by John Suchet
Mozart found himself increasingly in demand to perform in salons and halls, and indeed to have lunch with certain aristocratic ladies. He was good company, with none of the inbuilt snobbishness and class awareness of the Viennese. I can offer no direct evidence for this, but I am sure they would have been entranced by his Salzburg accent, his ‘country’ way of talking, his use of Bavarian dialect, words, expressions – much as a Londoner might enjoy listening to the lilt of a West Country accent.
Soon he was a regular guest in the highest salons in the city, and his hosts knew better than to patronise him, or underestimate his worth. One can imagine there was laughter at the prince-archbishop’s expense at these gatherings, and jokes about the relative merits of musicians, when compared to valets and cooks.
And then, a glittering prize. He was commissioned to write a new opera. It would be his first work for the Vienna imperial court theatre. It was, as with Idomeneo, exactly what he needed, and it had arrived at exactly the right moment. It would not have come as a complete shock to him. He had been lobbying the director of German opera in the city, who was also a librettist, to commission an opera.
When it was announced that there was to be a royal visit from Russia later in the year – Grand Duke Paul, son of Catherine the Great, and heir to the Russian throne – the librettist, one Gottlieb Stephanie, sought out Mozart.
This is where we now have real evidence of Mozart the composer. From the very start, he takes control of the project. He has already worked enough on opera to know that it is the composer who must lead. No more will he allow others to dictate what he must do, or even influence it.
Nothing in opera is as important as the music, he believes, and so the libretto must be at the service of the music.
He spells it out to his father in no uncertain terms:
I would say that in an opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music. Why are Italian comic operas popular everywhere, in spite of the miserable libretti? Because the music reigns supreme, and when one listens to it all else is forgotten. An opera is sure of success when the plot is well worked out, the words written solely for the music, and not shoved in here and there to suit some miserable rhyme.
This is a wonderful insight into the thinking of a young composer, twenty-five years of age, who, in the following decade would compose the greatest operas yet written.
Time was short, and Mozart threw himself at the project. And here occurred a happy confluence of his professional and private life: the main female character in the opera, by coincidence, was named Konstanze. The first aria that Mozart set to music for her was ‘Ach, ich liebte, war so glücklich’ (‘Oh I was in love, and so happy’).
Mozart was not going to let this go by. He sent a copy of the aria to his father, which had been written out by Constanze. It appears he did not tell Leopold it was his future wife who had written it, and Leopold could not have recognised her hand.
But it is a perfect example of how Mozart happily entwined his two lives. It is easy to imagine him working furiously on the score, Constanze at his side, breaking off to laugh and joke with her, share a coffee, no doubt a frequent kiss. The act of composition came so easily and naturally to Mozart that what might distract a lesser composer was all part of the process to him.
Just three weeks after receiving the libretto, Mozart had finished the first act. Then events intervened. The visit of the Russian Grand Duke was postponed, and it was decided not to stage the new opera until the following autumn. The pressure was off.
There is no doubt in my mind Mozart could have met the deadline, but even he was grateful for the extra time. The opera was to be called Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), and pandered to the fascination of Viennese aristocracy for all things Turkish.*
The plot concerned the attempt of the hero Belmonte to rescue his beloved Konstanze from Pasha Selim’s harem. The rescue fails, but the magnanimous Pasha recognises true love and pardons the couple.
Musically the opera shows how easily Mozart could adapt to other styles. He uses a richer orchestration here than ever before, adding bass drum, cymbals, triangle and piccolo to give an authentic Turkish feel to the music.
The opera premiered on 16 July 1782 at the Vienna Burgtheater, the most prestigious of Vienna’s state theatres, situated right alongside the Hofburg Palace, residence of the emperor.†
It was a huge success, and brought Mozart in the sum of 1,200 florins, three times more than his paltry salary in Salzburg.‡ Now he really could tell his father that the move to Vienna had been a wise decision, and he was a man of some substance. In other words, fit to keep a wife.
The path to marriage was still not smooth, and it was made a lot bumpier by the fact that there was a rat in the pack. Leopold had an informer in Vienna, a man with a scurrilous tongue who kept him informed of his son’s amorous goings-on. And how had this man described Mozart’s intended bride? As a slut (ein Luder).
Mozart found out about it, or more likely Leopold threw the accusation back at him. On 22 December 1781 Mozart sat down to write his father a long and difficult letter. It took him four days, and was his attempt to rebut, point by point, the accusations his father had hurled at him.
The informer, Mozart knew full well, was that ‘arch-scoundrel’ Winter. Peter von Winter was a violinist in the Mannheim-Munich orchestra, a composer whose operas had met with some success, who happened to be in Vienna at the time, studying with Antonio Salieri.
We do not know why Winter took it on himself to keep Leopold informed. He was roughly the same age as Mozart. Maybe it was jealousy that Mozart had been awarded the valuable court commission for Die Entführung. Whatever the motive, he was making life for Mozart very difficult indeed.
He somehow found out that Constanze’s family had made Mozart sign a pre-marriage contract, under which he promised to marry her within three years, or pay her 300 gulden a year compensation,* and he informed Leopold.
Leopold clearly challenged Mozart on this, and in response he feigned total ignorance of what his father meant:
I am asking you to explain some words from your last letter to me: ‘you probably will not believe that I know of a proposal that was made to you and to which you did not respond, at the time I found out about it’.
But he knew his father had seen through this, and so he wrote:
I will make an honest confession to you, convinced that you will forgive me for taking this step because I know that if you had been in my situation you would have acted the same – The only thing I’m asking your forgiveness for is that I haven’t informed you about this earlier.
Since Fridolin Weber’s sudden death, a guardian had been appointed to look after his daughter’s interests. This man, a financial administrator with the court theatre by the name of Johann Thorwart, had become alarmed at Mozart’s intimacy with Constanze, and had expressed his misgivings to her mother.
It was his recommendation that Mozart should sign a pre-marriage contract, to establish whether his intentions were sincere.† Frau Weber acquiesced. So did Mozart. Without informing his father, he signed.
In his eyes, this was not a contract, but more ‘the written assurances of my honourable intentions’. And he vented his anger against his father’s informant:
Certain busybodies and loud-mouthed gentlemen like Herr Winter must have given an earful about me to this guardian, who doesn’t even know me at all, that he should be wary of me – that I had no secure income – that I was far too intimate with her – that I might probably jilt her – and that the girl would therefore be ruined, etc. All this made him smell a rat.
Mozart goes into great detail about how the guardian filled Constanze’s mother’s ears with scandalous lies about him. He then had a face-to-face meeting with the guardian, which did not go well, and the guardian advised Frau Weber to forbid all association between them.
He tries to reassure his father by telling him Frau Weber is firmly on his side:<
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The mother told him: [my] entire association with [Constanze] consists in coming to their house and – I can’t forbid him my house – he is too good a friend for that – a friend to whom I am obliged in many ways – I am satisfied and I trust him – you must work out an agreement yourself.
“Tensions between them were inevitable. Several times the engagement actually ended.”
But the guardian simply won’t listen, and makes it a condition of the relationship continuing that Mozart sign a pre-marriage contract.
In a classic line, he says that signing the contract was the easiest thing he had ever had to do, because he knew he would never have to pay those 300 gulden, ‘for I shall never forsake her’.
He saved his most powerful point until the end. Constanze herself would have none of it:
What did this heavenly girl do as soon as her father [i.e. guardian] had left? – She demanded that her mother give her the document – then said to me – dear Mozart! I don’t need any written assurances from you, I believe what you say – and she tore up the writ – This gesture endeared my dear Konstanze to me even more.
With a final flourish that Winter himself had advised him to drop all ideas of marriage, and take a mistress – ‘You can afford it!’ – he signs off the letter in the usually affectionate way, convinced he has put his father’s mind at rest.
A vain hope. As far as Leopold was concerned, the pre-marriage contract was clear evidence of a conspiracy to entrap his son. His anger thoroughly aroused, and with no danger of understatement, he rants that both the guardian and Frau Weber ‘should be put in chains, made to sweep the streets, and have boards hung round their necks bearing the words, “Seducers of Youth”’.
Mozart might have been set on making Constanze his wife, but it was going to be an uphill struggle getting his father to give their marriage his blessing.
At times, it was an uphill struggle even for the couple themselves. From Mozart’s point of view, it was unthinkable that he could go ahead with marriage without his father’s approval. For Constanze, she was aware her guardian was set firmly against it, and despite Mozart’s reassurances in his letters, it was likely her mother was not fully supportive either.
Tensions between the couple were inevitable. Several times the engagement actually ended, and it was Constanze who broke if off each time. The most serious break came when Mozart displayed jealous anger at her high spiritedness at a party that he had not attended. Constanze was at the house of Baroness von Waldstätten, and in a moment of high jinks both she and the baroness had allowed ‘some Chapeaux’ (sic) – a young rogue – to measure their calves with a ribbon.
To make matters worse in Mozart’s eyes, Constanze had laughingly told her sisters what had happened in his presence, which was how he learned of it. He clearly flew into a rage, in effect accusing her of immoral behaviour, causing Constanze to retaliate, and in front of her sisters to call the engagement off.
Later on the same day, Mozart writes a letter to Constanze, which is a mixture of anger but also a plea for forgiveness. He begins by attempting to justify his anger, and administering what amounts to a lecture:
No woman intent upon her honour does that sort of thing – I do understand the maxime that when you are with others, you do as others do – but one has to think about certain related matters – whether it is a gathering of good friends and acquaintances? – whether you are a child or a young woman of marriageable age – but especially, whether you are already engaged to be married.
Mozart has turned into his father. This is exactly the kind of language Leopold uses to him. He then pens a line that is thoroughly insulting to the baroness:
If it’s true that the Baroness permitted the same thing to be done to her, well, that’s something entirely different because she is a woman past her prime who cannot possibly excite anybody any more.
Baroness von Waldstätten was thirty-eight.
He dispenses what amounts to fatherly, and rather absurd, advice. If Constanze positively could not resist playing along with the others, then she should have taken the ribbon and measured her calves herself. That, he rails, is what any honourable woman would have done in similar circumstances.
Having got it off his chest, he makes a valiant attempt at reconciliation:
But it’s over now – and a mere acknowledgement of this unwise exhibition would have been enough to make everything all right and – if you don’t take it amiss, dearest friend – would still make it all right – You can see from this how much I love you – I don’t flare up like you – I think – I reflect – and I feel – If you, too, can feel – if you allow your feelings to come forth – then I know for sure that on this very day I can say to myself confidently: Konstanze is the virtuous, Honourable – sensible and truly beloved of that Trustworthy and well-meaning
Mozart
Despite the rather double-edged nature of those last few lines, it appears to have done the trick. The engagement was back on.
With all this going on, the turmoil of an on-off engagement, his father’s obdurate refusal to sanction the marriage, Mozart is working flat out – ‘I must just spend the night on it, that is the only way’ – on his new opera, Die Entführung.
The opening, as we know, was a triumph, and this emboldens Mozart to address his father in more direct tones regarding his marriage. Buried in his words is an admission that he and Constanze have already consummated their relationship, therefore they have no option but to marry:
I must implore you, implore you for all you hold dear in the world: please give me your consent so that I can marry my dear Konstanze – Don’t think it is only for the sake of getting married – if it were for that reason alone, I’d be glad to wait a little longer – However, I feel that it is absolutely necessary on account of my honour as well as that of my girl, but also on account of my health and peace of mind.
His letter has crossed with another angry rejection from his father. He is all the more hurt because his father has not acknowledged the success of the new opera. No congratulations for that, nor thanks for the fact that – although fully occupied with the opera – he found time to compose a symphony hurriedly for the Haffner family in Salzburg at his father’s request.*
Things were not going well on the domestic front in Vienna either. Constanze’s mother was clearly no more in favour of the marriage than Mozart’s father, and Constanze had fled from the family apartment to stay with her friend (and accomplice in the calf-measuring ‘crime’) Baroness Waldstätten.
Frau Weber resorted to extreme action, and threatened to call the police to have Constanze forcibly returned home. We know this because Mozart wrote to the Baroness in despair, asking for her advice on how to resolve the matter. (She might have been less inclined to give it, had she known of his unflattering comments about her age.)
The letter is undated – unusual for Mozart – and is, perhaps, a sign of his desperation. So, too, is this sentence: ‘If such an action [calling the police] is legal here, I would know of no better way to avert it than by marrying Constanze tomorrow morning.’
Which is, pretty much, what he did. Mozart now decided to think the unthinkable, and act on it. It might not have been the very next morning, but on 2 August he and Constanze went to confession and took Communion together. On the following day their marriage contract was signed and witnessed.
On 4 August 1782 Mozart and Constanze were married in St Stephen’s Cathedral. Only a small group was present, and it seems at least one rift had been healed, or at least papered over. Constanze’s mother and her younger sister Sophie were there, as well as the daughters’ guardian who had caused so much trouble. Mozart’s best man was a surgeon-barber whom he had known for many years, and a district councillor acted as witness.
It was, as Mozart wrote to his father three days later, an emotional scene: ‘When we were joined together, my wife and I began to cry – everybody was touched by that, even the priest; – they all wept when they saw how dee
ply moved we were in our hearts.’
That evening Baroness Waldstätten, who had clearly acted – successfully – as mediator, put on a wedding feast, which Mozart described as ‘more princely than baronial’.
He had finally taken matters into his own hands, and married his Constanze. It was the only way to quell disputatious voices, in both Salzburg and Vienna. It appears they had been quelled in Vienna; the same was not entirely true in Salzburg.
Two days after the wedding, Mozart received a letter from his father. The good news, if it could be so called, was that Leopold was resigned to his son’s marriage. However, he still refused to give his blessing. Worse still, he made it clear he believed Mozart had lied to Constanze about the Mozart family wealth, and as a result she was only out to get her hands on it.
Mozart was incensed. He wrote calmly, but we can feel the fury in his words:
You are very much mistaken about your son if you think him capable of a dishonest deed –
My dear Konstanze, now, thank god, my wedded wife, has long known my situation and what I can expect from you – However, her friendship and love for me are so great that she gladly – and with the greatest joy sacrificed her entire future for me – and my destiny.
He remains polite towards his father, but the language is formal and without affection. At the end, he holds out the prospect of bringing his wife to Salzburg to meet her father-in-law and sister-in-law:
– and I wager – I wager – that you will rejoice in my happiness once you get to know her! – what else could possibly happen if in your eyes, just as in mine, a right-thinking, honest, virtuous, and amiable wife remains a blessing for her husband –