Mozart renewed his ties with the Webers once more. Aloysia, indeed, was now out of his reach, but there were three other daughters, the youngest still a child, to be sure. The oldest, Josepha, had a good voice but she left Wolfgang cold. He was more attracted to Aloysia’s sister, Constanze, a fact that was not lost on the scheming Mother Weber, now a widow, content to rent rooms and take in boarders. In May 1781, he settled in the Weber house, Zum Auge Gottes, just off the Graben. Needless to say, Leopold was greatly upset, for he had as low an opinion of the Webers as ever. But Wolfgang was no longer disposed to let his father’s tastes sway him and, when he felt that he really loved Constanze, he determined to make her his wife regardless of parental wishes. The unscrupulous Madame Weber, pleased at the turn of affairs, took care that gossip should spread, and people began to talk about the probability of the marriage. Mozart, yielding to Mother Weber’s “advice,” left the Auge Gottes in September 1781, though returning for daily visits. Constanze’s mother played her cards cleverly so as to compromise her daughter and enjoyed the satisfaction of having Mozart ask his father for his “approval.” A Weber for a daughter-in-law was the last thing Leopold wanted. Finally on August 4, 1782, the couple married, the elder Mozart’s reluctant consent not arriving in Vienna until August 5. He never forgave his son, however, for this step. No more did Nannerl, who had quite as little use for her brother’s wife.

Later, after the composer’s death, Schlichtegroll’s necrology said of Constanze: “Mozart found in her a good mother for the two children she bore him, who sought to restrain him from many follies and dissipations...”—the rest of which passage Constanze was subsequently moved to make illegible. Be all of which as it may, there is no use pretending that Mozart was, earlier or later, in the least indifferent to feminine allurements. Sometimes it was the women who plagued him with attentions, a capital instance of which was his pupil, the pianist Josephine Aurnhammer, a talented but exceedingly repulsive person, of whom he left us a gruesome picture in a letter dated August 22, 1781: “She is as fat as a farm wench, perspires so that you feel inclined to vomit, and goes about so scantily clad that you really can read as plain as print: ‘Pray, do look here.’” It was for this same Aurnhammer, nonetheless, that he wrote the adorable clavier concerto, K. 453.

Alfred Einstein maintains that Constanze owes her fame “to the fact that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart loved her, and in so doing preserved her name for eternity, as a fly is preserved in amber. But this does not mean that she deserved either his love or the fame it brought her.” Certainly, she could not follow his flights of genius; neither was she always above reproach in her private conduct. Before their marriage her “honest and devoted” lover was writing to point out her thoughtless behavior in allowing some man “to measure her leg” in a game of forfeits; and nearly a decade later he was begging her “to consider appearances,” to be “careful of her honor,” and to keep away from the Baden casino because “the company is ... you understand what I mean!” Einstein believed that the only woman of whom Constanze had a right to be jealous “was Nancy Storace, his first Susanna.... Between Mozart and her there must have been a deep and sympathetic understanding. She was beautiful, an artist and a finished singer....”

Die Entführung aus dem Serail

The composer was probably delighted to have the chance to place on the stage a character named Constanze; and in the summer and autumn of 1781 he began the music of his next major opera, Belmonte und Constanze or Die Entführung aus dem Serail (“The Abduction from the Seraglio”). This Singspiel, the book of which was originally the work of Christian Friedrich Bretzner, had been presented a year earlier in Germany with a score by Johann André. Under Wolfgang’s careful supervision the three-act piece underwent dramatic and textual modifications by Christian Gottlob Stephanie the Younger. Mozart had written his father: “The book is good; the subject is Turkish and is called ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio.’” Rehearsals did not start till June 1782, and on July 16 of that year the work was produced in Vienna with extraordinary success. The stimulus back of Stephanie’s revisions was unquestionably the penetrating theater sense of the composer himself. Into the love songs of the tenor, Belmonte, Mozart poured all his tender feelings for Constanze Weber, whom he was shortly to lead to the altar. The characterizations throughout have a life, a diversity, and a psychological truth that had not been met with in any previous Mozartean operatic effort.

The Emperor, though he recognized the genius in the work, thought it necessary to warn Mozart that the music seemed to him “too good for the Viennese” and contained “a powerful quantity of notes”—whereupon the ready-witted Mozart retorted, “Just as many as are necessary, Your Majesty!” His older contemporary, Gluck, was himself stirred to enthusiasm by the work (in which he unquestionably detected the influence of his own exotic Les Pèlerins de la Mecque) and invited the composer to dinner. Die Entführung—which Carl Maria von Weber was to say was such a work as Mozart could have written only once in his lifetime—quickly spread through most other theaters of Central Europe, where, after close to two hundred years, it still leads a lusty existence. The more amusing, therefore, is a notice the disgruntled Bretzner inserted in a Leipzig newspaper: “A certain person in Vienna named Mozart has had the effrontery to misuse my drama ‘Belmonte und Constanze’ for an opera libretto. I herewith protest most solemnly that I reserve the right to take further steps against this outrage.”

On the surface the newly married couple were happy. Yet it might be inquiring too closely to ask whether Wolfgang did not, as time passed, suffer from that deep-seated loneliness and lack of understanding that are sooner or later the lot of a genius of this caliber. Under today’s conditions we have reason to assume that a triumph like Die Entführung, and the numberless other treasures he was giving the world, would lift him above material cares. Instead, financial troubles began to thicken about him and grew continually more burdensome. They were, indeed, to beset him to his end.

For all the stir it created, the opera did not bring its composer the appointment he expected. And money was becoming a pressing necessity. Constanze’s pregnancies were frequent during her married life and, though only two children survived infancy (to become, it is ironic to reflect, wretched but fairly long-lived mediocrities), her various confinements and her slow recovery from them did not help to further her housewifely qualities. It is not wholly surprising that Mozart’s religious conviction, which had earlier been a sort of childlike faith, weakened little by little—the more so because he was brought into growing contact with men who were profound thinkers and of whom many belonged to the secret society of Freemasons. Freemasonry had political implications and was frowned upon by the Church. Frederick the Great had been a Freemason, Goethe was one, likewise Joseph II, Gluck, and Joseph Haydn. Eventually Mozart persuaded his father to join the society. Who shall say that its principles and philosophies did not serve Wolfgang as a protective armor, enabling him the more bravely to endure his social and material tribulations?

Pupils and Friends—Haydn

Mozart took his wife to Salzburg in the summer of 1783. He had made a vow the previous year that when he married Constanze and presented her to his father he would bring along a newly composed mass for presentation in his native town. The superb one in C minor was the outcome, but for some reason it remained unfinished. We cannot speculate here on the reasons for its incompleteness. The torso (or shall we say patchwork?) was rehearsed in St. Peter’s Church in Salzburg, and Constanze sang some of the soprano solos. Despite its incompleteness the C minor Mass is a soaring masterwork, the music of which Mozart later put to use in the oratorio Davidde Penitente.