Mozart's Women

by Glover, Jane

  But her Tagebuch included details of the rest of her correspondence too. Her letters to various friends and acquaintances across Europe appear there, including Nissen’s relations (her ‘cousins’) in Denmark, her niece Josefa Hönig (daughter of her late sister Josefa) and her husband Carl. (Both these young people would in fact predecease her, in the early 1830s.) And of course there were letters to and from her immediate family. Carl and Wolfgang were both in regular contact with Constanze, and like all mothers she loved to hear from them: on 4 September 1831 she noted with delight, ‘Since 14 June I have had 11 letters from Wolfgang, the dear boy!’34 But she continued to worry about her younger son. She periodically sent him small sums of money, and was much happier about him after 1838 when at last he left Lemberg (still with Josephine and her husband) and moved to Vienna. There, at least, his talents ‘might be better known and appreciated’, as she had confided to Vincent Novello. She was less worried about Carl, securely employed as he was in Milan, and comfortable with his life as an Italian. But she learned with genuine distress, in March 1833, of the death of ‘his Constanza’, from a malignant growth, and she wrote to him immediately to pour out her sympathies. For here was Carl’s other life. He too had evidently had an illicit relationship, and produced an illegitimate daughter whom he had named after his mother. If the girl’s death was something Carl could share with Constanze, then she must have known about her granddaughter, and may even have met her on her visit to Milan. Meanwhile, both Carl and Wolfgang continued to visit their mother, Wolfgang rather more often than his brother. And indeed, the two sons of Mozart were also acquiring an important status in Salzburg, as the town at last began to plan a permanent foundation and memorial in the name of their father. They had even begun to make their own friends there.

  The other members of Constanze’s family who received care and assistance from her were her two surviving sisters. Sophie of course lived with her, and they looked after each other. And Aloysia too, struggling as she was in Vienna, was increasingly supported by her. In August 1830 Aloysia came to Salzburg for a short visit, and from November that year there are several payments to her recorded in Constanze’s Tagebuch. Some of these subsidies, generally of 12 florins each, went through Constanze’s bank in Vienna, but most of them were simply enclosed in letters. In 1831 Aloysia wrote to tell her sisters that her former husband, Joseph Lange, had died. This would have affected Constanze, not only for the memory of happy times that she and Aloysia and their husbands had shared nearly fifty years earlier, but also because of Lange’s unfinished but deeply treasured portrait of Mozart that Constanze still had in her possession. In spite of Constanze’s regular contributions to Aloysia’s living expenses, there was apparently some further crisis in July 1832, and Aloysia wrote her sister a long letter appealing for more help, which Constanze immediately supplied. By the middle of the decade, it was decided that Aloysia too should come and live permanently in Salzburg, in close proximity to her sisters. Around 1835, she moved into an apartment in what is now the Dreifaltigkeitsgasse, just round the corner from the Tanzmeisterhaus. It is likely that, here too, family connections were instrumental in finding her this home, for one of Nannerl’s stepsons, Karl Joseph Franz Berchtold, lived in the same building.

  So now all three surviving Weber sisters were gathered in the town of Mozart’s birth, drawn there by their intimate connection with his life and his music, and with one another. Aloysia was the first to go: she died on 8 June 1839, at the age of seventy-nine, and so would probably have been unaware of the by now accelerating interest in establishing the foundation in Mozart’s name. The year 1841 would be the fiftieth anniversary of his death, and Salzburg was to mark it, and finally make its peace with him, by founding a conservatory, to be known as the Dommusikverein and Mozarteum, and by erecting a monument to him in the very heart of the town. Constanze’s own robust health was now declining: the old injury to her foot had returned to trouble her, and she was plagued by gout. So she and Sophie abandoned their beloved Nonnberggasse house, and settled together in Michaelsplatz. It was in the centre of this square that the statue of Mozart was to be erected, and Constanze would be able to see it from her new lodging. She became deeply involved in the setting up of the Mozarteum, and tried hard to get Wolfgang appointed as its director. He was not in fact given the job, though he was tactfully made an ‘honorary Kapellmeister’; but Alois Taux, who did become head of the conservatory, was a close friend to Constanze and to both her sons for the rest of their lives. As the festivities were planned for the unveiling of the monument and the commemoration of the half-centenary, Taux kept all the family informed. Wolfgang in particular was to play an active part in the music-making surrounding the events.

  As it happened, these festivities had to be delayed for a year, because the monument to Mozart, by Ludwig Schwannthaler in Munich, was not ready. The unveiling of the statue, that resides to this day in the renamed Mozartplatz, eventually took place in September 1842. Carl and Wolfgang both came to Salzburg for the celebrations, and Wolfgang was indeed a prominent participant, conducting an anthem that he himself had put together from sections of La clemenza di Tito (to his own text), and playing his father’s D minor piano concerto. Two thousand people were in the audience, many of whom had come from all corners of the world. At a certain point, according to one visitor, the proceedings were dramatically interrupted by the appearance of a ‘very tall, thin and eccentric-looking woman, who at once exclaimed, as though addressing an audience, “Ich bin die erste Pamina” [I am the first Pamina] . . . This lady had ostensibly come from Vienna to join in our homage.’35

  How appropriate it was that at this final, official reconciliation of Mozart with his birthplace, there should be a representative from his legions of beloved and talented women performers. And how appropriate too, perhaps, that it should be Anna Gottlieb, who shared his middle name, and who had created both the youngest and then the last of his great stage women. Sophie, who was also present, would of course have remembered her. And it is to be hoped that these women rejoiced in their reunion, and shared memories and reminiscences as they sat in Sophie’s apartment, overlooking the newly named Mozartplatz.

  But Constanze was not there. She had died six months earlier, on 6 March 1842, at 3.45 in the morning. She was eighty years old. The woman who had brought the greatest human joy to Mozart had outlived him by more than half a century.

  NO PART OF Constanze’s long life had ever been tinged with the ordinary. From her earliest years, she and her sisters had stood out from the crowd. Their childhood was not without its upheavals and dramas: before Constanze reached adulthood she experienced the harsh tragedy of bereavement three times, with the death of her two brothers, and then, when she was seventeen, of her father. But the close-knit family was loving and lively, and especially united by the musical gifts they all shared. Not unlike the Brontë sisters, Josefa, Aloysia, Constanze and Sophie were different from other children around them precisely because of their creative and artistic talents. Constanze would have been somewhat overshadowed by her two elder sisters, and especially by the family’s high achiever, Aloysia. Glamorous, successful, extraordinarily gifted as an all-round musician, and attractive to all men, Aloysia’s every prodigious development dictated the movements of the entire Weber family. Her appointment to Vienna in 1779, and then her marriage to one of the most acclaimed and high-profile actors in the city, provided great excitement for her sisters. But the theatrical personality of Joseph Lange was nothing compared to that of Mozart, the veritable fireball of musical genius that stormed their habitat and swept Constanze away as his bride.

  The marriage between Mozart and Constanze has been somewhat maligned, ridiculed and slandered by the cruel tongues of posterity. Constanze in particular has been seen as woefully inadequate as the partner to a genius, and decried as a wife whose influence was demeaning, distracting and ultimately destructive. But on its own terms – that is, on their terms – the marriage was a great success. Li
fe with Constanze was never dull. She was essentially a fun-loving companion, totally compatible with Wolfgang’s physical needs, supportive, intelligent, and encouraging of all his activities. While nobody could possibly have been equal to his unique musicianship, Constanze did possess a discerning and educated understanding of their art: according to Aloysia’s generous statement to Mary Novello, it was superior to her own and probably therefore to that of the rest of the Weber family. When Constanze took control (rather late, admittedly) of the business side of their married life, she did turn it around; and that early apprenticeship in financial organization stood her in great stead for her later years. But most important of all, Mozart adored Constanze unreservedly. Theirs was a marriage of immense devotion and concord, and its early truncation was brutal.

  In her immediate bereavement Constanze discovered a particularly driven kind of energy as she sought to provide for her sons and herself. Carl and young Wolfgang were then somewhat sidelined, as Constanze’s obsession with maintaining the Mozart flame grew. As a mother to small boys, therefore, she was not especially close, and though she planned her sons’ education with the greatest care, she did tend to leave them to their own devices. But they never seemed to hold this against her: rather in the manner of most children sent away to boarding school, they took it all in their stride. In marked contrast to the relationship between Leopold and Wolfgang, that between Constanze and her sons was never intricate. Carl and young Wolfgang were always part of her life, but not especially central to it.

  Constanze was indeed fortunate to sail into the safe harbour that was Georg Nissen. This intelligent and decent man, completely different temperamentally from Mozart, was steady, dependable and safe. And, like Mozart, he adored Constanze. With him she was entirely willing to escape from the mainstream of European life, and to go and live in Copenhagen for a long decade. She acquired a wisdom and maturity through her second marriage, and a general deepening of her innate characteristics. Through Nissen, probably, she developed her considerable business skills, becoming tirelessly vigilant in her affairs, and therefore extremely successful. But she was always generous with the monies that she acquired late in life, and neglected no opportunity to provide care and assistance for one or other of her family.

  It was this propensity for warmth and care that had always characterized all of the Weber sisters, Mozart’s ‘other’ family. It kept them in close contact throughout their lives: they supported one another at times of crisis, but simply enjoyed too the very pleasure of one another’s company. And in their final years they were brought together again to exercise their loving care on a permanent basis. They were indeed fortunate to have one another’s support. And Constanze, who had in childhood been less prominent, unquestionably ended up as the overseer and provider, and effectively therefore as the head of the family.

  THE PUBLISHED ANNOUNCEMENT of Constanze’s death had been in Sophie’s name. Neither of her sons was present at her funeral. She was buried beside Georg Nissen in the Mozart family grave, in the churchyard of St Sebastian. Her considerable estate was divided between Carl and Wolfgang; but there was also generous provision for Sophie – of furnishings, clothes and linen in addition to money – and there were smaller gifts too for individuals. Fifty years after the death of her first husband, it was he who was magnificently providing for the descendants of both their families.

  But there were not to be any more of them. Wolfgang died just two years after his mother, on 29 July 1844, at the age of fifty-three. He bequeathed everything to his beloved Josephine, to whom he had remained passionately devoted all his life, and she returned all the Mozart items and memorabilia – sheet music, manuscripts and letters, portraits, a piano – to the Mozarteum. Sophie died on 26 October 1846, aged eighty-three. And Carl resisted all pressure to come and live permanently in Salzburg (Taux at the Mozarteum tried repeatedly to lure him there), preferring instead to remain in Italy. In his seventy-second year, he did travel once more to Salzburg, to join in the Mozart Centenary celebrations in 1856. But in general he shunned the limelight, as he always had: Constanze had been right to shield him from it when he was a child. He returned to Italy, dividing his life between a modest summer house in the village of Caversaccio (his version of the Nonnberggasse house) and his apartment in Milan, where he, and the Mozart line, died on 2 November 1858.

  IN THE CEMETERY of St Sebastian in Salzburg, no inscribed stone marks the graves of Aloysia or Sophie. But Constanze’s final resting-place is shared with five others, whose names are all tastefully displayed on three separate stones. These six cohabitants were assembled, like a chaotic game of Mozartian ‘Consequences’, over four generations. United for ever in stone are Mozart’s grandmother Eva Rosina, his father Leopold, his wife’s aunt Genoveva, his niece Jeanette, his wife’s second husband Georg Nissen, and, in pride of place above them all, his beloved wife Constanze. How uneasy a social gathering that might have constituted, had they all chanced to come together in the living world. But the headstones are eloquent too of absentees. There is no Maria Anna, whose remains in Paris have long since been raked over. There is no Nannerl, though she is safely and independently immortalized in her grave in St Peter’s, on the other side of Salzburg. Most poignant of all, there is no Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  Postlude

  MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who reported it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop. So I shall follow the advice of my sister, thanks to our mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, and put a stop not only to my moral digression, but to my whole letter.

  Mozart to Gottfried von Jacquin, 4 November 1787

  Notes and Sources

  L numbers refer to the letters published in The Letters of Mozart and his Family, ed. Emily Anderson. 3rd edition (Macmillan, 1985). (Some have had minor adjustments to the translation.) Letters not included in Anderson’s edition have been directly translated from the German collection: Mozart, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. W. A. Bauer et al. (Deutsch and Eibl, 1962–1975) (referred to as Briefe).

  Deutsch = O. E. Deutsch, Mozart, Die Dokumente seines Lebens (A. & C. Black Ltd, 1965) (English translation by E. Blom, P. Branscombe and J. Noble: Mozart, A Documentary Biography, 1966).

  WM = Wolfgang

  N = Nannerl

  LM = Leopold

  C = Constanze

  MA = Maria Anna

  ‘B’ = the ‘Bäsle’

  Mozart’s Family

  1. Full quotation in Solomon, p. 23.

  2. This reference to their impoverished union appeared in a letter LM wrote on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary: L162, LM to MA, 21 November 1772.

  3. Quoted in Deutsch, p. 9.

  4. N’s memoir, spring 1792, quoted ibid., pp. 454–62.

  5. Schachtner’s memoir, in a letter to N, 24 April 1792, quoted ibid., pp. 451–4.

  6. N’s memoir, ibid.

  7. L2, LM to Hagenauer, 16 October 1762.

  8. Quoted in Deutsch, p. 17.

  9. L12, LM to Hagenauer, 11 July 1763.

  10. L16, LM to Hagenauer, 20 August 1763.

  11. From N’s travel diary, Briefe 77.

  12. L466, WM to the Baroness von Waldstätten, 28 September 1782.

  13. L28, LM to Hagenauer, 8 June 1764.

  14. From N’s travel diary, Briefe 85.

  15. Published in Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Leipzig, 22 January 1800; reproduced in Deutsch, p. 493.

  16. L31, LM to Hagenauer, 13 September 1764.

  17. L39, LM to Hagenauer, 5 November 1765.

  18. N’s memoir, Deutsch, p. 457.

  19. From Grimm’s Correspondance Littéraire, 15 July 1766; quoted in ibid., p. 56.

  20. Ibid., p. 57.

  21. Quoted in Gutman, p. 207.

  22. Quoted in Deutsch, pp.
67–9.

  23. N’s memoir, ibid., p. 458.

  24. L55, LM to Hagenauer, 3 February 1768.

  25. L54, LM to Hagenauer, 23 January 1768.

  26. Opera buffa: term used to describe Italian comic operas with recitative as opposed to spoken dialogue.

  27. N’s memoir, Deutsch, p. 458.

  28. L106a, WM to N, 4 August 1770.

  29. N’s memoir, Deutsch, pp. 458ff, from which all the following quotations have been taken.

  30. L71b, WM to N, 14 December 1769.

  31. L73, LM to MA, 17 December 1769.

  32. L77, LM to MA, 26 January 1770.

  33. L99, LM to MA, 27 June 1770.

  34. L72, LM to MA, 15 December 1769.

  35. L78, LM to MA, 3 February 1770.

  36. L79, LM to MA, 10 February 1770.

  37. L123, LM to MA, 1 December 1770.

  38. L107, LM to MA, 11 August 1770.

  39. L110, LM to MA, 1 September 1770.

  40. L91, LM to MA, 2 May 1770.

  41. L87, LM to MA, 14 April 1770.

  42. L125, LM to MA, 15 December 1770.

  43. L98a, WM to N, 16 June 1770.

  44. For example, L102a, WM to N, 7 July 1770 (retranslated), et passim.

  45. L92a, WM to N, 19 May 1770.

  46. L95a, WM to N, 29 May 1770.

  47. L89, WM to N, 25 April 1770.

  48. L87a, WM to MA and N, 14 April 1770.

  49. L84a, WM to N, 24 March 1770.

  50. L92a, WM to N, 19 May 1770.

  51. L106a, WM to N, 4 August 1770.