Mozart's Women

by Glover, Jane

  Relations between the Mozart family and Breitkopf and Härtel actually went back a quarter of a century, for in 1772, and again in 1775 and 1781, Leopold Mozart had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the publishers to take some of Wolfgang’s music. After Constanze’s advances to them in 1795, they did begin to show some interest. But it was only after the Niemetshek biography appeared, and then another, much smaller, publisher, Johann Peter Spehr, printed six instalments of what was declared to be a collected edition, that Breitkopf and Härtel sprang into action. Without even consulting Constanze, they published their own announcement of a ‘correct and complete’ edition; and only then did Gottfried Christoph Härtel, the tough, thirty-two-year-old head of the firm, write a careful letter to the ‘honoured lady and friend’.16 He apologized for having made his announcement without first contacting her, but explained that he had been forced to do so because of Spehr’s action. Constanze replied firmly, beginning, ‘It did indeed seem strange to me that I would have to read in a public announcement about an undertaking which, without my participation, would be daring and difficult to execute.’ She continued:

  Does anyone know how many manuscripts I still own – manuscripts which have never been copied? Is there anyone who would disagree with me, Mozart’s widow, if I were to announce publicly that no complete edition of Mozart’s works is possible unless issued by me or with my assistance? Could a person turn to anyone but me for the publication of all his hitherto unpublished works, since I am the person who owns the autographs?

  But she was of course keen to secure a contract (and Breitkopf and Härtel were the most reputable firm), and so, she declared, she was open to offers.

  It was at this point that the Requiem reappeared, and became something of a problem. Breitkopf and Härtel had acquired two copies of it (for, again, any copyist could make scores of anything, and circulate them), and now asked for the score in Constanze’s possession. Still deliberately withholding the name of Count Walsegg, Constanze declared that she had held back from publishing it ‘out of respect for the gentleman who had commissioned it on condition that it never be published’. But she reckoned she could ‘work things out with the gentleman in question’, and get his permission to publish. She was adamant that Breitkopf and Härtel should do nothing with their copies of the Requiem until she had reached some agreement with Walsegg, for, technically, he had paid for it and therefore owned it. She (or, more likely, the clever and diplomatic Nissen) drafted an appeal to ‘the anonymous patron’, and prepared to publish it in Viennese newspapers:

  More than seven years have gone by since the noble anonymous commissioned the late Mozart to write a Requiem, just a few months before the composer’s death. Since during all this time the patron has not had the work published, Mozart’s widow gratefully takes this as proof that he is agreeable to her deriving some gain from such publication. But she wishes to make sure of this, for she has only noble feelings of respect and devotion towards that person. She therefore considers it her duty to insert notices in newspapers in Vienna, Hamburg and Frankfurt, inviting the gentleman to indicate his intentions within three months, after which interval she will make so bold as to have the Requiem appear in an edition of the late composer’s complete works.17

  But Constanze never had to go into print with this announcement. Anxious to avoid a humiliating revelation of his own deceptions, Count Walsegg reappeared quietly, had his money refunded, received the promise of some published scores, and scuttled back into obscurity. So Constanze handed over her own copy of the Requiem, and washed her hands of it.

  It was most likely Nissen who brokered the deal with Walsegg, and steered Constanze through the complexities of the Requiem’s passage to publication. And he must also have been behind Constanze as she now worked to secure a proper contract with Breitkopf and Härtel for their complete edition of Mozart’s music. On 9 November 1799 she wrote to ask them to pay her 1,000 ducats (4,050 florins) for all his scores, either payable in two instalments at six-monthly intervals, or (again showing her negotiating skills) in one lump sum of 900 ducats. She concluded her letter:

  I would be happy if you and I could come to an agreement over this, for you were the first one to have the idea (very agreeable to me) of issuing a proper edition of my late husband’s works, as a fitting memorial to him. For this I would gladly offer you favourable terms.18

  But Breitkopf and Härtel did not respond to this offer, probably thinking that she was asking too high a price, and that if they called her bluff she might drop it. Later that month, on the 27th, Constanze wrote again, threatening to ‘sell all the music in my possession to another interested party, at a good price, in order to put an end to all this uncertainty’.19 She gave them another two weeks to respond, and then, still hearing nothing, she issued an ultimatum:

  Since no answer has been forthcoming, it is evident that you are rejecting my terms. I therefore must tell you for the last time (though this should hardly be necessary) that, though I would have liked to maintain our business relationship, I shall without fail sell all my husband’s complete musical estate by the end of the year.20

  And so she did. She had not been bluffing. In Offenbach, one Johann Anton André, aged only twenty-four, had just taken over his father’s publishing house, and had indeed approached Constanze. Early in 1800 she sold the rest of her music to André for 2,550 florins (just over one half of what she had asked of Breitkopf and Härtel). So now two rival publishers were preparing printed scores of Mozart’s music, and the battles between them became ugly and argumentative. Constanze’s affiliation with André did not in the event turn out to be particularly happy, for he was slow with his payments and the quality of his publications was flawed. Härtel was naturally furious at having missed out on a complete oeuvre, and even brought Nannerl into the fray, trying to play her off with Constanze, and no doubt instilling more mistrust into an already strained relationship between the two sisters-in-law. But, sweetly willing though Nannerl was to cooperate, just as she had been with biographers, she could produce no additional scores for Breitkopf and Härtel, and apologetically referred them back to Constanze.

  All the while these transactions were being negotiated, Breitkopf and Härtel were advertising their new edition; and, in an attempt to boost advance sales, they were also publishing biographical anecdotes about Mozart in their house journal, the Allgemeiner musikalische Zeitung. The editor of this was Friedrich Rochlitz. He asked Constanze and others to submit material for its columns, and Constanze cooperated fully. She handed over not only her own anecdotal testimony, but also precious letters, including, astonishingly, those that Wolfgang had written to his cousin, the ‘Bäsle’. As she told Rochlitz, she felt that the inclusion of these, as well as letters to herself, her sister Aloysia and Michael Puchberg, would give a truly rounded picture of Wolfgang. But, mystifyingly, Rochlitz chose to ignore the content of the letters, preferring instead to present the more attractive copy that he was getting from Constanze and Nannerl, and from the Niemetschek biography, now in print. He wrote many of the columns himself, and the whitewash picture that he presented was one of Mozart the victim, poorly treated by society. The cynical interpretation of these Rochlitz articles – some forty of them, appearing between 1798 and 1801 – is that they must have been good for sales.

  By the turn of the century, though, Constanze’s situation was at last stable. For all the tension in her negotiations with the publishers, she had now entered into agreements with two of them, and financially she was more secure than she had ever been. The Abbé Stadler and Georg Nissen had certainly played their part in these recent events, Stadler as organizer of the material, and Nissen as diplomatic negotiator. And indeed it was with the calm, civilized presence of Georg Nissen that Constanze felt, literally, at home. They now lived in the Michaelerplatz, under the same roof if not in the same apartment, in quiet domesticity.

  CONSTANZE’S SONS, WHO had both spent some years in Prague receiving their musical and general educa
tion, were growing up. The elder, Carl, had left the Gymnasium in 1799 at the age of fifteen, and Constanze was now trying to steer him towards a career in business. In January 1800 she wrote to André, describing her son as ‘well-mannered and with a good heart’,21 who spoke a little French and was beginning also to learn English and Italian. ‘If he agrees,’ she confided, ‘I intend him to be in business.’ Eventually she got her way, for Carl travelled to Livorno and entered an English business firm there as an apprentice. Like his father, he was enchanted by Italy, and in due course would decide to make his home there. But he was still reluctant to abandon completely the idea of a career in music. He moved to Milan where, with Haydn’s long-promised recommendation, he took his composition lessons from Bonifazio Asioli. But he lacked confidence as a musician, and perhaps application too; and Constanze firmly believed that to continue on this path would actually be folly. On 5 March 1806 she wrote her son an extremely careful letter. ‘I always, now and in the future, want what you want,’ she began, but continued then by asking him to think appropriately for a man of his age. (He was twenty-one.) She acknowledged that he was ‘not indifferent to music’, and supposed that he worked hard at it (‘You will know more about this than I do’). But she begged him to remember what she had often told him in the past, that ‘no son of Mozart should ever be mediocre, for this would only bring shame rather than honour’. As if this tough little rejoinder were not enough, she also pointed out that Carl’s younger brother (now fifteen) showed great talent (implying, correctly, that it was greater than his own) and told him she would hate ‘to see one brother praised above the other’. But she concluded by putting the whole decision in his own hands, cleverly adding that if they both did well, ‘my joy would accordingly be greater’.22

  The comparison of Carl with his brother would have made its mark. From their earliest childhood Constanze had evidently realized that Franz Xavier had the greater talent, as she had shown by forbidding Carl’s stage appearances but encouraging his brother’s. To an extent Carl always resented this (‘My mother had made the firm decision that not I but my brother . . . was to become a musician’23) and retained a thread of hope that he might yet be a composer or a performer. But in his mid-twenties he at last recognized the truth of his mother’s realistic assessment, and returned to the business world. Eventually he became an official in the service of the Viceroy of Naples in Milan; his music-making remained a private pleasure.

  Meanwhile, Constanze did indeed continue to rally her younger son. At some point it was decided to change Franz Xavier’s names to Wolfgang Amadeus, as if even in name he was now to assume the identity of the father he had never known. Expectations of the young Wolfgang were high, and the pressure on him was great. He too had returned from Prague to Vienna, where his father’s old colleagues were eager to help him. He was taught by no lesser men than Haydn, Salieri, Hummel (his parents’ former lodger) and Albrechtsberger. And in 1805, when young Wolfgang was fourteen, he gave a piano recital at Schikaneder’s theatre. The public roared their appreciation, and a huge sum of money (1,700 florins) was taken; it must have been a great night for Constanze too. Other concerts followed, in cities where not only his father but also his mother had performed. But if young Wolfgang’s early appearances were received with an enthusiasm born of earnest nostalgia, his own talents were reviewed with decidedly faint praise, and he began either to resent or to feel daunted by the limelight. At the age of seventeen, in 1808, he took a teaching post far from Vienna, in Galicia, at the extreme edge of the Austrian realm. So now both Constanze’s sons had left home. But although family reunions were few after this point, they all kept in touch with one another by letter, and genuine if distant affection and mutual concern remained between them.

  THE FIRST YEARS of the nineteenth century were uncomfortable for foreign diplomats in Vienna. Francis II, who had succeeded his father, Leopold II, was a deeply conservative Emperor, who swept aside the social reforms that had initially though not lastingly made his eldest brother, Joseph II, so beloved by his people. In Joseph’s time, Enlightenment thought, heralding the idea of man as a free individual, had led to strong Viennese support for the revolutionaries in France; but under Francis II a new anti-revolutionary stance was adopted, with the disastrous result that France declared war on Austria. As the great Napoleon Bonaparte emerged, he was seen by the younger (Wordsworthian, Beethovenian) generation as the champion of the poor, embodying the principles of freedom and equality, as opposed to the repression of the ruling Habsburgs. But when in 1804 Napoleon declared himself Emperor (famously causing Beethoven to rename his third symphony, originally dedicated to Napoleon, the ‘Eroica’), the Austrian people saw it as a betrayal of principle. Napoleon’s two Austrian campaigns, in 1805 and 1809, were terrible times for the Viennese. Napoleon set up his own quarters in Schönbrunn, and his troops occupied the city. Austria’s victory over France at Aspern in April 1809 was but a false dawn, for the French, preoccupied with fighting the British in Portugal, had rather taken their eye off the ball. Napoleon retaliated immediately, with a victory at Wagram in July; there were huge casualties on both sides. Between these two campaigns, many foreign diplomats fled from Vienna across the Danube to Pressburg (now Bratislava). Georg Nissen was among them, and he took Constanze with him. On 26 June 1809, while Napoleon was rallying and reforming his armies, Georg Nissen and Constanze Mozart were married in Pressburg Cathedral.

  Life with her second husband was for Constanze an altogether different matter to life with her first. Georg Nissen was calm, solid and comfortable. While he cannot have begun to resemble the high-octane, hyperactive genius of Wolfgang, in his own way he adored Constanze as deeply and passionately as Wolfgang had. She had experienced extreme emotional turbulence, both in her twenties as Wolfgang’s wife, and then in her thirties as his widow. Now, in her late forties, she was more than ready to devote herself to a man whose loving companionship brought her tranquillity and the greatest contentment. And her two sons, each in his remote outpost of Habsburg territory, approved greatly of their mother’s new husband. They referred to him ever afterwards as their ‘father’, even between themselves, and always spoke of him with affection, respect and gratitude.

  After their marriage, Georg and Constanze Nissen moved briefly back to Vienna, but they were not anxious to stay there. (Since Napoleon’s victory at Wagram, the French were occupying the capital once more.) Nissen wanted to take Constanze back home to Copenhagen, and, at forty-nine, he was more than ready to leave diplomatic service. According to young Wolfgang, he had been planning this for some time. Wolfgang wrote to Carl: ‘Our father . . . is so happy at the prospect of being reunited with his countrymen that he seems ten years younger. As you probably know it has been his wish for some years to leave Vienna for Copenhagen.’24 And so they did, in 1810. Before they left, they made various financial arrangements for Constanze’s sons, and it was Nissen who wrote to them, outlining their affairs.25 He informed them that the money that Constanze had so carefully accrued, through her travels and concerts and the selling of scores, was now a sum that would increase rather than diminish, and that in due course (Nissen naturally meant at the time of Constanze’s death – ‘and you and I both hope that this will be a long way off’) it would be divided between the two of them. With the gentlest, most diplomatic and loving practicality, Nissen was reassuring his stepsons that he would not be touching any of their mother’s money. At the same time Constanze sent Carl and Wolfgang each one of Mozart’s precious keyboard instruments.

  The Nissens then made their journey back to the Danish capital, and eventually bought a new property on Lavendelstraede, near the Town Hall, in 1812. Nissen was appointed as state press censor, a post which gave him security, a small but regular salary, and, most important of all, plenty of free time to pursue his own cultural interests. And Constanze took to her new home willingly. Copenhagen had had its troubles, and was still recovering, both physically and economically, from the British naval bombardm
ent of 1807. But Constanze liked the city’s culture and people; she also liked her new home and especially her garden. She spoke warmly of her new life in her letters to her sons.

  Constanze’s old life was by no means forgotten or ignored, however. Mozart’s music was becoming increasingly popular now in Denmark, and the arrival of his widow would not have gone unnoticed in Copenhagen. She had visiting cards printed, proudly naming both her husbands: ‘CONSTANZA Etats Raethin von NISSEN, gevesene Witwe Mozart’. And, in the best Mozart tradition, the Nissens regularly enjoyed evenings of chamber music in their own home. After several years, young Wolfgang visited his mother and stepfather in 1819, and rejoiced in ‘the happy life they have led for twenty years’.26 He was relieved to find his mother in such good form, confessing to his brother that he had not been sure what to expect after eleven years, but was thrilled that she seemed completely unchanged. Constanze revitalized her old skills, and organized a concert for him at the Royal Theatre (with tickets obtainable through her at the Lavendelstraede house). The programme involved singers too, from the Royal Danish Opera, and consisted entirely of Mozart’s music. Constanze must again have been flooded with a kaleidoscope of emotions as she sat beside her second husband in his city that was now her home, listening to her son perform music by her adored and brilliant first husband – music to which in any case she could never listen with equanimity. As she approached her sixtieth year, her life circle must have seemed almost complete. But there was one more, extremely courageous, chapter to come.

  IN A CURIOUS way, it was the spirit of Mozart that had bound Georg Nissen and Constanze together. After whatever serendipitous accident had brought them to live under the same roof, he had become ever closer to her through the work that he and the Abbé Stadler did for her. In marrying Mozart’s widow, and partly taking responsibility for the upbringing of his sons, Nissen had taken his place at the very forefront of the Mozart family. At some stage in their marriage, husband and wife hatched the idea of Nissen writing a full-scale biography of Wolfgang. He had plenty of free time in Copenhagen. As a passionate music-lover, he deeply appreciated Mozart’s music, especially since he had, literally, lived with so much of it. And of course he had unique access to the person who had shared Wolfgang’s entire adult life. What he and Constanze both lacked was any detailed knowledge of Mozart’s earlier years. As the Nissens approached the age of retirement in Copenhagen, they took an immensely bold decision: they would move to Salzburg, and research and write the biography there.