The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume I Part 8

The opera was successful, and the Pope gave him a knighthood; and he was only fourteen years old!

Perhaps this mysterious sweetheart is the same one he alludes to later as Annamindl, and concerning whom he sends his sister such solemn messages as these:

"Don't, I entreat, forget about _the one other_, where no other can ever be."

"Say to Fraulein W. von Molk that I rejoice at the thought of Salzburg, in the hope that I may again receive the same kind of present, for the minuets which was bestowed on me at a similar concert. She knows all about it."

"Carissima Sorella,--Spero che voi sarete stata dalla Signora, che voi gia sapete."

"My dearest Sister,--I entreat you not to forget before your journey, to perform your promise, that is, to make a certain visit. I have my reasons for this. Pray present my kind regards in that quarter, but in the most impressive and tender manner,--the most tender; and, oh,--but I need not be in such anxiety. I beg my compliments to Roxalana, who is to drink tea this evening with the Sultan. All sorts of pretty speeches to Madlle Mizerl; she must not doubt my love. I have her constantly before my eyes in her fascinating _neglige_. I have seen many pretty girls here, but not one whose beauty can be compared with hers." The daughter of Doctor Barisani, the family physician, was for a time his heart's queen. Later Rosa Cannabich was "the magnet." And Wendling's daughter paid her visit to his heart's best room.

These instances of puppy-love can have given little anxiety to the father and mother; but soon old Leopold began to fear that this amorous activity might interfere with his son's wedlock to his art. When, therefore, he was sixteen years old and began to take a solemn interest in an opera singer at Munich, to weep over the beauty of her singing, and to seek her acquaintance, the father began to protest. This was Mlle. Keiserin, the daughter of a cook, and Mozart was later a little ashamed of his easy enthusiasm.

There seems to be an implied affair, perhaps more serious, in this letter to his father, dated 1777--he was born in 1756:

"As to the baker's daughter, I have no objection to make; I foresaw all this long ago. This was the cause of my reluctance to leave home, and finding it so difficult to go. I hope the affair is not by this time known all over Salzburg. I beg you, dear papa, most urgently to keep the matter quiet as long as possible, and in the meantime to pay her father on my account any expense he may have incurred by her entrance into the convent, which I will repay gladly when I return to Salzburg."

Meanwhile he was well immersed in his dalliance with his Basle, or cousin. In 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one and travelling on a concert-tour with his mother, he met, at Augsburg, Marianne Mozart, the daughter of his uncle, a book-binder. His experience at Augsburg with certain impertinent sn.o.bs disgusted him with the place, and he wrote his father that the meeting with his fair cousin was the only compensation of visiting the town. He found her "pretty, intelligent, lovable, clever, and gay," and, like him, "rather inclined to be satirical."

They struck up a correspondence which shows him in most hilarious moods.

His letters are full of that _possenhaften Jargon_ with which he sprinkled his letters to his sister. He calls his cousin by the pet name of Basle, with which he rhymes "Hasle," a colloquial word for "rabbit."

His first letter to her overflows with nonsense and meaningless rhymes, puns, and quibbles, such as:

"Ich hoffe, Sie werden auch meinen Brief--trief, welchen ich Ihnen aus Mannheim geschrieben erhalten haben--schaben.

Des...o...b..sser, besser desto!"

Lady Wallace has made a translation which reproduces well the nonsense if not literally the sense. This is a sample:

"My dear Coz-Buzz:--I have safely received your precious epistle--thistle, and from it I perceive--achieve, that my aunt--gaunt, and you--shoe, are quite well--bell. I have to-day a letter--setter, from my papa--ah-ha, safe in my hands--sands."

A week later he writes her a letter beginning:

"My dear niece, cousin, daughter! mother, sister, and wife!--Potz Himmel! Croatians, demons, witches, hags, and cross batteries! Potz Element! air, earth, fire and water! Europe, Asia, Africa, and America!

Jesuits, Augustines, Benedictines, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carthusians, and Knights of the Cross! privateers, canons regular and irregular, sluggards, rascals, scoundrels, imps, and villains all! donkeys, buffaloes, oxen, fools, blockheads, numskulls, and foxes! What means this? Four soldiers and three shoulder-belts! Such a packet and no portrait!"

It seems that she had promised him her picture! She sends it later, and it is still in the Mozart Museum, showing her, as Jahn declares, to have a good-natured and cheerful face, and rather a stocky figure; he adds, "Without being beautiful she seems right pleasing." It is certain that in whatever b.u.t.terfly humour Mozart regarded her, she took him and his kisses and his flowery declarations seriously. Had he not said in this very letter, "love me as I love you, and then we shall never cease loving each other?" Had he not thence broken into French?

"Je vous baise vos mains,--votre visage--afin, tout ce que vous me permettez de baiser. Je suis de tout mon coeur," etc.

His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who met for crossbow practice, and the target represented "the melancholy farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the Basle."

His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris. The father was the more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with Aloysia Weber--of whom more later. Mozart loved his father and treated him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him:

"The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent intercourse with your brother's daughter, makes me justly indignant; but it is not as you think. I require to give you no answer on the subject."

A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning:

"You may think or believe that I have croaked (_crepirt_) or kicked the bucket (_verreckt_). But I beg you not to think so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?"

Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.

In Munich it was Mozart's fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long absence) showed herself indifferent. He had planned that his cousin should "have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia." This I would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any deep affection in his cousin. There is nothing in his life that shows him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.

And yet his flirtation with the Basle certainly went past mere bantering and repartee. She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation. She went with him to Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him writing with the same exuberance, addressing her as--

"Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest, by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken."

With her name he puns on _Basle_ and _Ba.s.s_, thence, "_Baschen oder Violoncellchen_"--a little ba.s.s-viol or violoncelline. He writes, as he says, to appease her "alluring beauty (_visibilia et invisibilia_) heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel." Then he writes her a pa.s.sionate parody on a poem of Klopstock's, and writes it in circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies neither beauty on her part nor art on his.

This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a business letter two years later. And this marks the end of a flirtation which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity. But this was not her mood. Biographer Jahn says:

"The Basle seems to have taken her cousin's courtship seriously; at least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that there was something of deluded expectation in her tone. She spoke neither gladly nor often of this time. She was not musical and could not have had a proper appreciation of Mozart's artistic value. His vivacity and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her. Of her later life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of eighty-three."

So much for the Basle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more serious--for Mozart a very serious--affair, was his infatuation with Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little heart.

When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the Basle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work. The copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but hospitable man. His name was Weber, and his brother became the father of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.

The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart.

Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career. It was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer Keiserin some years before. And now we find him writing to his father on Jan. 17, 1778, the following description of the Weber family:

"He has a daughter who sings admirably, and has a lovely pure voice; she is only fifteen. She fails in nothing but in stage action; were it not for that, she might be the prima donna of any theatre. Her father is a downright honest German who brings up his children well, for which very reason the girl is persecuted here. He has six children,--five girls and a son. He and his wife and children have been obliged to live for the last fourteen years on an income of 200 florins, but as he has already done his duty well, and has lately provided a very accomplished singer for the Elector, he has now actually 400 florins. My aria for De' Amicis she sings to perfection with all its tremendous pa.s.sages."

He and his mother had been living with the Wendlings. Frl. Wendling, who had engaged Mozart's interest for a time, turned out to be a disreputable character and the father to be devoid of all religion. The deeply pious Mozart writes in the same letter to his father, "Friends who have no religion cannot long be our friends." Then, with man's usual consistency, he outlines the white lie by which he is going to break off the a.s.sociation with the Wendlings; and goes on to say that he wishes to form a similar connection with the Weber family. The daughter Aloysia is improving vastly in her singing under his tuition; he has written an aria especially for her, and he plans a trip to Italy princ.i.p.ally for her benefit. They could live very comfortably, he says, because Aloysia's eldest sister could cook. The father Weber reminds him greatly of his own father, and Aloysia will be, he is sure, a congenial friend for Nannerl.

Mozart is so much in love with Aloysia that in this long letter to his father he declares:

"I am so deeply touched with this oppressed family that my greatest wish is to make them happy, and perhaps I may be able to do so.... I will be answerable with my life for her singing, and her doing credit to my recommendation.... I will gladly write an opera for Verona for thirty zeccini, solely that Madlle. Weber may acquire fame by it; for if I don't, I fear she may be sacrificed.... I have now written you of what is in my heart; my mother is satisfied with my plans."

How well the mother was satisfied with the plans is evident from the postscript in her own hand, added secretly to the letter and displaying a slight touch of motherly jealousy:

"No doubt you perceive by the accompanying letter that when Wolfgang makes new friends he would give his life for them. It is true that she does sing incomparably; still, we ought not to lose sight of our own interests. I write this quite secretly while he is at dinner, for I don't wish him to know it."

Five days afterwards Mozart recurs to the subject, referring to a friend who married for money and commenting:

"I hope never to marry in this way; I wish to make my wife happy, but not to become rich by her means.... The n.o.bility must not marry from love or inclination, but from interest, and all kinds of other considerations. It would not at all suit a grandee to love his wife after she had done her duty, and brought in to the world an heir to his property. But we poor humble people are privileged not only to choose a wife who loves us, and whom we love, but we may, can, and do take such a one, because we are neither n.o.ble, nor high-born, nor rich, but, on the contrary, lowly, humble, and poor; we therefore need no wealthy wife, for our wealth, being in our heads, dies with us, and these no man can deprive us of, unless he cut them off, in which case we need nothing more."

Next week he writes again asking his father to concern himself for the Webers. The poor father had been imploring Wolfgang to go to Paris for fame and fortune's sake. Now he finds him so far from being willing to pursue his own promising career, that he wishes to give up all thought of Paris and subordinate his genius to the task of boosting into fame the daughter of a poverty-stricken music-copyist!

Leopold answers in the violent tone he could adopt on occasions, and tries to distract his son's attention by appealing to his ambition. He asks him to decide whether he wishes to become "a commonplace artist whom the world will forget, or a celebrated capellmeister of whom posterity will read years after in books,--whether, infatuated with a pretty face you one day breathe your last on a straw sack, your wife and children in a state of starvation, or, after a well-spent Christian life, you die in honour and independence and your family well provided for.... Get to Paris without delay, take your place by the side of really great people. _Aut Caesar ant nihil_."

Little the father could have realised how much truth there was to be in the dark side of his prophecy; and that, too, in spite of the fact that his son took his advice. Leaving Aloysia behind, the son and his mother went to Paris.

He landed there in the very midst of the tempest raging around Gluck.

Paris did not at all please Mozart, and the French people disgusted him.

For this Paris was not entirely to blame, seeing that Mozart had gone there unwillingly and was parted from his beloved Aloysia. It was in Paris, too, that his mother died. And now, while he was so deeply concerned for Aloysia's career and was trying so desperately to secure her an engagement in Paris, she was blandly forgetting him. Of this, however, he had no suspicion until he reached Munich, where she, the star of his heart and of his ambition, was waiting for him.

What the change was that had come over Aloysia it is impossible to tell.

The first thought is that, having risen to prominence by Mozart's tuition and a.s.sistance, she spurned the ladder that had uplifted her.

But Nohl's theory that her head was turned by her admission to the favour that quickly surrounds the successful prima donna is hardly to be held, in view of the fact that in rejecting a man of Mozart's prominence she took the actor Lange, who had little, if any, more prominence. It was doubtless simply the old story of the one who loves and the other who lets herself be loved, just to keep up practice, until she learns to love elsewhere.