The Intimate Mozart

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Sadly, the book with the perfect title, Mozart's Wife, has had to be issued with a new name, owing to shenanigans on the part of a monstrously large retailer whose name I shall not speak. I wrote this book quite some years ago, now in the last century.  

What began for me as a Mozart obsession soon became entangled with the story of the women who lived with a genius for nine short years, and who took his Viennese rocket ride to fame and fortune and crashed into poverty beside him. This little woman, who was even more diminutive than her vertically challenged husband, saw our hero at his best and at his worst. Her name was Constanze, or, using the German spelling: Konstanze. In his letters, Mozart often called her "Stanzi" or "Stanzerl" when he wasn't teasing her about her "Needle Nose."

It began with a romance, as this least favored of the Weber daughters married her big sister's erstwhile boyfriend, a young fellow who'd been a wunderkind and who was now attempting to be taken seriously as an adult musician. It appears that Mozart suffered from all the familiar problems of a child star attempting to bridge the gap. Accustomed as he had been to fame and adulation from his earliest years, this was made supremely difficult, not only because of Mozart’s own high opinion of himself, but because of the understandable resentment of older musicians who believed they had achieved official appointments “the hard way.”

I found that many of Mozart’s biographers had no love for Constanze. They either belittled her as someone who abandoned her man when the going got rough—as things certainly did in the later years in Vienna—or they dismissed her as a silly young woman from an insignificant family who’d married a genius she was ill-prepared to handle. I immediately doubted the “insignificant” part, at least in terms of the Weber family’s musicianship. Constanze’s two older sisters became famous singers, performing the most demanding vocal music of the day—some of it written specifically for them by their brilliant brother-in-law.

Mozart’s largest problem in finding financial security was that upon voluntarily leaving the Archbishop of Salzburg’s service, he became the first freelance musician (of any stature) in Europe. With an almost impenetrable class system in 18th Century Europe, he paid a high price for his daring. No nobleman could allow such an insult to pass, because in those days, "inferior"  was what musicians, no matter how brilliant, were. (Every great musician who came after him, even the fiercely proud and independent Beethoven, would carry the image of Mozart’s rebellion like a banner.)

It is a modern axiom that “anonymous was a woman,” and so it proved to be as I searched for facts about Constanze among a host of biographies. In the second volume of The Mozart Family Letters,* I found many written by Mozart himself, most sent from Vienna to his father in Salzburg. They make good reading, for Wolfgang was a witty observer. These letters may be the horse’s mouth in one sense, however, we must also bear in mind that they were also carefully tailored to soothe the recipient, the stern and possessive Leopold.

Leopold Mozart had not spent his life schooling and grooming Wolfgang for the pure pleasure of the exercise. He always hoped that his son would receive a good appointment at an important Court and would then be able to support his parents in high style. An early marriage—to anyone, much less to a penniless girl with no useful social connections—was not his plan.

When Mozart began to lodge with the Weber’s, tongues began to wag. Despite the expense, slowness, and difficulty of communication in the late 18^th Century, Leopold Mozart seems to have had a network of informants who were only too happy to supply him with information that the proud old man would find disagreeable.  And by simply looking the other way, it was easy enough for the recently widowed Mama, Cecelia Weber, to allow Mozart to compromise Constanze. What amounts to a shotgun wedding was eventually forced with connivance between the widow and a court-appointed guardian.  

 “But who is the object of my love? Again, do not be horrified, I beg of you! Not one of the Webers? Yes, eine Weberische—Constanze, the middle one...my dear good Constanze, she ….is the best of them all. She makes herself responsible for the whole household, and yet she can never do right! …One thing more I must tell you, which is that I was not in love at the time of my resignation. It was born of her tender care and service when I lodged in their house…” 

Stanzi wanted to escape her domineering and critical mother; Mozart hoped to take a wife and have a safe and comfortable home to return to after his battles with the world. He looked forward to having his supper fixed, his clothes cleaned, pressed and mended. He seems to have not thought much about the expenses of a family, nor about the inevitability of children nor any of the difficulties of marriage.

The Mozart’s union took a classic form—young people wanting to escape from restrictions and injustices at home. Wolfgang and his Constanze jumped out of the frying pan of parental domination into the fire.

 Another feature of Constanze’s life is rarely mentioned by Wolfgang’s biographers, one I came to believe that this was the key to her story. Frau Mozart was pregnant or convalescent from childbirth for six years out of the nine she was married to Wolfgang. The longest interval between pregnancies was seventeen months, the shortest (on two occasions) six months. In 1789 she was bedridden. Her legs swelled, she had intermittent fevers and a terrible pain in her legs and abdomen throughout the entire pregnancy. The daughter she bore that year died at birth and very nearly took her mother with her.

From the letters, and from what I’ve read to research the symptoms, it would appear that Constanze nearly died of puerperal fever on two separate occasions. Childbirth and the resulting illnesses brought doctors, midwives, wet-nurses, and prescriptions--and expense. It would be difficult, even today, to keep a woman with such an obstetrical record “in good general health.” 

All large European cities were dirty. There were backhouses behind crowded apartment buildings. What this meant for the summer water supply is not hard to guess. The brief life of four of Mozart’s children and the illnesses of the parents were not unusual. However, it can only be imagined how difficult the birth and death of four infants in such a short space of time was for a young mother.

“My dear wife….will make a full recovery from her confinement. From the condition of her breasts I am rather afraid of milk-fever. And now the child has been given to a foster-nurse against my will, or rather, at my wish! For I was quite determined that whether she should be able to do so or not, my wife was never to feed her child. Yet I was equally determined that my child was never to take the milk of a stranger! I wanted the child to be brought up on water, like my sister and myself. However, the midwife, my mother-in-law ... have begged and implored me not to allow it, if only for the reason that most children here who are brought up on water do not survive as the people here don’t know how to give it properly. That induced me to give in, for I should not like to have anything to reproach myself with.”

It was a good thing that Mama Cecelia, tactful for once, managed to persuade Mozart that babies cannot live on sugar water, whatever wicked nonsense Leopold had retailed! The wet nurse system being what it was, women took on more babies than they could feed in return for the pittance they were paid. The more I learned, the less surprised I was that only two of the six Mozart babies Stanzi bore in the nine years of their marriage survived to adulthood. 

This letter changed my focus once and for all. All I could see was Stanzi, no doubt ill-prepared and injured by the rigors of childbirth, now ordered not to nurse her child--and being sickened with milk fever as a result--by a man who apparently lived in a dream world. Genius or not, my musical hero had feet of clay. Sisterhood is Powerful!

The emotional toll of so many births and deaths had to be great.  I cannot imagine that Constanze ever felt very well—or was able to function efficiently on any level—while her husband’s moods swung from despair to elation and back again. Their sixth child, Franz Wolfgang, was born at the very nadir of Mozart’s fortune. He survived—perhaps, as I wrote, because the family was now so destitute that his mother was forced to feed him herself. 

After Leopold Mozart, a demanding correspondent, died, the picture of the Mozart’s family life becomes less clear. The other reason we know less is because Constanze, like other wives of famous men,* destroyed many letters written by her to Mozart and most of the letters he wrote to her when she was at the spa or times when he was touring. Those that survive are filled with names that she carefully blacked out during the long years that remained to her after Mozart’s death.

Was she protecting her own reputation? Or was she protecting the reputations of people who were then still alive—and still powerful? Was she covering up something? A few bits of gossip remain.

 “Mozart,” it was said, loved his wife tenderly, although he was sometimes unfaithful to her. His fancies had such a hold over him that he could not resist them.”*

While Mozart was probably no Don Giovanni, he was a profoundly talented man working in a profession full of beautiful, talented women. These artists shone the glory of his creation back upon him—a most seductive mirror. Or, perhaps, as has been suggested: “Mozart disguised his own hyper sensitivity by expressing himself through women.”*

The end of the story, culminating in the mystery of Mozart’s death, was created from hints in a multitude of diaries and letters. In the end, I was forced to trust the characters to tell me what had taken place. Whether it is fact or fiction, I allowed the last few chapters of The Intimate Mozart to unfold exactly as my characters explained. 

We women know how much we bring to the table and yet how little we are still regarded. I began by wanting to write a novel which would center on a great man. I ended by depicting an 18th Century wife's world, complete with all the challenges, the successes and failures, the light and joy as well as the sorrows and shadows.

~~Juliet Waldron

*Mozart, by Marcia Davenport, 
*The Mozart Family Letters, translated by Emily Anderson
*Jean-Baptiste-Antione Suard in his Anecdotes of Mozart, 1804
*Martha Washington and Elizabeth Hamilton are known to have destroyed letters "too personal"
* The Mozart Brothers, Swedish film, 1986