Aloysia Weber

• 1. Introduction

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  Aloysia Weber was born around 1760 in Zell im Wiesental, and she would go on to become one of the most gifted sopranos in the German-speaking operatic world. She is remembered today chiefly because a young composer named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart fell deeply in love with her, wrote some of his most demanding music for her voice, and was famously rejected. But that story, as compelling as it is, only hints at who Aloysia really was. How did a girl from a family where her father earned less than she did become a fixture of the Vienna stage? What did her voice actually sound like to those who heard it? And what happened after Mozart moved on, married her sister, and became her brother-in-law? The answers lie in the Weber household, the court theaters of Munich and Vienna, and a diary entry written by a Danish visitor who could barely contain his astonishment.

• 2. The Weber Household

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  Fridolin Weber worked as a prompter and music copyist, earning 600 florins a year at the Munich Court Theater. His daughter Aloysia commanded 1,000 florins at the same institution, a figure that reversed the usual family hierarchy and made her the primary breadwinner long before she was twenty. The family had moved to Mannheim shortly after her birth, and it was there that Aloysia grew up before relocating to Munich in 1778 for her operatic debut.

  When the Emperor Joseph II launched the National Singspiel in Vienna, Aloysia was engaged to sing in the project, and the entire Weber family traveled together to Vienna in September of that year. Fridolin took a position as a ticket-taker at the theater but died suddenly only a month after their arrival. The loss was sudden, and it fell to Aloysia to support her mother Cacilia and her sisters: Josepha, Constanze, and Sophie.

  Josepha was herself a soprano who would later create the role of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute. Constanze would become Mozart's wife. Through a separate branch of the family, the composer Carl Maria von Weber was their half-first cousin. Music ran so thoroughly through the Weber line that even the household's domestic arrangements were negotiated in musical terms, as would become clear when Aloysia married in 1780.

• 3. Mozart's Pupil

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  Around 1777, a 21-year-old Mozart arrived in Mannheim hoping to find employment, and found instead a singer whose talent immediately arrested him. He undertook to teach Aloysia, a decision that was less unusual than it might appear. According to scholar Mahling, Mozart was himself a trained former soprano, instructed between 1764 and 1765 by the celebrated castrato Giovanni Manzuoli, and he had performed publicly as a singer up until the age of 13.

  Mozart's assessment of Aloysia was precise. He felt she already possessed an excellent cantabile style, the ability to sustain long, flowing melodic lines, but he believed she needed work on bravura passages, the rapid, technically demanding runs that Italian audiences expected. He wrote to his father about her: "She will certainly not forget cantabile, because that is her natural inclination."

  To sharpen her bravura technique, Mozart had her study arias he had composed during his earlier work in Italy. The examination piece he wrote for her at the conclusion of their study was the recitative and aria K. 294, "Alcandro, lo confesso/Non so, d'onde viene." Mozart described her preparation of it in a letter to his father, noting that after two days she sang it to him exactly as he would have wished, adding: "That is now the best aria she has; with it she certainly brings credit on herself wherever she goes."

  A second aria from this Mannheim period, "Popoli di Tessaglia!" K. 316, would eventually be listed in the Guinness records for containing the highest demanded note in the classical repertoire, reaching up to a high G.

• 4. Rejection and Its Aftermath

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  Mozart fell in love with Aloysia during the period of instruction, and expressed a desire to marry her, though the source leaves uncertain how serious his intentions were or whether they were reciprocated. He then left Mannheim for Paris on an unsuccessful job search, and by the time he returned, Aloysia's career had advanced considerably while his had not.

  The encounter on his way back through Munich became the stuff of Mozart biography. According to Georg Nikolaus von Nissen's draft biography of Mozart, Aloysia appeared no longer to know him when he entered the room. Mozart's response, as the anecdote has it, was to sit down at the piano and sing a vulgar phrase in a loud voice, one that corresponds to the English idiom "kiss my ass" and appears frequently elsewhere in Mozart's letters.

  Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, and for a period lodged in the Weber home, where Cacilia was taking in boarders to make ends meet after Fridolin's death. He transferred his affections to the third daughter, Constanze, and when they married in 1782 he became Aloysia's brother-in-law. Whatever awkwardness existed between them seems to have dissipated: Mozart went on to write a substantial body of music specifically for Aloysia across the following years, including concert arias, substitution pieces for operas by other composers, and a role in his own work Der Schauspieldirektor.

• 5. A Career in Vienna

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  On the 31st of October 1780, Aloysia married Joseph Lange, an actor at the Theater am Karntnertor who also painted, and who later produced a well-known portrait of Mozart. Because Aloysia was the chief financial support of her family, Lange agreed at the time of the marriage to pay her mother Cacilia an advance of 900 florins plus 700 florins per year on an ongoing basis. It was Lange's second marriage; his first wife had died in 1779.

  In 1782 Aloysia moved to the Burgtheater to sing Italian opera, a more prestigious position. It lasted only eight months. Contemporary accounts describe her becoming "persona non grata owing to disagreements over salary and role distribution as well as missed performances." She then continued singing at the Karntnertor while taking occasional roles at the Burgtheater.

  Her Mozart roles during the Vienna years were substantial. She sang Konstanze in revival productions of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail in 1783, 1785, and 1789. She sang Donna Anna at the Vienna premiere of Don Giovanni on the 7th of May 1788. She took the role of Sesto in performances of La clemenza di Tito organized by her sister Constanze in late 1794 and early 1795. One of the concert pieces Mozart completed for her, the scena and rondo K. 416, was finished in Vienna on the 8th of January 1783 and premiered by Aloysia three days later at a concert in the Mehlgrube, the same venue that later hosted the premieres of many of Mozart's piano concertos.

  By 1795, Aloysia had ceased to live with her husband Lange, and that same year she went on concert tour with her widowed sister Constanze. She spent her later years in Salzburg, moving there to be near Constanze and Sophie.

• 6. What the Witnesses Heard

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  Joachim-Daniel Preisler, a Danish actor and musician, was sent to Vienna on a study tour by his employer, the Royal Theater in Copenhagen. He was invited into the Lange home while Aloysia was pregnant and not performing. He heard her sing privately and recorded his impressions in his diary with notable candor.

  Preisler wrote that her voice was "something exceptional" while also noting, with the honesty of a professional, that it was not quite as good as a certain Muller he knew from home. He then set that aside to catalog what he found unmistakable: her high range, her delicacy, her execution, her taste, and her theoretical knowledge, none of which, he said, could fail to be admired by any impartial critic. He added that she could "sing the longest and most difficult parts incomparably better" than the Italian singers being celebrated by the Viennese nobility at the time.

  Preisler went further, observing that her musicianship extended beyond singing. He wrote that her brother-in-law, whom he called "well-known," had taught her so thoroughly that she could accompany from a full score and play interludes "like a Kapellmeister." That last word signals something beyond competence. A Kapellmeister was a director of music; the comparison placed Aloysia in the company of professional musicians, not merely gifted amateurs.

  The aria K. 538, "Ah se in ciel, benigne stelle," carries a history that underscores how long Mozart's connection to her voice endured. A partial score exists from 1778, written when Mozart was in love with Aloysia. A complete score, dedicated to the now-married "Signora Lange," dates from 1788, a decade later. As scholar Alan Tyson noted in 1990: "There was no real dishonesty in describing it almost ten years later as 'per la Sigra Lange' - it was still the same voice, though the singer had changed her name."