at each other, each admitting how unhappy she was. They saw it in each other’s eyes from across the room.
“And I need my slippers; where are my slippers?” the youngest Weber sister continued. “Aloysia never returned them. Why must she take everything? She already has everything. One of these days Josefa will go as well, and then there will be just us. I can’t bear to be here anymore, I can’t. I’m truly going to join a convent.”
Constanze rushed to her, knocking over the dresses that had been flung on a chair and tripping on the shoes that were scattered on the floor, crying, “Sophie, don’t, don’t! What will I do without you? If you go, I’ll go, too. Love leads only to unhappiness.” They sat down on the floor amid the fallen dresses and sobbed, holding each other. Then Constanze broke away and sat down at the table. “I’m going to write to Johann Schantz,” she said, pressing her lips together hard between her words. “I like him best. I’m going to ask him to take me away.”
“Do you want to do that, Stanzi?”
“Yes, I know he loves me.”
“Did he say that?”
“Wait, I think he did, or he was about to. I’d go anyplace to get away from here! You can come, too.” Constanze was already writing.
“But this is madness. Would you? Would he? What about his wife? Where would you go?”
“Anywhere.” The pen scratched furiously, and then Constanze signed the letter and threw it down. They looked at each other and listened.
Below came the sound of Maria Caecilia climbing the steps, stopping once to catch her breath. They knew their mother stood outside their door for a moment without knocking, and then came the very soft scratch and the old low, tender voice, “Come, my chicks, my little fleas, there’s coffee and cake in the kitchen; everyone’s gone out and the house is quiet. Don’t you know, my loves, that I have seen life, that I want only the best for you whom I suckled and nursed and protected from this terrible world?”
The girls stood and dried their eyes. Then, holding hands, they opened the door and joined arms with their mother. The three of them went down for coffee, talking of more ordinary things: gossip of the street, the price of veal, the concerts in the public gardens this summer, the dark moods of the kitchen girl who had recently come to help them. No further word was said about the gathering at the fortepiano maker’s house.
January snow was falling heavily all over the city one evening some six months later as Mozart walked into the central hall of Prince Nicholas Esterházy’s winter mansion, and stood for a moment listening to the sound of the Prince’s orchestra in the allegro of a symphony. Many candles glittered in the crystal chandeliers. About him beautiful women, grease holding their curls in place, glanced at him and then looked away, barely nodding to his bow. Brushing the snow from his hat brim before giving it to the lackey, he did not enter the ballroom where the orchestra played but made his way through a few other large and beautiful rooms with their many guests, the invitation he had received dry in his vest pocket.
In a small library, head bent over a book, was the elderly Franciscan monk Giovanni Battista Martini, maestro di capella from Bologna. Mozart bounded toward him. He remembered running down the rectory halls in Italy, music under his arm, when he was fourteen years old. Padre Martini had aged since then, and Mozart had heard the monk’s health was not good. “Padre Martini,” he cried. “I was overjoyed to hear you were in the city.”
“Wolferl Amadé,” said the monk, his words light and a little breathy. “Let me look at you; it’s been many years since I’ve seen you. The distances that separate people are untenable to me. In heaven there will be no such distances.”
He made room on the blue silk sofa by a tray of wine and glasses. “I looked with the greatest pleasure the other day at the offertory that you send me some years back. But tonight you have just missed your own wind sextet; the men were here, and have now gone on to play it elsewhere and make a florin or two. A gentle piece—bassoons, horns, and clarinets—you at your most tender. A friend of yours was among them, a towering young man, laughs loudly, big teeth. His name was Leutgeb,