Mozart's Last Aria Part 28

"I understand," he said.

Precisely because he accepted my decision, it was hard to maintain my determination. "Even when you and I are apart, we'll both play his music," I said.

"For me, the music is at an end." His sad eyes rested on my neck, the cross of ambers he had given me. "Anyway, I always believed he composed only for you."

I thought of what Magdalena had said at the graveyard, her solution to Wolfgang's riddle. I understood that Swieten was right. There was pa.s.sion for me in Vienna with the baron. But the world would lay its corrupting touch upon us and make our affair seem tawdry. The love that was left to me was in Wolfgang's music.

I hurried down the stone stairs and into the courtyard. The fog froze my tears.

Lenerl averted her eyes as I climbed into the carriage. If she told tales on me when we returned to the village, my sobs would be the least of the strange things she might relate. I let them come.

The driver circled back to the entrance. The horses' hooves clattered toward the vaulted gateway.

Swieten came down the steps three at a time. He caught the coach at the gate as the traffic on Herren Lane forced it to pause.

He laid his hands on the side of the carriage. I heard again the music of the aria I had sung for him in his library. This time the strings and the soprano were in harmony. I saw that he heard them, too. He smiled at me, though his jaw trembled.

The carriage pulled into the street. With a snap of the whip, the horses took me away from the baron. I leaned out of the window. The mist and the traffic closed about him. He became as invisible as if he had been consigned to the cells with Pergen's victims.

Within a half hour, my carriage was in the countryside, adrift on a fog that smothered Vienna in its enclosing silence forever.

Epilogue.

I read throughout the night. By the morning I was feverish with excitement. I rushed down the mountainside to Aunt Nannerl's home. I carried the journal she had given me, recording the events of that week in 1791. Its secrets, revealed for the first time after almost forty years, were so strange that I needed to feel their weight in my hand. Otherwise I might have believed that I had dreamed them.

I headed through the narrow streets at the foot of the mountain. I crossed the cathedral square and hurried up the steps to Aunt Nannerl's apartment.

Her maid opened the door. She held a handkerchief to her eyes. "Master Wolfgang, I'm so glad you're here. Dear G.o.d has sent you." Franziska wiped at her tears and only then noticed my own agitation. She hesitated.

"What is it, girl?"

"She's had a terrible night, sir. She's very weak." She sobbed. "I don't think she has long. She won't let me call for a doctor. But she's been asking for you."

I went through to the bedroom. Aunt Nannerl lay as I had left her. Under her bonnet, her face was so pale it seemed to have been dusted in flour. A thin hand lay across her shawl.

I sat beside her, and touched her shoulder gently.

She snapped her head toward me. "Wolfgang," she whispered.

"I'm here, Auntie."

Her blind eyes were milkier than ever. "You read it? You know now?"

"I can't believe it, Auntie."

She snorted. "Do you think such things could be made up?"

"Why did you never tell?"

She pursed her lips-the pause of one who must concentrate hard to accomplish the mere act of breathing. Her maid might be right, I thought: Aunt Nannerl seemed close to the end.

I touched her wrist. The flesh was cold. "Did you want to protect my mother? Was that why you told no one?" I said. "You didn't want Mamma to suffer, to know the truth of how her husband was taken from her?"

Her pale eyebrows descended, a grimace.

"Don't tax your strength, Auntie. I understand. Mamma will never know."

She nodded toward the piano.

"You wish for me to play for you?" I raised my voice as though I spoke to a child or a foreigner.

She beckoned with a slight motion of her hand. I leaned close. Her breath was bitter and metallic, like a coffeepot that has lain unwashed for a day.

"I wish to explain to you," she murmured.

"That's why you gave me the diary?"

Her head shook. "Sing it for me."

The aria was for a soprano, but it was hardly the time to quibble with my aunt about musical technicalities.

I laid the journal on the edge of her bed and sat at the old Stein. In my head, I formulated the letter I must send that day to Innsbruck, to her sole surviving child, Leopold, urging him to come bid her farewell. Under my breath I found the right pitch for my voice. I played through the introduction, transposing the orchestral part directly for the piano, and sang: I wish to explain to you, O G.o.d, what my grief is.

But fate condemns me To weep and remain silent.

My aunt's head lay to the side. She stared toward the window. I wondered if, in her blindness, she detected traces of the strong morning sun off the cathedral towers, perhaps as an undefined glow before her eyes. Her lips moved, but I couldn't tell if she was singing with me or struggling for breath.

My heart may not crave for the one I wish to love.

At the dramatic conclusion of the aria I confess the music took hold of me. I no longer was aware of Aunt Nannerl, small in her bed. I brought out the highest C-sharp I could manage and, as often happened when I played my father's music, I felt his hand guiding mine across the keyboard.

Part from me, run from me.

Of love, do not speak.

With the aria at an end, I closed my eyes and listened to the final chord resonate in the body of the piano. Something brushed the back of my wrist and I started in fright.

I turned to ask Aunt Nannerl if she had enjoyed the aria. She lay so still I decided, instead, to tuck her hand beneath the blanket for warmth and tiptoe to the sitting room.

I lifted her arm. It was heavy, like a sleeping child. I bent close to her and whispered her name. Her head remained on its side, facing the window, eyes closed. I raised my hand before her lips and nose, but felt no breath. Her chest was still.

While I had been singing, she had gone.

I took her hand between both of mine, as though my warmth might revive her. She held something there. I turned her wrist to see what it was.

A thin gold chain looped around her middle finger. In the center of her palm, at the end of the necklace, lay a cross embedded with ambers.

FRANZ XAVER WOLFGANG MOZART.

Salzburg, October 10, 1829.

Author's Note.

This novel is based on real historical events. Mozart's antic.i.p.ation of his own death, his risky plan for a new Masonic lodge of some kind, and his mission to Berlin are matters of historical research. Pergen's secret police persecution of the Masons, Hofdemel's suicide, and his mutilation of Magdalena are also well doc.u.mented, as are many of the other details of the characters, their relationships, and their membership of secret Masonic Brotherhoods. That women would have been members of Wolfgang's new lodge is drawn from the text of The Magic Flute, which I interpret as a forceful argument for women's inclusion in the Masons.

I altered the histories of several characters, allowing myself fictional license of varying degrees. In fact, Nannerl never visited Vienna after Wolfgang's death. Gieseke fled the imperial capital, only to turn up in Greenland and later Dublin, where he died in 1833, a respected professor of mineralogy. Count Pergen really was fired by Leopold II. But he was reinstated soon after the emperor's sudden death, which came only three months after Wolfgang's pa.s.sing. It was suspected Leopold had been poisoned by Freemasons.

Before he died, Leopold dismissed Swieten, whose membership of the Masonic Illuminati had become known. The baron never returned to public life. He died in 1803.

Magdalena Hofdemel went back to her family's home in Moravia. The capacity of Wolfgang's music to soothe various disorders is the subject of many recent scientific studies. A paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2001 found Mozart's piano sonatas reduced epileptic activity in sufferers like Magdalena.

As for Wolfgang, no one can be sure exactly how he came to his end. But he might really have died this way.

Acknowledgments.

With thanks to: Dr. Orit Wolf, for showing how great musicians work; Louise and Dieter Hecht, for taking me high above the Karlskirche and demonstrating how scary old Vienna can be; and Maestro Zubin Mehta, who told me that he, too, would find it hard to live without Mozart.

The Music.

Mozart's work was catalogued for the first time by Ludwig Ritter von Kochel, an Austrian music historian, in 1862. The music is identified these days by his so-called Kochel, or "K," numbers. Mozart's contemporaries, of course, wouldn't have used K numbers, so I didn't refer to the music that way in this novel. But if you want to look up and listen to the music featured in this book, here's a list of the K numbers:

PROLOGUE.

"Vedrai carino" ("You will see, my dear"), aria from the opera Don Giovanni, K 527 Sonata for Piano in A, K 331

CHAPTER 1.

Piano variations "Ah, vous dirai-je," K 265 "Per pieta, ben mio, perdona" ("For pity's sake, my darling, forgive"), aria from the opera Cos fan tutte (Thus Do All Women), K 588 Sonata for Piano in A Minor, K 310

CHAPTER 5.

Adagio for Piano in B Minor, K 540

CHAPTER 6.

Clarinet Concerto in A, K 622

CHAPTER 8.

"Ach, ich liebte" ("Ah, I was in love"), aria from the opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), K 384 Symphony 41 "Jupiter" in C, K 551 "Der Holle Rache" ("h.e.l.l's revenge"), aria from the opera Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), K 620 Sonata for Piano in B-flat, K 333 Piano Concerto in C, K 467