July 1784 there is no mention of Berchtold, nor indeed of any romantic attachment at all. But a month later, on 18 August, his excitement about her new situation revived all his younger-brother cheekiness:
It is high time I wrote to you if I want my letter to find you still a vestal virgin! A few days more and – it is gone! My wife and I wish you all joy and happiness in your change of state and are only heartily sorry that we cannot have the pleasure of being present at your wedding. But we hope to embrace you as Frau von Sonnenburg and your husband also next spring both at Salzburg and at St Gilgen.61
And, after a more serious paragraph, confiding his anxiety now about Leopold, he ended with a poem of characteristically creative brilliance:
Du wirst im Ehstand viel erfahren
was dir ein halbes Räthsel war;
bald wirst du aus Erfahrung wissen,
wie Eva einst hat handeln müssen
daß sie hernach den kain gebahr.
doch schwester, diese Ehstands Pflichten
wirst du vom Herzen gern verrichten,
denn glaube mir, sie sind nicht schwer;
doch Jede Sache hat zwei Seiten;
der Ehstand bringt zwar viele freuden,
allein auch kummer bringet er.
drum wenn dein Mann dir finstre Mienen,
die du nicht glaubest zu verdienen, in seiner üblen Laune macht:
So denke, das ist Männergrille,
und sag: Herr, es gescheh dein wille
beytag – und meiner bey der Nacht.
(Wedlock will show you many things
Which still a mystery remain;
Experience soon will teach to you
What Eve herself once had to do
Before she could give birth to Cain.
But all these duties are so light
You will perform them with delight.
Yet no state is an unmixed joy
And marriage has its own alloy,
Lest us its bliss perchance should cloy.
So when your husband shows reserve
Or wrath which you do not deserve,
And perhaps a nasty temper too,
Think, sister, ’tis a man’s queer way.
Say, ‘Lord, thy will be done by day,
But mine at night you’ll do.’)
FOR WOLFGANG AND Constanze, 1784 progressed with ever more musical and social activity and success. Their son Carl Thomas was born on 21 September. He was a healthy boy, and would live into his seventies. A week later the Mozarts moved house yet again (their sixth residence in just over two years of marriage), this time to a splendid apartment practically under the shadow of St Stephen’s Cathedral, in Domgasse. They rented it from a family called Camesina: a generation earlier, its owner Albert Camesina had been Court plasterer in Vienna and also worked in Salzburg. One small room in the Domgasse apartment has a Camesina ceiling of stuccoed marble decoration, and Wolfgang would have felt considerable satisfaction at being able to enjoy his own version of what appeared all over the Archbishop’s Palace in Salzburg. Certainly the location, and the plentiful and spacious rooms, of this new home were symbols of Wolfgang’s current standing in Viennese society. And the two and a half years that they spent in Domgasse were ind
eed the best of times for Wolfgang and Constanze: reputation, success, artistic satisfaction and domestic happiness all peaked here. But if Wolfgang’s social status was high, so too was the rent. Whereas they had paid 150 florins per month at the Trattnerhof, they now had to find 460. (In Salzburg, Leopold was paying only 90 florins per month for the Tanzmeisterhaus.) For a young family with no regular or secure income, this move was potentially very precarious.
As soon as Wolfgang and Constanze were settled into the Domgasse apartment, they renewed their invitation to Leopold to come and visit them. Here at last was a grandson they wanted him to inspect, and a home they wanted him to see. (The significance of the Camesina ceiling would not be lost on him.) In the new year of 1785 Leopold prepared to make the journey, and he brought with him his ex-pupil, Heinrich Marchand, now aged sixteen. (After Nannerl’s marriage and departure from Salzburg, the Marchands had moved back to Munich.) Leopold’s visit lasted ten weeks and was an almost unqualified triumph. He was bowled over by the frantic pace of Wolfgang’s musical activities, by the brilliance of his new compositions and the excellence of their execution, by his dazzling acquaintance (both fellow musicians and their patrician patrons), by the charm of baby Carl, and, even, by the Weber family. For, at this most critical of testing times, Constanze had conscripted the support of her mother and sisters.
Almost as soon as Leopold arrived in Vienna, he was taken to lunch at Frau Weber’s. This was the woman who, according to Leopold in 1782, should have been ‘put in chains and made to sweep streets’62 for having tried to trick Wolfgang into marrying her daughter: there was certainly potential here for an icy social occasion. But Frau Weber, together with her youngest daughter Sophie, came through with flying colours. (Josefa was away, earning her living as a singer.) She took great trouble over the meal and judged it perfectly. Leopold could not disguise his genuine admiration when he wrote to tell Nannerl all about it: