Mozart's Women

by Glover, Jane

  Baron van Swieten, who had so capably dealt with the immediate funerary procedures, then addressed Constanze’s longer-term financial position. Nothing could be done with Wolfgang’s estate until his creditors had been paid off, and provision made for the welfare of his children. So an inventory was made of all his possessions, and everything on it was valued. Exempt from this inventory were manuscripts, for royal statutes had no taxable requirement of them – and in due course this loophole would provide Constanze with the means to secure a future for her children and herself. But it is unlikely that in those early and bewildered stages of bereavement she paid much attention yet to the potential gold-dust lying around the apartment. She and van Swieten would have been more preoccupied with paying bills and medical expenses, and, if any, creditors. But in fact, with Wolfgang’s recent change in fortune, and no doubt with Constanze’s organizational encouragement, he had paid off the loan she had arranged with Lackenbacher. And his other two chief creditors, Lichnowsky and of course Puchberg, both showed great magnanimity and never claimed a penny. So, for the moment, Constanze was just about solvent.

  On 10 December there was a memorial service for Wolfgang in St Michael’s Church, organized, and indeed paid for, by his distraught friend Emanuel Schikaneder. The following day Constanze presented a petition to the Emperor.1 In a dignified and carefully worded document (almost certainly drafted by van Swieten), she acknowledged that she had no right to a pension, since her late husband had not been in Imperial service for the statutory ten years. But she was trusting in the favour and generosity of the Court to hear her appeal, especially in view of Wolfgang’s loyalty to it, and the cruelty of fate which ‘took him from the world at that very moment when his prospects for the future were beginning to grow brighter on all sides’. She mentioned in passing that she was unable to apply for help from the Tönkunstler-Societät, which after all existed to support widows and orphans of its musician-members, because Wolfgang had never in fact ‘thought to ensure provision for his dependants by enrolling’. (This was not strictly true: Wolfgang had applied for membership, but had been rejected on the technicality that he could not produce his baptism certificate. And indeed that same, wretchedly elusive document had almost prevented their wedding from taking place, and its requirement had had to be waived.) Constanze did in fact apply to the Tönkunstler-Societät for help; but, sticking doggedly to their rule-book, they replied tersely that Wolfgang’s ‘bereaved widow is neither at present drawing a pension from the funds of the afore-mentioned Society, nor has she any expectation of one in the future’.2 The Court, however, in its own time, did look sympathetically on Constanze’s application. Having made her supply various documents supporting her request, they eventually agreed to award her one third of Wolfgang’s 800-florin salary, backdated to 1 January 1792. So Constanze would at least receive just over 265 florins per annum – though there was an emphatic clause to the effect that this was ‘granted as a special favour and does not establish a precedent’.3

  There would have been donations too from appalled and sympathetic well-wishers, as a number of newspaper articles had appeared in Vienna and beyond, outlining Constanze’s situation, and some of these elicited gifts. But if Constanze had read her newspapers carefully, some stories would have upset her. She would have been outraged to learn of a rumour that Leopold Kozeluch was to be appointed to succeed Wolfgang as Kammermusikus, with a salary restored to 2,000 florins;4 indeed, if it was true, it does seem incomprehensible that the emoluments of these two incumbents fluctuated wildly, and bore no reflection at all of their respective talents. And for her, of course, one third of 2,000 (as opposed to 800) florins would have been very welcome. Then another story, at once sensational and gruesome, would also have distressed Constanze. It concerned the Mozarts’ friends Franz and Magdalena Hofdemel: Franz was one of the fellow Freemasons who had lent Wolfgang money for his journey to Berlin in 1789; his wife Magdalena had been one of Wolfgang’s pupils. On 6 December, the day of Wolfgang’s funeral, Franz Hofdemel had violently attacked his pregnant wife with a razor, slashing her face and hands; he had then cut his own throat. She survived this bloodied frenzy, but he did not. Rumours immediately spread, first, that Hofdemel had brutally disfigured his wife out of jealousy, believing her to have had an affair with her teacher, Mozart; and second, therefore, that Hofdemel had actually poisoned Mozart as part of the same grim scenario. Good newspaper copy though this was, it is unlikely that any of it was true, although what it was that drove poor Hofdemel to such crazed action has never been established. There were further petitions at Court, now on behalf of Magdalena Hofdemel; and, most interestingly, it was the women there, headed by the Empress Marie Louise herself, who became passionately concerned, and sent financial assistance to both Magdalena and Constanze. But these dramatic events and consequent rumours can have done little to ease Constanze’s path towards emotional equanimity.

  She was not however having to deal with this on her own: there was an enormous amount of support for her. In the same way that Herr Thorwart had become legal guardian to Constanze herself and her sisters when their own father had died in 1779, the Magistracy now appointed Dr Nicklas Ramor, an advocate, for her sons; and in her dealings with the Magistracy, Constanze nominated their still-devoted friend Michael Puchberg as her own representative. Several of Wolfgang’s other old patrons and supporters rallied around her, including, as well as Baron van Swieten, the Countess Thun, and members of his Lodge (‘New Crowned Hope’), who in June of 1792 opened a collection fund for Constanze and her children. Schikaneder’s company had taken part in the memorial service, and various individuals among them made their own contributions. (In a gesture touchingly anticipating that of Colline in La Bohème, Benedikt Schack pawned his watch and gave the proceeds to Constanze.) Like all close-knit theatrical communities, they would have been deeply affected by the loss of someone who had effectively been one of them, and had certainly been largely responsible for their current buoyancy. With the immediate connection of Josefa and Franz Hofer, the welfare of Constanze and her sons would have been uppermost in their concerns. And above all, the carer of the Weber family, Sophie, who had been charged by Wolfgang on his deathbed to look after Constanze, would have applied herself to this responsibility with fervent dedication. The very passion of her memoir to Nissen, written so long after the events, testifies to the depth of her emotional involvement, and probably therefore to the success with which she carried out her obligation.

  Beyond Vienna, too, other appalled friends rushed to try to help. In Prague, where they had come to look upon Wolfgang as one of the jewels in their own crown, they first held a church service in his memory. According to reports in the Viennese press, the ceremony had been arranged by the orchestra of Prague’s National Theatre, and 120 of the city’s musicians took part. One of the soloists was the Mozarts’ great friend, Josefa Duschek (for whom Wolfgang had written the scena ‘Ah, lo previdi’ in 1777, and ‘Bella mia fiamma’ in 1787, and who had become and would remain close to Constanze). And, as the newspaper report carried it, ‘solemn silence lay all about, and 1,000 tears flowed in poignant memory of the artist who through [his] harmonies so often turned all hearts to the liveliest of feelings.’5 By the end of the year, those same musicians were planning a benefit concert for Constanze and the children.

  Even further afield, in London, the tragic news reached Haydn. (He had indeed accepted the invitation of Johann Peter Salomon, and was now enjoying great success there.) He was, as he wrote to Puchberg, ‘beside myself for some considerable time because of [Mozart’s] death, and could not believe that Providence should so soon summon an irreplaceable man to the other world’. Longing to be able to do something, he asked for a list of all Wolfgang’s works to be sent to him in London, so that he could make them known there ‘for the benefit of the widow’. He also wrote to Constanze herself, promising personally to take charge of her son Carl’s musical education, ‘so as to some extent to take the place of his fathe
r’.6 And he kept to his word: in due course Carl would go, at Haydn’s suggestion, to study composition in Milan with Bonifazio Asioli. But before that, with the collaborative concern of many of Constanze’s other sources of help, the boy was to go to school in Prague.

  As Wolfgang’s last letter to Constanze had indicated, the Mozarts were uneasy about the level of schooling that Carl had been receiving in Perchtoldsdorf. He was extremely healthy, ‘because the children do nothing but eat, drink, sleep and go for walks’; and from that point of view ‘he could not be in a better place, but everything else there is wretched, alas! All they can do is turn out a good peasant into the world.’7 So they were thinking of moving him to a Christian Brothers’ seminary. The death of Wolfgang was the obvious moment to take decisive steps about Carl’s schooling, so Baron van Swieten paid for him to go to Prague where, under the watchful eye of Josefa Duschek and her husband Franz, he stayed with Franz Xavier Niemetschek, and was also schooled by him. This must have been a more satisfactory arrangement, for in later years Constanze would also send her younger son to the Niemetscheks. And since Niemetschek was in any case engaged in trying to write a biography of Mozart, it was presumably beneficial to both parties to have such close contact with the widow.

  MEANWHILE CONSTANZE, WITH the help of van Swieten and others, had to attend to some issues relating to Wolfgang’s music. The most pressing of these was the problem of what to do with the Requiem. It lay unfinished; but if it could somehow be completed, Constanze would receive the rest of the commission money. She did not, in the first instance, ask Süssmayr to continue the work he had begun with Wolfgang and complete it in the way in which Wolfgang had been trying to demonstrate as he died. (Years later, Constanze seemed to think she had been ‘annoyed’ with Süssmayr, although she could not remember why.) Instead she contacted another young composer, the twenty-six-year-old Joseph Eybler, who had very possibly assisted Wolfgang in rehearsals for Così fan tutte in 1790, and had a good reputation in Vienna as a composer and a singer – better, no doubt, than Süssmayr’s. Within weeks of Wolfgang’s death, Eybler signed a statement in which he undertook to complete the work by the middle of Lent. But he was soon daunted by his labour. Early in 1792 he returned the unfinished score to Constanze, who, having now apparently got over her irritation, handed it back to Süssmayr, just as Wolfgang had intended. Süssmayr strained earnestly to adhere to Wolfgang’s desperate guidelines, and at last produced a score which, however unequal it may have been in its patchwork, was at least complete. Keeping a copy for herself, Constanze sent the Requiem Mass to its patient commissioner, Count Walsegg, and received her money.

  But this was not the end of the story, either for Constanze or for the Requiem itself. Hardly surprisingly for a venture founded on deceit, the ensuing web did indeed become truly tangled. Misled perhaps by Constanze and her negotiators, Walsegg believed that Wolfgang had composed everything in the Requiem except the last movement (the Agnus Dei), and that once that had been completed, the score that he paid for and received was now his, and he could do whatever he wanted with it. So in his usual fashion he copied it out, ‘note by note in his own hand’, according to Anton Herzog, and then passed it on to his musicians to make individual orchestral parts. But those musicians were of course familiar with the Count’s customary plagiarism, and in any case knew from Anton Leitgeb (the ‘grey messenger’) of the dealings with Mozart. As each movement came their way, they ‘followed the progress of this exceptional work with mounting interest’8 – and indeed their gradual assembly of the Mozart Requiem is greatly to be envied. The date originally planned for the first performance of Walsegg’s supposed Requiem was 14 February 1792, the anniversary of his young wife’s death. But because of all the delays (Constanze’s bereaved confusion, Eybler’s failure to deliver, and eventually Süssmayr’s clumsy completion), that date was long past. Walsegg was probably surprised too by the very scale of Mozart’s conception of his Requiem, for he realized he could in no way muster the required forces in his castle in Stuppach, and began to plan instead for a performance in nearby Wiener-Neustadt. This did not happen until 12 December 1793, when Walsegg himself was the conductor. (Herzog had prepared the choir.) He then repeated the performance closer to home, in the church of Maria-Schulz in Semmering, on 14 February 1794, the third anniversary of his wife’s death. But although he had originally intended this to be an annual event, he never performed ‘his’ Requiem again. Almost certainly, he must by then have realized that he had been rumbled.

  And indeed, given the single degree of separation between Count Walsegg and Constanze (their mutual friend Michael Puchberg), it is astonishing that he even imagined he could get away with his vastly scaled plagiarism. Constanze and her supportive circle, headed by Baron van Swieten, must have got wind of the Count’s deceptive preparations. True, Walsegg had paid for the score, and, if he had proposed to perform it under the name of Mozart, that would have been perfectly reasonable. But the very injustice of Walsegg’s attempting to pass Wolfgang’s composition off as his own may well have prompted some retaliatory action. Using material that they had retained between them, Constanze, Süssmayr and Eybler organized their own performance, almost a year before Walsegg’s, on 2 January 1792. It was given at the establishment of Ignaz Jahn in Vienna, and attended by many Viennese dignitaries, including Salieri. According to press reports, a sum of more than 300 ducats was raised for Constanze and her children. Count Walsegg must have read of this event, and could do nothing about it, although the preparations for his own performance were now beyond the point of no return. He did try pathetically to save face with his own musicians. According to Herzog,

  The Count tried to say to us that he was a pupil of Mozart’s and he had often sent [his Requiem] to him piece by piece to be looked through. Shortly before Mozart’s death he had sent him the completed Benedictus for this purpose. After Mozart’s death the score, from the beginning up to the Agnus Dei, had been found, and people believed it was a composition of Mozart’s, so deceptively similar were their handwritings.9

  But perhaps even he finally saw the futility of such an outrageous falsehood. All he could do now was delay his own plans for a few months, so that no direct comparison could be made between the two supposedly different Requiem Masses.

  It is significant that there had never apparently been any contractual document either between Walsegg and Wolfgang, or between Walsegg and Constanze. And Constanze was clever. She never named the ‘unknown commissioner’ of the Requiem, in any statement to any biographer, nor even in any correspondence. When Breitkopf and Härtel came into the story, and eventually published Mozart’s Requiem, she still withheld Walsegg’s name. According to Herzog, the Count was furious to see the score in print, and ‘at first intended to take serious measures with the widow Mozart’. But in the end he merely asked for 50 ducats (the equivalent, presumably, of what he had paid in the first place), and some copies of the printed version, and disappeared. The whole truth of this gothic tale was eventually revealed only in the mid-twentieth century, when a full account by Anton Herzog – written in 1839 after the death of almost all the original protagonists except Constanze and himself, but suppressed at the time by the Imperial Library in Vienna – finally came to light. By then, of course, the rumours, the claims and counter-claims, the accusations and counter-accusations, and certainly the myths, had become ever more knotted and surreal, and much acrimony had settled on Constanze. But Herzog’s disclosures proved once and for all that every deception stemmed from Count Walsegg’s curious condition of musical kleptomania, and that Constanze’s actions were motivated not only by the need for money, but also by a desire to identify and protect the property – that precious final creation – of her late husband.

  AFTER WOLFGANG’S DEATH, brief obituary notices had appeared in several newspapers across Europe, generally stating the basic facts (Wolfgang’s age, date and place of his death, his position as I & R Kammermusikus, and his heirs), and occasionally embellis
hed by some editorial statement along the lines of ‘exceptional natural gifts’. But soon there were plans afoot for much longer obituaries, and even biographies. Constanze herself cooperated fully with Niemetschek in Prague, supplying documentation as well as many verbal anecdotes and opinions. And meanwhile, a young German scholar based in Gotha, Friedrich von Schlichtegroll, was exploring other routes in order to amass material for his own publication. Between 1790 and 1806, Schlichtegroll published 34 volumes of obituaries, at six-monthly intervals. Mozart was an obvious candidate of his Nekrolog auf der Jahr 1791. These two publications were therefore being prepared in parallel. And while Niemetschek’s biography was a rather leisurely exercise, based on the input from Constanze and recent family friends, and would not appear until 1798, Schlichtegroll’s article used material from Salzburg sources, and was published in 1793. If the relations between the Salzburg and Vienna sides of Wolfgang’s life (or, more specifically, between Nannerl and Constanze) had never been exactly relaxed, they were now to become seriously strained.

  For it is here that Nannerl comes back into the picture. She and Wolfgang had effectively lost contact after the death of Leopold. She had had no letter from him since 1788, and had not actually seen him since 1783. She probably remembered the happy period of Idomeneo in Munich, for the Carnival of 1781, as the last proper family time she had spent with her father and brother together. It was after that visit that they had literally gone their separate ways – she and Leopold back to Salzburg, and Wolfgang to Vienna where his life had changed immeasurably. Since then she had been in Wolfgang’s company for just three months, and even then she had had to share him, for the occasion was the visit of Wolfgang and Constanze to Salzburg in 1783. The last letter she had received from her brother had apparently been extremely cheerful, as he had sent her his latest keyboard works, told her about his appointment at Court, and alluded modestly to the success of Don Giovanni. The siblings had not even communicated to each other the births (and deaths) of their children. In those years of silence between them, Wolfgang’s daughter Anna Maria had been born and died within the hour, in November 1789, but his healthy son Franz Xavier had been born in July 1791. Nannerl meanwhile had had two daughters: Johanna (always known as Jeanette), born on 22 March 1789, and Maria Babette, who was born on 17 November 1790 but had died six months later.