Mozart always unpacked her bags at once when she came from traveling, but this time she had gone to bed upon her return, and now morning had come with the cold day pressing outside the iron bars of the window. She had dreamed of her house plants, which she had left once more on the windowsills of her Salzburg home; she alone trimmed the dead leaves from them so lovingly, murmuring to them old Austrian endearments. But it was not in her own home where she awoke, rather in their hosts’ house in Mannheim, in which she now found no charm.
Her son had gone out.
Rising and pulling on her dressing gown, she began to walk up and down her room past the still-buckled traveling bags, starting to make the bed and then forgetting it, until at last she sank into the chair and began to write.
Dear Husband,
I have returned from my two weeks’ stay with you to a catastrophe. What else can it be? Your son. He did not wait for me to take off my cloak yesterday before presenting me with what he assumed I would take as good news: that he intends to go on concert tour with the impoverished Webers, particularly Mademoiselle Aloysia, with whom he is beginning to fall in love, but of course he denies that. Instead of finishing the Dutchman’s flute compositions, which will bring us money, or the piano/violin duets in honor of the Electress to win her goodwill, he does little but write songs for the mademoiselle. Indeed, he performed a concert with her at some estate, and gave her and her family half the fee! Now what will occur with our plans to leave soon for Paris, where he will surely find the great success he deserves? He cannot quite recall we planned it; he waves it off with a dismissing hand and goes back to explaining his new idea. The Webers! He hopes to create their fortune, but what, I ask you, of our fortunes? We will all end paupers, begging on the corners of Salzburg.
She looked up, hearing footsteps, quickly blew on the letter to dry it, and turned it facedown. There was her son at the door, hair ruffled wildly as if the wind had once more gotten the best of him. Once more, as he often did when not in concert attire, he looked like an unmade bed. What was she to do with him?
She said coldly, “Wolfgang, I didn’t close my eyes all night. I can only presume that you have come to your senses and thought better of the ridiculous proposition you set before me last evening.”
“What, Mother, how can you call it that,” he cried, coming close to her with his face full of affection. “I’ve arranged it all. The tour with the Webers will bring a great deal of money, enough for all of us.”
“You still intend to do that? Your own father will be beside himself when he receives my letter. Do you think just to post word that this unknown chit of a girl and her farmwife sister will be singing will be enough to fill hundreds of seats? You’re the only one whose name is known at all, and you yourself struggle for enough concerts and patronage. Your father goes about in such shabby garments he can barely show his face to the Archbishop (I couldn’t believe the state of his shirts, truly past mending) and now you propose to divide what you earn between us and them.” She turned to finish making the bed, threw up her hands, and covered her face.
Between her fingers, she said, “You haven’t the power to uplift them, and it will drag us further down.”
He pulled her hands away from her face. “Mother, I know voices,” he said. “Aloysia has the makings of a great singer. She could be one of the finest prima donnas in Europe.”
“What do I care about her abilities? She only wants what she can get from you, and I wouldn’t trust her, nor any of them. I knew it from the first moment I mounted those many flights of steps. ”
“You say that about someone I esteem so highly? You say that? Well, I’m going, I don’t know if I will be back. You’ve slandered her and wounded me.”
He ran out and walked the cold, windy streets for a long time, until he had lessons to give. By the time they were done, and his pupils had noticed his