Vienna Nocturne

by Vivien Shotwell

  “Will you play?” Mozart asked Anna. He was just the same. It was all she could do not to cry.

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Why do you have a table, then?”

  “I had it brought for you.”

  He tilted his head. “For me? You should do better things with your money.”

  “It’s my birthday. I can do anything I like.”

  He looked at her and shook his head. She sighed, took his arm, and leaned against him. She felt him relax. “You,” he murmured, “can always do what you like.”

  “Not always. Not now.”

  “We must teach you billiards.”

  “Billiards is not a game for ladies. I couldn’t hold the stick properly. My bodice is too tight. I couldn’t raise my arms. And when I bent over everyone would be scandalized.”

  “Then we should play when we’re all alone and you’re able to move in comfort.”

  “If you’d show me how.”

  “I think you’d be a fine student.”

  “We’ll see each other soon,” she said. “It won’t be long—a year, no more. Stephen and I will bring you to London. Once I’m there it will be so simple to gain influence and find someone to invite you. They have so much thirst and they’ve never heard anyone like you. They’re not so stodgy as the Viennese. Everything will work out for the best. We’ll revive Figaro before I leave. Or you’ll find another soprano.”

  “Another soprano will make me change the last aria.”

  She smiled. “That’s good. I don’t want anyone else singing it.”

  He shook his head, wincing. “I’ll miss you. I hadn’t realized how much.”

  The little girl playing Cupid came up to them on her pony, led by Lidia. The pony had a wreath of hothouse flowers around its neck. The little girl listed complacently from side to side, clutching the pommel of the saddle. Goose-feather wings were fastened to her dress and a gold ribbon bound back her curls. A bow and arrow bumped gently at her side.

  “Would you like a party favor?” she asked Mozart in a loud voice. He smiled and said he’d like one very much.

  “My first role,” Anna explained, “was Cupid.”

  “Were you as young as this little one? She’s not much older than my Karl.”

  “I was thirteen—a good deal older. I felt already grown.”

  Lidia helped the child pick out the favor that had been chosen for Mozart, a ceramic whistle in the shape of a bird. “Listen to that,” he exclaimed, delighted, after he opened the box and blew upon the toy. “Wolfgang Mozart whistles at last!” It was a long-standing joke between him and Anna that he could not whistle. He bent down to the little girl and thanked her warmly.

  “You’re welcome, sir,” said the girl, who had been well trained. She proceeded along to the next guests.

  “Were you on a pony, too?” Mozart asked Anna.

  “Oh no, but the child insisted. We should never have convinced her, otherwise. I want to take her with me. She could order everyone about.”

  “When I was ten I was in Paris,” he said, watching the child. “I went back later with my mother and she died, so I can’t think of it without sadness. But I’ve never seen a more beautiful city. You must stop there on your way home. You belong in such a place.”

  “A sad one?”

  “No, a beautiful one.”

  Da Ponte came up to them. “My dear Mozart,” he said, “did our muse tell you she’s leaving us? I mean to follow her. Without Mademoiselle Storace, I don’t know how I’m supposed to live.”

  “She did tell me,” Mozart said. He spread his hands. “I’m completely distraught.”

  “I’ll see you again,” Anna cried. “You act as if I’m joining a convent.”

  “I can’t imagine you in a convent,” said Da Ponte. “I have a very particular idea of nuns and you are nothing like them. And I am an ordained priest.”

  “An impious one.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “What are they like, then, your nuns?”

  “Oh—rude, stiff, shy.”

  “I’m rude!” Anna exclaimed. She appealed to Mozart, “Am I not rude?”

  “Extremely,” he said.

  “But why aren’t you dancing?” asked Da Ponte.

  She looked at Mozart. “No one has asked me.”

  “May I?” Da Ponte said, and offered his arm. “I’m almost as good a dancer as I am a poet.” He looked down at her fondly. “And I shan’t have many more chances to dance with you.”

  She did not wish to leave the billiards table, but she could not refuse him, and perhaps it would be better not to be seen too much in Mozart’s company. She and Da Ponte danced. Vincente Martín y Soler, the new Spanish composer, was dancing the same set, and Anna took a turn in his arms. “Ah, my Lilla,” he said, “so fresh you are. I feel I’m breathing new air.”

  “Rake,” Anna called to him as she turned herself round. Martín y Soler had arrived in the city last spring. He beguiled everyone he met. Already he was known in Vienna as a god of melody. Lilla was Anna’s role in his new opera, A Rare Thing, which was to premiere this month. Da Ponte had written a libretto for Martín with a plot quite like Figaro’s, but simpler and shorter, to suit the ear-catching, guileless melodies, derived from Spanish folk music, at which Martín so excelled.

  As she danced she was aware of Mozart watching her from the billiards table. All she had desired this day was to feel happy and at ease, and to make her friends feel the same. To that end she had brought these people here; to that end gone to such extravagant expense. But she had failed—failed utterly.

  A Rare Thing was the most successful opera in living memory. If Anna had not been lauded before, she was now. Women blushed in her presence, and diligently emulated Lilla’s dress, coiffure, and manner of moving. Men stopped her on the street to declare their adoration. Every night four hundred hopeful listeners were shut out on the street, disappointed for tickets. And those were the ones who could afford tickets. It became difficult to enter or leave the theater for the throngs gathered around it. The music from the opera spread to every rank. On every corner, in houses rich and poor, at gatherings crass and fashionable, the air was filled with the Spaniard’s tuneful melodies.

  There was nothing difficult, no uncertainty or fear. A feeling of rightness had been on the cast almost from the beginning. The labor was hidden, the gears basted in silk, and no effort was required, even of the most easily distracted listeners, to apprehend the opera’s beauty. When Anna sang Martín’s melodies, the heart swelled and reposed. Da Ponte’s libretto amused the spirit but did not attempt to challenge it. The course of the action was predictable even in its surprises, and therefore it, too, was right and good. The audience left the theater reassured in the goodness and virtue of the heroine, Lilla, and in her ultimate triumph. Melodies from the opera came into their heads unbidden, at odd moments, and made them feel again that same reassurance and pleasure. A Rare Thing became a point of commonality. One talked of it over dinner, read references to it in papers, looked forward to the chance to hear it again, as many times as was possible, in order to relive and ingrain the same sweet first impressions: the feeling of witnessing, here, with all these collected contemporaries, a great event.

  There could be no more talk now of reviving Mozart’s Figaro before Lent. Anna did not see Mozart after the opening, though she had known he was there. The baby boy born to him and Constanze in October had died two days ago, on November 15; he was disinclined to mingle socially. Anna imagined him sitting perfectly still, watching this great setback unfold before him at the hands of his friends. He sent a note later to say that he had enjoyed her performance and that some of the melodies had been very pretty.

  The Emperor’s Chocolate

  Joseph II received Anna in the study where he breakfasted, looking drawn and irritable. “What’s this?” he asked, brandishing her letter. “You’re resigning at the moment of your greatest success? In the middle of the most celebrated run any
one has ever known?”

  Tossing his head he looked at Anna, it seemed to her, with bitter contempt. “Now I know,” he said, “how your husband felt.”

  Anna fixed her eyes on the pattern of his desk, red and fawn and black, inlaid to resemble a starburst. “My brother has arranged a contract for us both in London. I’ve been too long from my home.”

  “Your home!” exclaimed the emperor. “You come here spouting this nationalist claptrap to me? Do you think I’ve nothing better to do than listen to my star soprano express her ego? What, do you want me to increase your pay, is that what it is?”

  “My brother needs me with him in London,” Anna said. “I can make his career.”

  “If you leave,” the emperor said, “you’ll never work in any of my cities again—not in my entire empire. You’ll be shunned in France, Burgundy, Italy, anywhere I have influence. Do you have any idea how many children my mother had? My brothers and sisters rule the world. I don’t take these things lightly. Neither will they.”

  He had gone red in the cheeks; the rest of his complexion was white as lilies.

  “I’ll work in England,” Anna said.

  “Never to return? Never to leave? What madness is this? All for your brother? What’s he done for you that an emperor cannot?”

  Anna looked away. No longer was she the unstrung girl who had sipped the emperor’s chocolate. She did not care what he thought. She would not live anymore in Vienna. “Loved me—cared for me.”

  “I dispute that,” cried Joseph, as if he had just witnessed foul play in a game of whist. He grasped her wrists and pulled her toward him. “What of your debts to me?”

  “Debts, Your Excellency?”

  “Your husband banished, your brother given an opera to botch. Two operas! He’s putting on another one! In my theater!”

  “It wasn’t my brother—that was all my fault.”

  Joseph bent his face to hers. She leaned away. “I see,” he said abruptly, releasing her. “So you owe a debt to both of us now, to your brother and me, and blood holds more sway than the imminent disfavor of one of the noblest and most important men in the world, the most liberal and generous of patrons to you and your profession as you’re ever likely to find. I see.”

  Anna’s smile was small. “There are times,” she said carefully, “when love holds more power than reason.”

  “Rubbish,” Joseph said. He fished in his pocket and came up with nothing. “Love is but lust.”

  She looked at him steadily and then dropped a slight curtsy. “Forgive me, Your Excellency. Nothing you can say will make me change my mind.”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” the emperor exclaimed, banging open a drawer. “You’re the same as everyone. You’re just waiting for me to give in.”

  “Give in, sir?”

  “Proposition you. Entreat, beg you to stay. Tell you I’ll pay you more, that I’ll expect nothing in return, not a gesture, not a look—not a foot, a toe, extended in a pink slipper for me to hold in my hands and kiss.”

  As he spoke he banged through all the drawers in his desk, opening them with an agitation Anna had rarely seen him display, going over their contents with eyes and hand and slamming them shut again.

  Anna took a small step back. “I’m waiting for nothing, Your Excellency.” Her slippers today were yellow and cream. They had almost never been pink, not since Figaro.

  “That’s what you’d like me to think,” said the emperor, glancing at her. He rang the bell on his desk and a servant entered. “Gregor,” he said tersely, “why do I find myself left without chocolate? Has there been some crisis of state? A revolution? Has the sky fallen in? Have we gone bankrupt?”

  Gregor blanched and muttered something about killing himself and hurried outside.

  “Louse!” Joseph called after him. He leveled his gaze at Anna. “Well. I can’t pay you any more. You’re already costing me too much. I could hire forty soldiers for two years on your salary. Frankly I’d have been just as happy to get rid of you, during your absence, but that I’d thought it would smack of cruelty and make me look bad to the people. And then I found myself, oddly”—his voice lowered a little—“missing you. I was as glad as any of my dimmest subjects to have you back. And now this—betrayal! Too much!”

  This last was almost shouted. During the long pause that followed, Gregor returned with a tray piled with chocolates and left again. The emperor stuffed a few into his mouth. “Well?” he demanded.

  Only John Fisher shouted at her like that. “I am in love,” Anna said in a choked, angry voice, “with someone who can’t have me. If I don’t leave your city I’ll kill myself.”

  The emperor stared at her, incredulous. “My dear girl. Life is not an opera. Wait a few months and it’ll all be over.”

  “I’ve already waited.”

  “If you go now I’ll never have you back. You think I shall but I shan’t. I never forget a betrayal.”

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t care.”

  He snorted and waved a hand. “Fine. Good riddance. Whoever this fellow is—damn his eyes.”

  Vienna Nocturne

  In December, a cold, bright day, with two and a half months remaining before Anna’s departure from Vienna, Mozart called on her, on her afternoon off. He had ridden his horse and his nose and cheeks were bright with chill.

  Anna had been reading in her room. Stephen was out with Da Ponte and her mother was at Mass.

  They embraced, just for a moment, though they’d promised each other not to, and then drew apart. He was weary and preoccupied. He’d come to tell her that the Czechs wanted to put on his opera in Prague, in January, and that he would go there to direct it and to concertize. The Czechs adored him.

  “Our Figaro?” she asked.

  “I could hardly have wished for better luck. To get away for a bit.” He paced in and out of a low band of winter light. The room was warm with the fire. “Everywhere I go I hear A Rare Thing. My own wife hums it in her sleep.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I’ll be back for Lent and Carnival—to send you off. Constanze goes with me.”

  “Oh,” she said with a slight gasp. She felt an ache in her chest, deep and low, as though there were a hot coal resting lightly and inexorably against her naked heart. “Then we’ve no more time.”

  He placed his fingers on the ledge of the window, where it was cooler. His reflection looked back at him, broken by hoarfrost and strips of lead.

  “It wasn’t when I first saw you that I lost myself to you,” he said. “It wasn’t when I kissed you in the garden.” He swallowed. “It was when you were so ill and came down to me. I could’ve whispered you away on the air. It was all I could do to just sit there—if I’d been any kind of man I’d have cradled you.”

  She smiled gently, remembering. “So you played.”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat and gave a quick shrug. “You know I don’t think I’ve ever played with more intent. Only concentrating on you, on the cradling. The way you listened.”

  “I couldn’t help it.” She added, wryly, “I did try.”

  With a restless movement he went to sit at the card table. The clock chimed. “When I was a little boy in Holland,” he said in a low voice, “my sister and I were very sick. I was delirious—had such strange fantasies that even when I think of them now, they make me shiver. I knew I was dying. Knew from the way they talked around me. I was angry with myself. I thought I’d failed. There we were, in the middle of our tour, and it was so important I be well, or all the concerts would be canceled, all the visits, all the money.” He rubbed his eyes. “I remember looking at my arms and hands all covered in spots and wondering if I’d lose the use of them. Then I’d make no more music, unless I played with my nose or something. And it was my fault.”

  He opened the backgammon board and fiddled with the pieces, red and black, which clacked and sifted like stones, placing them in rows of alternating colors, stacking them in threes and fours, ro
lling them from hand to hand. “Then I lived. My sister lived, as well. We had some scars—here, on the cheeks, and hands—to remind us. Sometimes I look at these on my hands and forget why they’re there. They’ve faded since I was such a little boy. I was only a few years older than my Karl. Six, seven? But I felt like a man.” He smiled, stacking the pieces higher. She sat beside him and put her cheek on his shoulder, breathing the sweet, warm scent of his body. He had been smoking his pipe. She loved to watch his hands. They were always in motion, always fiddling with something or other. The scars were faint. “I suppose that’s what makes me stubborn. Your Italian friends call me arrogant. My father told everyone I had a gift from God. There was always that expectation. Even on the commode. I had to produce these God-given shits.”

  Anna laughed. He took up one of her hands, his thumbs meeting at the joint of her wrist, his fingers pressing gently against the curve of her palm. “Do you know,” he remarked, smiling, “when you come into a room, I always feel you bring the sunshine. Even when you weren’t well, I felt that. It’s like that when you’re on the stage. I think we watch you for that. We bare our breasts to you and you lay on us your warmth and light.”

  She stirred. “I couldn’t do anything without your music.”

  He squeezed her hand. “My starling died,” he said. “Did I tell you? I was unaccountably broken up about it. I wrote him a funerary poem. I’ll send it to you. Such a winter this is—our poor baby, you know.” He looked toward the window, unblinking, and then shook his head. “I’m glad to be going to Prague. The air’s no warmer in Prague, but I think the people are.”

  “And then you’ll come to London,” she said. She was crying again.

  He sat up and made a show of kissing the tears away. “I had an idea,” he said, “that I could write an aria for your farewell concert. I have just the text. A rondo I set for my Idomeneo last year.”

  She had not been to that concert, a private revival of his Munich opera. “A proper rondo?” she asked. She took his cue and tried to perk up, tried not to think how long he would be gone; how long it would be, after he came back, before she saw him again.