“I don’t know. What have I done? Is what we had over truly? I thought, If I wanted to enough, I could go back. And today I said, ‘I want to go back; I want to begin again, and he’ll be waiting for me.’ Time’s such an odd thing, an unreasonable thing. How can you say, ‘Be happy, Aloysia!’ when you withhold happiness from me? Tell me this one thing, let me smile today: Will you meet with me when you are married?”
“I’ll try to be your friend. More I can’t do, won’tdo. I saw your husband last week, and he said he’d like to paint me. Aloysia, do you know what you seek? You couldn’t have found it with me.” He reached for the door. “Look, I must go now.” Pushing open the door to the gathering room, he was greeted with the smell of paint and wood, and the perfume of dozens of long white chandelier candles. Then he returned to his orchestral parts.
It was Johann Schantz, coming to replace a string in the theater fortepiano, who glimpsed Aloysia running from the theater in tears, her silk sash in her hand; she stopped and looked at him haughtily. He mentioned the scene to Thorwart, who told it to his wife; she, in turn, walked over to the boardinghouse near Peterskirche and reported that Aloysia Lange had been to see Mozart privately, that they had been closeted together for some time, and that no banging on the door could bring them out. Constanze came up from the kitchen as Maria Caecilia and Madame Thorwart were speaking. She, too, had been to the thehe had gone away to speak privately with the beautiful singer and would not come out when they called.
To Constanze the coming of autumn was the most beautiful time of the year, with the stone buildings glowing in the late afternoon sun and the green trees drooping toward the washed cobbles. Sometimes when you turned a street corner you felt the faintest tinge of cooler weather, or saw a single tree whose leaf edges were drying. Everything was rich, heavy, and warm. The lemonade stands were crowded. Yet, she thought as she walked between Josefa and Sophie toward the theater for the performance, all my life from now on there will also be a terrible sadness for me in this time.
She understood that even with all the tenderness between her and the young composer, in his mind she had been and always would be a mere substitute for Aloysia. She had spent much of the last hours grieving alone in the sewing room and had decided that she would bid him good-bye with as much dignity as possible. She would hear the opera with whose composing she would always feel deeply connected, and she would send him word tomorrow. She would not make any kind of scene. She respected him for his hard work; she loved him for it. She was her father’s daughter.
Dozens of horses and carriages were gathered before the theater, though the royal parties had not yet arrived. Constanze walked up the steps with her two sisters, and they found their places on the gilt and red-velvet-covered chairs to the left of the stage. The house was half full already with perfumed men and women, their hair powdered and jewels glistening, who came to see the first performance of the new work in the presence of the Russian Grand Duke and the Emperor himself. They could hear musicians tuning.
Constanze closed her eyes.
With the rustling of fabric and the scraping of chairs, the entire audience stood and bowed deeply toward the imperial box. The Emperor and his guests seated themselves and turned to the stage. Mozart entered in his white wig to take his place at the fortepiano. Constanze leaned forward. He’s tired, she thought, but in a moment anger consumed her sympathy. The overture began, and the singers came onstage.
She had heard a great deal of Die Entführung aus dem Serail before, but only in pieces: arias, duets, choruses accompanied passionately on the fortepiano, the sound flowing down the steps from his rooms and pouring from his open window, accompanied by his light tenor. Now the full glory of orchestra with horns and timpani and rich singers swept over her. She clutched her fan and leaned forward still more.
The heroine and her maid had fallen to pirates and been sold to the Pasha, and their faithful lovers, a nobleman and his