Covering Up for Mozart's Wife

...Stephen's Cathedral, was attended by the musical élite of Vienna, including Antonio Salieri...

...Worshipful Master of the Lodge) first appears in Act I, Scene 18...

...And when the three boys appear suspended above the stage in a machine, it (notes the libretto of 1791) is covered with roses...

...Landon absurdly imputes this to "prudishness...

...Beethoven at first declined, protesting "Isn't that the woman who had the affair with Mozart...

...one that is especially obvious in the final 100 pages, where Landon tries to uphold the fiction that the Mozarts were a happily married couple...

...It is therefore reasonable to assume that she may well have hoped to continue to live with him as his wife...

...Constanze was then beginning to spend most of her days in Baden "taking the cure,' and Mozart, though receiving more money from his compositions than ever before, was desperately seeking loans from his fellow Masons in Vienna...

...What really prompted Beethoven's refusal, though, was the idea that Frau Hofdemel was somehow responsible for the murder of his revered master...

...Even after she was finally persuaded by her second husband, Mozart's biographer, to do so—17 years after the burial—she would not allow a cross to be placed at the site...

...overnight she had become the widow of a great man, who now was looking for a second husband...

...Marriage to her was not what he [Süssmayr] wanted...

...But Mozart...

...His widow, however, stayed away...

...One may speculate about her motive for keeping Mozart's grave unmarked...

...He then proceeded to cut his own throat...

...She also smashed the only copy of the death mask that had been made the morning Mozart died...

...Perhaps she was afraid that an autopsy might reveal that he had been poisoned...

...Nor does he mention that certain replies to Mozart's letters from his friend and fellow Mason Michael Puchberg would in all likelihood have explained why the composer was borrowing huge sums for "chemists and doctors" (Mozart's words) while enjoining absolute secrecy...

...Mozart'sbody was simply flung by gravediggers into an unmarked pit...

...After all, the five volumes were presented as a "chronicle," not a book, and those willing to pay $248 for the facts would not expect the humorless, workaholic Haydn, great as he was, to be made lively...

...The composer himself had expressed the suspicion that he was being poisoned, and many at the time believed Hofdemel the likeliest culprit...

...One cannot say for sure: Puchberg's letters were destroyed by Constanze after her husband's death—like dozens, maybe hundreds of others relating to the 1789-91 period, including all of her own...

...Did Landon have to go and make that impassioned, effervescent, fun-filled composer dull too...

...No one witnessed the burial that followed...

...Mozart's funeral service, held in St...

...Mozart enjoyed life right up to the end—one need only listen to the music to appreciate that...

...Sarastro, the High Priest (i.e...

...It is all the more regrettable, then, that this short book depicts him as the sort of problem-solver and worrywart he disdained to be...

...Most interesting of all is the possibility that Franz Hofdemel committed suicide in expiation for his poisoning Mozart...

...The day after Mozart's death, her husband Franz(yet another Mason) mutilated her face and breasts with a razor, leaving his pregnant wife in a pool of blood...

...He left at once and never returned"—dying, with admirable reticence, shortly thereafter...

...While there are no doubt numerologjcal conundrums and other "problems" in the Masonic Flute, it is hard to imagine Mozart or his ebullient librettist Emanuel Schikaneder being very concerned with any objective other than finding hilarious ways to poke fun at the Court, the musical bureaucracy and their fellow Masons...

...In 1805, Haydn—who had been in England at the time of Mozart's death —voiced his disgust at Constanze's refusal to visit Mozart's grave...

...Evidently he was infuriated by his wife's grief, and he may also have suspected that the child she-was carrying was not his...

...Why was this world-famous composer, already hailed by Haydn as the greatest of all time, given the kind of anonymous interment for which no fee was required...

...A number of years later, Karl Czerny asked Beethoven whether he would improvise at the piano at the request of a veiled lady who was Czemy's pupil...

...Landon's account of the first goes as follows: "In the last two years of Mozart's life, Constanze had shared her apartment in Vienna and at Baden contentedly, it seems, with Süssmayr...

...When Papageno asks the hideous old woman, who will turn out to be Papagena, how old she is, she answers '18...

...Landon quotes from their letters at the lime: "'Iain glad when you have some fun in Baden—of course I am, but I do wish that you would not sometimes make yourself so cheap...

...Constanze Mozart's disgraceful conduct at the time of her husband's funeral, her lifelong attempt to cash in on his growing posthumous repute as music's supreme genius (she survived him by 50 years), and the pains she took to suppress any evidence belying her idealized picture of connubial bliss, are accepted facts to most biographers...

...But listen to the author-pedant: "The orchestral introduction [to one particular scene] contains precisely 18 groups of notes...

...If Constanze really wanted to marry Süssmayr, as Landon says—and not to make the world forget that he had been her lover—it is very odd that upon Mozart's death she took the manuscript of the unfinished Requiem to Josef Eybler instead...

...Might the money have been needed to finance an abortion or two for his wife...

...Landon himself has an inkling of the Mozarts'marital stresses, as is clear from his description of their situation in August 1789...

...At the beginning of Act II, Sarastro and his Priests enter: There are (as the libretto of 1791 makes sure to mention) precisely 18 priests and 18 chairs, and the first section of the chorus they sing, ? Isis and Osiris, is 18 bars long...

...author, "Trazom, " a play about Mozart's last year Nine years ago when H. C. Robbins Landon's 3,842-page Haydn: Chronicle and Works was published by the University of Indiana Press, I reviewed it in these pages with the customary obeisance to its exhaustive scholarship, forbearing to underscore its monumental dullness...

...But her destruction of her own and much of her husband's correspondence ensures that the whole truth will probably never be known...

...But leaving this almost hypnotic fascination with the 18° (Rose-Croix), we must remember that 18 is made of six times three....' Granted, when it comes to the minute details of Mozart's music, the house he and his wife Constanze lived in, or life at the Court, Landon's scholarship is impeccable, if ungenerous to his predecessors (he fails to mention, even in his bibliography, Alfred Einstein's classic book on Mozart...

...Remember that you yourself once admitted to me that you were inclined to comply too easily.'" In that same letter, Landon notes, "Mozart told Constanze that she should not torment herself or him 'with unnecessary jealousy.'" From this the author draws the reasonable conclusion that "Constanze was being 'free and easy' with another man at this time, and Mozart was making her jealous by his friendship with another woman...

...And particularly Mozart's final year, which saw him create The Magic Flute, his clarinet concerto and Requiem, and the greatest of his trios, quartets and quintets...

...it needs to be presented with peculiar force: 'Those whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder.'" So much for intrepid scholarship...

...Landon's eagerness to cover up Constanze's original cover-up of the true nature of her marriage to Mozart is even more patent in the section of the book dealing with Franz Xaver Süssmayr and Maria Magdalena Hofdemel—who were, in fact, Constanze's and Mozart's lovers, respectively...

...Even the distorted, untruthful image of a dirty-minded little genius who never grew up, as presented by Peter Shaffer in A madeus—properly excoriated by Landon— is preferable...

...Landon's final chapter, "Constanze: A Vindication," completes the whitewash by ignoring a mountain of evidence bearing on the behavior of Constanze after her husband's death...

...Then he adds: "Discovering who these two people were may not be very difficult...

...Landon's high-handed dismissal of all this, and practically anything else that might implicate Constanze in distorting the circumstances of her marriage to Mozart, is crowned by the unbelievably sanctimonious conclusion to his book...

...But [then] Mozart died...

...The cause of Mozart's need for more money presents greater problems.' Oddly, though, Landon does not pursue the identity of "these two people...

...Schikaneder, Süssmayr, Baron von Swieten, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, and Eybler...

...Maria Magdalena Hofdemel's story is more dramatic—indeed, melodramatic is the word...

...You are too free and easy with [the name was deleted by Constanze after Mozart's death...

...Süssmayr, of course, studied under Mozart, and the composer had left instructions that this pupil should be the one to finish his Requiem...

...Yet there is an ulterior purpose at play in his book...

...And it was the same with [another name scratched out] when he was still at Baden...

...He was no pauper, after all, and his family had ample resources...

...I believe," he writes, "that [a] higher precept obtains in the case of Constanze and Wolfgang Mozart...

...as soon as Czerny convinced him that this was not the case, Beethoven complied...