Mozart's Last Aria Part 1

Mozart's LAST ARIA.

A Novel.

MATT REES.

Dedication.

To Devorah, who is all the music I need.

Epigraph.

In October 1791 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the greatest musical genius the world has ever seen, told his wife he had been poisoned. Six weeks later, at the age of thirty-five, he was dead.

The truth, the truth, even if it be a crime!

The Magic Flute, Act I, scene 18.

Prologue.

When she sang, it was hard to imagine death was so near.

Her maid let me in at my usual time in the mid-afternoon. A soprano voice of considerable purity came from the front of the apartment.

"Someone's visiting her, Franziska?" I asked.

The maid shook her head. "She's alone, sir."

I pa.s.sed through the sitting room. She was singing Zerlina's aria from Don Giovanni, in which the peasant coquette describes the desire beating in her chest. Her voice quieted for the last line, an invitation to the girl's suitor: "Touch me here." A raw tone infiltrated as she repeated those words to a crescendo. The concluding note weakened and quavered.

I heard a dry cough as I went through the door to Aunt Nannerl's bedroom. Her thin hand conducted an imaginary orchestra through the coda.

She laid her fingers on the bedspread and dropped her chin to her chest. Was she hearing the applause of an audience? Perhaps the effort of singing exhausted her.

The lids of her blind, old eyes flickered. I pondered the life she had led and all that she had seen, gone now forever. As a musician, I understood the secrets a composer hides in the pages of his score, locked away from those unable to comprehend the fullness of his creation. I was hardly aware of it, but I had been less perceptive as a nephew.

My visits to her home near Salzburg's cathedral had been so frequent, I would have been tempted to conclude that I knew everything there was of her to be learned. Her renown as a child prodigy on the keyboard, her adolescent performances with my father in Europe's great cities. Marriage to a provincial functionary and elevation to the minor n.o.bility, so that she had borne the t.i.tle Baroness of the Empire since 1792. Then after her husband's pa.s.sing, her return to Salzburg, where she taught piano until her eyesight failed.

This presumption to summarize her seventy-eight years was, in fact, the thoughtless dismissal of an enfeebled old woman by a younger man. I say this with certainty, because today she revealed to me a life more fantastic even than her famous history would suggest.

Her singing done, my aunt lay silent and still in the narrow bed. She wore a lace nightshirt and a simple shawl around her shoulders. I kissed her dry cheek, drew up a chair, and recounted the gossip of the town. She didn't register my presence.

When I grew silent, she reached out, moving with a swiftness that surprised me, and pressed hard on my hand. Her fingers retained the power of a lifetime in which she sat at the piano three hours or more each day, exercising the skills that once entertained kings and princes and counts. "Play for me," she said.

Her pianoforte was a fine old grand by Stein of Augsburg. I gave her the Sonata in A by my father. I wished for her in her frailty to feel roused by the dance rhythm of its Turkish rondo. As I played, she fingered a gold cross inlaid with amber which she wore around her neck. Her blank, sightless eyes were wide. When I finished, she croaked out my name: "Wolfgang."

"Yes, dearest aunt," I replied.

She turned to me as though she had expected someone else to respond.

When I first came to play for her, she told me that I reminded her of my father. In truth my hair and eyes are dark like my mother's and my talent at the keyboard is of a kind that he would no doubt have described as mechanical. I have nothing of his genius. But I am named Wolfgang, and perhaps for Aunt Nannerl that much resemblance sufficed. Until that moment. I sensed that she spoke directly to the man thirty-eight years dead who had been her little brother. The man famed throughout Europe and even in America as an unmatched composer.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

"On that shelf. In a box inlaid with mother-of-pearl." Her hand lifted from the quilt with an unaccustomed grace that made me wonder if she were already dead and I was gazing upon her spirit, rising free of her fragile bones and decaying skin. I opened the casket and, beneath some old painted ribbons, I found a volume in nicked brown leather. I placed it in her grasp.

"I'll be dead soon enough," she murmured.

"May the Lord forbid it, dearest Auntie. Don't speak of such things."

She flipped back the book's cover and ran her fingers over the dry, yellowed pages within. A quill pen such as few have used for years now had filled the book with lines slanting upward from left to right. I recognized the hand as her own, for she had often written to me as I toured the concert halls of Poland and Prussia. She turned a few pages and spread her bony fingers across the text. On the first line, I read a place and a date: Vienna, December 21, 1791.

She shut the book with a clap that was like a cannon shot through the silence of her apartment. In the instant that it took me to blink in fright, the leather-bound volume swung toward me and dropped into my fumbling grasp.

"Don't show it to your mother," she said.

"Why not?" I smiled. "What secrets do you keep, Aunt Nannerl?"

Her faint eyebrows lifted and I felt that a much younger woman fixed me with those melancholy brown eyes.

"Upon my death I shall leave to my son Leopold all that I have," she said. "He'll inherit my money, my few valuable pieces of jewelry. Also my papers, my diaries, my daily books. Mostly dull chronicles of the simple routines of Salzburg and the village where I pa.s.sed my married life." She sucked for breath. Her head lapsed against the pillows.

I lifted the volume in my hand. "But this-?"

"Something different. Only for you."

"Is it about my father?" I could ill disguise my eagerness, for I was just a few months old when he was taken from us. He has been with me always at the piano, though only as the mythic G.o.ds of Olympus could be said to have been with the Greeks when they ground wheat for flour.

My aunt swallowed hard and coughed. I thought perhaps I had been mistaken. After all, when I used to ask her about my father's last years in Vienna, she always pleaded that she hadn't seen him after 1788, when my grandfather's will was settled in her favor and a coolness arose between the siblings. She had remained with her husband in the village of St. Gilgen. My father had continued his career in the opera houses and aristocratic salons of Vienna, until he was cut down three summers later in his thirty-sixth year.

Her lips pursed, she gathered herself. "That book records the truth about events that have shaped your life-and all musical history."

"It is him," I said, striking the notched surface of the leather binding in excitement.

"It's his death."

"The fever? Yes, Auntie, I know."

She shook her head. The hair, which her maid had dressed high and old-fashioned even though she lay in bed, rustled across the pillow as if it were hushing me, commanding my silence.

"His murder," she said.

I heard a sound like the final exhalation of a dying soul. I couldn't tell if it emanated from my aunt or from me, or perhaps it was the grieving spirit of my poor father. I would've spoken, but my breath chilled, my ribs seemed to close in on my lungs, and my cravat was suddenly tight around my high collar.

Flicking her wrist in dismissal, Aunt Nannerl subsided onto her pillows.

I hastened to my room in my dear mother's house on Nonnberg Lane, almost at a run up the steep steps beneath the cliffs. The leather of my aunt's diary darkened with the sweat of my palm, though the day was cold enough that the first snowfall threatened.

At home, I wiped the perspiration from the cover onto the leg of my breeches, closed my eyes to whisper a Hail Mary for my father's soul, and opened the book.

FRANZ XAVER WOLFGANG MOZART.

Salzburg, October 9, 1829.

Chapter 1.

December 1791.

ST. GILGEN, NEAR SALZBURG.

As I returned from early Ma.s.s at St. Aegidius, snow screened the summit of the Zwolferhorn and layered the village in white silence. Approaching my door through the garden by the lakeside, I heard little Leopold picking out one of my brother's minuets on the piano. I smiled that this should be the only sound on the sh.o.r.es of the Abersee that morning. The snowfall smothered all but the essential music that joined me to dear Wolfgang. I wondered if he was watching the same gentle drift cover the streets of Vienna at that moment.

In the hall, Lenerl took my fur and handed me a letter delivered by the village bailiff, who had returned from Salzburg late the previous night. I ordered a hot chocolate and pulled my chair close to the fire in the sitting room. I watched the snow gather in the window mullions, grinning each time the boy struck a false note in the drawing room.

The discordant tune was hardly little Leopold's fault. The piano sounded ill enough when I played it. By the mountain lakes of the Salzkammergut, cold and damp had warped the instrument's wood, made the keys stick, and moldered the hammer casings, so that a true note was rare enough. Even so the boy spent an hour each day at the piano, because he hoped to gratify me.

To tell the truth, it pleased me that my son played only as well as a six-year-old ought. My brother, of course, composed his first dance at six, and it had been my departed father's desire to re-create that prodigy in my firstborn. But that was never my intention. I had come to resent the fact that true happiness was mine only when seated at the piano. Even when playing cards with friends or shooting a pistol at target practice, I moved the fingers of my free hand through an imaginary arpeggio, for if I didn't I became distracted and irritable. The curse of the artist is to have the best part of one's faculties occupied only with one's craft. Friends and family skim your existence like a fisherman on the Abersee, while your real self is as inaccessible to them as the depths of the lake. But I had long since ceased to live the life of an artist, and I sometimes felt this preoccupation rather as a cripple might his useless foot.

I beat a rhythm on the letter lying in my lap. Perhaps it carried news of my brother. In the winter, it was hard to keep up with events beyond the s...o...b..und village. The latest news sheet to reach us reported that Wolfgang had another original opera in production. Acquaintances returning from Vienna told me that his health wasn't of the best. He was frequently sick, so I earnestly wished for tidings of his recovery in this letter. I felt sure I recognized the handwriting.

For Madame's personal attention.

Madame Maria Anna Berchtold von Sonnenburg.

Living at the Prefect's House.

St. Gilgen.

Near Salzburg.

I read my name as if it belonged to a stranger. A collection of surnames, earned by marriage to the man working alone on his accounts in the study across the hall. These things, which ought to have distinguished me, served only to make me anonymous. Before Berchtold had brought me to this remote village-thus adding a geographical anonymity, too-I had a name that everyone knew and which I admit I still applied to myself in the privacy of these moments seated before the fire.

Mozart.

The memory of that name sounded in my head like a dream. The soft Z and disappearing T with which the French had p.r.o.nounced it when we entered the salon of Louis XV at Versailles. The long English A I had noted from the mouth of King George's chamberlain announcing us at Buckingham House.

Lenerl laid my hot chocolate on the table and curtsied. "Will there be anything else, madame?"

I lifted my chin to dismiss her.

It was deluded to muse on my family's long-ago travels to Europe's capitals. If I no longer bore the name, I had to acknowledge that even then I had been merely a Mozart. Only he had ever been "Mozart." One might have addressed a letter in Milan or Berlin with that single word and it would have found my brother in Vienna. I had inherited the miniature watches and golden snuffboxes, gifts from delighted aristocrats in the time of our joint fame as touring child musicians. But my brother had retained the name.

To the people of this village I wasn't a Mozart. Few of them had ventured farther than Salzburg, six hours' journey away through the mountains. What could they know of the palaces of Nymphenburg and Schonbrunn where I had displayed my mastery of the keyboard, wandered the gardens, chattered with the king, worn clothes made for the empress's children? The villagers' lives didn't extend beyond the church, the bathhouse where the surgeon pulled their teeth, and the stall by the lake where the s.e.xton sold rosaries and devotional candles.

No one even called me Nannerl anymore, now that Mamma and Papa were gone. No one, except he who had been silent for three years. Though it had been unsaid in our last letters, I feared that the unpleasantness of our father's testament, in which all the fruits of our early fame were bequeathed to me, had broken the bond with my brother, my dear Jack Pudding, my Franz of the Nosebleed.

These years without communication were, I a.s.sumed, harder for me to bear than for him. Were he to consider the painful task of writing to his sister in her simple marital home, there would be the distraction of a salon at which to perform, a ball to attend, a concerto to be scored.

I enjoyed no such diversions. Still, I delighted in the reviews of his operas in the Salzburg news sheets and subscribed to each piano transcription of his works, playing through them with wonder at his compositional development. Even my poor, restrained husband had failed to hide his tears when I sang "For pity's sake, my darling, forgive the error of a loving soul," from Wolfgang's Cos fan tutte. Throughout these years of silence, I comforted myself that one day he might visit our village and we'd play together once more.

I sang that aria as I slipped my finger behind the seal and unfolded the letter. It was from my sister-in-law, Constanze.

My song caught at a high G and transformed to a sob.

Your beloved brother pa.s.sed away in the night of December 5, she wrote. The greatest of composers and the most devoted of husbands lies in a simple grave in the field of St. Marx. My fondest, most desperate wish is to join him there.

Constanze gave the dreadful details. Wolfgang had succ.u.mbed to "acute heated miliary fever," which she explained meant that he had been afflicted with a rash resembling tiny white millet grains.

My chin quivered as I read her description of his last days, the swelling of his body, the vomiting and chills, the final coma before his death at one hour past midnight. He had been gone a week.

I crossed myself and mouthed a prayer that he should be delivered to the company of Christ. I pressed the letter to my breast and wept. "Wolfgang," I whispered.

On the piano, my son stumbled through a French nursery rhyme, Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman. I had taught it to him one morning after I played Wolfgang's marvelous set of variations on its theme. The simple melody stabbed at me. I bent over, pain sharp in my abdomen.

The piano went silent. Leopold's small feet skipped across the hall. He entered the salon with his green jacket b.u.t.toned to his chubby chin and blew a kiss at the portrait of Salzburg's prince archbishop on the wall because he knew it made me laugh. When he hugged me I pressed his face to my neck, for in that moment I couldn't look upon features so like my brother's had been in his infancy. I stroked his blond hair behind his ears.

"Would you play for me, Mamma?" he said. "My fingers are tired."

"Tired? And it's not yet eight in the morning. Will you have no energy to make mischief during the day?" I grabbed his cold little hands and blew on them.

He giggled. "I'm not tired. Just my fingers."

"I'll play for you in a little while, my darling. First, Mamma has a letter to read."

"Who wrote it?"

"Your aunt Constanze in Vienna."

Never having met my sister-in-law, the boy shrugged.