Mozart's Last Aria (5 page)
“Karl, Karl.” Schikaneder’s voice was low and powerful, a baritone stage whisper. It rumbled in my bones.
“Shut up,” Gieseke said to him. He gripped my wrist. “In
The Magic Flute
, the name of the high priest is spoken eighteen times and sung eighteen times. He speaks eighteen sentences and sings one hundred and eighty bars of music. When he comes onstage, the chorus that accompanies him is eighteen bars long.”
“What does this mean?” I asked.
Schikaneder puffed out his cheeks. “Our friend here is an actor, but also a would-be scientist. Myself, I have no patience for accounting.”
“Listen, woman.” Gieseke pressed my wrist so that the skin twisted. “Wolfgang died eighteen days after the first performance of
The Magic Flute
. That’s true. One need not be a scientist to count a couple of weeks. And he died in his thirty-sixth year, which is two times eighteen, in the year of 1791, whose digits add up to eighteen.”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” Schikaneder said with good humor. He went to the corner to pour himself another punch.
“My dear lady,” Gieseke said, “this has been driving me mad.”
“You don’t say?” Schikaneder smiled.
“I wrote the text for your brother’s final Masonic music. The last thing he ever wrote for them.”
“Them? Don’t deny that you’re one of them.” Schikaneder drank.
“That’s right. I was a brother Mason in Wolfgang’s lodge.”
“What was the piece you wrote with him?” I said.
“A Masonic cantata for performance at one of our lodge meetings,” Gieseke said. “The score is eighteen pages long.
Eighteen
pages.”
He rose from his seat, his arms wide, appealing.
The door opened and a thickset maid brought a tray to the table.
Schikaneder lifted the lid of a pot. “Look, Karl, eighteen slices of potato, served by Johanna, who is eighteen years of age, and cooked in a kitchen eighteen paces from here. And she earns three and a half kreuzers a day, which makes twenty-four and a half a week, which— Oh, but that doesn’t help your theory, does it.”
The maid looked puzzled. Schikaneder waved for her to leave.
When the door shut, Gieseke hammered the edge of his fist onto the table. “Wolfgang’s music was filled with the secrets of the Masons, for anyone to recognize. Even those who weren’t initiated into the Brotherhood. He was poisoned because he betrayed these things.”
“The number eighteen?” I said.
Schikaneder spooned out some sauerkraut. “If such trivia is kept secret, it’s only because to reveal it makes one look ludicrous and quite possibly insane.”
“Wolfgang’s body didn’t become stiff and cold after death. You told me so yourself,” Gieseke said to him. “Just like the famous case of the last pope, who
was
poisoned. There should be an investigation.”
Schikaneder played with the hair around his ears, studying the actor. He made his voice quiet and penetrating. “If there were an investigation, who do you think they’d come to first?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were a member of Wolfgang’s lodge, Karl. You’re quite certain he died by foul means. You worked with him on the cantata which, as you point out, was a magical eighteen pages long. You might have some explaining to do.”
“I have nothing to hide.”
Schikaneder ladled a thick brown sauce onto two pale dumplings. “Yes, nothing. And also
nowhere
to hide. Not from them.”
He laid the spoon in the gravy dish. The two men stared at each other, silent and tense.
“Them?” I said. “Who do you mean?”
They held their stare. Schikaneder shoved the plate toward Gieseke. “You need to eat, to keep up your strength, Karl. You aren’t yourself,” he said. “Remember, you have performances this week.”
Gieseke swept the dumplings onto the floor. “Starvation would be a better, quicker death than this,” he yelled.
He rushed out into the cold.
The door swung in the wind. Schikaneder closed it, turned the latch, and leaned against it a moment. He returned to the table and made up a plate for me.
“A quicker death?” I said.
“Pay no attention to Gieseke. Wolfgang’s tragic passing has affected us all in different ways,” he said. “You understand?”
I inclined my head.
Schikaneder put the plate before me. “
Mahlzeit. Bon appétit
. Liver dumplings and sauerkraut,” he said. “Wolfgang’s favorite.”
A
dizzying throng of people and animals weaved along Kärntner Street as my cab returned from Schikaneder’s theater. Coachmen rattled their vehicles over the snowy, half-frozen mud, yelling at pedestrians who stumbled on the rutted dirt. So different from the quiet of my village.
We reached St. Stephen’s Square. The cosmopolitan lower echelons of the imperial capital hurried about, slowing the carriages to a walking pace. People from every part of the Empire passed the window of my cab. Serbs twisting their mustaches. Greeks with the bowls of their long pipes glowing in the twilight. A pair of Jews, black-bearded and with long side curls, their dark coats limp over meager shoulders, speaking something that sounded like Polish. I heard Hungarian from the mouth of a man in a greasy sheepskin coat, and the language of Bohemia from a blond-haired youth shoving a knife into the top of his tall leather boots.
It was a long time since I had witnessed a scene so bustling and alien, and the first time I had ever experienced a city alone. I was cautious and thrilled, like an adventurer entering the heart of a forbidden civilization in some far continent.
The cab continued beyond the wide Graben. Amid all the strangeness, I noticed a place I recognized. I called to my driver, climbed down to the street, and dismissed him. Beside the great church in the square of Am Hof, the Collalto Palace glowed by the light of the lamps at its entrance. I had made my debut in the imperial capital here as an eleven-year-old. My brother had been the star that night. Though only six, he had played accurately even with the keyboard obscured beneath a cloth. Count von Collalto wrote a poem for Wolfgang which said that though he was “small in stature, like the greatest he plays.” It had been an audition of a kind, and we had succeeded. An invitation soon came to perform before the empress at Schönbrunn.
I stood on the corner by the palace, gazing up at the relief columns of the otherwise plain façade. I had passed through these heavy chestnut doors thirty years ago with so many dreams. I had been accompanied by my father, my mother, and my brother. They were gone from me, as surely as my aspirations for fame as a musician. The count’s verse had fretted that Wolfgang was so frail he would “too soon outwear” his body. My family had overlooked that foreboding reference. We reread only the poem’s laudatory lines, delighted by the entrée Collalto gave us into Viennese society.
At home, where I was content to be with my children, I might’ve said that the desire for acclaim had been my father’s ambition alone, grafted onto me until I thought it had been my own, then slowly stripped away by bitter years of attending to him in Salzburg. But as I stood before the majestic Collalto Palace and speculated which of the windows gave onto the room where I had performed, Vienna entered my veins once more. The fantasies were revived of the little girl who had curtsied and blushed at the praise of the aristocratic connoisseurs, even as her father gathered the trinkets offered in payment.
I wondered if I would cope differently with such praise now. In the glow of the palace’s lamps, I understood that for much of my life my reactions to people and places had been hollow, like a musician manufacturing sensations with a flawless technique. Perhaps it had been the inevitable result of my childhood performances. I had played music filled with the delicacy of romance and the rage of passion, before I was old enough to have experienced either. When I faced such emotions in reality, I merely faked my responses, as I had done at the keyboard.
I lived with this emptiness until I became a mother. Then I had no more need to pretend. Every smile or tear or retch from my babies awoke in me a tremor that burst through the counterfeit emotions I had known so long. I was no longer a faker. I knew myself. Before this palace, which I had entered as a provincial girl and departed as a celebrated prodigy, I felt exhilarated, like someone meeting an exciting stranger whom she was eager to know.
A footman scampered through the gates of the palace and waved to a coach in front of the Am Hof Church. The coachman walked his team up to the gates. Two men emerged from Collalto’s mansion and paused beside the carriage.
The first was Stadler. He held his hat in his hands, turning it in agitation.
The other man squeezed Stadler’s arm as if to reassure him. He was tall and broad. His frock coat was a lively green with delicate piping.
The Collalto footman unclipped the steps of the carriage. I couldn’t identify the crest on the door he held open, but I understood that the tall man was of some importance. He gave a comforting tap to Stadler’s shoulder.
Wolfgang’s friend grinned, pleased with the familiarity shown to him by this nobleman, whatever else was worrying him. His smile disappeared when he noticed me.
His companion followed Stadler’s gaze. His dark eyes found me. They widened just enough to reveal surprise. His lips parted as though he were about to call, but he frowned and was silent. He lifted his hat in greeting.
I curtsied.
When I raised my eyes he was on the steps of the carriage. He spoke a brief sentence to Stadler, who responded with a hesitant nod.
As his carriage pulled away, the nobleman watched me with a face that seemed marked by pain and loss. For a moment his expression softened and we looked at each other as though it were not our first meeting.
His coachman looped around the square and went toward the Hofburg, where the imperial family lived.
A freezing gust rushed past the palace and lifted the fur hood of my cloak almost off my head. I looked toward the gate of the Collalto Palace. Stadler was gone. I shivered and decided that I ought to linger no longer in the open air.
I considered calling upon the many Viennese who had stayed a night or two with my family in Salzburg since that long-ago concert for Count Collalto. Traveling musicians and writers, noblemen and impresarios, all had broken their journeys to enjoy the convivial music making my father encouraged and to observe the young prodigies at home. But I found my steps drawing me through the lamplight to the door of someone who had never partaken of our provincial hospitality.
A
maid hauling a heavy basket of herbs and poultry against her hip pointed out the house of Magdalena Hofdemel on a narrow, dark street behind Jews’ Square. The façade was a washed-out blue, like an old woman’s irises. A statue of the Virgin nestled in a niche above the windows of the second floor. In the gateway, the cobbles were small rectangles of wood to damp the noise of carriage wheels and horseshoes.
I mounted a wide staircase to the Hofdemel apartment two flights up. It would’ve been the most expensive dwelling in the building, above the dinginess of the street and not so demanding a climb as the garrets farther up the stone steps. When she had told me where Magdalena lived, Constanze had mentioned that the deceased husband had been a chancery clerk. Strange that a mere functionary in the courthouse should earn a salary sufficient to pay for such a well-situated apartment.
A peephole slid back in the door. A maid stood on tiptoe to reach the opening, blinking at me in the dark stairwell.
When she guided me into the sitting room, my surprise at the sumptuousness of the Hofdemel apartment increased. The furnishing was rich, even given the simple designs then in vogue. I touched my fingertips to a gilt-chair covered in satin of great softness, but I didn’t sit. I was drawn to the piano. It was quite newly made, by Stein of Augsburg, the craftsman my brother had always loved for the delicacy of his pedal effects.
I laid my right hand across the keys. It was on a pair of Steins that I had performed with Wolfgang for the last time a decade ago. My fingers tripped through a delicate melody. The second movement of the concerto I was to perform the following night. I struck some of the notes late by a fraction of a beat. My father had once written to tell me Wolfgang played it that way.
The door opened, pulled back with great force. A woman of about twenty-five years entered. Her eyes signaled anger. She glared at my hand until I withdrew it from the piano, then she turned her ferocious gaze on my face.
I gasped, and the woman seemed to forget her fury. Her eyes receded into her head and she lifted a fan to cover her nose, her mouth and jaw. Though I had exclaimed only in surprise at her sudden entry, I believe she thought it a reaction to the injuries evident on her face. It was gashed all across with lurid strips of scabbed blood, the skin between each slash bruised yellow and green.
I gathered myself and approached her. “Madame Hofdemel?” I said. “I am—”
“I know who you are. It’s obvious, to look at you. When he cut my face, my husband didn’t take my eyes.” Her voice was curt and bitter.
A suicide, her husband must surely have been damned forever. She winced, as though her speech had split the scab over one of her wounds, and I thought that it was she who had been condemned. I dropped my chin. Her stance softened and she reached a hand to my cheek, lifting my face.
“Excuse my ill manners.” Her expression became strained and melancholy. “The pain of my wounds takes over and I forget myself.”
She led me to a green linen sofa. She sat at its edge, very upright as though at a piano, and I remembered that she had been Wolfgang’s student.
“The Stein. It’s a beautiful instrument,” I said.
“When I started my lessons with Wolfgang, he commented to my husband on the quality of Stein’s pianos. My Franz insisted on purchasing one, though I told him it was too great an expense. It cost him three hundred gulden. That’s how he was, my Franz. Generous, loving. He was the best of husbands before—all this.”
Magdalena drew a lace handkerchief from her sleeve and touched it to her eyes. As she did so, she lowered the fan from her face and I noticed that she had been pretty, even beautiful, before her suicidal husband attacked her. Her brow was a little high, but her hair rolled away from it in brown ringlets. Her eyes were hazel and soft. She held her full, lower lip between teeth of such whiteness that I imagined they must be enchanting when exposed in a smile.
“Franz would sit where we are now and listen all night as I played the piano,” she said. “I had some hopes of a concert career. But that’s all at an end now.”
I twitched a smile, as though someone had pinched the back of my hand. I had come to her because I wished to know the part her husband might have played in my brother’s death. Now that I sat beside her, I could think of no way to approach the subject that wouldn’t be like another cut to the skin of her damaged face.
I cleared my throat and looked for another way to approach her. “Did Wolfgang intend to perform with you?”
“With most of his pupils he did. He wasn’t concerned with teaching young ladies to amuse their husbands’ dinner guests. He wanted to bring us out before the public.”
“So he was training you for that?”
“It’s in my blood, after all. My father was the music master at St. Peter’s Church in Brünn.” She touched the back of her thumbnail to her lip. “But Franz wasn’t interested in me performing.”
“Yet he wanted you to have a fine piano, to take lessons with a great composer.”
“Only so that I could play at soirees here in our home. Franz didn’t pick Wolfgang for the social cachet of a famous teacher. He arranged for me to study with your brother because they already had a—a connection.”
The Masons again, I thought. “Of what nature?”
The fan rose above her chin again and her eyes were wary. “They had business ties. Franz lent money to Wolfgang.”
I recalled Constanze’s talk of my brother’s financial problems. “A loan? For what?”
“A trip Wolfgang made to Berlin. About two years ago. There was a position for him at the court of the Prussian king, but he returned disappointed.”
Disappointed and indebted, I thought. “My sister-in-law reorganized Wolfgang’s finances this last summer, I gather. Did he repay Franz then?”
“I believe not.” Magdalena dropped her eyes behind the fan and sobbed. Her chest trembled, lifting and stretching her scars. “It’s so dreadful, madame.”
I blushed to consider it, but I imagined Wolfgang alone in Vienna with this sweet woman while his pregnant wife hobbled into the hot springs at Baden on her bad foot. It seemed quite possible that the teacher could’ve fallen into sin with his pupil and that, in turn, the wronged husband had taken his revenge.
“Why did—?”
The door opened. Magdalena’s maid brought us each a cup of hot red wine. I inhaled the scent of cinnamon and cloves, listening to the maid shuffle back to the kitchen. I sipped the
glühwein
before I spoke again, but I still found it hard to ask my question.
“Why did your husband— What reason had he to hurt you?”
“Must a man have a reason to hurt his wife?” Bitterness took over Magdalena’s eyes.
“What spurred him?”
She closed her fan with a snap. The marks about her eyes and brow were little more than scratches compared to the parallel gashes I saw now across her neck. They were so deep they had been sewn. She ran her finger above the stiff, black stitches.
I flinched.
“He didn’t try to
hurt
me. He aimed to kill me.” Her tears made the scars on her face damp and bright, as though they bled once more. “Franz believed he had slit my throat and that I would die. Only then did he do the same for himself. I watched him pull open his collar to ready himself. Hate in his eyes, where I had been used to such love. As though he detested me above all creatures in the world. Then he pulled his razor across his throat and I saw that it was himself that he hated most, and only then me.”
Despite myself, I returned to the notion of Franz Hofdemel as a betrayed husband. What other reason could he have had for such butchery?
“I pleaded with Franz, begged for the sake of his soul,” she said. “I told him that he’d go to Hell. Not, you understand, because I wished to chastise him. It was only that I feared for the immortal spirit of the man I loved.”
“Even as he tried to murder you?”
“Even then.”
“Didn’t he fear Hell?”
“He said Hell was full of the foolishness he had committed before he gained wisdom, and neither I nor Satan could force him to live that way again.” Magdalena slouched forward.
I touched her wrist. It was hard, like bone, as though she had willed her skin to such a thickness that it might never again be cut.
“I feel so guilty, Madame de Mozart. So very guilty.” She sniffled into her handkerchief. “Don’t think badly of my Franz. Though I never would’ve intended it, I’m sure I drove him to this.”
“Did you? Did you really?”
She swallowed hard and tried to make her expression bright. “Wolfgang often spoke of your skill at the piano. He used to tell me that if I worked very hard I might be almost as good as you. Would you play for me? Something by your brother.”
“He spoke of me?”
“Do play. It soothes me to listen to a fine pianist.”
Until I played the opening triad, I hadn’t known that I would give her Wolfgang’s Adagio in B Minor. The piece ran through my fingers without any thought. Instantly I parted from the company of the woman with the scarred face. Instead, I was with Wolfgang. I became calm, savoring the symmetry of the music, even as I sensed the tension my brother had injected with its unexpected key transitions.
More tears lay on Magdalena’s face. But they seemed now to be drawn from some happy recollection. She smiled at me.
As I reached the coda and the piece turned to B major, the door opened. A woman several years younger than me stood there in a thick fur, her hand supported by a squat, swarthy maid. Her eyes rolled in their sockets, the pupils swinging up into her skull, so that only the whites were visible.
I hesitated, and the blind woman sensed it. She rotated her hand, gesturing for me to continue. When she removed her fur hat and thrust it at the maid, I recognized her as Maria Theresia von Paradies, a virtuoso of the piano who had visited our family in Salzburg while on her way to perform in London and Paris.
Paradies listened to the silence after the final notes. Her nose lifted as though savoring the scent of the music. She shrugged her coat off her shoulders for Magdalena’s house girl to catch. She turned her body toward the sofa, and the dark maid pulled her to Magdalena.
“My dear.” Paradies leaned close to Magdalena and glided her fingers over the scars on the woman’s neck. “Better?”
“Much better.”
The maid stomped to the other side of the room and leaned against the window frame, staring into the evening darkness.
Magdalena took Paradies’s arm and guided her onto the sofa beside her. “How did you know it was I who sat here on the sofa?” she said.
“Little one, there were two people breathing in this room when I entered. The one playing the piano was—I’m sorry to tell you—evidently not you.” Paradies rubbed Magdalena’s forearm. “Who’s our performer?”
“It’s Wolfgang’s sister.”
Paradies held out her hand until I grasped it. “It’s been a long time,” she said.
“Eight years,” I replied.
“I’ve played hundreds of concerts since then and written a few operas. What’ve you been doing?”
I would’ve withdrawn my hand, but I knew better than to struggle against the powerful fingers of another pianist. “I married a district prefect. I live some way from Salzburg.”
“It’s clear that you continue to practice hard. You haven’t lost your talent.”
“You’re too kind.”
“But a concerto is no easy thing.”
Her tone was sharp. I saw that Paradies was offended Stadler hadn’t chosen her as the soloist for the benefit concert at the Academy. So here, I thought, was one person who’d be willing me to fail when I played Wolfgang’s concerto.
“Quite. No easy thing,” I said.
“Still, it’s easier than sitting down to write a simple letter to one’s younger brother, apparently. One’s only living relative.”
Magdalena pulled at Paradies’s skirt. “Theresia,” she whispered.
Wolfgang, it seemed, had known these women with enough intimacy to have complained to them about me. After our father’s death, there had been financial disputes. But more than that had come between us. Perhaps both of us had been cut adrift when Papa went, the commanding polestar of our lives was eclipsed. Certainly my emotions had spun in all directions. For some time I had thought only of my own loss. I had been unaware of the feelings of others.
“You’re quite correct, Fräulein von Paradies,” I said. “A concerto is difficult, but not impossible.”
She let go of my hand. I sat in an upright chair beside the sofa.
“I’ve learned sixty concertos by heart,” Paradies said, “but I’d forget them all before I would neglect one of Wolfgang’s.”
I was silent.
“What do you say to that?” She raised her voice.
“I agree,” I said. “I’d consider it a dreadful burden to have neglected anything of Wolfgang’s.”
Paradies’s eyeballs twitched. “I shall be content to play one of his sonatas tomorrow night at the Academy.” She lifted her hand to her powdered hair. It stood high, combed loosely back to her neck. “I remember telling your father he ought to send you to Vienna.”
“Did you?”
“You played during my visit to Salzburg. I was struck by your technique.”
I recalled that time well. My thirty-second birthday. Wolfgang had bought me ices in the afternoon after target shooting near the Mirabell Gate and served me punch in the evening. But he had been visiting with his new bride, while I was losing hope that I’d ever be wed. I had resented his cheeriness and pretended to choke on the ices. I didn’t remember that I had played so well for Paradies, but I bowed in acknowledgment. “Thank you for this compliment.”
“Your
father
didn’t thank me. He said his daughter had no interest in travel or performance.”
I pressed my thumbs against each other. My father had decided everything for me, just as he had attempted to do for Wolfgang. But he was long gone.
“Well, now you’re here in Vienna, after all,” Paradies said. “And with a major performance tomorrow.”
I spoke softly. “Here I am.”