by Glover, Jane
We lunched on Thursday the 17th with your brother’s mother-in-law, Frau Weber. There were just the four of us [Leopold, Wolfgang, Constanze and Heinrich], Frau Weber and her daughter Sophie, since the eldest daughter is in Graz. I must tell you that the meal, which was neither too lavish nor too stingy, was cooked to perfection. The roast was a fine plump pheasant; and everything was excellently well prepared.63
Leopold had caught a cold on the journey from Salzburg (he was always nervous of these, especially after his terrible experiences in London twenty years earlier), and for at least a day he had to miss out on many musical and social events. But while he remained at home, he was not alone. The carer of the Weber family, Sophie, came to sit with him: she gave him lunch and stayed until the late evening when everyone else returned from two separate concerts (Wolfgang had been playing at one for Count Zichy; Constanze had taken young Heinrich to another). And Aloysia played her part as well. On at least two occasions the Langes invited Leopold to their house. Each time she sang several arias for him, and on one of the evenings her husband did a sketch of him. Although Leopold was hypercritical of Aloysia’s singing (she perhaps was the one Weber girl he residually found it hardest to forgive) he cannot have failed to appreciate her gifts, which had indeed brought her to the top of her profession in Vienna.
Probably the greatest effort to ensure that this all-important visit was a success was made by Constanze. And, like her mother, she seems cleverly to have judged it all very well. Carl no doubt played his part too, for Leopold was captivated by his five-month-old grandson: ‘Little Carl is the picture of [Wolfgang]. He seems very healthy, but now and then, of course, children have trouble with their teeth. On the whole the child is charming, for he is extremely friendly and laughs when spoken to. I have only seen him cry once and the next moment he started to laugh.’64 Leopold even praised Constanze’s running of the house. Elsewhere in Vienna he was enjoying lavish and gourmet entertaining, but at home in Domgasse he appreciated Constanze’s economies. He went so far as to include her in the affectionate formalities with which he signed off his letters to Nannerl (‘Your brother, your sister-in-law, Marchand and I kiss you millions of times’65). This was truly a big step forward.
There was every reason for Leopold to incline uncharacteristically towards generosity. He was positively euphoric about the music he was hearing. He wept tears of joy at the first performance of Wolfgang’s new and intensely dramatic D minor piano concerto, K466, with its ink still wet on the page, and then again at many other concerts when Wolfgang played his concertos. He heard once more the thrilling music from Constanze’s C minor Mass, which Wolfgang had reworked into a cantata, Davidde penitente, K469, for the Tonkünstler-Societät (to a text by his new colleague Lorenzo Da Ponte). In the Domgasse apartment he heard Wolfgang’s mould-breaking string quartets K387, 421(417b), 428(421b), 458, 464, 465: these would shortly be published and dedicated to Wolfgang’s new friend and fellow quartet-player, Joseph Haydn (whose brother Michael was a colleague of Leopold’s in Salzburg). He was basking in compliments paid to him on Wolfgang’s behalf by absolutely everybody, and especially those of Haydn, who told him, ‘Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me.’66 He wallowed too in the attentions of the Emperor (who ‘waved his hat and called out “Bravo, Mozart!”’) and the entire Viennese aristocracy. He was particularly besotted with the Baroness Waldstätten, who had continued to be a wonderful ally to Wolfgang and Constanze after their marriage. She had corresponded warmly and tactfully with Leopold, who now referred to her as ‘this woman of my heart’67 (what can Nannerl have made of that?). And during Leopold’s visit to Vienna, the Baroness did indeed pull out all the stops, inviting him out to her house in Klosterneuberg, and sending her carriage and horses for him.
But most important of all, Leopold was once more on the best of terms with Wolfgang. This was like the old days, on their Grand Tour, or the Italian trips. Along with success and adulation, there was again great harmony between father and son, and Constanze had undoubtedly played her part in the rebuilding of it. While Leopold was in Vienna he became a Freemason, at the same Lodge that Wolfgang himself had recently joined (Zur Wohltätigkeit [Beneficence]). In this ideal society, unsullied of course by the presence of women, they could together enjoy friendship, social contact (useful for advancement), good food, recreation and the sort of ritual procedures that they both respected and valued. Wolfgang composed his cantata Die Maurerfreude, K471, for their Lodge, and it was performed there on the night before Leopold left the city. In the end, Leopold was utterly exhausted by the sheer pace of his Viennese schedule, but, in his own way, he had loved every minute of it.
HOW POOR NANNERL reacted to Leopold’s dizzy accounts of his activities can only be imagined, as she shivered through the winter in her snow-bound ‘wilderness’, as she called it. She and her brother, once regarded as equals, were now seemingly poles apart. He was at the hub of cultural and artistic activity in one of the most vibrant cities in the world, successful, fulfilled, apparently well rewarded, and a happy husband and father. She was living in a freezing backwater with a husband she barely knew and five boisterous stepchildren who did not like her (Leopold actually described them as being ‘troublesome, evil-minded children’), and she could not even touch a decent keyboard. There was at least one glimmer of, literally, new life in her: she was pregnant. She and Johann Baptist went to Salzburg in mid-May to welcome her father back to the Tanzmeisterhaus, and informed him of their good news. Between them all, it was decided that she should return to Salzburg again in the summer, when her baby came to term.
Leopold Alois Pantaleon Berchtold was duly born in the Tanzmeisterhaus on 27 July 1785. Leopold senior had gone to St Gilgen to bring Nannerl back to Salzburg in June, some six weeks before the birth, as her husband had not been willing to leave then. After the baby was born, Nannerl remained with her father for another month. But when she returned to St Gilgen, to her husband and her unruly stepchildren, in early September, she left her own baby with his grandfather.
How Nannerl, Johann Baptist and Leopold arrived at this astonishing arrangement is not known. Little Leopold, or Leopoldl as he became known, had not been well before Nannerl left, and continued to be periodically troubled by illness for the first few months of his life. Perhaps when Nannerl left him behind, she believed it to be only a temporary measure, and that she would come and collect her baby once he had recovered. But then in the autumn months she herself became quite unwell, and, as the winter closed in, it was impracticable for a sickly baby to make a six-hour journey on difficult roads. By Carnival season of the following year, Leopold wanted to go to Munich to see the Marchands, and he asked Nannerl and Johann Baptist to come and look after Leopoldl themselves. But Johann Baptist refused to travel to Salzburg, claiming he had too much work in St Gilgen. Leopold was outraged, and now unleashed his fury, hitherto generally reserved for his son, on to his son-in-law:
That my son-in-law should make the excuse that he couldn’t travel in because of the sheer amount of work is something I really couldn’t tell anyone without going red myself, since everyone knows the extent of the little Pfleg of St Gilgen, and can therefore deduce from that the terrible pile of work. I salute my son-in-law and ask him what he believes all reasonable people must think of a man who is capable of holding out for a whole eight or nine months, and perhaps even longer, without seeing his child, or maybe, which God forbid, ever seeing him again, when he’s only six hours away from him? because he hasn’t seen him for five months, and I’ll hardly be able to take him out in under four months because of the weather – what might and must reasonable people think?68
And what, more to the point, did Nannerl think? She was not in fact to see her child again until he was almost a year old, when, in the following June, her husband could at last be persuaded to make the journey to Salzburg. Meanwhile Leopold, who had indeed gone to Munich, unfeelingly sent her more lively reports of th
e Carnival activities, which Nannerl had twice adored there, and of the burgeoning singing career of young Gretl Marchand. So Nannerl, who had been denied the opportunity to develop a musical career of her own, and watched longingly from the sidelines as her brother had swept along his brilliant path, now had to suffer the pain of knowing that her own protégée was leading the lifestyle that should and could so easily have been hers. Even her own child, like her talent, had effectively been taken from her. If Nannerl became withdrawn and embittered in St Gilgen, it is not altogether surprising. By whatever combination of circumstances, and for whatever reasons, her own will had been completely suppressed.
FOR THE YOUNG Mozarts in Vienna, the frantic pace of life continued after Leopold’s departure. The sheer amount of music that Wolfgang composed between arriving at the Domgasse apartment in late 1784 and his next trip out of Vienna (to Prague, with Constanze, in January 1787) suggests an almost inhuman pace of labour. Beneath his Camesina ceiling he wrote two operas (Der Schauspieldirektor, K486, and Le nozze di Figaro, K492), at least six concertos, two string quartets and an enormous quantity of other chamber music in various combinations, vocal arias, duets and trios, and music for his Masonic Lodge. And the quality of all this music is utterly insuperable. Wolfgang was creatively at his zenith, and in demand on all sides for new music (for everything was rehearsed and performed as soon as it was written). It is no wonder that he pleaded overwork in a letter to Anton Klein in Mannheim, in May 1785: ‘My hands are so full that I can scarcely ever find a minute to call my own.’69 Nor is it surprising to find Leopold complaining regularly in his letters to Nannerl that he had not heard from Wolfgang for weeks (‘I haven’t had a single line from your brother’70).
Much of this new music was now being published. Wolfgang was doing business with both Artaria, the reputable Viennese firm of art, map and music publishers, and Franz Anton Hoffmeister, a composer of Wolfgang’s age who had just started his own publishing business. But a letter from Wolfgang to Hoffmeister of November 1785, when he was in the middle of this successful and prolific period, is quite startling in its content: ‘I turn to you in my distress and beg you to help me out with some money, which I need very badly at the moment.’71 Wolfgang had been receiving decent sums for all his compositions and performances at this time; but he was clearly unable to control his spending of them.
Certainly, the gregarious Mozarts’ social life was as hyperactive as Wolfgang’s creative genius. The Domgasse apartment was always welcoming friends and colleagues for meals and music-making. In addition to Wolfgang’s composer friends Haydn, Dittersdorf and Vanhal, with whom he regularly played string quartets written by all of them, there were many singers. After the great success of Die Entführung, which continued to appear periodically in Vienna, the fashion for German-language singspiel had been overtaken once more by the triumphant return of Italian opera to the Burgtheater. From the 1783–4 season, there was therefore a large influx of singers, including the English soprano Nancy Storace (together with her composer brother Stephen), the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, and many Italians. The German opera company, including Aloysia, had moved to the Kärntnerthor-Theater in 1785. But singers from both companies found themselves in the Domgasse apartment, and Wolfgang delighted in their vitality and their talents. And in due course, as ever fitting his music like a good tailor, he wrote for all of them.
The most hilarious occasion for the Mozarts’ singing circle was undoubtedly a party at Schönbrunn, organized by the Emperor Joseph II himself. His sister Maria Christina was married to the Governor General of the Netherlands, Duke Albert Kasimir of Saxe-Teschen, and they were visiting Vienna early in 1786. The Emperor asked Mozart and the Court composer Salieri each to write a short work, in which the whole business of creating and performing opera was effectively sent up: singers were presented as being temperamental, jealous and competitive, theatre managers as devious and neurotic, and composers and librettists as manipulative opportunists. Wolfgang’s one-act opera, Der Schauspieldirektor, was to a text by his old collaborator from Die Entführung, Johann Gottlieb Stephanie, and other colleagues from the German opera company were brought in too. The two women associated with the role of Constanze in Die Entführung, namely Caterina Cavalieri who had created it, and of course Aloysia, played the rival divas Madame Silberklang and Madame Herz. The original Belmonte, Johann Adamberger, sang the tenor role of Monsieur Vogelsang. And the speaking parts were taken by a number of actors including Stephanie himself, his wife, and Aloysia’s husband Joseph Lange. It was practically a family affair. After this came Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole, presented by the newer Italian opera company, whose singers included Nancy Storace, Francesco Benucci and Stefano Mandini, soon to be, respectively, Susanna, Figaro and the Count in Le nozze di Figaro. The two operas were presented one after the other at either end of the Orangery at Schönbrunn, with the audience sitting between them, and there was a magnificent banquet. It is hard to imagine a more brilliant occasion of first-rate music, superb individual performances and high-spirited, affectionate camaraderie.
Aloysia’s appearance at this event in early February 1786 was happy confirmation of her good health. In 1785 she had apparently been ‘gravely ill’ for some weeks, and her return to work, as Constanze in Die Entführung at the Kärntnerthor-Theater, was an event of such importance that it was reported in the press. Even Leopold in Salzburg had heard of Aloysia’s indisposition, and almost seemed disappointed when he cattily reported on her recovery in a letter to Nannerl in St Gilgen: ‘Regarding the singer Lange, it’s ridiculous, and can now be confirmed that she is not dead, for this appeared in the Regenspurger Zeitung from Vienna: “We would have lost the greatest singer”. Then it goes on to discuss her husband, and give public testimonials of her faultless performance, and so on.’72
Aloysia was indeed now at the forefront of her profession, having overtaken Caterina Cavalieri in popularity and accomplishment. The Irish tenor Michael Kelly recalled in his Reminiscences, some thirty years later:
The first female singer was Madame Langé, wife to the excellent comedian of that name, and sister to Madame Mozart. She was a wonderful favourite, and deservedly so; she had a greater extent of high notes than any other singer I ever heard. The songs which Mozart composed for her in L’Enlèvement du Sérail [Kelly had evidently forgotten that Cavalieri, not Aloysia, had actually done the first performances] show what a compass of voice she had; her execution was brilliant.73
During Aloysia’s illness her sister Constanze was concerned too, as she took care of her baby Carl and tried to keep up with the pace of her husband’s life. They frequently had guests staying with them. Two Salzburg oboists, looking for work in Vienna, were there in January 1786. And they also took in the seven-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel, from Pressburg, who became Wolfgang’s pupil. Wolfgang must have been especially sympathetic to a child prodigy, recognizing that strangely isolating gift that could bring both visionary joy and deep loneliness to a bewildered boy. He and Constanze treated the young Hummel as if he were their own son, and in adulthood Hummel always declared that, once he was successful, he would not fail to recompense Constanze for all the trouble she had taken, for the care he received, the cost of his board and lodging, and the lessons. (In fact he never honoured these effusive statements, greatly to Constanze’s annoyance.) By the time of the Schönbrunn opera party, Constanze was pregnant once more, and her third son, Johann Thomas Leopold, was born on 18 October 1786. Sadly, this child also died within weeks of his birth, and again the Weber family, Constanze’s mother and sisters, would have been on comforting hand. (Wolfgang did not even tell Leopold or Nannerl of this latest tragedy: they only found out months later, from a third party.)
When Constanze recovered, the Mozarts contemplated travel, inspired perhaps by their cosmopolitan acquaintance. Through their friendship with the Storaces and Kelly, they became keen on the idea of going to England. Wolfgang still retained happy memories of his childhood months in L
ondon, and once, after hearing with delight of an English victory over the French in 1782, even declared himself ‘an out-and-out Englishman’.74 He started brushing up his English, and wrote to ask Leopold if he would take care of Carl if he and Constanze travelled for a while. He had heard (not in fact directly from his father or sister) that Leopold was already looking after Leopoldl, and assumed therefore that he enjoyed having his grandchildren around him. He also trusted him to take good care of his child, as he had done of Nannerl and himself as children, in very extreme circumstances. But Leopold flatly refused. All the goodwill that had been so successfully nurtured and established during his visit to Vienna had totally evaporated in the ensuing months of poor communication. He wrote, somewhat hysterically, to Nannerl: ‘So that is how the brilliant idea occurred to him or perhaps to his wife. Not at all a bad arrangement! They could go off and travel – they might even die – or remain in England – and I should have to run after them with the children.’75
In fact Wolfgang and Constanze abandoned their plan to go to England. But this was not because Leopold had refused to look after Carl. They had had another invitation.
WOLFGANG’S GROUNDBREAKING MASTERPIECE, Le nozze di Figaro, the first of his spectacular collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, had been premiered in the Burgtheater in May 1786 to huge public acclaim. It was then taken up elsewhere, and in Prague it was a sensation. As Leopold reported to Nannerl, the Prague ‘orchestra and a company of distinguished connoisseurs and lovers of music sent him letters inviting him to Prague and also a poem composed in his honour.’76 So early in the new year of 1787, Wolfgang and Constanze set out, together with a small group of good friends including two musicians from the Vienna Court orchestra, a violinist, Franz Hofer, and a clarinettist, Anton Stadler. They left Carl in the care of some of Constanze’s cousins, who were staying in the Domgasse apartment while they were away. On the morning of their departure, at five o’clock, Wolfgang wrote in the commonplace book of twenty-one-year-old Edmund Weber (son of Constanze’s uncle Franz Anton, and half-brother to the six-week-old baby Carl Maria von Weber): ‘Be diligent – cultivate your work – and do not forget your cousin who loves you from his heart.’77