Constanze Mozart

• 1. Introduction

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  Constanze Mozart outlived her famous husband by more than fifty years, dying on the 6th of March 1842 at the age of eighty. For much of the twentieth century, that long life was treated as little more than a footnote to someone else's story. Biographers called her unintelligent, unmusical, even unfaithful. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians later concluded that those judgments were based on no good evidence, tainted with anti-feminism, and probably wrong on all counts.

  Born Maria Constanze Cacilia Josepha Johanna Aloysia Weber on the 5th of January 1762 in Zell im Wiesental, she grew up in a household saturated with music, married one of history's most celebrated composers under extraordinary pressure, raised six children while only two survived infancy, and then, widowed at twenty-nine with debts and no income, built herself into a businesswoman who shaped how the world would remember Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  Her story raises questions worth sitting with. What kind of woman actually lived inside that marriage? What did she do when it ended? And why did so many people work so hard to diminish her?

• 2. The Weber Household

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  Fridolin Weber, Constanze's father, worked as a double bass player, prompter, and music copyist. His half-brother was the father of the composer Carl Maria von Weber, so musical talent ran through the family at more than one angle. Cäcilia Weber, née Stamm, was Constanze's mother, and she raised four daughters in Mannheim, a city the source describes as an important cultural, intellectual, and musical center.

  All four daughters were trained as singers. Josepha and Aloysia both went on to distinguished musical careers, later performing in premieres of Mozart's own works. Constanze was the third daughter; Sophie was the youngest. The family's connection to Mozart did not begin with Constanze. When the twenty-one-year-old composer visited Mannheim in 1777 on a job-hunting tour with his mother, he fell in love with Aloysia, who was fifteen at the time. Aloysia then obtained a position as a singer in Munich, the family followed her, and she rejected Mozart when he passed through on his way back to Salzburg.

  By 1779, the family had moved to Vienna, again following Aloysia's career. A month after arriving, Fridolin died. When Mozart himself moved to Vienna in 1781, Aloysia had already married the actor Joseph Lange. Cäcilia took in boarders to make ends meet at their house on the second floor of Am Peter 11, a building known as Zum Auge Gottes, meaning God's Eye.

• 3. A Marriage Under Pressure

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  Mozart arrived in Vienna on the 16th of March 1781 as a member of Archbishop Colloredo's household. In May he was, in his own words, obliged to leave that arrangement. He chose to board with the Weber family, initially expecting to stay only a week.

  Cäcilia Weber eventually noticed that Mozart was courting Constanze, then nineteen, and asked him to leave in the interest of propriety. He moved out on the 5th of September to a room on the third floor of the Graben. The courtship continued but ran into trouble. Surviving letters show that Mozart and Constanze briefly broke up in April 1782 over a jealousy episode: Constanze had permitted another young man to measure her calves during a parlor game. Meanwhile, Mozart faced the hard task of winning marriage permission from his father Leopold.

  The crisis came to a head abruptly. The historian Daniel Heartz suggests that Constanze eventually moved in with Mozart, placing her in serious social disgrace by the standards of the time. On the 31st of July 1782, Mozart wrote to Leopold: "All the good and well-intentioned advice you have sent fails to address the case of a man who has already gone so far with a maiden. Further postponement is out of the question." Constanze's sister Sophie had reportedly declared, in tears, that their mother would send the police after Constanze if she did not return home. On the 4th of August, Mozart wrote to Baroness von Waldstatten asking whether the police could enter a private house, then added: "I know no better remedy than to marry Constanze tomorrow morning or if possible today."

  The wedding did take place that same day, the 4th of August 1782, in a side chapel of St. Stephen's Cathedral. The marriage contract stipulated that Constanze assigned her bridegroom five hundred gulden, which he promised to augment with one thousand gulden, with the combined sum to pass to whichever spouse survived. Leopold's consent arrived in the mail the following day.

• 4. Letters and Love

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  Mozart wrote to Constanze from Dresden on the 16th of April 1789, and the letter is a curious mixture of tenderness and instruction. He included a six-item list of requests: not to be sad, to take care of her health, to be assured of his love, and, among other things, not to go out walking alone. He concluded with a string of nonsense numbers: "I kiss you and squeeze you 1095060437082 times; this will help you to practice your pronunciation."

  A letter from Berlin, written on the 23rd of May 1789 as Mozart anticipated returning home, is more openly erotic. He wrote that on the 1st of June he would sleep in Prague, and on the 4th with his dear little wife. The letter then shifts into a playful fantasy about a part of himself that had crept onto the writing table, and two words have been erased by an unknown hand at different points. The passage reads as entirely affectionate and physically direct.

  No letters from Constanze to Mozart survive. But in her old age she wrote to a music teacher named Friedrich Schwaan on the 5th of December 1829: "I have had two most excellent husbands by whom I was loved and honoured - even, I have to say, adored; they, too were both equally loved by me with the utmost tenderness, thus I was twice completely happy."

  Constanze gave birth to six children in eight years. Only two survived infancy. Karl Thomas Mozart, born on the 21st of September 1784, lived until the 31st of October 1858. Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, born on the 26th of July 1791, died on the 29th of July 1844.

• 5. After Mozart's Death

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  Mozart died in 1791 leaving debts. Constanze was twenty-nine. What followed was a sustained and largely self-directed recovery. She secured a pension from the emperor, organized profitable memorial concerts, and launched a campaign to publish her husband's works. These efforts moved her from near poverty to financial security and eventually to wealth.

  She sent her two surviving sons, Karl and Franz, to Prague to be educated by Franz Xaver Niemetschek, and she collaborated with Niemetschek on the first full-length biography of Mozart. Among her musical efforts in these years was her work promoting La Clemenza di Tito, the late opera that had been prepared for performance in Prague in 1791. On the 29th of December 1794, she mounted a benefit performance at the Kartnertortheater in Vienna, with her sister Aloysia Weber singing the role of Sextus. In further performances, Constanze herself took the role of Vitellia.

  Toward the end of 1797 she met Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, a Danish diplomat and writer who was, at first, her tenant. They began living together in September 1798. Because Nissen was Protestant and Constanze Catholic, marriage was legally blocked in Austria at the time, so they traveled to Pressburg, today's Bratislava, in 1809 to marry. From 1810 to 1820 they lived in Copenhagen, then traveled through Europe before settling in Salzburg in 1824. Both worked on a biography of Mozart; Constanze published it in 1828, two years after Nissen's death.

• 6. Constanze and the Music

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  The soprano writing in Mozart's Great Mass in C minor was written for Constanze. She sang in the 1783 premiere of the work in Salzburg, and the demands placed on the solo soprano voice in passages such as the Christe eleison and the aria Et incarnatus est reflect what Mozart knew she could do. Maynard Solomon, in his Mozart biography, describes the Mass speculatively as a love offering.

  Constanze also played a documented role in pushing Mozart toward Baroque counterpoint. On the 20th of April 1782, Mozart wrote to his sister Nannerl explaining why he had composed the Fantasy and Fugue, K. 394. He had been visiting Baron Gottfried van Swieten every Sunday, examining van Swieten's manuscript collection of works by Bach and Handel. When Constanze heard the fugues, Mozart wrote, "she absolutely fell in love with them. Now she will listen to nothing but fugues." She scolded him for not writing any down and kept pushing him until he did.

  The same letter contains a note Constanze wrote directly to Nannerl, signed Constanza Weber, which is one of the few surviving pieces of her own writing from the marriage years. She wrote that she would not have dared write so boldly had Mozart not assured her that Nannerl would not take offense, and she added that Nannerl had become precious to her "for no other reason than your being the sister of a brother so worthy of you."

• 7. Myth, Evidence, and Legacy

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  A daguerreotype photograph, first brought to scholarly attention in 1958, was claimed to show Constanze Nissen at seventy-eight, taken in Altotting, Bavaria, in October 1840 outside the home of composer Max Keller. Multiple Mozart scholars rejected the identification on several grounds. The lenses needed to take such a photograph outdoors were not invented by Joseph Petzval until after Constanze died in 1842. Documentation shows that Constanze was crippled by severe arthritis in her final years. Her biographer Agnes Selby wrote that "there is absolutely no way she could have traveled to visit Maximillian Keller during the period when the photograph was taken," and noted that Constanze had had no documented contact with Keller since 1826. The author Sean Munger also observed that the woman in the image does not appear old enough to be seventy-eight.

  The Royal Conservatory of Brussels holds several autograph documents from Constanze, including letters to her son Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart and a small illustrated Album de Souvenirs. The album is dated 1789 but covers the 1801-1823 period, collecting memories, impressions, and poems.

  In her final years in Salzburg, Constanze had the company of her two surviving sisters, Aloysia and Sophie, both of them also widows, who moved to Salzburg and lived out their lives there. The three Weber sisters who had each, in their way, circled Mozart's world ended their days together in the same city where he was born.