ast Aurora: Aloysia married the man of her choice—an actor by the name of Lange. They quarreled right shortly, and soon he used to beat her. This was endured for a year or more, then she left him. For a while she lived with Wolfgang and Constance, and Mozart, true to his nature, gave her from his own scanty store and deprived himself for her benefit. He stood godfather to one of her children and was a true friend to her to the last.
After Aloysia lived to be an old woman, and long after Mozart had passed out, and the world had begun to utter his praises, she said: "I never for a moment thought he was a genius—I always considered him just a nice little man."
Mozart's soul was filled with melody, and all of his music is faultless and complete. He possessed the artistic conscience to a degree that is unique. Careless and heedless in all else, if his mood was not right and the product was halting, he straightway destroyed the score. He was always at work, always hearing sweet sounds, always weighing and balancing them in the delicate scales of his judgment.
So absorbed was he in his art that he fell an easy victim to the designing, and never stopped his work long enough to strike off the shackles that bound him to a vain, selfish and unappreciative court.
Worn by constant work, worried by his wife's continued illness, dogged by creditors, and unable to get justice from those who owed it to him, his nerves at the early age of thirty-five gave way.
His vitality rapidly declined and at last went out as a candle does when blown upon by a sudden gust from an open door.
It was a blustering winter day in December, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one, when his burial occurred. A little company of friends assembled, but no funeral-dirge was played for him, save the blast blown through the naked branches of the trees, as they hurried the plain pine coffin to its final resting-place. At the gate of the cemetery the few friends turned back and left the lifeless clay to the old gravedigger, who never guessed the honor thus done him.
It was a pauper's grave that closed over the body of Mozart—coffin piled on coffin, and no one marked the spot. All we know is, that somewhere in Saint Mark's Cemetery, Vienna, was buried in a trench the most accomplished composer and performer the world has ever known. It was a hundred years afterward before the city made tardy amends by erecting a fitting monument to his memory.
His best monument is his work. The melody that once filled his soul is yours and mine; for by his art he made us heirs to all that wealth of love that was never requited, and the dreams, that for him never came true, are our precious and priceless legacy.