Mozart's Last Aria

by Matt Rees

  No one even called me Nannerl any more, now that Mamma and Papa were gone. No one, except he who had been silent for three years. Though it had been unsaid in our last letters, I feared that the unpleasantness of our father’s testament, in which all the fruits of our early fame were bequeathed to me, had broken the bond with my brother, my dear Jack Pudding, my Franz of the Nosebleed.

  These years without communication were, I assumed, harder for me to bear than for him. Were he to consider the painful task of writing to his sister in her simple marital home, there would be the distraction of a salon at which to perform, a ball to attend, a concerto to be scored.

  I enjoyed no such diversions. Still, I delighted in the reviews of his operas in the Salzburg news-sheets and subscribed to each piano transcription of his works, playing through them with wonder at his compositional development. Even my poor restrained husband had failed to hide his tears when I sang ‘For pity’s sake, my darling, forgive the error of a loving soul’ from Wolfgang’s Così fan tutte. Throughout these years of silence, I comforted myself that one day he might visit our village and we’d play together once more.

  I sang that aria as I slipped my finger behind the seal and unfolded the letter. It was from my sister-in-law Constanze.

  My song caught at a high G and transformed to a sob.

  Your beloved brother passed away in the night of 5th December, she wrote. The greatest of composers and the most devoted of husbands lies in a simple grave in the field of St Marx. My fondest, most desperate wish is to join him there.

  Constanze gave the dreadful details. Wolfgang had succumbed to ‘acute heated miliary fever’, which she explained meant that he had been afflicted with a rash resembling tiny white millet grains.

  My chin quivered as I read her description of his last days, the swelling of his body, the vomiting and chills, the final coma before his death at one hour past midnight. He had been gone a week.

  I crossed myself and mouthed a prayer that he should be delivered to the company of Christ. I pressed the letter to my breast and wept. ‘Wolfgang,’ I whispered.

  On the piano, my son stumbled through a French nursery rhyme, ‘Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman’. I had taught it to him one morning after I played Wolfgang’s marvelous set of variations on its theme. The simple melody stabbed at me. I bent over, pain sharp in my abdomen.

  The piano went silent. Leopold’s small feet skipped across the hall. He entered the salon with his green jacket buttoned to his chubby chin and blew a kiss at the portrait of Salzburg’s Prince Archbishop on the wall because he knew it made me laugh. When he hugged me I pressed his face to my neck, for in that moment I couldn’t look upon features so like my brother’s had been in his infancy. I stroked his blonde hair behind his ears.

  ‘Would you play for me, Mamma?’ he said. ‘My fingers are tired.’

  ‘Tired? And it’s not yet eight in the morning. Will you have no energy to make mischief during the day?’ I grabbed his cold little hands and blew on them.

  He giggled. ‘I’m not tired. Just my fingers.’

  ‘I’ll play for you in a little while, my darling. First, Mamma has a letter to read.’

  ‘Who wrote it?’

  ‘Your Aunt Constanze in Vienna.’

  Never having met my sister-in-law, the boy shrugged.

  ‘Go and see if Jeannette is still sleeping,’ I said. ‘It’s time Lenerl gave her breakfast.’

  He grinned at the mention of his two-year-old sister and hopped up the stairs.

  I closed my eyes. In my mind, I heard ‘Ah, vous dirai-je’ through the dozen complex variations Wolfgang had composed, changes of tempo, legato to staccato, the running scales in the left hand ascending and descending the keyboard. I could feel my own touch light on the keys, see the manuscript, his delicate fingers scribbling the notes across the stave with his characteristic slight backward slant.

  Upstairs, Jeanette protested her awakening, until Leopold tickled her into laughter, as he did each day.

  I read on through Constanze’s letter. I skimmed the lengthy account of her sister’s desperate errands to priests and doctors, none of whom appeared to have helped my brother. It was far from clear that he had even received the final sacrament.

  The letter wound back in time through the premiere of my brother’s new opera The Magic Flute, until I found myself with Constanze and Wolfgang in the public gardens of the Prater on a fine fall day in October. On that occasion, I read, Wolfgang had told his wife that he knew he would ‘not last much longer. I’m sure I’ve been poisoned.’

  The cup shook in my grip. Chocolate slopped onto the rug. I laid the cup on the table so hastily that it caught against the saucer and overturned. My fingers smudged cocoa across the letter.

  Constanze had been unable to shake Wolfgang from the dire perception that his death was preordained, she wrote. From time to time, he had recovered himself enough to describe his suspicions as temporary fancies. Yet he soon returned to the certainty that his end was coming – at the hands of a poisoner. It grieved Constanze deeply that her last months with Wolfgang should have been marred by this melancholia.

  The letter gave a brief account of Wolfgang’s funeral at St Stephen’s Cathedral, organized by his friend, the noted musical connoisseur Baron van Swieten. Constanze closed with a few sentences of condolence, though I sensed that she wished more to impress upon me her extreme suffering and assumed that I’d mourn little for the loss of my estranged brother.

  I would have put the letter aside, but I noticed another page folded behind the others. A postscript on a smaller sheet of paper:

  It may be that gossip shall reach you asserting your brother’s infidelity to me. I beseech you to place no faith in such slanders. On the day of Wolfgang’s funeral, his dear friend and Masonic brother Hofdemel slashed with a razor at the face of his wife Magdalena, who used to receive lessons from your brother at their house behind Jews’ Square. Poor Hofdemel then took his own life. It has been spoken among some whose shame should be eternal that Hofdemel lost his mind in a fury of jealousy because of a romance between Wolfgang and Magdalena. Some have even asserted that the enraged Hofdemel murdered my beloved Wolfgang by poison. I urge you to reject all such scurrilous conjecture and to know that to his final breath your brother remained a most true and devoted husband and father.

  A strange heat flared in my face and darkness crossed my sight. My agitation drove me from my chair. As I came to my feet, the fire crackled in the draughts from my skirt.

  I looked into the gilt-framed mirror above the mantel. I saw only death in my pale skin. Wrinkles marked my eyes like the rings of a tree trunk, though signifying the onset of another winter rather than a new spring. Then, there he was, clear in my face, rising out of the image of this woman in the last of her younger days – the wry lips of my brother, his prominent nose and his quiet eyes. He watched me stagger away from the mirror, upsetting the table, smashing the cup of chocolate to the floor.

  From his study, I heard my husband clear his throat in annoyance at the noise. I imagined the doctors indulging in the same gesture of impatience when my brother told them that he had been poisoned. He was, after all, someone who always made a fuss about minor injuries and ailments.

  Surely Wolfgang had known something they had not. The symptoms may have suggested a ‘miliary fever’, but only to one who didn’t suspect foul play. Could this Hofdemel have been a killer? I forced myself to consider the reprehensible possibility that my brother’s selfishness, cultivated by the indulgence of the many who lauded his genius, may have overridden his moral scruples and led him into the sin of adultery.

  As soon as I allowed any credence to the possibility of poison, I was struck by the number of other murderous suspects who occurred to me. Wolfgang never learned to deliver a politic opinion and was often frank and disparaging, so his killer might be a singer he scorned. Or a rival composer robbed of a commission by the greater artist. Then there was his uncouth little wife and her conniving
Weber family which had blackmailed my brother into marriage. I found it hard to imagine them as murderers, yet why was Constanze so determined that I should dismiss Wolfgang’s suspicion of poisoning as the delusion of a melancholic spirit?

  Everything about Wolfgang’s life was extraordinary. Now I was asked to accept that his death had been so commonplace it could be explained by a doctor’s examination of a rash on his skin. I wouldn’t believe it.

  Another glance in the mirror. I couldn’t look away. My eyes, like his, large and brown, a clear hazel. My cheeks, a little marked by pox, though less than Wolfgang’s had been. Were our faces entirely alike? What was solely mine of all these features? Not the mouth, with its thin lower lip and gentle, sardonic upward turn at the corners. That, too, resembled my brother.

  As I stared into the glass, I discovered one thing new in this face, something I didn’t recognize as my own characteristic: I found it to be strong. Perhaps it was the same strength that had allowed Wolfgang to defy our father, leaving Salzburg to make his way as an independent composer in Vienna. I had never dared even to imagine that power and certainly hadn’t imitated it. Wolfgang’s defiance had pained me, because I was left alone in our dull provincial town, charged with the care of our father. Yet now I perceived that same boldness in my own gaze.

  I crossed the hall, knocked upon the study door, and entered.

  My husband turned his thin face toward me and lifted the fur collar of his dressing gown. I read annoyance in his eyes, then he disguised it with the aloofness that greeted petitioners seeking his approval for some official document.

  ‘My brother has died, may God give him rest.’ I held Constanze’s letter toward him.

  ‘Surely he was dead to you already.’ He glanced at the chocolate smudge on the paper and raised a single eyebrow. He saw the reproach on my face and cleared his throat. ‘May the good Lord protect his soul, my dear.’ His voice was as thin as his body under the gray velvet of his gown.

  ‘My sister-in-law writes that he died of a fever last week.’

  ‘I shall pray for him, of course.’ He waved away the letter and made to return to his papers.

  From obedient habit, I stepped backward to the door. The face I had beheld in the mirror stopped me.

  I looked my husband over. He had married me so that there would be someone to oversee his household and his five troublesome children. When we wed, my father made it clear that this was my last chance to avoid the lonely life of the old maid. In seven years, I had given Berchtold three more children, though one girl had been lost that spring after only five months. I knew his remoteness to be the reserve of a man never warm who found himself frightened to love me for fear that I should be taken from him like his first two wives. At fifty-five, he was fifteen years my senior, though he saw the marriage as an act of charity on his part toward a spinster from a lower rank of society. Love had been no part of the bargain Papa had struck with Berchtold. Even my virginity had been accorded a monetary value. My dowry was augmented by five hundred florins after the wedding night, when Berchtold had ascertained that he had possessed me intact.

  He looked up and took in a loud breath through his nose, exasperated to find me still there. He tapped his hand on the documents before him to signal that he wished to focus on them – perhaps a customs record of iron transported from the mines across the Abersee to Salzburg, or an order for a fornicator to be taken to the torture room in his assistant’s house next door.

  I stepped forward.

  He righted his periwig and I glimpsed the blue baldness of his scalp beneath.

  ‘Wolfgang believed he had been poisoned,’ I said.

  ‘Surely not. Ridiculous man. Over-sensitive.’

  ‘There may have been intrigues against him. It’s Vienna, after all.’

  ‘Madam, what do you know of such things?’

  ‘I haven’t lived all my days in this village, sir. I know the ways of court life and of the cities.’ As my husband, born in the village and educated no further away than Salzburg, did not.

  He caught my insinuation and his lips tightened. ‘Let a mass be said for him and be done with it.’

  ‘I would visit his grave.’

  He tapped his bony fingers against his writing desk. ‘I have no time for such a journey. My work here is pressing.’

  I knew this for a falsehood. He shut himself into his study not for the perusal of administrative papers, but with the intention of escaping the demands of social life and the expenses incurred by it.

  ‘I’ll travel alone,’ I said.

  ‘Alone?’ Surprise disturbed the officious stillness of his face. He was unaccustomed to my determination. In seven years of marriage, I had never pretended to be anything but deferential and far from self-sufficient – behavior promoted to deep habit by my duties during the widower years of my Papa.

  ‘I’ll take Lenerl to attend to my needs,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a journey of five days, and expensive.’ He seemed muddled, thwarted and a little desperate, so that I dared wonder if, faced with my departure, he considered that he might miss me.

  ‘I’ll bear the cost from the bequest of my father. I shan’t burden you.’

  ‘You never have done so,’ he stammered. His eyes dropped to the floor and his fingers fretted the fur of his collar.

  I halted at the door with the handle in my grasp, moved by his emotion. Did all death recall for him his own losses, his wives and infant children? It was cold in the room and I saw that the grate was empty to spare the cost of a fire, though Berchtold had already saved ample funds to provision his children in a lifetime of comfort. ‘Johann,’ I said.

  ‘I shall wait upon your swift return, madam.’ He shuffled the papers on his desk and straightened. ‘This departure inconveniences me and leaves my children unattended.’

  ‘I shall make haste to come back to you.’

  ‘And when you do, we shall hear no more of this brother of yours or of fanciful plots against his life.’

  To Berchtold, all professional musicians were alike, disreputable and irresponsible. No doubt he assumed Wolfgang to have died dissolute and alone in a basement tavern. If my brother had been poisoned, surely it would have been to avenge some immorality. Whatever I wished not to countenance, my husband would willingly have suspected.

  ‘You shall hear no more of such things.’ I shut the door.

  In the hall, I called for Lenerl, ordered her to pack my trunks and to send for my husband’s carriage.

  When my mother passed away, I fell into a fit of weeping so violent that I vomited and took to my bed for days. My father’s end caused me to drop into a strange darkness from which I didn’t emerge for months. But I was a mother now, a mother who had experienced the loss of one of her own infants and had continued with her life for the sake of the children who remained. I was no longer so feeble before extreme emotions. When I faced Death, I was able to deliberate on which cheek I would strike him. That was how I resolved to go to Vienna.

  Seating myself in the drawing room before my piano, a wedding gift from my father, I warmed my fingers under my arms. I looked toward the wall and its simple papering, thin green vertical stripes on white. Beyond it, my husband shivered in the cold and scowled at the documents on his desk. You shall hear this of him, I thought. I played the sonata in A minor Wolfgang wrote after our dear mother’s death in Paris.

  Its opening theme, dark and disturbing, sounded true even on my half-ruined keyboard. The D-sharp in the right hand was discordant over the relentless basso ostinato of the left hand, built around the A minor chord. I hammered at the frenetic allegro maestoso as if I wished my brother’s soul to hear it, wherever he was.

  ‘I’m coming, Wolfgang,’ I whispered.

  2

  VIENNA

  The goddess Providence watched me leave my inn after breakfast and cross the empty Flour Market in the cold wind. In her bronze hands the two-faced head of Janus frowned back upon the past as a bearded old man, whil
e youthful and open he peered the other way into his future. Wishing I might know what lay ahead of me, I shivered. Even the mythic embodiment of foresight could find herself abandoned in a frozen fountain at the center of a blustery square. I prayed that I shouldn’t be so isolated.

  Beyond the statue was the gray, shuttered Flour Pit Hall, where Wolfgang often gave concerts, and the terra cotta façade of the Capuchin Church, crypt of the Habsburgs. I kicked at the muck and snowy slush with my high boots, and headed in the direction of the younger Janus’s gaze.

  The innkeeper had directed me toward a narrow street of five-story houses, their ground floors in heavy, broad granite and their gables stuccoed orange or yellow or white. The buildings were bright, despite the dull, flat light filtering through the clouds. When I came to the foot of a church spire on my left, I turned into Rauhenstein Lane and looked for my brother’s home.

  A gentleman in a broad-brimmed English hat was kind enough to guide me into a modest courtyard. Horse feed and wet hay ripened on the cold air.

  ‘You’ll find the apartment of the late composer at the first landing, madame,’ he said. ‘You won’t be the only one to pay your respects to his widow today, though you may be the earliest. Our little street has been crowded with distraught music-lovers this entire week.’

  ‘I’m sure it has.’ I made for the entry to the staircase.

  ‘I knew him only by sight,’ the gentleman called after me. ‘One would never have thought… Such a small, unassuming man, and yet his work… Masterpieces, genius. But to look at him… well, one hardly would look at him, really. Did you know him, madame?’

  ‘As if he were my brother,’ I said.

  The gentleman’s mournful smile faded into confusion. He raised his hand like someone trying to place the face of a remote acquaintance.

  The wind rushed into the courtyard. I stepped past the open door of the building’s toilet, and onto the dark staircase.