The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1Hughes, Rupert
History
The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1
Hughes, Rupert
Composers -- Biography
A little later one of Mozart's letters is interrupted and is finished in
a strange hand as follows:
"Your good son has just been summoned by Countess
Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear
father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you
know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be
without a letter from him. Next post he will write again.
I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable
to you as what your son would have written. I beg
my compliments to your amiable daughter. I am your
obedient friend,
"CONSTANZE WEBER."
This is the first appearance in Mozart's correspondence of this name.
Constanze Weber was the younger sister of Aloysia. She had no dramatic
or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played
fairly well, especially at sight. Strangely enough, she had an unusual
fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his
improvisations.
The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of
friendship with the Webers. The buzz became so noisy that it reached the
alert ears of the father in Salzburg, and he wrote demanding that
Wolfgang should move at once.
Mozart answered that he had been planning to move, but only to quiet the
gossip that he is to marry Constanze--ridiculous gossip, he calls it.
"I will not say that, living in the same house with the young lady to
whom people have married me, I am ill-bred and do not speak to her, but
I am not in love with her. I banter and jest with her when time permits
(which is only in the evenings when I chance to be at home, for in the
morning I write in my room, and in the afternoon am rarely in the
house), but nothing more. If I were obliged to marry all those with whom
I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives."
Among the rooms elsewhere offered to Mozart was one at Aurnhammer's. The
daughter of the family threw herself at Mozart's head with a vengeance.
According to his picture of her, she was so ugly and untidy that even
Mozart could not flirt with her. He draws an amusing picture of his
predicament--a sort of Venus and Adonis affair, with a homely Venus:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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