Mozart's Last Aria (3 page)

I crossed the hall, knocked upon the study door, and entered.

My husband turned his thin face toward me and lifted the fur collar of his dressing gown. I read annoyance in his eyes, then he disguised it with the aloofness that greeted petitioners seeking his approval for some official document.

“My brother has died, may God give him rest.” I held Constanze’s letter toward him.

“Surely he was dead to you already.” He glanced at the chocolate smudge on the paper and raised a single eyebrow. He saw the reproach on my face and cleared his throat. “May the good Lord protect his soul, my dear.” His voice was as thin as his body under the gray velvet of his gown.

“My sister-in-law writes that he died of a fever last week.”

“I shall pray for him, of course.” He waved away the letter and made to return to his papers.

From obedient habit, I stepped backward to the door. The face I had beheld in the mirror stopped me.

I looked my husband over. He had married me so that there would be someone to oversee his household and his five troublesome children. When we wed, my father made it clear that this was my last chance to avoid the lonely life of the old maid. In seven years, I had given Berchtold three more children, though one girl had been lost that spring after only five months. I knew his remoteness to be the reserve of a man never warm who found himself frightened to love me for fear that I should be taken from him like his first two wives. At fifty-five, he was fifteen years my senior, though he saw the marriage as an act of charity on his part toward a spinster from a lower rank of society. Love had been no part of the bargain Papa had struck with Berchtold. Even my virginity had been accorded a monetary value. My dowry was augmented by five hundred florins after the wedding night, when Berchtold had ascertained that he had possessed me intact.

He looked up and took in a loud breath through his nose, exasperated to find me still there. He tapped his hand on the documents before him to signal that he wished to focus on them—perhaps a customs record of iron transported from the mines across the Abersee to Salzburg, or an order for a fornicator to be taken to the torture room in his assistant’s house next door.

I stepped forward.

He righted his periwig and I glimpsed the blue baldness of his scalp beneath.

“Wolfgang believed he had been poisoned,” I said.

“Surely not. Ridiculous man. Oversensitive.”

“There could’ve been intrigues against him. It’s Vienna, after all.”

“Madame, what do you know of such things?”

“I haven’t lived all my days in this village, sir. I know the ways of court life and of the cities.” As my husband, born in the village and educated no farther away than Salzburg, did not.

He caught my insinuation and his lips tightened. “Let a Mass be said for him and be done with it.”

“I would visit his grave.”

He tapped his bony fingers against his writing desk. “I have no time for such a journey. My work here is pressing.”

I knew this for a falsehood. He shut himself into his study not for the perusal of administrative papers, but with the intention of escaping the demands of social life and the expenses incurred by it.

“I’ll travel alone,” I said.

“Alone?” Surprise disturbed the officious stillness of his face. He was unaccustomed to my determination. In seven years of marriage, I had never pretended to be anything but deferential and far from self-sufficient—behavior promoted to deep habit by my duties during the widower years of my papa.

“I’ll take Lenerl to attend to my needs,” I said.

“It’s a journey of five days, and expensive.” He seemed muddled, thwarted and a little desperate, so that I dared wonder if, faced with my departure, he considered that he might miss me.

“I’ll bear the cost from the bequest of my father. I shan’t burden you.”

“You never have done so,” he stammered. His eyes dropped to the floor and his fingers fretted the fur of his collar.

I halted at the door with the handle in my grasp, moved by his emotion. Did all death recall for him his own losses, his wives and infant children? It was cold in the room and I saw that the grate was empty to spare the cost of a fire, though Berchtold had already saved ample funds to provision his children in a lifetime of comfort. “Johann,” I said.

“I shall wait upon your swift return, madame.” He shuffled the papers on his desk and straightened. “This departure inconveniences me and leaves my children unattended.”

“I shall make haste to come back to you.”

“And when you do, we shall hear no more of this brother of yours or of fanciful plots against his life.”

To Berchtold, all professional musicians were alike, disreputable and irresponsible. No doubt he assumed Wolfgang to have died dissolute and alone in a basement tavern. If my brother had been poisoned, surely it would’ve been to avenge some immorality. Whatever I wished not to countenance, my husband would willingly have suspected.

“You shall hear no more of such things.” I shut the door.

In the hall, I called for Lenerl, ordered her to pack my trunks and to send for my husband’s carriage.

When my mother passed away, I fell into a fit of weeping so violent that I vomited and took to my bed for days. My father’s end caused me to drop into a strange darkness from which I didn’t emerge for months. But I was a mother now, a mother who had experienced the loss of one of her own infants and had continued with her life for the sake of the children who remained. I was no longer so feeble before extreme emotions. When I faced Death, I was able to deliberate on which cheek I would strike him. That was how I resolved to go to Vienna.

Seating myself in the drawing room before my piano, a wedding gift from my father, I warmed my fingers under my arms. I looked toward the wall and its simple papering, thin green vertical stripes on white. Beyond it, my husband shivered in the cold and scowled at the documents on his desk.
You shall hear
this
of him
, I thought. I played the Sonata in A Minor Wolfgang wrote after our dear mother’s death in Paris.

Its opening theme, dark and disturbing, sounded true even on my half-ruined keyboard. The D-sharp in the right hand was discordant over the relentless basso ostinato of the left hand, built around the A minor chord. I hammered at the frenetic Allegro maestoso as if I wished my brother’s soul to hear it, wherever he was.

“I’m coming, Wolfgang,” I whispered.

Chapter 2

V
IENNA

T
he goddess Providence watched me leave my inn after breakfast and cross the empty Flour Market in the cold wind. In her bronze hands the two-faced head of Janus frowned back upon the past as a bearded old man, while youthful and open he peered the other way into his future. Wishing I might know what lay ahead of me, I shivered. Even the mythic embodiment of foresight could find herself abandoned in a frozen fountain at the center of a blustery square. I prayed that I shouldn’t be so isolated.

Beyond the statue was the gray, shuttered Flour Pit Hall, where Wolfgang often gave concerts, and the terra-cotta façade of the Capuchin Church, crypt of the Habsburgs. I kicked at the muck and snowy slush with my high boots, and headed in the direction of the younger Janus’s gaze.

The innkeeper had directed me toward a narrow street of five-story houses, their ground floors in heavy, broad granite and their gables stuccoed orange or yellow or white. The buildings were bright, despite the dull, flat light filtering through the clouds. When I came to the foot of a church spire on my left, I turned into Rauhenstein Lane and looked for my brother’s home.

A gentleman in a broad-brimmed English hat was kind enough to guide me into a modest courtyard. Horse feed and wet hay ripened on the cold air.

“You’ll find the apartment of the late composer at the first landing, madame,” he said. “You won’t be the only one to pay your respects to his widow today, though you may be the earliest. Our little street has been crowded with distraught music lovers this entire week.”

“I’m sure it has.” I made for the entry to the staircase.

“I knew him only by sight,” the gentleman called after me. “One would never have thought— Such a small, unassuming man, and yet his work— Masterpieces, genius. But to look at him—well, one hardly
would
look at him, really. Did you know him, madame?”

“As if he were my brother,” I said.

The gentleman’s mournful smile faded into confusion. He raised his hand like someone trying to place the face of a remote acquaintance.

The wind rushed into the courtyard. I stepped past the open door of the building’s toilet, and onto the dark staircase.

One flight up, I pulled back the hood of my cloak and spread it over my shoulders. I heard a high voice within the apartment calling someone’s name and I knew it was my sister-in-law. I felt a twinge of anger toward the woman who had stolen my brother away from my family. I kicked my knuckle against the door and was answered by the high-pitched bark of a lapdog.

A short, thick girl with red cheeks and black hair raked under a white Bohemian bonnet opened the door and curtsied.

“
Grüss Gott
. May you greet God,” she said.

“
Grüss Gott.
Please tell Frau Mozart her sister is here,” I said.

The girl led me through the kitchen, past the stove and a pair of metal bedsteads for the servants. We came into a living room with a half-dozen chairs upholstered in canvas and arranged around a sofa. She took my cloak and proceeded to the next room.

A gilt-framed mirror hung on the wall. I looked into it, massaging my cheeks to bring some blood to my skin after the cold walk.

My sister-in-law appeared in the glass. She stood in the doorway in a black woolen shawl and a loose black dress that gathered beneath her breasts. Her mouth gaped, and her bright teeth made her look ravenous and despairing. In her hands she held a short jacket she had been unraveling so that the wool might be reused.

I came to her, laid aside the wool, and held her hands. Her black eyes were reddened with the despair of these last days.

“Dearest Constanze.” I pressed my lips to her cheek and found it cold. I touched my palm to the black curls dropping over her pale forehead. She was still only twenty-nine and even shorter than me, with a figure whose boyish slimness had been undiminished by her many pregnancies.

A white spaniel brushed against my skirts, barking with excitement. Constanze bent to lift the dog. “Gaukerl,” she whispered. She seemed to draw warmth and life from it. Smiling at me, she caught my hand. “Come, sister.”

We entered the sitting room. Two plain lacquered cabinets stood against the walls. Behind a pair of divans, lemon-striped wallpaper decorated three large panels.

In the corner a newborn baby wriggled in its crib. A boy of about seven hid behind his mother’s skirt. “Karl, greet your aunt Nannerl,” Constanze said. “She’s Papa’s sister.”

The boy scuffed his foot against the floorboards and retreated to the next room, slamming the door. I thought of my Leopold, at home with my unruly stepchildren, and felt a flash of guilt for leaving him.

Constanze smiled awkwardly at the boy’s behavior. She leaned over the cradle, rocking it with her foot.

“This is little Wolfgang,” she said. “He’s not yet five months old. But of course you didn’t know—” She covered her mouth with the back of her wrist. A small gold watch dangled about her thin forearm. I recognized it as the present Wolfgang had given her on their wedding day.

“That’s true. I didn’t hear about little Wolfgang’s birth,” I said. “Is he healthy?”

“He’s had a touch of the flour dog.”

The infection that nearly killed my Leopold at two months. A white rash on his tongue and between his legs. Coughing, whining, never sleeping. I still carried the rosary I had bought to pray for his health—a string of dried nuts from the Holy Land which had imbibed Christ’s healing power as they grew from the soil near His tomb.

I glanced at the baby. Constanze seemed to sense my anxiety.

“The little thing’s all right now, as far as I can tell,” she said. “Still, I’ve had four babies pass away within a few months of birth, God bless them every one. Each seemed sound to me and I did everything I could for them. But—”

Another memory: Babette, the cramps and spasms that took her from me only half a year ago, while she was still a newborn. I squeezed at the rosary in my pocket. “I, too—”

Constanze didn’t notice that I had spoken. “I fed all the babies on water gruel to be sure that they didn’t contract the milk fever from my breast, and I followed the instructions of the doctors. But medicine was as much help to them as it was to my husband.” She let the dog scramble to the floor. “Why did he leave us like this?”

I came close to her. “Where did my brother die?”

She leaned back against the door to open it and extended her arm into the next room.

To save space, the chamber was used for entertaining guests and for sleeping. Two beds were pushed together against the wall. An iron stove with its pipe running toward the ceiling clicked and rattled in the corner. My sister-in-law braced herself against the billiard table at the center of the floor and shuddered, despite the heat.

“These four walls where we now stand—it’s as though they sucked the life of the entire world away. Everything good that ever was, died in this room,” she said. “For more than two weeks he lay here, until—”

I approached the beds. My mouth was dry. Perspiration stood out on my scalp. For a moment I thought he still lay under the lumpy covers. I opened my mouth to excuse myself, to beg his absolution for the hurt I had caused him.

But I halted. The bed was empty. If I was to find forgiveness, it would be elsewhere.

“Before his illness,” Constanze said, “this was a room of great happiness for him. He’d play billiards with other musicians and smoke a pipe. They’d joke about the pompous aristocrats they were required to entertain. And then, of course, this was where he and I passed our nights.”

I thought it crude to refer to marital relations at such a time. Constanze registered the disapproval on my face. She put her hands to her stomach and wept.

I wished I could’ve been alone with my imaginings of my brother’s final moments, to have listened to the traces of the last notes he might’ve played in this place. Instead I went to her and touched her cheek. “Let’s go to his study.”

Constanze led me to the last room in the apartment. The gloom of the enclosed bedroom lifted. Winter light crossed white through two windows set in a double aspect. It flickered over Wolfgang’s piano as though ghostly hands played on its ivory keys.

The instrument drew me toward it. Its polished chestnut wood was luscious, inscribed with the name of Anton Walter, the Viennese master keyboard maker. I sat at the stool.

I played a soft chord and closed my eyes. Something frozen seemed to breathe over my neck. My fingers trembled. I pressed them into my lap.

Constanze leaned against a high desk. It was designed for a man to stand as he wrote. She picked up a cut-glass scent bottle from the inkwell shelf, pulled out the stopper, and held it beneath her nose. A hint of jasmine suffused the cold air.

“Wolfgang’s eau de cologne,” she said. “This room used to be like a busy workshop. At that table, his copyists would transcribe his scores. He’d pace between them and his composing desk and his piano, leaving traces of this perfume behind him. I used to cut the quill pens for the copyists. Sometimes I’d help copy Wolfgang’s pages for the orchestra. There was such energy here. When he completed
The Magic Flute
, we were all industrious and happy. We knew it was a masterpiece.”

Constanze’s speech was fast, overwrought, in a high, plaintive register. She had been like this on the only previous occasion we had met, when she had been anxious for the approval of my father. The loss of her husband had added a demented note to her ingratiating tone. I worried for her and for Wolfgang’s two boys.

“The new opera has been a success?” I asked.

“
The Magic Flute
? It’s more acclaimed than any other of his works. Not only for the music, astonishing though that is.”

“For what else?”

“For its philosophy. That everyone should exist in peace and brotherhood. Wolfgang wrote it with his friend Schikaneder, the impresario of the Freihaus Theater. Well, really you should go and talk to Schikaneder about it, but it’s clear to me that
The Magic Flute
encapsulated Wolfgang’s belief in equality and brotherly love.”

“How so?”

“I don’t really understand these things, you know. But the opera’s about a princess who undergoes a series of ordeals for the sake of her love for a prince. The priests say a woman won’t be able to endure the trials. Yet she succeeds. Ah, you should simply see the opera and make up your own mind.”

“Schikaneder still gives performances?”

“To packed houses.”

A copy of Bach’s
The Well-Tempered Clavier
lay on top of the piano. I brushed the dust from its cover. “In your letter,” I said, “you wrote of Wolfgang’s . . . presentiments.”

Constanze frowned, but her puzzlement seemed feigned.

“His fear that his own death was imminent,” I went on. “That he had been poisoned.”

“Let’s not talk of this. I wrote that letter in a very emotional state. I wasn’t in my right mind.”

At first I thought to tell her that I hadn’t come all the way to Vienna in the snow just to console her. Instead, I reached for her wrist. “I have to know, Constanze. I’m his sister. Tell me.”

She stared at my hand for a long time, distant and engrossed. It was as though she reviewed the weeks in which her husband had been dying, reliving their pain and seeking different paths she might have taken to help him. I released her arm.

“In his quiet moments,” she said, “he was more and more consumed—not by music, but by black thoughts. He told me, ‘Stanzerl, I can’t shake them.’ He claimed he had been poisoned with
acqua toffana
.”

“What’s that?”

“Some mixture of different venoms.” Constanze sobbed. “I can’t believe he was poisoned. So many other things might have been responsible for his melancholy mood. He was overworked. He owed a great deal of money—much of it on my account.”

“How so? Surely his compositions paid well?”

“My last pregnancy caused some trouble with my feet. Bad circulation. He sent me to Baden to take the waters. I was away from him for some weeks. The hotel at the spa was expensive.”

“Could he have been so embarrassed by his debts that he became depressed? Enough to convince himself that someone wished him dead?”

“It can’t be. The only men who even knew of his troubles were Prince Lichnowsky and poor Hofdemel. Both of them were brothers of Wolfgang in the lodge.”

“You mean, they were Freemasons?”

Constanze settled in an old damask chair. “Wolfgang often said that among the Masons there was no inequality. Merchants, nobility, tradesmen, and musicians all attended meetings of the lodge wearing the spurs and dress sword of a gentleman.”

I understood the attraction to Wolfgang of such an egalitarian brotherhood. He had always hated rank. In the service of the prince archbishop of Salzburg, he had been treated as a lackey, dining with the valets and writing only the music his master considered suitable. It was to escape this servile position that my brother ran off to Vienna.

“The high regard in which the Masonic brothers held him was of the utmost importance to Wolfgang.” Constanze clasped her hands at her chest. “He had a great need to be loved.”

I recognized the truth in this. It was a craving born in his childhood, when he received the adulation of the most important people in Europe. No matter how he matured, he required admiration and acclaim.

“He didn’t always get the love he needed from—” She halted.

“His family.” I turned fully toward Constanze. “Sister, Wolfgang used to refer to me in his letters and conversation as a prudish, affected girl. I can’t deny that I was too concerned with ribbons and hairstyles and the latest fashion in hats. Marriage and motherhood have matured me. He’d find me a different person now, and so shall you.”

Constanze’s smile, a wavering turn of the lips, was at odds with the tension in her eyes. “He spoke of you often,” she said. “At the end. You were much on his mind.”

I pondered that. “Was I? Yet I had neglected my relationship with him.”

“For three years at least.”