Mozart's Last Aria

by Matt Rees

  Stadler leaned his elbows on his knees, his head low over the sheet of paper. ‘You want to put this in his biography?’

  ‘I want people to read the story of his life. Those who love his music should know about the good man who wrote it.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Stadler’s voice was a whisper.

  ‘A biography from his birth to his last days. Nannerl will be the one to recall for me stories of Wolfgang’s early life, I hope.’

  I inclined my head in asset.

  ‘So you must help me, dear Anton, with his years in Vienna and his final illness.’ She gestured toward the sheet in Stadler’s hand. ‘This, after all, was what he was working on at the end.’

  ‘Was it?’ Stadler still didn’t raise his eyes from the page, though there were only a few sentences on it.

  ‘Well, for one thing it’s not finished. Also I went through his papers only a few weeks ago looking for the letter that commissioned him to write his Requiem, and this page wasn’t there then,’ Constanze said. ‘So, yes, I’m sure it’s very recent.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Constanze,’ Stadler said. ‘Just some of his musings. Nothing serious.’

  He folded the sheet until it was small enough that his hand hid it. Constanze pouted and would have tried to persuade him further, but her baby cried out in the next room. With an apologetic smile, she went to soothe the child.

  Stadler moved his hand toward the pocket of his jacket, watching Constanze through the door as she bent over the baby’s crib. I glimpsed the paper between his fingers.

  ‘May I see that once more?’ I said.

  Stadler jerked upright in his seat, as though he had thought himself alone.

  ‘My brother’s note?’ I held out my hand.

  His lips opened to speak, but he hesitated. It seemed he might deny that the page existed, palming it up his sleeve like a conjurer at a Saturday market. Then he stiffened his jaw and held the small square of paper toward me with a gallant flourish of his wrist.

  I unfolded the page and pointed to the line that interested me most. ‘What “new ground” would this lodge have broken?’ I asked. ‘What did Wolfgang mean by that?’

  Stadler pursed his lips, working them as though they gripped the reed of his instrument. They were supple and muscular from constant exercise with the clarinet, but they were firmly shut to me.

  ‘Surely you have some idea,’ I said. ‘You were one of Wolfgang’s closest friends. Why don’t you complete his essay, as Constanze asked? He must have explained to you his vision for this Grotto. No doubt he would’ve canvassed you to become a founding member.’

  ‘His vision?’ Stadler looked at me with the eyes of a tradesman caught cheating on a bill, fearful and brazen.

  ‘You’re mounting a concert in his memory tomorrow. What better way to memorialize him than to found this new lodge in his name?’

  Stadler rose and stepped to the window. He grasped the frame, laying his forehead against the cold glass.

  ‘I can’t do what you ask.’ His breath misted on the window. ‘You don’t know how dangerous it is.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ I saw that he had expected this word to shock me into silence. Yet I already suspected something more wicked than a fever had taken my brother’s life. I gave a quiet laugh tinged with mockery. ‘Surely you’re exaggerating, Herr Stadler?’

  He shook his head. ‘If you love him – loved him, I advise you not to get involved, Madame de Mozart.’

  Five days freezing in an uncomfortable coach. Three years with barely a word from my dead brother. I was already involved.

  I held out the page with Wolfgang’s handwriting. ‘Tell me what this letter means, my dear Herr Stadler. It can be our secret.’

  He grabbed the sheet, screwed it between his fists, and threw it into the open lid of the piano.

  ‘For God’s sake, woman, do you want us all to end up like Wolfgang?’ he shouted.

  The paper played a soft, metallic scale as it rolled across the wires inside the piano.

  Stadler circled the center of the room with his hands over his eyes.

  I was fearful of his sudden rage. Yet I was also content. I had been right to come to Vienna. Something was wrong here.

  Stadler took a heavy breath, made a swift bow, and left. In the doorway, Constanze reached for him, but he brushed past her and the baby on her shoulder. He wrenched his hat from the maid’s hand, slammed the door, and descended the stairs fast.

  I leaned into the piano and took out the ball of paper. I smoothed it against the cover of The Well-Tempered Clavier. When I held it up, it shook in my agitated hand. I put it in the pocket of my dress.

  4

  Outside the Freihaus, I paid the coachman fifteen kreutzer for the ride to the suburbs. It was almost noon. The ruts in the road were iced hard. I tottered over the frozen mud to the gate, where a spray of straw made walking easier.

  I entered a wide courtyard. It was laid out with flowerbeds, sparse now, but in summer no doubt quite lovely. The thorns of the bare rosebushes glinted dull gray like the tarnished silver of old knives. Faded brown patches of grass showed through the snow. Beyond the lawn stood a tall stone building with a red-tiled roof: the theater. The lime-green double doors were shut. A printed sign advertised performances of The Magic Flute.

  At the center of the courtyard was a small pavilion with a deck across the front. Its wood was dark as tobacco. Smoke rose from the chimney and a circle melted around it in the snow. I had come to Vienna to probe Wolfgang’s death, but Constanze’s praise for The Magic Flute awakened a desire to learn more about his life, and he truly lived in his music. It was with this in mind that I approached the wooden hut to ask for Herr Schikaneder.

  An irritable voice answered my knock. When I entered, a pasty face squinted at me with suspicion.

  The man wore a black worsted frock coat with silver buttons. The coat was stained at its lower hem with something that might have been thick cream. His white shirt was open at the neck and a cravat dangled untied. A film of sweat glimmered on his pale chest in the light of the lantern on the table. He rubbed his sandy hair, which was thin though he appeared to be no more than thirty years old. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  The air smelled of warm brandy punch. There was a yeasty undertone of spilled beer. I assumed this must be the room where the actors and singers celebrated their performances late into the night. I stepped into the circle of the lantern.

  The man started upright, lifted the light, and stared at me with a wary curiosity.

  ‘I’m looking for Herr Schikaneder,’ I said.

  ‘Does he owe you money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has he dishonored you?’

  I leaned toward the man, unused to such effrontery. It had been a long time since I was around theatrical types. ‘How dare you?’

  He smirked. ‘I suppose you’re a bit old, even for him. Perhaps he’s been after your daughter?’

  I opened my eyes wide.

  ‘Just checking. You’ll find him over there.’ The man wiped his nose with the back of his index finger and extended it toward the darkest corner of the room.

  A tall, broad-chested man came toward me with his arms extended. ‘Forgive my friend Gieseke and his poor jokes,’ he said. ‘There are so many charlatans in this city, one must guard against them.’

  ‘In order to protect one’s reputation as the greatest charlatan of them all,’ the man in the black coat muttered.

  The tall man laughed, deep and resonant. ‘Emanuel Schikaneder, at your service, madame. Actor, singer, theatrical producer, and admirer of well-bred ladies who don’t allow themselves to be perturbed by ill-mannered lackeys.’ Glancing at the other man, he bowed and caught my hand to kiss it. As he straightened, he paused, looking down at me with his head angled to the right. He raised his finger and smiled. ‘Ahh, Madame Berchtold, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘You’re correct, sir.’

  ‘Or as I prefer to remember you from my journeys through Salz
burg: Nannerl. Little Nanna Mozart.’ He took both my hands. ‘Gieseke, this is Wolfgang’s sister. Give her some punch.’

  Gieseke slouched to a counter along the back wall and poured a glass from a ceramic pitcher. He watched me steadily. I would have been unnerved, had I not found Schikaneder’s warmth so welcome after my strange meeting with Stadler. I grinned along with him as he recounted his visit to our family home.

  ‘I spent five months in Salzburg in ’80, if I remember right,’ he told Gieseke. ‘I had my whole troupe with me then and we performed our entire repertoire to great acclaim. Singspiels, ballets, a daring play by Monsieur Beaumarchais. I gave my Hamlet, of course. Yet the highlights of my stay were my evenings with the Mozart family at their home. Young Wolfgang and this talented sister of his improvised at the piano with flair and delicacy. I gave the family free passes to all my performances, you know.’

  ‘An act of unaccustomed generosity,’ Gieseke said.

  He handed me a glass that was sticky in my grasp, either from lack of washing or from his palm. The warm punch thawed me after the cab ride, and I accepted Schikaneder’s invitation to eat a light lunch with them. I sat at the table as he went to the porch to bellow for his maid.

  Gieseke leaned against the wall, his body hidden by shadow. ‘Your face,’ he said.

  I peered into his unlit corner.

  ‘No, don’t move,’ he said. ‘As you were. When you raise your chin, the lantern casts strange shadows.’

  I regarded my hands on the rough pine tabletop.

  ‘You look so much like Wolfgang, it’s actually rather disturbing,’ Gieseke whispered. ‘It’s almost as though you’re his ghost.’

  My smile had little humor. ‘You saw Herr Schikaneder clasp my hands. I’m rather too substantial for a ghost, don’t you think?’

  ‘In Vienna, even the ghosts need to be proficient dissemblers. Perhaps you’re just a clever phantom.’

  I sipped the punch. The rum predominated. It bit as I swallowed, and I coughed.

  ‘You taste the rum? There’s port, brandy and arrack in there, too. Don’t be confused by the sweetness,’ Gieseke said. ‘Just because Schikaneder fills his punch with sugar, doesn’t mean it won’t put you under the table if you overdo it.’

  I coughed again.

  Schikaneder returned. ‘Ah, the punch. Zum Wohl! Your health. Yes, yes, it’s strong stuff. Wolfgang could’ve told you that. Right, Gieseke?’

  ‘I never saw him partake of too much alcohol except under your expert tutelage,’ Gieseke said.

  ‘True. A most temperate little fellow he was.’ Schikaneder’s lips quivered and his brow descended like a man experiencing the utmost pleasure. He widened his eyes and seemed to search the shadows in the corners of the room. ‘His spirit follows me everywhere.’

  Gieseke laughed. ‘Then he must be damned.’

  Schikaneder shot a finger out toward the younger man and the laughter halted.

  ‘Damned he could never be,’ Schikaneder said. ‘I’m five years older than he was. Imagine what he would’ve accomplished had his life been spared only that much longer.’

  I coughed through another sip of punch. Its heat tingled in the roots of my hair. ‘Did Wolfgang seem content, before he passed away?’

  ‘He wasn’t given to displays of emotion, as I’m sure you know,’ Schikaneder said. ‘Except when absorbed by music. Then he would indulge in a burst of joy which might carry him away from his instrument as if borne on the air itself.’

  ‘He seemed pretty miserable when you’d poured enough punch down his throat,’ Gieseke said.

  Schikaneder dropped into the chair at the end of the table. ‘That I will concede,’ he said.

  ‘Miserable?’ I asked.

  ‘Our new opera premiered not long before Wolfgang’s passing,’ said the impresario. ‘It’s a tremendous success. We celebrated late into the night in this pavilion. Wolfgang drank more than his accustomed glass or two. He became quite morose.’

  ‘Did he mention death?’

  Gieseke’s heel struck the floorboards, but when I glanced toward him he was still.

  ‘Death?’ Schikaneder said. ‘No, he only said that when he was young he had been feted in the palaces of Europe, the toast of kings and princes. Whereas now he struggled to make ends meet.’

  ‘Did he say nothing more?’

  ‘After that, no matter how we teased him and joked with him, he merely mumbled and sank into the kind of somberness that overcomes many of us when we’ve taken too much drink.’

  Gieseke paced along the wall in the darkness. I made out his pale hands clasping and unclasping behind his back.

  ‘It was in this pavilion that your brother wrote much of The Magic Flute.’ Schikaneder spread his hand around the room as though he were showing me a wide hall. ‘It’s true that this is no palace. But he produced a work which shall resonate through the centuries and be applauded by millions, when all our monarchs and aristocrats are nothing more than faded portraits hung in the most remote corridors of their castles.’

  ‘I look forward very much to attending a performance this week,’ I said.

  Schikaneder bowed his head and smiled a welcome.

  ‘What’s the subject of the opera? I read a little in one of the Salzburg news-sheets, but it hardly made any sense,’ I said.

  ‘Its plot is open to misinterpretation, that much is true,’ he said. ‘To be frank, Wolfgang wished very much to compose an opera that would, if you will, be an advertisement for a certain secret brotherhood.’

  Gieseke’s tread grew heavier, faster.

  Freemasons again, I thought. Wolfgang’s note in my pocket burned against my hip. How important can his membership have been to him? What might he have risked for it? ‘My sister-in-law said the opera is about a young prince and a princess who find love.’

  ‘That as well, of course. My company is famous for popular romances. For special effects, too. There’s a battle with an enormous dragon in Act One. People find it most impressive. But when I wrote the text for Wolfgang to set to music, he was quite determined that our opera should counter the unnatural suspicion the Emperor has developed for the brotherhood.’

  ‘What does the Emperor suspect?’

  Schikaneder rolled his shoulders and took a long breath. ‘Our beloved Emperor appears to consider that the Masons harbor malign intentions toward the monarchy.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘There has been revolution in France, madame. Our Emperor’s sister, Queen Marie Antoinette as the French call her, has been under arrest these past six months. The philosophy of the revolutionaries – liberty, equality, brotherhood – is rather similar to that espoused by the Masons.’

  ‘The Emperor believes the Masons wish for a revolution here?’

  ‘Perhaps. Any secret is cause for suspicion these days.’

  ‘Secrets? What secrets do the Masons keep?’

  He ran his tongue around his lips and leered. ‘Nothing of such great interest, you might think. But they enforce their secrecy with measures ranging from the harmless to the – theatrically bloodcurdling.’

  ‘With violence?’

  ‘With the promise of violence.’ He waved a hand in dismissal. ‘Usually it’s just a matter of coded symbols they use to recognize a Brother. They draw little triangles, or they write to each other in English. Things like that.’

  ‘Wolfgang’s English was poor.’

  ‘He had studied it much of late. Maestro Haydn has been on a lucrative concert tour to London. Wolfgang intended to follow him there next year.’

  ‘But why do the Masons employ English?’

  ‘The Masonic Order was first created in Scotland. The use of English acknowledges those early traditions.’

  ‘That seems harmless.’

  ‘To the Emperor even such innocent fun might look like the Masons are trying to hide secret knowledge. English is a language spoken by few people in Vienna.’

  ‘Does the Emperor act on his suspicions?�
��

  ‘He has gone so far as to order that no more Masonic lodges be formed.’

  No new lodges. I understood a little of Stadler’s fury about the Grotto. ‘Then why did Wolfgang create an opera about Masonry?’

  Schikaneder shook his head. ‘People sometimes think Wolfgang was less than serious. Because his laughter was a touch manic and he used to hop and skip when he was overexcited. But he had his intellectual side. He was a great admirer of the new Enlightenment philosophers – for their belief that reason, equality, and the human spirit are greater than the authority of the Church and of kings. As a measure of this, Wolfgang rejected hierarchies. He judged everyone by their talents and their character alone, rich or poor, man or woman. He injected these ideals of his into The Magic Flute. He wished to show the true, beautiful face of Masonic brotherhood, regardless of… of the potential for misinterpretation.’

  It was I who felt naïve amid this talk of suspicion and revolution. I was disturbed that my brother had risked offending our Emperor. ‘Yet you collaborated on the opera with him.’

  ‘Wolfgang was determined,’ Schikaneder said. ‘God knows, I owe the order of Freemasons nothing. My lodge was Charles of the Three Keys in Regensburg. But I was expelled.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For immorality,’ Gieseke snapped. ‘With two actresses in his company.’

  Schikaneder’s laugh was wistful, as though he recalled some long-ago pleasure. ‘Quite so.’

  ‘How then does this opera, as you put it, advertise Masonry’s best elements?’ I said.

  He fluttered his hand. ‘Symbols,’ he said. ‘Some symbols, that’s all.’

  Gieseke clicked his tongue.

  Schikaneder cast a dark look into the shadows where the younger man paced.

  I wondered at their silence. It was heavy with things they would surely have spoken to each other had I not been present. Do you want us all to end up like Wolfgang? Stadler had said. Perhaps ‘us’ referred to the men who might have joined his new Masonic lodge. ‘Can my brother’s love for Masonry have endangered him?’