by Glover, Jane
Quite apart from the whole physical upheaval of uprooting themselves from their comfortable Copenhagen home, and crossing many hundreds of miles to start again in a new environment, the psychological bravery of this move was considerable for Constanze. Memories of her single visit to Salzburg, with Wolfgang in 1783, cannot have been happy; and she had been deeply upset by the Schlichtegroll article in his Nekrolog auf der Jahr 1791, composed largely of contributions from Salzburg inhabitants. Above all, her relationship with her sister-in-law Nannerl, who would have to be a crucial, and willing, participant in this new biographical venture, had never been exactly easy, and there had been no direct communication between them for at least thirty years. However much Constanze looked forward to returning to her homeland, she must have been steeling herself to face residual animosity and disapproval in Salzburg. But, even as she battled with her instinctive reluctance, no fewer than three people were on hand to ease her path. The first was of course Nissen, the professional diplomat whose intelligence, charm and decency could dispel tension in any situation. The second was her son Wolfgang, who was also drawn to his father’s birthplace. The third, and the most surprising, was Nannerl herself.
After Nannerl’s uncomfortable contribution to the Schlichtegroll obituary in 1793, she had retreated again from public gaze. Her husband, Johann Baptist, had been raised to the nobility in 1792, and from then on all his family, including Nannerl, could title themselves ‘von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg’. Nevertheless, St Gilgen was still essentially a ‘wilderness’, and there she quietly brought up her children Leopold and Jeanette, and continued to care too for her stepchildren, whose affection and respect she had gradually won. Breitkopf and Härtel tried to reel her into their dealings with Constanze over the publication of Wolfgang’s music, and in her sweet naivety Nannerl might indeed have been thoroughly exploited by the tough businessmen from Leipzig. But in fact she could not help them. As she politely told Breitkopf and Härtel, she had forwarded all Wolfgang’s music to her brother after the death of their father in 1787, and she ‘no longer had contact with that world’.27 (This did not stop Breitkopf and Härtel trying to use Nannerl to prise music out of other Salzburg composers, such as Michael Haydn; but nothing ever came of this notion, and they soon lost interest in her.)
In February 1801 Nannerl’s husband, Johann Baptist Franz von Berchtold zu Sonnenberg, died at the age of sixty-five. Within a few months, Nannerl packed up her possessions and left for ever her house by the lake in St Gilgen. As she returned at last to Salzburg, a widow with two children, her journey and situation were an almost exact replica of those of her maternal grandmother, three-quarters of a century earlier. But her children were older than Eva Rosina’s little girls had been (Leopold was sixteen and Jeanette twelve); and Nannerl herself had quite considerable resources, for Berchtold had left her comfortably off. She also had her own musical gifts. After having taken lodgings in an apartment owned by her old friends the Barisanis, in what is now the Sigmund-Haffnerstrasse, literally around the corner from her childhood home in Getreidegasse, she began to give piano lessons again, and to an extent to pick up the threads of the Salzburg musical life that she had left seventeen years earlier. But she had yet more tragedy to endure, for Jeanette died in 1805, aged only sixteen. Nannerl buried her daughter in the Mozart family grave in the St Sebastian cemetery, beside her grandmother Eva Rosina and her father Leopold. (Berchtold’s remains lay in his family’s vault in St Gilgen.)
In her late middle age Nannerl’s life continued to be a struggle. After Jeanette’s death, she lost two of her stepchildren; and her own son Leopold joined the army to fight the French. In 1809 he was captured and imprisoned. (He did survive, though, and left the army to become a customs official, eventually settling in Innsbruck. He lived into his fifty-fifth year.) And then Nannerl’s own health began to fail. Although she had certainly proved to be more robust than her frail brother, the serious illnesses that they had both endured in childhood had taken their toll on her constitution too, and she was now paying the price. Worst of all, she began to lose her eyesight, and this was the most spiritually debilitating infirmity for a woman whose greatest joy was still to sit at a keyboard and play it. But as Salzburg at last began to acknowledge the inestimable quality of her late brother, her own role as his surviving sister in the town of their birth was one she quietly enjoyed. She received visitors, displayed her family portraits and musical instruments, and was held in esteem by all who knew her.
In 1821 Nannerl received a most special visitor. Her brother’s son Wolfgang, whom she had never met, contacted her and told her he wanted to make her acquaintance. Young Wolfgang was now thirty years old. His teaching job in the service of Count Baworowsky in Galicia, which he had taken in 1808 in order to escape the pressures of Vienna, had initially stimulated him (he felt instinctively happier as a large fish in a small pond), but ultimately bored and therefore depressed him. He left it in 1810, and tried his luck with another patron, Count Janizzewski, but this too failed to satisfy him. After only eighteen months there he moved to Lemberg (now L’vov), and resolved to make a living as a musician without any regular income or patronage. The parallel with his father is striking. In Lemberg he became the piano teacher to young Julia Baroni-Cavalcabo, who would one day become a celebrated pianist herself. Her father was a government councillor, and her mother, Josephine, was twenty-three years younger than her husband and only three years older than young Wolfgang. In due course Josephine became Wolfgang’s mistress, and this forbidden, impossible relationship was to dominate the rest of his life. Josephine stayed with her elderly husband, but Wolfgang moved in with them, and his devoted infatuation for her never left him. Wolfgang’s brother Carl was supportive of this unconventional arrangement (he in fact had one of his own), and would subsequently refer to Josephine as a ‘saint’. When Wolfgang had visited his mother in Copenhagen, he had told her of his love for the ultimately unattainable Josephine, and Constanze had touched him by showing great pleasure at this news. (Wolfgang wrote delightedly to Josephine that Constanze and Georg Nissen ‘love me so much that they cannot help loving anyone who loves me and whom I love’.28) But Constanze was in fact privately troubled by her son’s infatuation, as she would confide years later to sympathetic visitors.
In 1819, at the age of twenty-eight, Wolfgang had embarked on an enormously ambitious venture, a concert tour of Europe. He would be away from Lemberg and Josephine for nearly four years. He had certainly inherited his father’s wanderlust, but perhaps also his chaotic inability to reap proper benefits from a tour on such a scale. (Would that he had rather taken after his mother in this regard, or certainly after his paternal grandfather.) His wanderings across European cities in those years yielded little reward, and often depressed him. Like his father, he desperately missed the woman of his heart, feeling incomplete without Josephine. But he did have some joyful encounters and reunions, not least with his mother in Copenhagen, with his brother Carl in Milan, with his old teacher Salieri, with Beethoven too, in Vienna, and with his mother’s brilliant cousin, Carl Maria von Weber, in Dresden. And finally, in Salzburg in May 1821, he met his aunt Nannerl.
For both aunt and nephew, this initial encounter was of extreme importance. These two essential loners found a wealth of common ground in their family connection. Wolfgang was thrilled to learn, first-hand, of his father’s childhood, of his life with Nannerl and their parents. And Nannerl could release all her harboured love and affection for her lost brother on to the son who so resembled him. She showed him the house of their birth in Getreidegasse, and the Tanzmeisterhaus. She introduced him to many elderly people who had been his father’s childhood friends, and who were moved to tears to meet him. She listened to him playing her piano, and maybe even played for him herself. What she then wrote so passionately in his album is barely recognizable as coming from the undemonstrative chronicler that she had always been:
In my seventieth year I had the great joy of meeting for the first tim
e the son of my dearly beloved brother. What delightful memories were evoked by hearing him play just as his father had played. These memories are treasured by his aunt Maria Anna, Freyfrau von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg, née Mozart.29
The bond was formed between Nannerl and young Wolfgang. Whenever in the coming years he visited Salzburg, he was extremely attentive to his aunt, and without doubt he became for her the real joy of her declining years. In 1826, when the publisher André was preparing a new edition of the Requiem, and proposing that all its profits went to Nannerl, she declined this generous offer, not wishing to ‘attract public attention’. She therefore passed all those profits to her two nephews, Carl (whom she had never met) and her new friend, Wolfgang.
It was shortly after Wolfgang’s first visit to Salzburg that Constanze and Nissen arrived, and settled in a beautiful house in Marktplatz (now Altermarkt). From everybody’s point of view, the timing could not have been better. Nannerl’s delight at having discovered her nephew can only have warmed her attitude to his mother, whom she had not seen for nearly forty years. The calm and kindly presence of Nissen, the palpable success of his devoted marriage to Constanze, and above all the sincerity of their combined project – to produce a proper biography of Nannerl’s brother – dispelled any residual suspicion (generated by Leopold, all those years ago) towards her sister-in-law. Nannerl became intrinsically involved in the biography, willingly handing over to Nissen all her letters and memorabilia, and no doubt being the key witness in Nissen’s research into his subject’s early life. Constanze would have breathed a huge sigh of relief. And, as Nannerl’s health and eyesight continued to decline in the 1820s, it is clear that Constanze’s natural Weber instinct to care for those around her now embraced her sister-in-law. At last, and for the remaining years of their lives, Constanze and Nannerl were united, not divided, by the man they had both loved.
SINCE NANNERL’S RETURN to Salzburg at the turn of the century, the city had changed considerably. As a result of Napoleon’s Austrian campaigns, the semi-feudal Prince-Archbishopric had been swept away. In 1800 Mozart’s old adversary, Archbishop Colloredo, had fled the city as the French troops advanced, and the Court was eventually abolished in 1806. Most of Salzburg’s musicians migrated to Vienna; those who remained dealt only with church services, where, inevitably, standards declined. After a brief period of Bavarian rule, the Congress of Vienna in 1816 restored political stability, and Salzburg, to Austria. But the brilliance of this former episcopal seat had faded: in effect it was now no more than a stagnant provincial town. Nannerl would have mourned the emptying of Salzburg’s musical resources – how different its cultural life now was to the bustling hub of activity that she had enjoyed in her childhood and early adulthood. And when Constanze arrived in 1820, she too would have been struck by the change in the musical environment, as compared with her previous experience back in 1783. But both she and Nannerl would have appreciated the peace and stability of nineteenth-century Salzburg. And they both lived long enough to witness the beginnings of its eventual artistic revival, centred entirely on the recognition, at last, of its debt to their Wolfgang.
Soon after the Nissens’ arrival in Salzburg, they evidently travelled to Milan to visit Carl. The chronology of events is not entirely clear at this stage of Constanze’s life, but it seems that they were in Italy for possibly as long as two years, for in 1823 she wrote to a composer friend, Christophe Weyse in Copenhagen, to apologize for having neglected her promise to him to try to spread awareness of his music there. For two years, she acknowledged, she had had many opportunities to do so, as Carl had organized weekly evenings of music-making for her.30 At any rate, whenever exactly it was, this visit to Milan was a significant reunion for mother and son. Although Carl would remain the more remote of her two sons, both emotionally and geographically, the very length of the visit, and that tiny indication of Carl’s efforts to please his mother, suggest that loving contact was restored. Wolfgang’s visits to Copenhagen, Milan and Salzburg would also have drawn together the disparate elements of Constanze’s family. Both her sons were genuinely fond of their stepfather; and now that she and Nissen had returned to Austria, the distances between them all, metaphorically as well as physically, seemed to have shrunk.
SALZBURG SUMMERS CAN be unbearably hot. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as in so many other cities, some residents chose to move out of the centre of town and into its cooler rural suburbs. Surrounded as it is by beguiling wooded hills (the Kapuzinerberg, Mönchsberg and Rainberg), Salzburg can offer much peripheral opportunity for airier tranquillity. And at some stage after their arrival in their new home, the Nissens too acquired a house in which to spend their summer months. Situated in Nonnberggasse, an energetic and steep climb out of town towards the Hohensalzburg fortress, the house had wonderful views, and a flourishing garden which, as ever, Constanze enjoyed enormously. The house was also just round the corner from the Nonnberg Priory, whose choirmaster Anton Jahndl was a passionate devotee and practitioner of Mozart’s church music, and who became closely involved with Georg Nissen as he worked on the biography.
With Jahndl and another Salzburg colleague, Maximilian Keller, to help, Nissen collected articles about Mozart from every journal, newspaper and periodical that he could find. He either interviewed personally or wrote letters to anyone he knew had had contact with him, inviting memories, opinions and judgements. Especially important at this time were Mozart’s closest family members. And it was here that Nissen’s gentle diplomacy brought him the close cooperation of Nannerl, and, with her, the incomparable hoard of over 400 letters that she had partly accumulated herself and partly inherited from Leopold. Her very conversations with Nissen, especially about her father and her childhood, would greatly influence his eventual conception of the biography. And Constanze considered her own sisters too, though only one of them did contribute. The eldest, Josefa, had died in 1819, at the age of sixty, while Constanze was in Copenhagen. (Constanze maintained contact with her daughter, also Josefa, and her husband Carl Hönig.) Aloysia, now also in her sixties, had retired as a performer, and returned from Zurich to Vienna where she was in demand as a singing teacher. But there is no evidence of any direct contribution to Nissen’s project from Aloysia, and Constanze may perhaps have been reluctant to ask for one, given Aloysia’s own early emotional involvement with Wolfgang. Her younger sister Sophie, on the other hand, was greatly important.
Sophie’s life had also changed considerably since the death of their mother. In 1807, at the age of forty-four, she had at last married. Her husband, Jakob Haibl, was, like Josefa’s two husbands, a member of Schikaneder’s company, where he had not only performed as a tenor but also been involved in administration. (Within a week of Mozart’s death, it was he who, on behalf of Schikaneder, had sent a libretto of Die Zauberflöte to the opera company at Mannheim, adding a sad little postscript, ‘Herr Mozart has died’.) Like many of Schikaneder’s company members, he was also a composer, and his popular singspiel, Der Tiroler Wastel, was performed 118 times by the company between 1796 and 1801. In 1806 his first wife Katharina died, and he moved to Djakovar (now Dakovo) in Slavonia. Sophie went with him, and on 7 January 1807 she married him in the Cathedral, where he was choirmaster.
So now Sophie too was asked by Nissen for her memories of Mozart, and especially to relive the part she had played in Mozart’s last days; and she duly sent him her passionate, poignant account. Finally, Constanze’s own sons were urged by their mother to make their own contributions to the biography. Young Wolfgang of course had no direct memory of his father, though he knew many musicians who had. Carl in Milan had had his childhood reminiscences, and now, like his brother, was in contact with others who could recall their own Mozartian experiences. As the replies came in, Nissen attempted to organize his rapidly growing piles of material into some sort of coherent shape. Even Constanze was overwhelmed by the ardour and diligence with which he worked. She wrote to Carl:
Day and night he
sits, buried under stacks of books and journals – stacks so high I can hardly see him. We would be hard put to find another Mozart advocate like him – there is no end to his efforts. I worry about the number of letters he has to write; they and all the other work might harm his health which up to now, God be praised, has been good . . . Tears come into my eyes as I write this.31
Having assembled such a huge amount of material, Nissen began to write. He started a Preface, and immediately revealed his diplomatic even-handedness and fairness of judgement. The advantage that his biography would have, he states, over the earlier studies by Schlichtegroll and Niemetschek, was the enrichment of his newly acquired hoard of letters. He had organized them and categorized them, and clearly spent several months absorbing their content. He had even cracked the codes that the Mozart family had sometimes deployed (probably with the help of Nannerl), and laboriously set out their complicated systems – they were basically a form of elongated acronym. Nissen evidently admired Leopold enormously. He praised all his good qualities: his exemplary organization, his intellect, his morals, and his brilliant education of his son. And although Nissen gives the impression of having learned all this from reading the letters, it is clear from his descriptions of Leopold’s educational methods, and of their practical interpretation on the children’s travels in the 1760s, that he must also have had first-hand accounts from Nannerl. Nissen does include references to Nannerl and her mother, but really only as witnesses to the main drama (the education and moulding of a genius boy) rather than as participants. And indeed Nissen goes on to state that the best of all the letters are those written between father and son (‘man to man’). Unquestionably Nissen revered Wolfgang, but he was extremely uncomfortable about certain aspects of his nature. The childish vulgarity, the obsession with bodily functions, and of course the inability to make provision for Constanze after his death, at best puzzled him and at worst appalled him. But in spite of his own scruples about basing his book on the contents of letters never intended for publication, Nissen was resolved to tell the whole truth: any concealment would be a form of lying (‘Verschweigung is schon Unwahrheit’).