Part 22 (1/2)

Buffalo: Mozart was in his twentieth year when he met Aloysia Weber. She was a gifted singer, surely, and was needlessly healthy. She was of that peculiar, heartless type that finds digression in leading men a merry chase and then flaunting and flouting them. Young Mozart, the impressionable, Mozart the delicate and sensitive, Mozart the aeolian harp, played upon by every pa.s.sing breeze, loved this bouncing bundle of pink-and-white tyranny.

She encouraged the pa.s.sion, and it gradually grew until it absorbed the boy and he grew oblivious to all else. He lived in her smile, bathed in the suns.h.i.+ne of her presence, fed on her words, and as for her singing in opera it was not so much what her voice was now but what he was sure it would be.

His glowing imagination made good her every deficiency. He thought he loved the girl. It was not the girl at all he loved: he only loved the ideal that existed in his own heart. His father opposed the mating and hastily transferred the youth from Vienna to Paris; but who ever heard of opposition and argument and forced separation curing love? So matters ran on and letters and messages pa.s.sed, and finally Mozart made his way back to Vienna and with breathless haste sought out the object of his whole heart's love.

She had recently met a man she liked better, and as she could not hold them both, treated Mozart as a stranger, and froze him to the marrow.

He was crushed, undone, and a fit of sickness followed. In his illness, Constance, a younger sister of Aloysia, came to him in pity and nursed him as a child. Very naturally, all the love he had felt for Aloysia was easily and readily transferred to Constance. The tendrils of the heart ruthlessly uprooted cling to the first object that presents itself.

And so Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Constance Weber were married. And they were happy ever afterward. It would have been much better if they had quarreled, but Mozart's gentle, yielding character readily adapted itself to the weaker nature of his wife. In his music she took a sort of blind and deaf delight and guessed its greatness because she loved the man. But when two weak wills combine, the net result is increased weakness--never strength.

Constance was as beautiful a specimen of the slipshod housekeeper as ever piled away breakfast dishes unwashed, or swept dirt under a settee.

If they had money she bought things they did not need, and if there was no money she borrowed provisions and forgot to return the loan.

Irregularity of living, deprivation and hope deferred, made the woman ill and she became a chronic sufferer. But she was ever tended with loving, patient care by the overburdened and underfed husband.

A biographer tells how Mozart would often arise early in the morning to set down some melody in music that he had dreamed out during the night.

On such occasions he would leave a little love-letter for his wife on the stand at the head of the bed, where she would find it on first awakening. One such note, freely translated, runs as follows: ”Good-morning, Dear Little Wife. I hope you rested well and had sweet dreams. You were sleeping so peacefully that I dare not kiss your cheek for fear of disturbing you. It is a beautiful morning and a bird outside is singing a song that is in my heart. I am going out to catch the strain and write it down as my own and yours. I shall be back in an hour.”

East 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 G.o.dfather 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 pa.s.sed 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 bl.u.s.tering winter day in December, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one, when his burial occurred. A little company of friends a.s.sembled, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHANNES BRAHMS]

JOHANNES BRAHMS

What is music? This question occupied my mind for hours last night before I fell asleep. The very existence of music is wonderful, I might even say miraculous. Its domain is between thought and phenomena. Like a twilight mediator, it hovers between spirit and matter, related to both, yet differing from each. It is spirit, but spirit subject to the measurement of time; it is matter, but matter that can dispense with s.p.a.ce.

--_Heine_