his musician friends. “Leutgeb, you ass, let me go!” he shouted. “I’m going to kill him.”
“No, you idiot!” Leutgeb cried, shaking his head. “Come away while you have a whole skin. We shouldn’t have let you go there. What did you say to your august employer? What could you have said?”
“I told him to kiss my arse, in so many words.”
“What? Actually said it, came near it? Don’t you know how dangerous that is? Why did you do it?”
“I am Mozart,” he said hoarsely.
“And you’ll be Mozart in a prison getting a good beating, believe me! Didn’t you hear what happened to that fellow who struck a nobleman? Nobility has all the privileges to behave badly; we have none. Disgusting, and this with a reforming Emperor on the throne. ”
Mozart shook them off, his voice gruff and ashamed. “Well then, go home, fool, idiot, ass. I’ll do as I like.” The three wind players had half-dragged him around the corner, where they slapped some cold fountain water at him and then dipped his face in it. “That’s it,” Leutgeb said. “I’ve got a horn lesson to give at dawn, and so do the rest of us. Keep your temper, Wolfgang. Don’t you know now’s not the time to let it out? Go to sleep and think about mending your bridges; you’re meant to walk across them, not burn them down. Will you now?”
“Yes, good night,” he said, for the water had sobered him, and he walked, dripping, back toward the cathedral square by the light of the still-burning lamps. But when he returned to the palace door, he saw that his trunks had been brought down and set on the street. All his clothing and his music lay in a heap, the symphony he had written in Paris folded up into his wind band music. Out of curiosity, a few people from houses nearby had opened their windows, only to see a servant fling down onto the pile a single shoe and two books. Impudent puppy and knave, the Count had called him. He would have liked to go back and beat him. “My God, the bastard, the bastard,” he muttered again and again. “To set me loose like this, as if I were some felon ... my God, my God. So this is what it comes to....”
“Do not leave his service for God’s sake,” his father had concluded the letter. “What security have you? You don’t know how to scrape; you don’t know how to bow. I have never doubted your gifts, but without these other attributes you are lost.”
“Dearest Father,” he thought now, composing his reply. “You’ve made me what I am, and I must be what I am. If I starve, sell what music I’ve written, but I must try, I must try. I can’t believe that God has created me to be a second-rate church composer, only doing what this small-minded clergyman wishes. I’ll write masses, great masses, great symphonies, and I shall write opera.”
But for now, at eleven o’clock at night, Mozart sat on one of his two trunks near Stephansdom, its one exquisite high spire reaching to heaven. He had no place in the city to go.
Sophie Weber, May 1842
ON SPRING DAYS LIKE THIS I FEEL A PALPABLE SENSE OF all the old keepsakes in my room, as if they want somehow to shake off their dust and rise from their boxes. People say the aged are inclined to live in their memories. Why shouldn’t that be? There is an irreplaceable world within me.
And then Monsieur Vincent Novello comes, carrying his walking stick or umbrella, always deferential, always hopeful. Sometimes I’m not feeling well and send him away, but today I pinned on my false curls and welcomed him, eager to tell him the things I once thought to withhold so that they will not fade away.
“I found something I thought was lost, monsieur!” I said. “Constanze’s letters, journals, and keepsakes, dating from her childhood until about the time Aloysia married. She kept the box under our bed, away from Mama’s prying eyes. Mama was too stout to look under there by then, as stout as I am now.”
We pushed aside the sweets, and opened the small box, with real flowers preserved forever under the lacquered top. “I feel as if I’m prying,” he said. “Is there anything as secret or personal as a young girl’s dreams and thoughts? I am so sorry to have waited these years to come, and not to have