Chapter XIII: Mozart (2)

All Vienna gossiped about his devotion. When she was ill, he was the most assiduous of nurses, and on one occasion got so into the habit of putting his fingers to his lips and saying "Psst!" to any one who entered the room where she was sleeping, that, on one occasion, on being spoken to in the street, he involuntarily placed his finger on his lips and gave the warning signal. When he was called away from home early, before she was awake, he would leave such a note for her as this: "_Guten Morgen, liebes Weibchen, Ich wünsche, dass Du gut geschlafen habest_" etc., or, as it runs in English: "Good morning, my darling wife! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household worries till I come back. May no evil befall you! I shall be home at--o'clock punctually."

Two weeks after the marriage we find Mozart writing to his father in this tone:

"Indeed, previous to our marriage we had for some time past attended mass together, as well as confessed and taken Holy Communion; and I found that I never prayed so fervently nor confessed so piously, as by her side; and she felt the same. In short, we were made for each other, and God, who orders all things, and consequently this also, will not forsake us."

They looked forward with great eagerness to visiting Salzburg, and it is not the least evidence of the kindness of Constanze's heart that one of her chief ambitions seems to have been the winning over of the father and the sister. The visit home was to be in November, 1782, but the weather grew very cold, and the wife's condition forbade. Mozart writes to his father that his wife "carries about a little silhouette of you, which she kisses twenty times a day at least." His letters are full of little domestic joys, such as a ball lasting from six o'clock in the evening until seven in the morning,--a game of skittles of which Constanze was especially fond,--a concert where Aloysia sang with great success an aria Mozart wrote for her,--and financial troubles of the most petty and annoying sort.

In June, 1783, Mozart writes his father asking him to be godfather to the expected visitor, who was to be named after the grandfather, either "Leopold" or "Leopoldine," according as fate decided. Fate decided that the first-born should be a son, and the young couple started gaily to Salzburg, for a visit.

But fate also decided that the visit should not be in any sense a success. Even as they set forth, they were stopped at the carriage by a creditor who demanded thirty gulden [about $15], a small sum, but not in Mozart's power to pay. At Salzburg, Mozart's father and sister seemed not to have outdone themselves in cordiality, and, worst of all, "the poor little fat baby" died after six months of life.

There is little profit and less pleasure in describing the financial troubles of the young couple. They are generally blamed for extravagance and bad management, for which Constanze is chiefly held responsible; but there are many reasons for disbelieving this charge, perhaps the chief of all being old Leopold Mozart's own statement that when he visited them he found them very economical. That was praise from Sir Hubert.

Of Mozart's devotion to his wife in the depths of his heart, there can be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous, beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional of his excursions from the path of rectitude, and found forgiveness there! "He loved her dearly, and confided everything to her, even his little sins, and she requited him with tenderness and true solicitude."

She always said, "One had to forgive him, one had to be good to him, since he was himself so good."

Four children were born to the devoted couple, all sons; the first child lived, as we have seen, only six months; the second was named Carl; the third was named Leopold; the fourth, Wolfgang Amadeus. Nohl says, "His wife's recovery on these occasions was always very tedious."

In 1787 Mozart's father died, and his letters to his sister show the depth of his grief. Nannerl had married three years before. Her first lover had relinquished her on account of her poverty, but she had captured a widower of means and position.

Mozart's letters to Constanze are not very numerous, because he was away from home neither often nor long. But they make up in tenderness and radiant congeniality what they lack in numbers. In 1789 he decided that a concert tour was necessary to replenish his flattened resources and to take him out of the rut in which the emperor was gradually dropping him as a mere composer of dance music for masked balls at the court. Mozart travelled in the carriage of his friend and pupil, Prince Carl Lichnowsky; and those who consider railroad travelling unpoetical will do well to read in Mozart's and Beethoven's letters the vivid pictures of the downright misery and tedium of the traveller of that time, even in a princely carriage, to say nothing of the common diligence. Mozart wrote to his wife frequently, and always in the most loverly fashion. He ends his first letter on this journey as follows:

"At nine o'clock at night we start for Dresden, where we hope to arrive to-morrow. My darling wife, I do so long for news of you! Perhaps I may find a letter from you in Dresden. May Providence realise this wish! [_O Gott! mache meine Wünsche wahr!_] After receiving my letter, you must write to me Poste Restante, Leipzig. Adieu, love! I must conclude, or I shall miss the post. Kiss our Carl a thousand times for me, and [_ich bin Dich von ganzem Herzen küssend, Dein ewig getreuer Mozart_] I am, kissing you with all my heart, your ever faithful,

MOZART."

_"Adieu! aime-moi et gardez votre santé, si précieuse a votre époux."_ In his next, three days later, he says:

"MY DARLING WIFE:--Would that I had a letter from you! If I were to tell you all my follies about your dear portrait, it would make you laugh. For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say to it, God bless you, my Stanzerl! God bless you Spitzbub, Krallerballer, Spitzignas, Bagatellerl, schluck, und druck! and when I put it away again, I let it slip gently into its hiding-place, saying, Now, now, now, now! [_Nu--nu--nu--nu!_] but with an appropriate emphasis on this significant word; and at the last one I say, quickly, 'Good night, darling mouse, sleep soundly!' I know I have written something very foolish (for the world at all events), but not in the least foolish for us, who love each other so fondly. This is the sixth day that I have been absent from you, and, by heavens! it seems to me a year. Love me as I shall ever love you. I send you a million of the most tender kisses, and am ever your fondly loving husband."

Again three days, and we find him writing at midnight to his "_liebstes bestes Weibchen_" an account of his activities:

"After the opera we went home. Then came the happiest of all moments to me; I found the long ardently wished-for letter from you, my darling, my beloved! I went quickly in triumph to my room, and kissed it over and over again before I broke it open, and then rather devoured than read it. I stayed a long time in my room, for I could not read over your letter often enough, or kiss it often enough.

"Darling wife, I have a number of requests to make of you:

"1st. I beg you not to be melancholy. 2d. That you will take care of yourself, and not expose yourself to the spring breezes. 3d. That you will not go out to walk alone,--indeed, it would be better not to walk at all. 4th. That you feel entirely assured of my love. I have not written you a single letter without placing your dear portrait before me. 5th. I beg you not only to be careful of your honour and mine in your conduct, but to be equally guarded as to appearances. Do not be angry at this request; indeed, it ought to make you love me still better, from seeing the regard I have for my honour. 6th. Lastly, I wish you would enter more into details in your letters. Now farewell, my best beloved! Remember that every night before going to bed I converse with your portrait for a good half-hour, and the same when I awake. O _stru! stru!_ I kiss and embrace you 1,095,060,437,082 times (this will give you a fine opportunity to exercise yourself in counting), and am ever your most faithful husband and friend."

Some of his letters are apparently lost, for one dated May 23d gives a list of the letters he had written to his wife--eleven in all (one of them in French)--between April 8th and May 23d. He complains bitterly that in this same time he had only six from her. There is worse news yet to add, seeing how poor they were:

"My darling little wife, when I return, you must rejoice more in me than in the money I bring. 100 Friedrichs-d'or don't make 900, but 700, florins,--at least so I am told here. 2d. Lichnowsky being in haste left me here, so I am obliged to pay my own board (in that expensive place, Potsdam). 3d.----borrowed 100 florins from me, his purse being at so low an ebb. I really could not refuse his request--you know why. 4th. My concert at Leipzig turned out badly, as I always predicted it would; so I went out of my way nearly a hundred miles almost for nothing. You must be satisfied with me, and with hearing that I am so fortunate as to be in favour with the king. What I have written to you must rest between ourselves."

His disappointment at the meagre financial returns from his tour was embittered by the serious illness of his Constanze and the drain upon his sympathy, his time, and his money. It was necessary for him to despatch in various directions a series of those pathetic begging letters that make up so much of his later correspondence.

Shortly after the failure of his concert tour, desperation goaded him to set forth again. He writes again to his _Herzens Weibchen_ or his _Herzaller-liebstes_ with renewed hope:

"I am quite determined to do the best I can for myself here, and shall then be heartily glad to return to you. What a delightful life we shall lead! I will work, and work in such a manner that I may never again be placed by unforeseen events in so distressing a position. Were you with me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet here, but all seems to me so empty. Adieu, my love! I am ever your loving Mozart.

"P.S.--While writing the last page, many a tear has fallen on it. But now let us be merry. Look! Swarms of kisses are flying about--Quick! catch some! I have caught three, and delicious they are."

This tour was again unsatisfactory. He came back almost poorer than he went.

In March, 1791, Constanze had to go to Baden to take the waters for her health. Mozart wrote a letter in advance engaging rooms for her, and taking great care that they were on the ground floor. While Constanze was at Baden, Mozart was getting deeper and deeper into financial hot water, but his letters betrayed great anxiety that she should not be worried, especially as she was about to become a mother again. One of his letters to her was as follows; part of it is French, which I have not translated, and the rest in German, part of which also it seems more vivid to leave in the original:

"MA TRÈS-CHÈRE ÉPOUSE:--J'écris cette lettre dans la petite chambre au Jardin chez Leitgeb [a Salzburg horn-player]; où j'ai couché cette nuit excellement--et j'espère que ma chère épouse aura passé cette nuit aussi bien que moi. J'attend avec beaucoup d'impatience une lettre que m'apprendra comme vous avez passé le jour d'hier; je tremble quand je pense au baigne de St. Antoine; car je crains toujours le risque de tomber sur l'escalier en sortant--et je me trouve entre l'espérance et la crainte--une situation bien désagréable! Si vous n'éties pas grosse, je craignerais moins--mais abandonons cette idée triste!--Le ciel aura eu certainement soin de ma chère Stanza Maria!...

"I have this moment received your dear letter, and find that you are well and in good spirits. Madame Leitgeb tied my neck-cloth for me to-day--but how? Good heavens! I told her repeatedly, 'This is the way my wife does it,' but it was all in vain. I rejoice to hear that you have so good an appetite;... You must walk a great deal, but I don't like you taking such long walks without me. Pray do all I tell you, for it comes from my heart. Adieu, my darling, my only love! I send you 2,999 and 1/2 kisses flying about in the air till you catch them. Nun sag ich dir etwas ins Ohr--du nun mir--nun machen wir dass Maul auf und zu immer mehr--und mehr--endlich sagen wir;--es ist wagen Slampi--Strampi, du kannst dir nun dabei denken was du willst das ist ebben die Comodität. Adieu, 1,000 tender kisses. Ever your Mozart."

It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears. Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with her punishment, and suggesting that the man's wife would probably assist her if informed.

It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a domestic tragedy. Frau Hofdämmel was a pupil of Mozart's whose husband grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her almost to death, and then committed suicide. The story gradually grew up that Mozart was the cause of the man's jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he later discarded after Köchel, another biographer, had succeeded in proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart's death. Hofdämmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan. There was, however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin, who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in 1789--90. She sang in his "Entführung," and it was said that his friends had to help him out of his entanglement with her. But Jahn scouts the idea.

Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was writing was an omen of his own end. Shortly before his father had died, Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death when it should come, and speaking of death as "this good and faithful friend of man," and adding: "I never lie down at night without thinking, young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns."

Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive, but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.

After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister, Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart, even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die. When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:

"I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?"

Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of "these unchristian Fathers" to do as she wished.

After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5, 1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!

Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease, thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to die with him. Her grief was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a pauper's grave, three corpses deep.

It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house. She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.

There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr. Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure, speaks of Constanze as "indifferent to the disposition of the mortal remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated."

For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician, there is a superfluity of proof.

After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he granted. Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to "our Raphael of Music," her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children he left fatherless and penniless.

For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a councillor from Denmark, George Nicolaus von Nissen. He undertook the education of her two boys, and won her hand. She lived with him in Copenhagen till 1820, when she returned to Salzburg. The quaintness of this affair should not blind us to the unusual depth of affection it revealed. Constanze inspired even her new husband with such devotion to Mozart's fame that Nissen wrote a biography of his predecessor in her affections.

There cannot be many instances of a second husband writing a eulogistic biography of the first, but Nissen wrote his with a candour and enthusiasm that spoke volumes for his goodness and for that of Constanze. He died, however, before the biography was completed, and Constanze finished it herself. She includes in the publication a portrait of Nissen and a tender tribute to his memory. Many of the most beautiful anecdotes of Mozart's life we owe to Nissen's gentle unjealousy, and Constanze could frankly sign herself "widow of Staatsrath Nissen, previously widow of Mozart."

She includes an anonymous poem on Mozart's death, beginning:

"Wo ist dein Grab? Wo duften die Cypressen?"

Which is in its way evidence enough that she did not hold herself, or her "indifference," responsible for the dingy entombment of this genius, and the disappearance of his grave. As her last words to the public she says: "May the reader accept this apologetic, this intimate love-offering, in the spirit in which it is given. Salzburg, 1828." What reader can refuse this sympathy to one who felt and gave so much to one who craved sympathy as the very food of his soul?

When Constanze was elderly and the second time widowed, she was, according to Crowest, visited by an English lady and her husband--an eminent musician--both of whom were anxious to converse with the relict of the great master. Notwithstanding the years that had passed, Frau Nissen's enthusiasm for her first husband was far from extinguished. She was much affected at the regard which the visitors showed for his memory, and willingly entered into conversation about him.

"Mozart," she said, "loved all the arts and possessed a taste for most of them. He could draw, and was an excellent dancer. He was generally cheerful and in good humour; rarely melancholy, though sometimes pensive. Indeed," she continued, "he was an angel on earth, and is one in heaven now."

Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight. Composers' widows live long.

Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights, for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.