Marrying Mozart (11 page)

“And where will you find the money to begin this venture?”

“From you, dear Uncle, with a little extra added on so that we can subsist until we succeed and Papa’s work increases. Now you can certainly see I am not asking for a mere loan, but capital for my shop. Here, if you will, look at this paper. The costs and profits are clear; I have been calculating them for weeks. The payments, interest added on, of course, will begin within a year. Our friends Heinemann and Alfonso will help us.”

Joseph Weber rose a little, leaning on his desk. “What, what? How?” he stammered. “Does my brother know of this? What do you know of the world? From books, which I am told you buy incessantly with your little musical earnings? Blessed Savior, you’re cut from your family’s cloth! Of course my brother can’t sustain such a large family with their longings for books, French hats, chocolates, and wine! I told him two years ago to leave Mannheim to find more work elsewhere. Would he go? No. Will he do anything practical for you girls? Engage you as ladies’ companions? No. Apprentice you as seamstresses or milliners? Send you out into service with some good family? Never. He has mad, ambitious ideas for you and himself, none of which will ever come true, and now you have inherited them.”

The clerk hid his scrawny face by busying himself with a pile of papers, while Uncle Joseph rose a little more, fixing his cold eyes upon them. “Music, music, music,” he cried. “And now, on my hope of salvation, more music! You all do nothing but starve on it, and still you persist. Loans last year, and the one before, and nothing repaid. Here I am selling cloth and have made a fine living, while he grows poorer and pretends it doesn’t matter. Will he join me in my work? No. Will he cease his ridiculous and expensive entertaining? No. He could have at least remained single; indeed, he should have joined the priesthood before he married that mother of yours.”

Josefa had drawn herself up now so much she seemed twice her height. “You can say what you may against our mother, though it’s unjust, unjust, but you won’t speak of our darling papa,” she shouted. “Can’t you see I’m sincere? You don’t; you don’t believe me.”

“Sincerity does not buy firewood; I certainly do not believe you.”

“It’s futile to come to you; you have no heart. Papa’s a saint. We’ll get on without you. I’ll make my way in the world, I swear, and won’t turn my back on my family. Aloysia will become a great singer and make an advantageous marriage, as will my younger sisters. She will make one soon; see how beautiful she is!”

Uncle Joseph smiled crookedly and sadly. “A great singer?” he murmured. “An advantageous marriage? You’ll starve on music as your father’s done, and where is the splendid suitor to climb all those flights of stairs to marry one of you? Men of good fortune want modest women; modest women don’t sing in public. Heinrich, pack the pork pies for them.”

“Stuff the pies up your arse!”

“Fine words, young woman! Get out! Good day to you.”

Josefa rushed out of the house and down the street, with Aloysia running behind her. After some streets, she managed to pull her older sister to a stop. “I’m cold, so cold,” Aloysia panted. “My legs aren’t as long as yours; I can’t run so fast. Let’s have a coffee. It’s not real coffee, only roasted barley with syrup, but they also give you a crescent roll. Did you have breakfast? I didn’t. I have two kreuzers. It’s all I have left from the last time we sang.”

Shivering, they drank their bowls of coffee in the wood shack while the old vendor spoke to some workmen who had also come in. Aloysia ate her roll slowly, pulling off fragments bit by bit. “We should have taken Uncle Joseph’s pork pies,” she said sadly.

“Let him choke on them!”

“Josefa, you scared him. You scared me.”

“I hate him. It would have been a wonderful music shop. I was going to call it Weber and Daughters—Music, Instruments, and Sundries. I
will
call it that. I’ll find someone else to sponsor it. ”

“Josy, we can’t go back there again to ask. You’re too horrible to have told our uncle to stuff the pork pies up his ...” She glanced at the workmen and ate the last crumb of her roll.
“Que tu es horrible de dire à notre oncle de s‘enculer avec sa tourte au porc! C’est terrible, c’est très impoli!
It was very impolite.” Aloysia suddenly burst into giggles and then struggled for poise.

“I’d die before going back. He’s a turd.”

“Still, thank you for saying I’m beautiful.”

“You are, you know,” said Josefa angrily, then she squeezed her sister’s arm warmly. “Though between you and Mother you’ll make something wretched out of it. Come on. We can’t go home to the others without some shred of good news. Let’s try to think something up.”

The sisters linked arms and hurried on, their cloaks whipping out behind them, until they found themselves before the Christuskirche with its statue of the Archangel Michael blowing his horn to the heavens high above the dome. Their father had played violin there often for choral masses.

Catching her breath, Josefa still nursed her anger. “How dare our uncle speak badly of Papa? He works so hard for us; he buys us hose when his are in tatters, he watches up for us all night when we’re sick and then goes to his work. No one understands how much he does, but I do. I’ve seen it as long as I can remember.”

She folded her arms and stared up at the trumpeting archangel. Her eyes narrowed. “Still, Uncle’s right in one thing,” she muttered. “What chance do we have of making things better at home? Perhaps the music shop would cost too much. There’s not even much work singing in churches; the priests prefer the singing of the old castrati. Come, let’s go in. At least we’ll be out of the wind.”

They pushed open the heavy doors and curtseyed slightly to a few elderly priests in narrow black cassocks. One of the wizened castrati, with his throat wrapped in an enormous gray scarf wound several times around, sniffed suspiciously at them, as if he had heard Josefa’s scathing words. Candles flickered before statues here and there, but the air was not still. Cold as it was, it reverberated from the sounds of the organ that someone was playing from the loft high above, with the great clunk clunk of the working bellows.

They took seats toward the back, holding hands. The castrato, a man of nearly seventy with his face like an old wrinkled apple, again glared at them. Beggars huddled in corners, making themselves as small as possible. By the back door behind the gold altar a small line of poor people gathered, waiting for alms. “We could have given them our uncle’s pork pies,” Josefa said almost to herself. “That is, if you wouldn’t have eaten them all at once like the piggy you are.”

They hardly noticed when the organ ceased, leaving a great hum in the air for a moment, and when footsteps sounded on the steps descending from the loft; they did not know their father’s friend Mozart was approaching them until he touched their shoulders and bowed.

They had seldom seen him since he had come that Thursday night with the song Aloysia sang at sight. They had heard he was visiting great houses outside the city to play. Once they had noticed him in the market, and he had waved to them. Now he looked as he did when he had ceased playing the clavier that first night at their house, half in another world, small and neat, with his natural light brown hair uncurled and fastened with ribbons at the back of his head. He said, “Mesdemoiselles Weber, what is it? Why are you huddled here? You look as though something has troubled you. May I sit with you?” With that he took a place courteously beside them.

Aloysia’s eyes filled with tears. Her life, which she felt ready to spring out to magnificence, had retreated since that magical night when she had stood among a pressing, admiring group of friends and family and sung his lyrical song on first sight. The music now lay under some other things, and she could not bear to look at it. It reminded her of how, in the openness of her heart that evening, she had agreed to secret meetings with Leutgeb, and how, during them, she had allowed him to put his hand where no good woman should. She should never have given so much; the faithless horn player had abruptly returned to Salzburg and, in spite of his heated promises, had never written a word to her. She had said nothing of this to anyone, of course, because she was ashamed, but now with her unhappiness over that and the lost Swedish opportunity combined with the rejection of Uncle Joseph, she blurted the story of her family’s misfortunes. She said more than she would have otherwise as she tore at her handkerchief and wiped the corners of her eyes.

Josefa only nodded grimly. This young composer from Salzburg for all his kindness and her father’s favor toward him was not one of them, and she had her mother’s horror of showing their dirty linen to a stranger. Her mouth compressed tightly, and she felt as she had in the carriage when she had tried to hide in the shadows. Once she nudged her sister sharply to stop the flow of her grieved, high voice.

As Aloysia spoke, Mozart looked at the shivering girls as intensely as he had looked inside himself in the loft the hour before, searching for a fugue by the lamented Bach, which he had heard once years before. His eyes filled with compassion at their faces reddened by the wind, their wind-loosened hair that fell in strands down their necks, their chapped lips, and their pale clasped hands. He thought of his mother’s neat gloves. The smaller girl shivered spasmodically, and flung her arms about her chest.

“Mesdemoiselles Weber,” he murmured. “You honor me to trust me with these confidences. Believe me, I won’t betray them. There’s little work for musicians here but for the orchestra. My mother and I are thinking of leaving when she returns from her visit to my father and sister in Salzburg. Still, there must be some way to take your family from its difficulties. You sing charmingly, beautifully. You yourselves are charming and beautiful.” He caught at their hands in both of his, chafing them, rubbing his supple fingers over them. “Go home now; you’re cold. I know some people, and I have some influence. Perhaps I can do something to help you.”

M
ozart took his midday meal of large veal chops and soup a few hours later in a smoky eating house with the orchestra director, Cannabich, and other musician friends who were passing through the city. They spoke of symphonies, of chamber music, of masses, of where work was; they spoke of good livings to be made that someone else always seemed just to have taken. They gathered around the table looking out at the muddy street that, in the dim light, retained the history of those who had passed this hour: the surly indentation of wheels left for a time until swept over by a beggar’s broom or the trailing, ragged skirts of a half-drunken whore.

Mozart had managed some weeks before to move with his mother to the comfortable house of the privy counselor, where she was warm and happy, and coughing less. She was treated as a family member, gossiping at table, and was altogether less (he arched his shoulders to think of it) of a burden on him. Still, they needed money, and, as he had not yet completed the second concerto and flute quartets of the Dutchman’s commission, he had not received any payment. In his pocket even now was a letter from his father that had arrived yesterday. “My dressing gown is in tatters. If someone had told me two years ago that I would have to wear woolen stockings and your old felt shoes over my old ones to warm myself ...” And he had written back rapidly just that morning: “But you know, my dearest Papa, this is not my fault.” Was it? It haunted him.

The clavier player and violinist who had played in a corner of the eating house had left, and Mozart scraped back his chair to go sit down at the instrument. Yesterday afternoon he had gone with friends to hear Holsbauer’s opera
Günther von Schwarzburg,
and now he began to play some of the beautiful music from memory. Cannabich listened for a time, and then came to stand beside him. His hair, pulled simply back in a ribbon, here and there showed traces of white, lavender-scented powder from his recent performance. He was a family man, with three gifted children.

“Enough of that opera!” he cried stoutly. “Let’s have a better tune.” Leaning over the small composer, he began to play with his right hand, clenching his pipe between his teeth.
“La finta giardiniera,
” he said, words and smoke rising with the music. “You wrote it three years ago for a Munich performance. I recall parts from memory. How old were you then, you gray beard? Eighteen? And how old when you penned that gorgeous little singspiel
Bastien?
Twelve in God’s name?”

Mozart said, “Nothing’s better than opera for me—music, drama, poetry. Play that bit again. Use both hands; I’ll sing it.”

Cannabich drew up another chair and they played competitively, crossing hands. “Here come the strings. Ah, that’s a nice tenor! What is happening, Wolfgang? No word on the position here?”

“Nothing, and more of nothing. I managed to corner the Elector himself on his way from chapel in a hall of the palace and asked him again about the position. ‘I am sorry, my dear child,’ he said solemnly, ‘but there is no position.’
My dear child—
those words.” Mozart played more intensely, leaning forward, and began to sing again.

“That’s the girl’s aria. You’ll rival the women the way you sing! I met Joseph Haydn last year, you know; he has the patronage of Esterházy in Hungary. He much admires your work. Didn’t his sister-in-law sing in
Finta?
”

“Yes, and his brother is konzertmeister at Salzburg. I’ve never met Joseph Haydn. Here’s the tempo change.”

“You know his quartets?”

“I admire them deeply. The tempo’s slower here. I can’t sing and play at once! What do you think opera should be, Cannabich, eh? Comic and serious, common and heavenly?”

In the early winter dusk Mozart returned to his new rooms in the comfortable house of the privy counselor. He looked at the score of another of his unfinished operas; then, putting it aside with a sigh, he began to work again on the second flute quartet. When he put down his pen, he did not know if the church bells were signaling the last service of the night or the first of the new morning.