Mozart's Last Aria

by Matt Rees

  I peered at the music, as she unfolded the pages along the stand. ‘Why “of course’?’

  ‘Don’t you see the dedication?’

  She ran her finger, stained black with ink from copying manuscripts, beneath a note at the top of the first page. It was scribbled in my brother’s handwriting. ‘To my most dearly beloved sister Maria Anna, my Nannerl.’ Then the curling parallel lines under our family name with which he signed his manuscripts.

  I touched the signature and whispered his name. I glanced at the opening staves. The piece was a sonata for piano. ‘He used to send me his scores all the time. But I’ve not seen this one.’

  ‘It’s new, isn’t it?’ Constanze’s black eyes glinted from the aureoles of tired, gray skin around them. ‘Play it. I’ve never heard the piece, I’m sure.’

  As I settled myself to play, I wondered why the Prussian ambassador chose to buy this sonata, rather than one of Wolfgang’s better-known compositions.

  I wasn’t far into the first movement, before I noticed that it was one of my brother’s most difficult sonatas. The broken arpeggios of the left hand moved fast beneath a testing, syncopated melody.

  Constanze turned the pages for me with excitement. I completed the final rondo with an exuberant cadenza, and grasped my sister-in-law’s hand.

  We spoke in unison. ‘It’s wonderful.’ We laughed and embraced. At my feet little Karl hugged my legs. Constanze’s spaniel hurried into the room and jumped into her lap. I regretted that we had never shared such a happy moment when my brother had been there to enjoy it.

  Constanze tinkled out a few notes of the sonata’s melody on the keyboard and said, ‘It’s as though Wolfgang left this piece to welcome you here. His way of saying hello to you.’

  ‘But I might never have seen it.’

  ‘Oh, I expect he knew you’d come.’

  I caught the dog’s ears and stroked them. He licked at my wrist. I read through the final bars of the sonata once more.

  When I reached the end, I noticed something that had escaped me in the thrill of playing the piece. A few lines scrawled in the margin. In Wolfgang’s hand.

  I bent closer and read them aloud. ‘‘She repents her blindness, as she is always penitent. At the keyboard her notes run riot like demons cast out. I will be with her as a brother in the halls of Paradise, at her side as always I’ve been, though not as my father intended.’’

  ‘It’s one of Wolfgang’s little riddles. What does it mean?’ Constanze scratched at the dog’s neck. ‘Do you remember the riddles he wrote for Carnival?’

  ‘Quite vividly.’ Those puzzles had been smutty, as was appropriate for that festival of drink, dance and lust. But this riddle disturbed me. The mention of repentance brought to mind the message Magdalena Hofdemel had left with my maid at the inn. Blindness and Paradise suggested Maria Theresia von Paradies, the brilliant pianist. So did the notes spilling from the keyboard like a riot. Yet surely the final reference – to his companion in Paradise, who wouldn’t be the one chosen by our father – was connected to Constanze. Papa had disapproved of her until the end.

  ‘Wolfgang was always too clever for me,’ Constanze said. ‘But he told me you understood his word games, Nannerl. Can you solve it?’

  I considered the puzzle’s mention of ‘a brother in the halls of Paradise’. Did that suggest the solution would be the name of a woman chosen to enter Wolfgang’s Grotto as a fellow Mason?

  Constanze nudged me. ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ll need to give this great thought,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I’ll work out the answer, sister.’

  I wondered if it had been for the riddle at its conclusion that the Prussian ambassador chose to buy this manuscript. No doubt Constanze was right – Wolfgang had set the puzzle for me. He had dedicated the sonata to his ‘most dearly beloved sister’ and left this message at its end as a signal or a guide.

  To what?

  I shivered as I considered that there may have been something of Wolfgang’s dangerous work that he knew would be left undone at his death. Had he decided that I’d be the one to complete it?

  ‘Well, keep thinking about it.’ Constanze stood. ‘I’m putting all my hopes in you to figure it out.’

  I felt a tug at my skirt. Karl crawled from under the piano. He shoved a white leather ball into my hand and ran through the door. Down the corridor, he took up position behind a triangle of skittles.

  ‘He hasn’t played with anyone since—’ Constanze broke off, her hand over her mouth.

  I wound up my shot. ‘Here it comes, Little Karl.’

  The ball bowled over the floorboards and into the nine-pins. It ricocheted into the air, and Karl caught it. One skittle remained standing. The boy knocked it over with his foot, laughing, as I cheered my success.

  The maid announced lunch. Constanze took my hand and drew me to the door.

  ‘Let’s get some food inside you. It’ll be cold in the church,’ she said.

  I watched Karl set up the skittles again. I wanted very much to stay and play with the child. It had been little more than a week since I left my village, but I missed even the arrogant smirks and indiscipline of my stepsons. Most of all I thought of my Leopold, who was almost the same age as Karl. ‘Church?’

  ‘After lunch, it’ll be time to go to the funeral Mass,’ Constanze said.

  I stared at her blankly.

  ‘For poor Gieseke.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I murmured. ‘Poor Gieseke.’

  Karl thrust the ball into my hand.

  29

  Beneath the angular medieval frescoes at the entrance to St Michael’s Church, Schikaneder recounted the story of Gieseke’s death for a handful of mourners. He fretted at the shoulder of his black frock coat, as though brushing away the blood that poured from the actor’s dangling corpse onto the Bird Man’s costume during the encores. With his eyes fixed on the altar, its sculptural angels tumbling to earth, his arm traced the dead man’s drop to the stage.

  Constanze called to him. He advanced toward her. When he saw that it was me who was arm in arm with my brother’s widow, he hesitated, but it was too late for him to return to his audience.

  ‘My dear Constanze,’ he said. ‘We are to sing some sections of Wolfgang’s Requiem today. For our friend Gieseke, who died during the performance of one of your husband’s most perfect works.’

  ‘It’s as it should be, Emanuel.’ Constanze’s eyes glistened in the candlelight.

  The impresario gave a brief bow to me. ‘Madame de Mozart.’

  I bent my knee. ‘Herr Schikaneder.’

  His hands folded around Constanze’s bony wrist. ‘I’m sure Wolfgang’s music would’ve soothed our dear Gieseke.’

  I believed it unlikely the murdered actor would have been calmed by any reminder of my brother, whose death haunted his final days. No doubt Wolfgang’s opera, sung in encores to the rapture of the audience, had been in Gieseke’s ears when he was killed at the theater.

  With another bow, Schikaneder went to take up his place in the choir.

  Constanze crossed herself and followed him up the aisle.

  I would have gone with her, but I was distracted by the sound of a heavy cough from the corner of the church. A woman knelt before a wooden crucifix in the side-chapel dedicated to St Nicholas. Her back was thin under her shawl. She shivered in the unheated church.

  I assumed she was a pauper off the streets. Or a girl of the lower classes who had been shamed by Gieseke and now lamented that he’d never restore her honor through marriage. Yet, as she rose, I noticed that the material of her dress was expensive.

  Stumbling, she reached out and grasped at the altar cloth. She dropped to her knees and, with her hand still tight around the embroidered silk, dragged the crucifix that stood upon it to the floor. She lay beside the cross trembling, her legs drawn up and her arms jerking in a spasm.

  I hurried to help her.

  Before I reached the step of the chapel a tiny, squat maid lifted the f
allen woman to her feet. She gave me a surly glance from under her thick eyebrows. I recognized her as the girl who worked for Mademoiselle von Paradies.

  The haughty voice of the blind pianist came from behind me, too loud for the echoing church, too forceful for a funeral. ‘Do you like the chapel?’

  I half-turned, my attention still held by the shaking woman who rested against the altar. Paradies’s eyes rotated like buttons in the sockets of a girl’s doll. ‘The chapel?’ I said. ‘It’s quite beautiful.’

  ‘It was paid for by a royal chef over four hundred years ago.’

  ‘A fine gesture.’

  ‘It was to thank God for his acquittal.’

  ‘He’d been on trial?’

  ‘For poisoning.’

  I would have sworn that the pianist’s eyeballs ceased for a moment their oscillations and held on me like the most penetrating of stares by eyes that could see. Her hand hooked through the air until it caught on my elbow. She pulled me toward the chapel.

  I crossed myself and dipped my knees. The woman who had fallen shivered now on a stool by the altar. Paradies reached out her free hand. With sudden gentleness she lifted the black veil from the woman’s face.

  Magdalena Hofdemel raised her chin. Her scars were raw against her pallid skin. Her eyelids fluttered, and she twitched her cheeks and brow.

  ‘Why are you praying in this chapel, little one?’ Paradies said to her. ‘Herr Gieseke’s service will be at the main altar.’ In clipped Italian, the pianist commanded her maid to bring a thicker wrap for her friend.

  ‘I’m awaiting my fate,’ Magdalena said. She scratched hard at the back of her wrist, as though she itched deep beneath the skin. ‘My dreadful fate.’ Her voice broke. It could no more hide her wounds than the weeping scars shining on her cheeks.

  She raised her eyes to the flat spandrels above the chapel’s arch. A fresco of The Last Judgment blazed there in red and rich blue. I pitied the girl and worried she might have given up on the divine mercy that would see her redeemed on that Last Day. I knelt beside her and touched her cheek. She flinched, but her gaze remained on the fresco.

  ‘What is it that afflicts you, my dear?’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t that obvious?’ Paradies said. ‘I haven’t the capacity to see the scars on her face, but I have touched them.’

  ‘I meant that she fell into a fit.’

  Paradies hissed me silent.

  The Italian maid draped a cloak of thick wool over Magdalena’s shoulders. She rubbed the hairs on her dark upper lip.

  Paradies snapped her fingers, and the maid was at her side. ‘Come and listen to Wolfgang’s music, Magdalena.’ She spoke with a softness I hadn’t heard from her before. Then her voice was hard again: ‘That man could even entertain the dead.’

  Magdalena covered her eyes with her hand. She made to draw down her veil, but I held her wrist and came close to her.

  ‘Listen to me,’ I whispered. ‘Since I visited you at your home, I’ve learned some of the circumstances surrounding Wolfgang’s death.’

  Tears ran through her fingers. She refused to look at me.

  My hand was wet with her crying. ‘Wolfgang’s death was something to do with – with things of which I can’t tell,’ I said. ‘Secret, dangerous things. But your husband didn’t kill him.’

  Her head shook. Tiny uncomprehending movements. Her eyes were reddened and brown and fearful.

  ‘He died as the result of a bigger conspiracy,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t your husband.’

  ‘My Franz,’ she murmured.

  ‘You came to my inn. You told my maid you wished to repent. You have nothing to repent of, do you understand?’ I kissed her cold hands and tasted her tears on my mouth. I made out the words ‘thank you’ on her lips, though they were too soft for me to hear.

  I left Magdalena in the pew beside Paradies and went toward the front of the church. In the aisle I stepped across a speckled flagstone. A bronze crest marked it as the entrance to the Pergen family crypt below the floor of the church. No doubt the Police Minister even has spies inside the graves of the Viennese, I thought.

  Slipping into the front row, I looked about for Baron Swieten. I couldn’t find him. I sat at Constanze’s side.

  Her sister Josefa hurried up the aisle. She kissed Constanze, bowed to me, and entered the choir where she was to sing the soprano part in the Requiem. The chorus of Schikaneder’s theater formed up on the altar, jostling the rough wooden box where Gieseke’s body lay. The soloists stepped into line with Josefa.

  As the woodwinds opened the introitus, Baron Swieten took the seat beside me. He was flushed and his mouth was tense. ‘Forgive my late arrival,’ he said.

  I inclined my head.

  ‘There are developments at the palace. I was engaged until the last moment.’

  ‘I thought it impossible you’d fail to attend the funeral Mass for an actor you applauded with such enthusiasm. You’re not that kind of man.’ I laid my fingers on the back of his wrist in reassurance.

  He blinked in surprise. He was restrained by the mood of the funeral, but his joy was so intense that I felt it smolder through my gloves where I touched him.

  Only one thing could have made us break the gaze between us. We turned to the choir, to Wolfgang’s music.

  God was in every note of my brother’s Requiem. He carved through the pretense with which we guard our souls. He revealed us in all our sin. I imagined poor Wolfgang laboring over this last great commission, a Mass for the Departed, even as he felt himself crossing into the realms of the dead.

  I trembled at the baleful confutatis maledictis, when the choir sang of the souls of sinners consigned to hellfire and begged to be among the blessed. I closed my eyes and prayed – for Wolfgang’s spirit, for my little lost daughter, for my mother and father, and for myself. But there was torment rather than salvation in the music. The singers sounded more like the desperate damned than those who were to be saved. My prayers were overpowered.

  I glanced toward Magdalena. She bent forward, her hands clasped before her veil. I hoped I had convinced her that her husband might not be condemned after all. He was innocent of Wolfgang’s murder. Then I understood why she had wept for him beneath the fresco of the Last Judgment. Even if he was no murderer, he had been a suicide, an unpardonable sinner. I crossed myself.

  At Magdalena’s side, Paradies moved her lips with the Latin of the choir. Her hand ran over the pew in front of her, as if improvising on a keyboard.

  I thought of Wolfgang’s riddle, scribbled at the end of his sonata. Did it refer to Paradies? He had written of sightlessness and of Paradise. But he also wrote that ‘She repents her blindness as she is always penitent.’ I had yet to see Paradies repent of anything.

  If he had intended admittance to his new Masonic lodge to be based on talent, Maria Theresia von Paradies was a musician second only perhaps to Wolfgang himself. No doubt he also sought a woman of determination. If the Princess in The Magic Flute had doubted herself, she’d never have made it. She won her place among the priests at the end of the opera, because of her absolute firmness. That was a quality Paradies possessed to a degree no less prodigious than her talent at the keyboard.

  When her sister sang of the eternal light shining on the saints, Constanze sobbed. I laid my arm across her meager back. The choir brought the Requiem to a close.

  Four porters in rough coats hoisted Gieseke’s coffin onto their shoulders. The body’s bony parts, perhaps the head, the elbows, the ankles, rattled against the unpolished wood. Like all peasants the porters still suffered the old terror of being buried alive. They hesitated, wanting to be sure that Gieseke hadn’t revived. Even if he were living I was sure he’d have been quiet in his casket until the earth closed over him. Fear had seeped like sweat through his pores. Death would have seemed the only safety and rest for him.

  I helped Constanze to the door of the church. Swieten took her other arm. The hearse rolled past the entrance, south toward St Marx Cemetery a
few leagues outside the city. Gieseke would rest near Wolfgang.

  Constanze wept against Schikaneder’s chest. Singers from the theater surrounded my sister-in-law. Though the service had been for Gieseke, Wolfgang’s music had drawn Constanze’s grief once more to their attention. Now that the body was on its way to the grave, everyone came to the little woman in black with a consoling hug, as though she were the widow of all the corpses in Vienna.

  The music had finished, but I continued to hear it. I turned back into the church to catch its last echoes.

  The pews were empty. Most of the candles had been snuffed. I passed once more over the Pergen family tomb. The slab moved with a gentle tilt beneath my foot. I hurried onto the firmer flagstones around it.

  The chatter of the opera singers receded in the square outside. They’d take Constanze home, or perhaps to an inn. I had no wish to go with them. Within the silence of the church, I detected the beautiful strains of Wolfgang’s Requiem. It was as if the angels behind the altar chanted it in a register audible only to me.

  A voice came through the church. I listened until it separated from the angels. It was a woman singing. I tracked it toward the north transept. She sang a melody from Wolfgang’s Requiem.

  I came to a worn stone staircase. From below, the woman sang the Domine Jesu Christe: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of hell and the deep pit.’

  From a niche beside the stairs I took a candle and lit it on the flame of an oil lamp. I followed the voice down into the dark.

  30

  ‘Let them not fall into darkness.’

  The voice wasn’t quite a soprano and the singer made no attempt at polish. She was all expression, as though her emotion and faith gave birth to the music that had, in fact, come from the pen of my dying brother.

  ‘The holy standard bearer, Michael, brings them back into the holy light,’ she sang.

  My candle flickered in a draught at the bottom of the stairs. I cupped my hand about it and stepped into a long, vaulted crypt.