Mozart's Last Aria

by Matt Rees

  The air was chilly and dusty dry. Low, narrow containers crowded the floor. I thought to call a greeting, but I didn’t wish to interrupt the music.

  ‘We offer sacrifice and prayers of praise to thee, O Lord.’

  I touched the nearest of the containers. Dust and metal, a hinge. I put down my candle to lift the lid of the box. Reaching inside, my palm rested on something dry and stiff. I took the candle in my other hand and held it close.

  A face. Empty eyes and a lipless grin.

  I stumbled backward, my palm upright before me as though to fend off the corpse should it rise from its casket.

  But the body lay still. The remnants of a woman’s wig encased the head, stiff and russet like autumn leaves. Her hands were crossed on her chest in lace gloves.

  I tripped over an uneven flagstone and reached out to steady myself. The wall spread its cold along my arm. Beside my hand in the shape of a cross were two long thigh bones.

  I spun away. My shin struck the nearest coffin. It rocked on the timber blocks that elevated it from the floor in case of a flood. Then it tipped against the next one. The caskets tumbled along the row. As they fell, the bones within snapped with a sound like running feet in summer undergrowth.

  The singing sounded further from me now. ‘Let them pass, O Master, from death to the life you promised to Abraham and his offspring.’

  I hurried down the row of coffins, trying to halt their fall. My head struck a low span in the stone vault and I dropped back into a niche in the wall. Pain ringed my brain and bore down on it.

  I opened my eyes. The niche was stacked high with pelvic bones. The first dead of the crypt, moved aside to make room for new corpses. I screamed with all my terror of death.

  My shriek subsided into short breaths.

  Silence beneath the church.

  The coffins had come to rest. Only the dust that choked the air showed they had been disturbed.

  The singing, too, had ended.

  I held my candle before me, my arm locked as if I might extend it far into the darkness to light up the whole crypt. I turned to my right and left, staring and blind.

  A footstep sounded, not close by. I spun toward it, but heard nothing more.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I called.

  Another step echoed through the vault. In my panic, I thought that a corpse, liberated from its coffin, had risen. I imagined it stumbling through the dark with limbs unaccustomed to walking, like a tottering baby.

  The steps came closer.

  I put the corpses out of my mind. I had been attacked only two days before. I had living, murderous men to fear, before I faced the spirits of the vengeful dead.

  My arm weakened. I lowered the candle.

  Measured and slow, the steps seemed still some way off.

  Then she was before me.

  ‘You’d do better without that pathetic little light,’ she said.

  I started, and lifted the candle once more. Paradies licked her thick lips and let her mouth hang open.

  I glanced at the candle and frowned.

  ‘I can smell the burning tallow,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re wondering.’

  I stammered, ‘I heard you singing. I couldn’t see—’

  ‘Down here you’re as blind as I am.’ She swept past me and extinguished the flame of my candle with her thumb and forefinger.

  I cried out. She grabbed my wrist and twisted it so that the useless stub of the candle dropped to the floor. She wrenched at my arm.

  ‘Come with me, damn it,’ she said.

  I blundered along behind her. My knees struck the sharp corners of the coffins. I tripped over unseen tools, left against the wall by workmen. She hauled me deeper into the crypt.

  ‘Before they built the graveyards outside the walls of the city, the wealthy were buried right beneath the churches,’ she said. ‘That’s who you see around you. Hundreds of nobles and leading citizens, dried out and preserved by the air down here.’

  ‘It was as if the woman inside the coffin was screaming at me.’

  Paradies clicked her tongue. ‘The burial workers tie up the jaws of the dead before they put them in the coffins. If you thought you saw one screaming, it was only that the string around her head had slipped and her mouth had dropped open.’

  She thrust my hand downward. She ran it along a leathery surface. Even in the dark I knew it was the skin of one of the corpses. I struggled, but she was stronger. ‘Feel that? There?’ she said. She rubbed my palm over the long bone of the thigh.

  ‘It curves. It isn’t straight,’ I said.

  ‘Broken, but badly set. This one must’ve been thin and malnourished, even though she surely would’ve been rich to be buried down here.’

  My fingers explored the brittle leg, until I realized that Paradies no longer held me there. I pulled away.

  ‘Now everyone but the Emperor’s family goes to a common grave. The new burial laws. You can have as many masses said for you as you’re prepared to pay for, but you’ll still be interred next to a poor man.’

  My breath shivered through my teeth.

  ‘Don’t be squeamish. Poor old Gieseke would be pleased to be buried in a cemetery where no distinction is made by rank. Wolfgang, too,’ she said. ‘That’s what the Masons want, isn’t it? Equality. A pity they have to die to get it.’

  She took me by the shoulder and led me in a new direction. ‘They stopped putting bodies down here a decade ago, but I still come. I know them all from the inscriptions on the metal plates of their coffins. From the touch of their fingers, the bones of their cheeks and foreheads.’

  We moved fast. The wall was on our right. I thought I was beginning to see things, dark against darker. I wondered if that was how the world appeared to the blind woman who rushed me through the crypt.

  She halted. I stubbed my foot against a step.

  ‘You’ll find a lantern down to your left,’ she said.

  I lifted a small glowing oil lamp and flipped back the guard. It cast a long shaft of yellow light. The room, which had become somehow clear to me in the dark, receded. I saw only the single coffin before us.

  ‘Metastasio,’ Paradies said.

  I directed the lamp toward her. Perspiration stood out on her upper lip. She must have detected something of the lamp’s glow, because she gestured impatiently for me to turn it back on the coffin.

  It was a tall pine casket painted with lutes and skulls garlanded with olive branches. At its side, there stood a copper urn. ‘The Imperial Poet?’ I thought of the expensive edition of the Italian’s poetry presented to Wolfgang by the Milanese count.

  ‘Fifty years as court poet. Wrote the texts of a few dozen operas, which were set to music by countless composers, including your brother. And now there he is – a gutted corpse.’

  ‘Gutted?’

  ‘In the urn beside his casket, you’d find the heart that was the source of his poetry and the tongue that declaimed it. A few other organs, too.’

  ‘A great genius,’ I said.

  ‘Now his guts are in a fancy bucket.’

  I gave her a sharp look. She flicked her wrist in dismissal, as though she had seen me.

  ‘What’ve you been doing since you came to Vienna?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve had some business to conduct.’

  She sneered. ‘Ridiculous woman.’

  ‘I want to know who killed my brother,’ I said.

  My words came back at me off the vaulted ceilings. I had spoken louder than I expected.

  Paradies sucked in her cheeks. ‘Do you want your innards in a pot, too?’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘Dear, I became blind when I was three. For a while I was bitter about it. Then I understood. In that time I’d seen enough of this dreadful world for it to live before my eyes forever. Without the distraction of sight, I see things as they truly are.’ She spoke through tight, emphatic lips. ‘I cared too much about your brother to let you go the way of the corpses down here.
You know what you should do? Live with Wolfgang. Don’t die with him.’

  Her stare was ferocious. I wondered how close Paradies had been to Wolfgang.

  ‘Why am I in danger?’ I said. ‘Is it the Grotto?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Grotto. The Masonic lodge he was founding. It was you he intended to make its first woman member. I’m sure of it. But perhaps you don’t want anyone to find out about it. Because of the Emperor’s restrictions on the Order.’

  Paradies laughed. ‘If that was Wolfgang’s intention, I’d have turned him down.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ve made my own way in the world. In spite of my blindness. In spite of being a woman. I’ve supported myself by working as a musician. I’ve toured London and Paris, earned big commissions. If I seem scornful of you, it’s because you had a talent at least equal to mine but you never broke free.’

  ‘I had to look after my father.’

  ‘True, I was never encumbered by anyone as domineering as that old bastard.’

  ‘Madame.’ I stamped my foot.

  ‘I’m not genteel enough for you? You’d prefer me to say it in French, perhaps? Your father tried to limit even Wolfgang’s career, because he wanted to be taken care of in his old age. Your brother barely made his escape. You didn’t stand a chance.’

  I leaned against the wall. It was cold on my neck.

  ‘Men destroy women. They refuse to acknowledge our talents. They ruin our bodies and our health with their midnight attentions and the constant pregnancies they bring. I avoided such misery. That’s why I’ve been able to have a successful career. I never sought the aid of any man in my success, because such support comes at the price almost of one’s life,’ Paradies said. ‘No man ever held me back, either. Masonry? I need no Brotherhood.’

  ‘What of friendship?’

  She waved her hand. ‘I’m blind. I’m accustomed to being alone, even when I’m surrounded by a crowd. That’s why I come to this crypt. In the church up there, death is a show. A Requiem by Maestro Mozart, a fine send-off. Down here I see better than anyone else. This is the reality of our lives – each shut up in our coffins, brittle and powerless. Music fills me with beauty, and I don’t care if people recoil from my spinning eyeballs. The dead don’t judge me the way living people do.’

  She dropped her chin. I sensed the isolation that led her to prefer such terrifying company.

  ‘I have to go. I’m leaving for Berlin.’ Paradies seemed to debate whether to say something more.

  I held my breath and waited.

  ‘The Prussian ambassador hired me to perform some pieces by Wolfgang. One of them, he says, is previously unknown. He has acquired it from the widow Mozart,’ she said.

  Her powdered face twitched with indecision. Then she seemed to relax. ‘I was at the ambassador’s residence today. He gave me the commission and ordered me to depart for Berlin as soon as possible.’

  ‘I know the new piece. I played it myself this lunchtime.’

  ‘While I was there, someone else came into the room. He blurted out the words, “Pergen knows”.’

  I would have spoken, but Paradies raised her hand for silence.

  ‘The ambassador and the newcomer became still, as though perhaps by a gesture or a look the Prussian had signaled that he wasn’t alone. There was something nervous and secretive in their quiet. I knew it was my presence that halted them. Then they remembered that I couldn’t see them, and I sensed their tension release. The ambassador rose and went to the door. The visitor whispered a few words to him. He said, “I can’t go on.” The ambassador told him to wait in another room. He didn’t ask him; he ordered him rather forcefully. Then he dismissed me, with payment in advance for my journey.’

  I frowned. ‘Pergen knows? Can’t go on? What does it mean?’

  ‘People behave as if I’m deaf as well as blind,’ she said. ‘They think that if they whisper I won’t know who they are. But I recognized the voice quite clearly. I teach piano to his wife and I’ve played at his mother-in-law’s salon many times.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Prince Lichnowsky.’

  At the home of the man who had told me the Prince was a scoundrel? What was Lichnowsky’s connection to the Prussian ambassador? And what did he believe Pergen knew?

  Paradies reached out her hand. I caught it in my own. ‘You have to be careful, Nannerl. Wolfgang cherished you to the very end. For his sake, take care.’

  Paradies touched my cheek. My tears fell on her hand. She led me to the steps of the crypt and pushed me up ahead of her.

  In the transept of the church, the gray evening light struggled through the windows.

  ‘Wolfgang wrote a riddle,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t about you...?’

  ‘I’m no good with riddles. I’m blind. I detest anything that makes it harder to see the truth.’

  In the first pew of the church, the Italian maid stood up. She faced the altar, crossed herself, and came to take the blind woman’s arm.

  When the door creaked shut behind them, I felt a draught against my back. It seemed to rise from the entrance to the crypt. I hurried down the aisle and out into the growing darkness.

  31

  All Vienna seemed as lifeless as the crypt beneath St Michael’s Church, as I went through the covered way before the Spanish Riding School. The Lipizzaners craned out of their stalls, their long heads gray and ghostly in the twilight. Market women stumbled home, catatonic with fatigue at the day’s end. The air was still and freezing.

  The fire blazed in the tall hearth at the porters’ station of the Imperial Library. I hurried to the head of the stairs and crossed the hall to Baron Swieten’s chambers.

  The Baron rose from his dining table. He pulled a napkin from his neck and tightened the belt of his green silk chamber robe over his breeches. He took both my hands and brushed my knuckles with his lips. Only then did I realize that he might misinterpret my returning alone to him, the day after he had hinted at love.

  He gestured toward the table. ‘Will you join me? I’m so happy you came. I lost you in the crowd, after the funeral Mass. I’m having uccellini. It was one of—’

  He hesitated, staring at the platter beside his candlestick. A sage leaf protruded from a roll of veal. Twisted within it, a spiral of prosciutto was like a wound in the pale meat.

  ‘One of Wolfgang’s favorites,’ I said.

  He touched his thumb to his lip.

  I glanced at the door. A page stood beside it with his eyes averted.

  ‘That’ll be all,’ the Baron said.

  The page clicked his heels and left the room.

  ‘My dear Baron,’ I said, ‘fear has brought me to you.’

  Not love? I saw the question run across his eyes as though it had been inscribed there. I couldn’t be sure if my answer was written as clearly, but I read in his face the response he found. The light that had illuminated him when I entered his chambers faded. No, not love.

  I told him what I had learned of the Prussian connection to Wolfgang’s Grotto, and that the King in Berlin tried to use my brother to infiltrate Viennese society.

  ‘I fear someone may have taken Wolfgang for a spy,’ I said.

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘But if such activities were discovered, who would have – who would have punished him? Count Pergen, whose job is to eliminate foreign agents? Or the King of Prussia, covering his tracks?’

  He led me to his couch. When he sat beside me, he brought the scent of jasmine. I remembered the perfume on his handkerchief when I had dried my tears of joy at the conclusion of The Magic Flute. A log dropped in the fire, and I started.

  ‘This information is very important, madame,’ he said.

  ‘Your Grace, it seems to me that it’s also very dangerous.’

  He grinned. ‘Nothing at the Imperial Court is important unless it’s dangerous, too. That’s the nature of palaces.’

  ‘Then I ought to cha
nge my negative opinion of the obscurity in which I’ve lived these last years at St Gilgen. At least there’s no danger there.’

  ‘One risks avalanches in your mountain village, and an unnoticed death. But, in a palace, when one takes a chance, it’s like a daring throw at dice for the richest pot in the casino.’

  He stood and paced the floor, slow ruminative footsteps, each making two clear connections on the floorboards, toe following heel. ‘And the pot, madame, is Austria. The future of its freedoms. If we cast a winning throw, we may save the Emperor’s subjects from the oppression of Count Pergen. We may grant them the liberty to think and speak as they wish. To inquire into the deep truths of new sciences.’

  I sensed it might be me who would rattle in the Baron’s hands and tumble across the gaming table at the mercy of chance. ‘How?’

  ‘Our Emperor Leopold trusts Pergen only so far.’

  Swieten tapped his forefinger on the medal adorning his jacket, the red and gold Knight Commander’s Cross of the Order of St Stephen. ‘In my capacity as Imperial Librarian and head of Censorship, I allow limited freedoms to publishers of books and pamphlets. I adjust those limits all the time.’

  ‘On what basis?’

  ‘My latest discussions with the Emperor. I carry out his politics as much as my own beliefs will permit. The same is true of Pergen. He’s allowed to run his network of spies, to arrest dissenters and to punish them. But he mustn’t overstep the bounds of what Emperor Leopold considers civilized.’

  ‘Has he ever done so?’

  The Baron sat on the arm of the couch. ‘The Emperor reprimanded Pergen earlier this year. A publisher had distributed some pamphlets critical of the government. Pergen engineered the absolute ruin of the poor man’s business. But he had gone too far. The Emperor forced him to rehabilitate the bankrupt fellow. What if he was proven to have done something that couldn’t be withdrawn?’

  The dice were in the Baron’s hands. The throw was coming. ‘Murder,’ I murmured.

  ‘Exactly. If the Emperor could be presented with proof that Pergen’s agents murdered a prominent figure like Wolfgang, it’d force the Emperor to dispose of his Police Minister.’