Marrying Mozart - By Stephanie Cowell Page 0,122
at both of them, tears streaming down her cheeks. “And now I’ve cried myself into ugliness; he won’t want me when he sees me.”
Sophie held the wedding dress carefully folded over her arms like an offering. “Let me bathe your eyes,” she said. “All women feel this way just before they marry; everyone says it, not that I have any personal knowledge. Of course you want to marry him. Stop crying, for heaven’s sake.”
“But if it’s horrible and wretched, I still have both of you. We could come back here as we once were, couldn’t we? Couldn’t we?”
“Yes, my love,” Josefa replied. “We could, but do we want to? I don’t think you’ll want to come back anymore. Now, will you fasten your hose? Do you intend to be married in your bare feet? Blessed saints, look at the time! We’ll have to run all the way.”
Constanze allowed her sisters to lace up the bodice and tie on the wide yellow satin skirt that opened over the petticoat. The embroidered flowers had been sewn with varying skill by the three of them. Finally, Sophie lifted a white, broad-brimmed velvet hat from a box. “It’s Aloysias gift,” she said, turning it around admiringly. “It’s from Paris, truly made there. She’s the only one of us who could afford it. I pinned on the flowers. Oh come, wear it! I think she wanted you to be pretty today. Yes, she’ll be at the church. Just a little rouge: there! You’re the loveliest woman in Vienna. Now let’s go. Mother’s waiting as well, and if we don’t hurry she’ll be back here looking for that book of suitors, which I burned weeks ago. If I ever marry, it will just have to be for love.”
Constanze’s hands were so cold she could hardly feel them. “Good-bye, room,” she murmured. “Good-bye, childhood,” and they went down the steps into the late October day.
At the cathedral she saw everything through a lace veil worked with flowers. The man wavering at the door, red faced and smiling, was Alfonso, who was to lead her to the altar. As her sisters released her and she walked forward with him, she saw through the lace the interior of the huge Gothic church, and the faces of family and friends, including her father’s wretched brother, Joseph. Constanze saw her mother weeping, murmuring to those about her, “Well, all has turned out as I wished.” She thought an older man smiled at her, and wondered if it were Mozart’s friend Haydn. There was the violinist Heinemann, Father’s old friend, come from Munich to see the marriage, but where were Mozart’s father and sister? The blessing had come by mail the day before, but the father had not.
By the altar she saw Leutgeb, grinning, hands clasped before him, but Mozart was nowhere to be seen. It was only when a burst of music came from the great pipes of the organ, and Leutgeb raised his eyes to the organ loft, that Constanze understood her husband was playing for her. When the music ceased, she heard his footsteps racing down the stairs from the organ loft.
They both wept through the ceremony, particularly when they knelt for the first time as man and wife to receive holy communion. Everyone around disappeared then, so focused they were on each other. At the end he took her arm and together they walked through the group of friends and family.
“And now, my Constanze,” he whispered, pressing her close, “we’ll be happy forever.”
They held each other, laughing and wiping away their tears, waiting at the entrance of Stephansdom for the others to come sweep them away to the marriage supper.
Sophie Weber, July 1842
MONSIEUR NOVELLO SAID ADIEU TODAY FOR THE LAST time, and I sat awhile in the dim light of my room before calling for candles. In truth, I thought at times over the past year to tell him the few things I withheld, but in the end did not. I have burned the letters from Mozart to Aloysia, which I denied having. I looked at them only once, for they were too painful. In them he asked Aloysia many times why she couldn’t love him as he loved her. Constanze never saw them; there was no need for it. They would only have troubled her.
“But were they happy always and forever?” Monsieur Novello asked me a few times that afternoon as he stood with his folded writing desk in his arms, taking leave of me. I had tried to explain it to him during some of our many afternoons together. There was passion, oh yes, that. There was a lot of gaiety, and then other times there were troubles because our beloved Mozart was not quite suited to this world. There were times when Constanze was furious at him and then forgave him. It was enough to see his little shoulders under his coat, his unshaven face, his hair, in performance concealed under a white wig, brown and rumpled. His hair smelled of candlewax. She told me this. There were several children. He died young; he was thirty-five and she merely twenty-nine when she lost him.
Still I thought about Monsieur Novello’s question for a long time before going to bed. Ah, sir, with all your pages of notes and inky fingers! Who can truly know all that is between man and wife? Even they sometimes do not know, but it was sweet much of the time, and more than that one cannot ask on this earth.
HISTORICAL NOTES
This novel is based on events in the life of the young Mozart.
He was closely involved with the four Weber sisters, among them Aloysia, who broke his heart, and Constanze, whom he married. We know that he and his wife were close to Sophie (he always sent kisses in his letters to her) and that he wrote some of his greatest music for Josefa.
Mozart had a hard time making a living in Vienna; acclaim for his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio began the short period during which he saw some prosperity. He indeed hid Constanze at the Baroness’s house to protect her from her unstable mother and was horrified that she allowed a young man to measure her leg. Though some of the dates of personal and musical events have been slightly rearranged for the novel, he really was physically kicked from the palace of his Archbishop. His close friend, the horn player Leutgeb, for whom Mozart wrote much of his horn music, also had a Viennese cheese shop. After his marriage, Mozart was quite kind and generous to his difficult mother-in-law
The Englishman Vincent Novello came to Constanze (who by then had lost her second husband) in her old age in Salzburg to gather what he could from her of Mozart’s life. Sophie, also a resident of Salzburg, lived until eighty-three and was the last surviving sister.
Stephanie Cowell
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