a nonsense song out of it for you. Tell me or I’ll tickle you!” At his tugging, Constanze rolled on top of him. Her fingernails were bitten, and there was a cut on her hand. “I’ll tickle you,” he said, edging his hand so that he could feel the place where her corset ended and her under petticoat tied in a knot.
She shrieked and squirmed. “Ah no, don’t, don’t!”
“She likes puppies,” cried Sophie, jumping up and down on the sofa. “Tickle her, tickle her! She likes puppies.”
“Puppies!” he cried. “Of course! I’ll write a concerto for mutt and orchestra in D major with a strong wind section. I’ll begin auditions for the best dog all over Munich at once.”
Constanze struggled away, her hair losing its large ivory pins. He handed one to her as she stood up and tried to catch her breath. “It’s like our old Thursdays,” she said. “It’s like Papa’s Thursdays when everyone came to play.” Tears filled her eyes, and it moved him. He looked about the room at all of them and breathed deeply, amazed, happy. The sensuality of all the sisters melded, blended into a single blurred sensation of youth and white cotton.
The date for the first rehearsals grew near, and he ceased to come to the Webers. Instead he sent effusive notes written on the back of music paper, filled with grotesque little drawings scratched from his fierce pen. He wrote apologetically that the opera was cast already and there were no roles for them; the light soprano had once been mistress of the Elector. She was a good singer and must remain; the other soprano role was also taken. He was working intensely, he wrote, trying to please those many men who could push the opera on the boards of the Residenztheater or jerk it away.
Cannabich brought him more music paper and also meat and soup, which often went untouched until the fat had congealed in white blobs. He wrote, ceasing only when he had to. He wrote at a desk by the window, hearing the music in his head, the words and feelings forming under his rapidly moving hand: regret; jealousy; fate; the father, Idomeneo, who for his rescue from danger at sea promised Neptune, the god of the sea, to sacrifice the first person he met when his ship returned home. The work grew on the pages with its arias and ensembles, its military marches and shipwrecks, its storms and coronation, its monster arising from the depths of seawaters.
Cannabich stood by, one hand on the hip of his silk breeches, turning over the pages. “It’s longer than they expected,” he said, “but the Elector heard us at rehearsal and said the music was so very moving.”
Mozart pulled the pages toward him. “Good, then he will want to keep me! Did he once again call me his ‘dear child’? Let the fool say what he will. My friend, if he’s pleased, he’ll surely grant me a position in his court, and then I can bring my father and sister here and marry.”
“The little Weber girl?”
“Indeed.”
Applause broke out as he stepped into the orchestra pit of the Residenztheater, surely a jewel, set around with rows of boxes, all of the most brilliant red and heavily embellished with gold. Cannabich had given over the premiere for him to conduct from the clavier.
In the back of the hall he could see the four Weber sisters. Oh, the winds: the flute, the oboe, the bassoon, and the horn riding over the stringed instruments. Onstage the monster would shortly rise from the deep to destroy the people because the King had broken his vow to sacrifice the first to greet him on land, his son, the Prince Idamante. The choruses echoed, and the old tenor sang of the sea now within him, more unrelenting than that sea that had sought to drag him to its depths.
Four singers stood together on the stage and began the great quartet. “Andrò ramingo, e solo”—I’ll wander forth and alone. He marked the tempo. The strings played exquisitely. His soul left his body.
Aloysia sat embroidering by the window of her home a week later at dusk, green silk thread in a soft neat roll on the table beside her. Mozart stood quietly in the doorway, studying the slope of her white neck down to the slight swell of her breasts. She was humming a bit of his opera.
He thought, I must memorize her perfectly as she is now, with the strand