Mozart at his Spinet in 1787.
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Georg Nikolaus Nissen in 1809
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When
I went to Salzburg in 1988 to research a short story in connection with
a German workshop for writers that I attended at the time, I actually
intended to write about Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, because Constanze
seemed far too bland.
Nannerl Mozart around 1785
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However,
the more I got to know about her, the more fascinated I became with her
multi-facetted character, which was miles away from common
preconceptions. Her life had been very exiting, also after Mozart’s
death.
Nannerl, though is not forgotten and I still plan to publish a book about her.
The story begins on a rainy October morning in Salzburg, a few months before Constanze’s death in 1841 at the age of 80.
Feeling
a trifle grumpy on account of rheumatic pains and old age, Constanze is
sitting in her warm and cosy living room, struggling with a pile of
invitations for the last great event in her life, the performance of
Mozart’s Requiem in St Rupert’s Cathedral to celebrate the 50th
anniversary of his death. The two sister-goddesses of remembrance and
forgetfulness, Mnenosyme and Lethe respectively, are sitting on either
side of the desk and they are there to stay. They cling to Constanze’s
daily life, intrude in her dreams and daydreams and on her imaginary
conversations with Mozart as they dissolve time and space into thoughts
and recollected images. Skeletons rattle in the closet and Lethe turns a
deaf ear.
A sheet of music from Mozart's Requiem.
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Constanze
remembers her childhood, sits down in the prompter’s box at the
3rd-rate theatre where her father worked as a prompter, and in the box
at the Court Theatre among the noblest of the nobility shrouded in an
atmosphere of heavy, nervous expectation mixed with sexual allure,
colours, scents and indomitable splendour while her elder sister,
Aloysia, sings and Mozart conducts.
 The Court Theatre at Schloss Schönbrunn |
Of
course, she recalls falling passionately in love with Mozart as well as
their completely unrestrained lovemaking, but she also remembers his
plentiful erotic escapades. No gentleman without a waiter and a mistress
as they said at the time, and since Mozart considered himself as part
to the top social circles he did not give much thought to his own little
amorous digressions.
 The singer Josepha Duschek. | 
The singer
Henriette Baranius.
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The singer
Nancy Storace.
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Of
course, she recalls falling passionately in love with Mozart as well as
their completely unrestrained lovemaking, but she also remembers his
plentiful erotic escapades. No gentleman without a waiter and a mistress
as they said at the time, and since Mozart considered himself as part
to the top social circles he did not give much thought to his own little
amorous digressions.
Constanze
still remembers the sound of Mozart’s singing voice - and the Salzburg
dialect - and she recalls his way of conducting and writing music as
well as remembering him as a father, husband, billiards player, horseman
and drinker.
Her
six difficult childbirths, four dead children, as well as Mozart’s
illness and death are experiences from which she never fully recovered.
She remembers only too vividly her struggle to survive as a penniless
widow with much debt and two small children, seven years and five months
old respectively.
But
Constanze managed to pull through that as well. She arranged concert
tours with Mozart’s music all over Europe; she visited Beethoven and
persuaded him to play during one of the intervals at the performance of
the opera ‘La Clemenza di Tito’, because in Vienna Beethoven had all of a
sudden become more popular than Mozart had ever been. She displayed
Public Relations skills, well ahead of her time.
With
the worst of her troubles behind her, she experienced a happy time in
cosmopolitan Vienna. The lucky man was Georg Nikolaus Nissen, the solid
Dane who was to become the second love of her life - not to be compared
with her love for Mozart, but nonetheless valuable to her. Love, as we
know, come in all guises.
And
Nikolaus opened the doors to the ‘best circles’ for her, because in
Austria, Nikolaus, by virtue of his Danish diplomatic status, was
considered a man of rank while Constanze as ‘nothing more’ than the
widow of a Court composer was considered of low rank. This difference in
rank, however also meant that they were unable to marry unless he left
the diplomacy, and he was refused on more than one occasion.
However, regardless of her new love, Constanze’s life continued to revolve around Mozart in a kind of ménage a trois, transgressing the boundaries of death.
Napoleon bombarding Vienna in 1809.
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The
good years in Vienna were abruptly put to an end in 1805 as Napoleon
entered, plundered and occupied the city. Constanze experienced it all
at close quarters, and during their dramatic flight across the
Marchlands on their way to Pressburg, they ran into hostile French
troops. A close encounter. Once in Pressburg, Constanze was finally
married to Nikolaus, seeing as the Napoleonic wars turned everything
upside down, why give a damn about old rules?
Their
joy was short-lived though, because the canon-fire from Aspen and
Wagram, where two of the most important battles of the Napoleonic wars
were fought, kept them up night after night. And their journey back to
Vienna, straight across the battlefields on account of high waters in
the Danube, proved no less dramatic.
Shortly
afterwards, Nikolaus was finally allowed to leave for Denmark and
Constanze courageously left everything that had hitherto been her life.
She held her head high and followed her husband to this strange country
of his, Denmark, in the far distant north – who even sided with
Napoleon!
On
their way through Denmark they visit some of Nikolaus’s aristocratic
and arrogant friends, meet up with a couple of curious characters, and
experience heavy storms and thieving rabble attacking their stagecoach
and much more.
Naturally
Constanze views Copenhagen form the point of view of a foreigner, which
turns the story to one of homes-sickness, loneliness as well as
helplessness, abandonment and isolation; experiences that invariably
affect those who pull up their roots and make for the unknown.
Gråbrødre Torv with the Corfitz Ulfeldt monument of infamy after the British bombardment in 1807.
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Their
arrival in Copenhagen very nearly left her dumbfounded. Arriving from
the lively, cosmopolitan Vienna with its countless cafes and
opera-theatres where she had met the greatest singers, conductors and
composers of the time – not to mention that she had been married to the
greatest of them all, Constanze found herself in a devastated bombed out
crater of a city called Copenhagen where rats ran from gutter to
gutter, torture was an everyday occurrence, the poverty indescribable,
and the stench originating from the Copenhageners’ digestive system
coupled with the smell of burning and putrefaction would have defeated
even the toughest Renaissance character.
In
Copenhageners they had barely heard of Mozart, and what had once been
half Constanze’s life, the opera, proved a rather unfamiliar concept.
The city’s trend-setting intellectual, Knud Lyhne Rahbek, who was the
director of the Royal Theatre, never so much as contemplated staging an
opera, and certainly not one of Mozart’s operas, which he described as
‘trivial hotchpotch’.
Constanze
tries her very best to adapt herself to the environment she has married
into. She controls her temper, behaves dignified, abandoning the casual
behaviour acceptable in Viennese cafés or the Prater, but she never
manages to fit in. She is and remains a foreigner. She experiences
extreme homesickness, language problems, she feels isolated and has
different political views from those of her circle of acquaintances who,
also on account of Nikolaus’s job as a censor, continue to keep them at
arm’s length. Moreover, they become exposed to the worst kind of
martyrdom imaginable, they are publicly humiliated, when the poet Jens
Baggesen publishes an infamous satirical rhyme about Constanze and
Nikolaus.
No
wonder it took the wind out of her sails, but there were a few rays of
comfort. She remembers a beautiful afternoon spent drinking tea with
Kamma Rahbek in the delightful Bakkehus at Frederiksberg as well as a
party hosted by Frederikke Brun at Sophienholm. The composer Weyse was
very interested in Mozart’s music and Constanze enjoyed talking to him
whenever the opportunity arose.
The entrance to Bakkehuset.
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However,
the most exciting experience for a landsman like Constanze was
witnessing the festive homecoming of a merchant ship at Langelinie Quay
that had managed to get through the British blockade, which was a rare
happening in post-war Denmark, when any- and everybody went bankrupt.
The merchant ship from China arrives.
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One
of the more memorable experiences of Constanze’s middle-aged existence,
was when her younger son Wowi visited her and Nikolaus in Copenhagen in
1819. They arranged a piano concert at the Royal Theatre, where Wowi
performed both his father’s and his own compositions. The evening was a
huge success.
During
Wowi’s visit they experience, again at close quarters, the persecution
of the Jews in Copenhagen; an event Danish history books seem to only
touch upon very lightly.
When
Nikolaus is dismissed, effective immediately, by his unsympathetic
boss, Counsellor Kaas, on the very same day that Constanze witnesses
poor Master Ferdinandsen’s suicide by drowning in the canal and she
encounters a mysterious man on her way home in the snow, her inner
despair gets the better of her.
 Wowi in 1825. |  |
However,
once again bad times provide impetus for better ones. Napoleon is sent
off to the island of St. Helena, and Vienna is back to its normal self,
so Constanze and Nikolaus decide to return to Austria to realize their
yearlong dream of writing a biography about Mozart. A worthy task for
their final years and almost a moral obligation after all the slander,
to which Constanze, Mozart and even Nikolaus had been exposed.
They
leave Denmark in search of Mozart’s surviving relatives, including his
cheeky cousin Bässle with whom he flirted as a young man, and
Constanze’s sister, Aloysia, who was Mozart’s first true love. The shock
of seeing Aloysia looking old and haggard prompts Constanze to take a
good look at herself in the mirror. The effects of age are invariably
visible in others before yourself.
 Cousin Bässle at the time Mozart was in love with her. |  Aloysia, Constanze's elder sister, at the time Mozart was in love with her |
They
also visit Constanze’s son Carl in Italy, but they are not on very good
terms. All in all, Constanze ends up not having much to do with either
of her sons, who seem more interested in her fat-lined purse than in
her.
Nikolaus’s
literary dreams become a mixture of a nightmare and an obsession. The
process of writing is far more difficult than he had ever imagined, and
as he is also seriously ill at the time, it all amounts to more than his
health can carry, and he dies before completing his great literary
work.
At
the age of 64, Constanze is once again alone, and she has to roll up
her sleeves, actually managing to finish the biography on her own. But
some madcap fellow swindles her out of all the subscription money, which
means that she is personally obliged to cover the publication costs.
At the end of the book, Constanze is back in the cathedral in Salzburg, on the
threshold
to her final transition, death. In a fit of dizziness she slips into a
near-death experience as the notes of the Requiem fade away.
I hope the above will inspire whoever is presently visiting this link to read more about Constanze and her family!
Most sincerely,
Louise Bugge Laermann
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