Mozart in love: ‘I know of no better solution than to marry Constanze tomorrow morning — today if at all possible’

On a late summer’s day in 1782, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart received news that he was about to be landed in serious trouble. A maidservant arrived at his rooms in Vienna with some unfinished manuscripts of his. He had asked for them to be brought from his previous lodgings in a house called Zum Auge Gottes, ‘The Eye of God’.

Mozart had left God’s Eye nine months earlier. He made the move to less comfortable quarters for propriety’s sake — having just become engaged to Constanze Weber, the 19-year-old daughter of his landlady. Now, the servant told him, his prospective mother-in-law, Frau Cäcilia Weber, was threatening to send the police round to Mozart’s address, because she suspected that Constanze was spending the nights there. Living in sin was an arrestable offence in 18th-century Vienna.

And Mozart knew that Frau Weber’s suspicions were well founded. His relationship with Constanze had taken a turn that was at best daringly bohemian, at worst downright illegal. Mozart urgently needed advice — so he sat down and wrote a letter to a trusted and powerful friend. That remarkable and emotional letter, which is to be auctioned in London on 6 July 2023 in The Exceptional Sale, was addressed to Mozart’s benefactress, Baroness Martha Elisabeth von Waldstätten.

The composer began his letter with an account of the alarming news from Frau Weber’s maid. Then he wrote: ‘I don’t believe that it could happen, as it would amount to prostitution for the whole family.’ But the attempt to talk himself down from the enormity of the situation did not work. ‘Are the police allowed to go into any house here?’ he queried. Then added, ‘If it might actually happen, then I know of no better solution than to marry Constanze tomorrow morning — today if at all possible. For I do not wish to expose my beloved to this shame — and it cannot happen if she is my wife.’

So this was Mozart’s plan: to pre-empt scandal with a wedding. The baroness was perfectly placed to help. A wealthy woman in her thirties — glamorous, sophisticated, musical, happily separated from her husband — she had taken Mozart and Constanze under her wing. When, for example, Mozart mentioned that he liked a certain red jacket that he had borrowed for a portrait, Martha Elisabeth had an identical one tailored for him as a surprise gift.

More pragmatically, in the moments when Constanze found life with her controlling mother too much to bear, the baroness would invite her stay at her residence. Constanze was ostensibly a house guest on the day that Mozart wrote his frantic letter. The baroness was using her high-born status as a cloak of respectability to throw over the lovers’ risqué living arrangements.

Other factors were at play in Mozart’s mind as he rushed to matrimony in those fraught August days. Just two weeks earlier, on 16 July, his first full-length German opera had debuted at Vienna’s Burgtheater. The production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’, was an immediate success, which gave Mozart reason to believe that his career was about to take off in new and lucrative ways.

Meanwhile, he had for months been asking his father Leopold to accept his betrothal to Constanze, but the starchy, snobbish Leopold Mozart had repeatedly refused. Exasperated by his father’s intransigence, Wolfgang was — on some subconscious level — looking to bring matters to a head.

Constanze, for her part, had an officious guardian named Johann von Thorwart, who acted as a kind of adviser to the widowed Frau Weber. He considered Mozart a shallow young man, a scoundrel in the making. When Wolfgang and Constanze declared their love, Thorwart presented Mozart with a contract saying that he would marry her within three years or else pay her a lifelong annuity of 300 florins. And if he did not sign, he would not be permitted to see Constanze at all.

Mozart gladly put his name to this strange inverted pre-nup agreement. But Constanze, when she heard of it, got hold of the document and tore it top to bottom before her mother’s eyes. She said that she knew Mozart’s intentions towards her were honourable, and required no grubby legal ratification of the fact.

Mozart was delighted by that theatrical gesture — and there is more than a touch of pantomime about the whole situation: the perplexed, love-lorn young hero; the sour, disapproving father; the scheming mother-in-law in waiting; the comically cold-hearted guardian; the betrothed bride whose virtue is in danger; the aristocratic fairy godmother. It could all be the plot of a Mozart opera, if it were not already the stuff of Mozart’s life.

One wonders what a later Viennese, Sigmund Freud, might have made of Mozart’s situation. In the letter to the baroness, we see the composer finally becoming himself, the fully fledged artist that he was born to be. Mozart had after all been famous for most of his life — but as a child prodigy. The Abduction from the Seraglio, with its ambition and adult theme, demonstrated that the child performer had metamorphosed into a composer of stature and maturity.

The marriage to Constanze performed the same grown-up function in his personal life (and it is telling that the female lead in The Abduction is also named Constanze). By taking a wife, Mozart was escaping his father’s dominance and showing that he could flourish without the paternal approval he had depended on since he was a small boy.

In one of his letters, Mozart mistakenly refers to his own opera as the Verführung  rather than the Entführung — not an abduction, but a seduction. It is exactly the kind of subconscious slip that would later carry Freud’s name — but what might it signify?

Mozart and Constanze were without doubt powerfully attracted to each other: the literal seduction, whenever it happened, was mutual. But that written error betokens something more: the alluring embrace of a destiny that was just taking shape in Mozart’s ego, the dawning awareness that a special order of fame — immortality, in fact — was beckoning him on and enticing him in.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Constanze Weber were married in St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, on 4 August 1782. The baroness generously laid on a wedding breakfast for her favourite genius and his bride. Mozart wrote to his father on the eve, asking for his blessing, but — significantly — did not wait for a reply. Leopold Mozart’s reluctant consent arrived in the post the day after the ceremony.

Frau Weber was expecting the newlyweds to live with her and pay rent — but they were adamant that they would be making a home for themselves elsewhere. They had in effect eloped without leaving town.

And for all their time together, they were never less than totally in love. Mozart was not one of those artists who require silence and solitude in which to work: much the reverse. He was happy to compose in the midst of a raucous household, while his children played at his feet. And if there was stillness by accident — in the dead of night, say — Constanze would stay up and read him fairy stories as he wrote.

He needed Constanze by him, and she proved constant in both senses: loyal, and also ever-present. After nine years of marriage, Mozart was still writing to her in the tremolando phrasings of fresh love. ‘My one wish is to settle my affairs so I can be with you again. You cannot imagine how I have been aching for you. I can’t describe what I have been feeling — a kind of longing that is never satisfied, which only increases daily. Even my work gives me no pleasure…’

That warm letter was penned in July 1791; five months later, Mozart was dead. He was 35. Constanze was too ill and grief-stricken to attend the funeral, which took place in a howling blizzard. But throughout her long widowhood, she worked diligently to preserve and publish her husband’s works. She remarried eventually, and lived to be 80. But she never ceased to refer to the man she met in her teens as ‘my Mozart’.