by Glover, Jane
Nissen barely began this monumental task, however. He did not even complete his Preface. Constanze was right to worry that the sheer volume of work was potentially harmful to his health, for on 24 March 1826 Georg Nissen died suddenly, of ‘paralysis of the lungs’, at the age of sixty-five. For the second time in her life, Constanze was widowed. And, in another curious parallel with her first husband, Nissen had left her in possession of an unfinished, major, project.
Posterity has never quite forgiven Constanze for her attitude to graves. She did not accompany Mozart’s coffin to its final resting place in the St Marx cemetery outside Vienna, nor did she ever organize a proper headstone for it. By the time she actually visited the cemetery, as late as 1808, more than the statutory ten years had elapsed; and in accordance with contemporary custom, the grave had been raked over, and the plot reclaimed for later occupants. Perhaps with this in mind, Constanze was much more actively involved with the remains of her second husband. The Mozart family did have their own appointed grave in the churchyard of St Sebastian in Salzburg. Already interred there were Wolfgang’s maternal grandmother, Eva Rosina, his father Leopold, Nannerl’s daughter Jeanette, and, bizarrely, Constanze’s aunt by marriage, Genoveva, the mother of Carl Maria von Weber. Genoveva (whom Constanze, two years her senior, had delighted in addressing as ‘Tante’) and her husband Franz Anton had visited Wolfgang and Constanze in Vienna in 1788: Constanze’s Carl was four years old at the time, Genoveva’s Carl was nearly two. She too was a singer, and had actually sung in Die Entführung, in Meiningen in 1790, and again in Weimar in 1794. In the mid-1790s she was with Franz Anton in Salzburg, where he briefly held the post of Kapellmeister; and it was there that she died, of tuberculosis, on 13 March 1798, aged only thirty-four. Her tangential connection with the Mozart family must have made their plot in the St Sebastian cemetery the obvious place for her to be buried; and so she had been. If Nannerl in St Gilgen had had any objections to her family’s plot being thus invaded, she had not raised them. So now Constanze continued along this somewhat crooked path of logic, and decided that Nissen too should be buried in that very same grave.
This was probably not Constanze’s most tactful decision. Nor was it exactly thoughtful to erect a headstone for this crowded grave, with only the name of Nissen on it, ignoring therefore Nannerl’s grandmother, father and daughter. Effectively, the Weber family had hijacked the Mozart family’s burying-place, and this time Nannerl did resent the invasion. She had made a will back in 1823, stating her wish to be buried beside her father in St Sebastian’s churchyard. In 1827, one year after Nissen’s burial there, she added a codicil asking to be buried instead in the churchyard of St Peter’s. Sympathetic though she may have been to Constanze in her new bereavement, Nannerl’s altering of her own arrangements was a strong statement. A little tension, it seems, had been rekindled between the two women, and ironically by the death of a man who had done so much to bring them closer together.
Young Wolfgang may well have been instrumental now in bridging any new gulf between Constanze and Nannerl. He came straight to his mother’s side after Nissen’s death, but, without fail, continued to pay loving attention, too, to his increasingly blind and frail aunt. Relationships between the two households remained courteous and caring. And meanwhile Constanze herself gained great comfort from the presence of her son. She organized a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in memory of Nissen, and Wolfgang conducted it. Again, this must have been for Constanze an occasion of multilayered emotion. And her younger son was not her only support in her second widowhood. In another remarkable family coincidence, her sister Sophie had lost her own husband, Jakob Haibl, on the very same day that Nissen died. As the two sisters shared commiseration and condolence by letter, they came to a decision that would affect the rest of their lives. Sophie packed up her house in Djakovor, and moved to Salzburg to live with Constanze. Now the two sisters would provide each other with companionship and, that Weber speciality, care.
AFTER ALL THE labour that had gone into Nissen’s researches for his Mozart biography, not to mention their very move to Salzburg in order to undertake it, Constanze was now determined to get the book finished. It would, after all, be a fitting memorial to both her late husbands. She still had the willing cooperation of Nissen’s two local assistants, Jahndl and Keller. But Constanze felt that a stronger, more literary figure was needed to bring cohesion to the huge piles of material that Nissen had accumulated. She was right in her realization of the need for the book, but wrong in her choice of person to deal with it. Johann Friedrich Feuerstein of Pirna, near Dresden, was a medical doctor, a Mozart enthusiast and an old friend of Nissen’s. He offered his services, and Constanze accepted them. She asked him to take over the whole project, and also to deal with the publishers, her old adversaries Breitkopf and Härtel. Feuerstein did so, and in due course the Biographie W.A. Mozarts appeared. But it was a very far cry from the painstakingly thorough presentation of information that Nissen had planned. Feuerstein cobbled it all together in a disastrously haphazard manner: there is absolutely no shape to the material; rather, the text is full of contradictions, repetitions and unidentified anecdotes. Whether Constanze ever actually read it, let alone approved of its content and style, must remain in some doubt. Within a few years, the relationship between Constanze and Feuerstein would end in bitter acrimony, for he withheld sums of money that she claimed to be rightfully hers. By the time she actually tried to retrieve these through litigation, he was of unsound mind and unable to testify. Constanze lost the case, and Feuerstein ended his days in a lunatic asylum.
But at the time when Feuerstein was doing his frantic patchwork, Constanze busied herself with the actual selling of it. The list of subscribers that she managed to enrol for the biography was highly impressive. It was headed, naturally, by the royal families of Austria and Denmark, followed closely by those of Bavaria, Saxony, Italy and Prussia. (The English king, George IV, does not appear among the supporters, although Constanze had written to him too.) Princes, dukes and counts flocked to subscribe, and eventually Constanze’s list numbered more than 600 well-heeled enthusiasts. When the book appeared she was delighted, and wrote in her diary on 1 April 1829, ‘it looks beautiful’. She then entered with equal energy into its distribution, sending crates of copies to all corners of Europe. Initially, sales were excellent, and the takings most gratifying. But the momentum did not last. After the first rush, everything slowed to a halt, and the book did not go into a second printing for over twenty years. Disappointment with the actual product had its inevitable effect on the biography’s ultimate fortune in the commercial, musical and literary worlds.
SHORTLY AFTER THE publication of the Nissen biography, two English visitors came to Salzburg. Vincent Novello, celebrated now for founding his music publishing house, but known in his time also as a practising musician, travelled with his wife Mary across Europe to Vienna, and back. The purpose of their journey was threefold: to collect material for a projected English biography of Mozart; to present Mozart’s sister Nannerl, whom they believed to be destitute, with a sum of money raised on her behalf in London; and to arrange some singing lessons in Paris for their daughter Clara (one of their eleven children). Their first arrival in Salzburg, in July 1829, was of such excitement to them that they deviated from their original itinerary and stayed there longer, abandoning altogether a planned visit to Prague. They then continued on to Vienna; and when in due course they returned homewards, they lingered in Salzburg once more. Both Vincent and Mary Novello kept diaries32 throughout this momentous journey; and these have survived, to present posterity with instant contemporary portraits of Constanze, Nannerl, Sophie and young Wolfgang (who happened to be there at the time, visiting his mother and aunts) in Salzburg, and of Aloysia in Vienna.
Upon their arrival in Salzburg that summer, Vincent Novello wrote (in French, since he understood little German, and spoke less) to both Nannerl and Constanze, asking if he and his wife might call on them, and, in Na
nnerl’s case, present her with his ‘petit cadeau’. Constanze in fact replied on behalf of them both, apologetically explaining that Nannerl was not well enough to see them that day, but inviting them to her own house, to which her servant would lead them. So Constanze was clearly now in close contact with Nannerl’s household, in what indeed was to be her final illness. Whether or not she saw her every day, she was monitoring her condition, assessing her ability to receive visitors, and politely dealing on her behalf with the outside world.
Over the next three days a warm and genuine friendship developed between the Novellos and Constanze. Their first meeting with her, up at the Nonnberggasse summerhouse on the afternoon of 14 July, left both Vincent and Mary Novello ‘in a complete trance’. On the 15th they were taken by young Wolfgang to see Nannerl, and, after they had invited him to join them for lunch, then spent the rest of the day with Constanze again. She offered to take them on a little outing to Aigen the following day, so they instantly changed their plans for departure and accepted her invitation. On the 17th, before reluctantly leaving in the afternoon, they spent one last morning with Constanze in her town house on Marktplatz. As they said their goodbyes to each other, both parties agreed that the visit had been a huge success. Vincent Novello wrote in his diary: ‘We at last parted with mutual anticipation of meeting again soon, whether at Salzburg or in London and with mutual promises of becoming in the meantime frequent correspondents. Altogether the three days I have passed at Salzburg with the widow and son of Mozart have [been] some of the most interesting, satisfying and gratifying that I ever enjoyed.’ And Constanze wrote in hers: ‘. . . very attractive man and altogether charming wife . . . these good people left today, July 17th.’33
Given that Novello was a passionate devotee of Mozart’s music, and that the main objective of his whole pilgrimage to Austria was to collect first-hand opinions of him from people who had known him, it was inevitable that this impressionable enthusiast would be completely overwhelmed by his Salzburg experiences. Before leaving home, he had acquired a copy of the Nissen biography (‘the very first copy which arrived in England’, he proudly reported to Constanze), and with his very limited German he had struggled his way through it. He had also prepared in advance a list of (not very penetrating) questions to ask Constanze, most of which would elicit answers that confirmed anecdotes related in the biography. But his recording of these responses in his diary, together with his descriptions of the circumstances and surroundings in which he found Constanze, and especially with the added insights and intuitions of Mary Novello as she recorded the same events, do release the most vivid portrait of Constanze the woman.
On the steep climb up to the Nonnberggasse house, Novello was already digging into his superlatives: ‘The road leading to the House is of the most uncommon and picturesque description, and the House itself is placed in one of the most exquisite spots I ever saw.’ And, as Mary Novello recorded, the house itself was unassuming but elegant and comfortable: ‘The apartments, like most foreign ones, are not encumbered with furniture and the room she received us in opened to a cabinet which contained her bed, but it was tastefully covered with a bright green counterpane forming a nice unison with some flowers round the room.’ These flowers almost certainly came from Constanze’s garden, which she loved, and which Mary Novello described after their next visit: ‘She was in her garden, which is beautifully situated halfway up the mountain and full of flowers, with Vines trellised up the sides and several seats which command the most delightful view perhaps in the world – the fine town, Palace and church to the left, the mountains covered with snows before and the Salzach river flowing beneath in a beautiful Valley.’ And on the third day, when the Novellos and Constanze met in the town, Constanze brought Mary ‘a beautiful bouquet of flowers out of her garden’. Within the house, the walls of Constanze’s rooms were hung with the Mozart family portraits, as Vincent Novello recorded:
Over the sofa, the one containing Mozart and his sister playing a Duett with the father sitting down and the Mother’s portrait in a picture frame, over that the Portrait of her second Husband Mr von Nissen. In the other Room, the portrait of Mozart as a Boy with an embroidered waist and sword, and the picture of his two Sons in a very affectionate and graceful attitude as if they were fondly attached to each other . . . By far the best likeness of him in [Madame] Nissen’s opinion the painting in oils done by the Husband of Madame Lange (the eldest sister of Mrs Nissen) from which the portrait of Mozart contained in her Biography – is unfinished but admirably done . . . in a wooden case as if it had been travelling.
That hauntingly unfinished Lange portrait captivated Mary too: ‘the forehead is high and ample in the extreme, full of genius, the mouth of sweetness and beauty, both this latter feature and the nose are exaggerated in the engraving, they are much more delicate in the painting . . . Mozart had very delicate hands.’
As for Constanze herself, Vincent Novello attempted to be dispassionate in his description of her, but again the high emotion of the occasion rather overtook him:
In her youth her Eyes must have been very brilliant and are still fine. Her face does not resemble the portrait given of her in the Biography. It is thin and has the traces of great care and anxiety in it, but when her features relax into a smile, the expression is a remarkably pleasant one. She is of a rather small stature, slim figure, and looks much younger than what I expected to find her. Her voice is low and gentle, her manners well-bred and prepossessing, unconstrained like a person who has lived much in society and seen a good deal of the world, and the way in which she spoke of her illustrious Husband (though not quite so enthusiastic as I should have expected in one ‘so near and dear’ to him) was tender and affectionate, and I could perceive a little tremor in her voice whilst she was looking with me at his portrait and on two or three occasions when she was alluding to some of the last years of his Life, which was not the less affecting or pathetic, from its being involuntary, unobtrusive and partly repressed. Nothing could be more kind, friendly and even cordial than her behaviour to me during the whole visit. Altogether this Lady is, to me, one of the most interesting Persons now in existence.
Mary Novello, too, was overwhelmed to meet Constanze:
When I first entered I was so overcome with various emotions that I could do nothing but weep and embrace her. She seemed also quite affected and said repeatedly in French ‘oh quel bonheur pour moi, de voir les enthousiastes pour mon Mozart’. She speaks French fluently though with a German accent, in Italian she thinks better but as I do not converse in that language she politely continued in French. She is completely a well bred Lady, and though no remains of beauty appear except in her eyes such as the engraving prefixed to her biography of Mozart would indicate, yet she keeps her figure and a certain air, well, for a woman of her age, which I suppose must be sixty-five. [She was in fact sixty-seven.]
In the course of their several conversations, the Novellos and Constanze covered much ground, familiar territory of course to Constanze, for it can by no means have been the first time that she had been subjected to this sort of questioning. But occasionally her own affectionate insights into the behaviour and personality of her first husband, and into their life together, brought delightful new shine to a well-worn surface. They were discussing Mozart’s compositional procedure, for instance, as Mary reported:
When some grand conception was working in his brain he was purely abstracted, walked about the apartment and knew not what was passing around, but when once arranged in his mind, he needed no Piano Forte but would take music paper and whilst he wrote would say to her, ‘Now, my dear wife, have the goodness to repeat what has been talked of’, and her conversation never interrupted him, he wrote on, ‘which is more’, she added, ‘than I can do with the commonest letter’.
The Novellos found Constanze to have extremely acute knowledge of Mozart’s music: she knew the operas by heart, and had often sung parts of them with and for Mozart; and she could certainly pass judgeme
nt on some truly awful performances that she had heard (‘so very unsatisfactory that she could hardly recognize it as the composition of Mozart’). But listening to his music could still upset her. She confided to Mary Novello that she ‘could not bear to hear either the Requiem or “Idomeneo” performed, the last time she heard “Don Giovanni”, she was not calm for a fortnight afterwards’. Constanze told the Novellos that she thought Mozart’s real cause of death was, quite simply, overwork, especially as he often composed through the night. But this unhappy memory was turned, by Constanze and her son, into a sweet revelation of Constanze’s own nocturnal habits, as Mary Novello recorded: ‘He frequently sat up composing until 2 and rose at 4, an exertion which assisted to destroy him. At present she rises at the same hour, but goes to bed, her son says, with the chickens.’