Marrying Mozart (16 page)

She was flushed and imperious. “And do you expect me to be pleased that you return empty-handed? I’ve waited faithfully for you. You must succeed for me. You owe it to me. Your influence could open my voice to the world. You know, you know how well I sing and play. It is your fault that you didn’t, that you turned down Versailles! You threw away our happiness! How can I forgive you?”

She was sobbing, and jerked her shawl closer around her sharp shoulders. Her delicate face was in profile to him; even without any rouge or curls, she was beautiful, her lower lip extended ruefully and tears rushing down her face to her chin. He gently took her by the shoulders and kissed the tears away, kissed the wet, resentful lips that still protested. “I could have had hats made by the Queen’s woman, at least a modest one. Then you would truly love me!”

He seized her more firmly then, kissing her wherever his lips could reach. He could feel her little nipples, and her tiny body, which he could not hold close enough, seemed worth all the riches of the courts of Europe.

“I don’t want to quarrel with you,” he said into her neck. “Don’t cry, don’t cry, I beg you. I’ll become a great success for you. Aloysia, what do I have but you? I’ve disappointed my father and my sister; I’ve lost my beloved mother; and I’ve failed you. Isn’t this enough? Dearest, you must believe in me. You must believe that there’s reason for what I do. Aloysia, what do I have without you? Every hope I had was swept away, but I thought of your family and you, and it was my whole comfort.”

“You must understand why I was angry with you.”

“You won’t have further cause.” He wiped her tears with his handkerchief; he was trembling so his hands shook. “Listen, listen, dearest,” he said. “But I come with good news, too, not only terrible. Very good news. How oddly the best things come hand in hand with tragedy. I have an opera commission for the Residenztheater. His Excellency has sponsored it.”

“What? Here in Munich? For our exquisite theater?”

“I thought about writing you but decided to wait to tell you in person. So you see, I have not come back empty-handed. It’s an opera
seria,
my best work to date. It’s called
Idomeneo.
I have a chance to succeed and begin to make a great deal of money, and then we can marry at once, my Aloysia, and never be parted again. Don’t cry anymore, my beloved. Trust me.”

She stroked his face gently, looking at him; she had become suddenly very still. “You are very tired,” she said. “You are very tired, my love.”

 

For three days he slept and slept in the small room behind their kitchen. He would awake startled, thinking himself in Paris or in some inn, overwhelmed with sadness when he recalled his loss and theirs. Sometimes he felt he could hardly stand. Still, outside that room there was life; he heard the sisters’ chatter as they drank their morning coffee. Even in their recent grief they chattered. A knock would come at his door; a cup would be handed to him through the crack. They were there in their dressing gowns, he just behind the door in his shirt. Once, coming from his small room unexpectedly, he saw them all flee down the hall, laughing in their white smocks and bare feet, leaving behind them a drip of washing water on the floor and the smell of lavender. They surrounded him every hour of the day; they were in every corner of the rooms, asking him questions and telling him stories. In between them, Maria Caecilia moved languidly, always smiling at him when he entered the room. Sensuality hung so heavily in the air that he felt he could not breathe. Not only Aloysia but all the sisters. Even Josefa’s bare long legs, visible when her dressing gown opened, haunted him. Even Sophie’s chapped lips, her flat little body. He was drunk and distracted and could not compose a note.

He moved to the Cannabich house, for the famous Mannheim orchestra was now in Munich. There he wrote until his eyes could no longer focus; then he jumped up and, along with a few orchestra musicians, rushed over to the Weber rooms. With their arms full of cheeses and sausages wrapped in old news journals, the musicians bolted up the steps three at a time.

In the rooms he whirled Aloysia in his arms. “A whole day without the sight of you!” he cried. “This is more than heaven should ask of me.”

After supper they all played games, dancing and chasing one another around the furniture. The sisters fled from him and he caught them, leaping over the furniture and growling. Shrieking, they ran from room to room. When he was panting too hard to run anymore, he sat down at the clavier and cried, “One of you cover my eyes with your hands, and I’ll play any song you know backward.”

Fluttering his covered eyelids for a moment, he saw little fingers with dry skin and guessed it was one of the younger sisters whose hands were pressed against his face. He played faster, rocking more violently as he did so, to all their shrieks. Finally, he tipped himself entirely off the chair, dragging the girl with him. “Constanze,” he cried, opening his eyes. “I never thought it was you! Come, tell me what you like; I’ll make 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.

A
loysia 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 of silk about her finger, and her embroidery of French court children held on her lap near her stomach where our real children, hers and mine, will one day grow. He had been walking about the city for some hours, starting for the house, then turning back again.

She sensed him then, and, jumping up at once, came toward him with open arms. “Is it true?” she murmured, looking at his bowed head.
“C’est terrible! Mon Dieu!
It can’t be; it can’t be.”

“But it is,” he said. “
Idomeneo
’s been withdrawn after three performances, and I’m told it won’t travel; it’s too difficult to perform with its orchestration and staging. And old-fashioned, not likely to catch on. ‘Too deep, too dark, too difficult. Too good,’ Cannabich said, ‘dear Mozart, you are too good.’ Can that be my fate, Aloysia, to be too good? To never quite be what people want?”

He gazed at Fridolin’s clavier, his fingers moving against his breeches; sighing, he hung his head. One of his side curls was badly rolled. He sagged against the doorjamb. “My love, I can’t hold any longer,” he said at last. “I can’t borrow any more money from home, and the opera fee must go to repay what I have already borrowed. I must return for a time to the Archbishop’s service in Salzburg. I would marry you now and take you with me, but you’d be as unhappy there as I will be. Stay here with your sisters.”

Her voice rose passionately. “I want to go with you!”

“Hush, I know. Oh God, to be an hour without you, my love!”

She lay her head against his shoulder, slowly stroking his ear. Once she shuddered; he felt it down her back. Her voice was unsteady as she put her words together. “It won’t be forever, Wolfgang. You’ll find a better position with an opera house where I can sing.”

“Yes, I will find it; I must. Within several months I’ll have obtained something else; all my friends are looking for me. Then we’ll be together as man and wife, and I’ll write great music for you. This I swear on my mother’s soul.”

“Don’t be uneasy on my behalf, Wolfgang! I’ll wait forever. Per sempre,” she repeated in Italian, standing up straight. Her small breasts heaved. For always ... mio
tesoro, amore mio!
My treasure, my love. He could hardly break away from her kisses then. He thought to take her on the sofa amid the dusty, soft, worn cushions; he thought to lock the doors and take her, pushing up her skirts. At least there was this simple thing between man and woman, so achievable and immediate. Desire rushed through him; he jerked his head back, grasping her hand so hard it whitened. She would allow it (every part of her body cried yes), but if she swelled with child before he had a good position, what would they do?

“Good-bye,” he said, kissing her many times.

“Wolfgang, don’t go.”

He ran down the stairs, but voices called from the window. He looked up to see Aloysia, Josefa, Sophie, and Constanze standing at the window, the curtains pushed back. The younger sisters were weeping; they likely had also heard about the operas cancellation and felt bad for him.
Per sempre,
she had said, and there had been tears in her eyes as well.
Wolfgang
,
don’t go
. He would never forget it.

H
is earliest memories were of his father lifting him into bed during some fever, and his father’s spare frame, bones hardy under his blue wool coat, holding him so that they almost melded. For years they had been inseparable as they journeyed from city to city all over Europe. His father placing him before harpsichords to play, watching from a short distance as he performed, carrying him away again—a little boy who was sometimes eager, sometimes curious, sometimes quiet. His father, leaning over him as he wrote his first childish compositions, later holding the splotched music paper to the light, breathing a sharp sigh. His father standing by a window in Vienna, combing his son’s small white wig, which caught the sunlight.

And now Leopold Mozart was waiting for him again, as he always had.

The rooms were not the ones where Mozart had been born—some years ago the family had moved across the river—but the furnishings were arranged in the same way. He’s near sixty, Mozart thought as he pressed his lips to the stark cheek. Still, his father was not much changed.

Mozart glanced about. On the wall was the portrait of himself and his sister; his legs dangled from the clavier bench. He was very young, very charming with his silky wig. On the windowsill, best placed to catch the sun, were his mother’s plants. The edges of some of the leaves had turned brown. He drew in his breath hard.

“God bless you, my son—a safe journey?”

“Nothing unexpected; we did not overturn.”

His father groaned, “My God, your mother—even after this time I hope it is not true, that surely she must come up the steps after you. I have had masses said.”