'Dearest, most beloved little wife': Marrying Mozart

Marrying Mozart. Stephanie Cowell. (Viking, 2004.)

Four sisters growing up in genteel poverty with dreams of marriage and career, with plans both domestic and artistic -- sound familiar? Now, try this on for size: Meg gets pregnant, then married; Jo doesn't fit in because, thanks to Marmee's premarital indiscretions, she's actually illegitimate; Beth enters holy orders for a while and ends up surviving all her sisters; and Amy lands Laurie only after he's been rejected by her older sister. (Okay, so, that last one doesn't count.)

Instead of the beloved novel chronicling the lives and loves of the March girls, Marrying Mozart is the (mostly) true-life story of the Weber sisters: Josefa, Aloysia, Constanze and Sophie. One of them would marry Mozart.

This much we know: In 1777, Wolfgang Mozart was befriended by Mannheim musician Fridolin Weber, and fell in love with his beautiful, talented second daughter Aloysia. Aloysia, an ambitious soprano, became engaged to young Mozart but broke things off when he took too long to make his fortune. (As she said, years later, "I did not know, you see. I only thought... he was such a little man.") Years later, when he had left the servitude of the Archbishop of Salzburg, Wolfgang took a room in the Vienna boarding house run by the now-widowed Frau Weber. It was during this time that he fell in love with Constanze, the third Weber girl; they were married in 1781.

The emotional effect of the Weber sisters on Wolfgang Mozart should not be dismissed. Apart from his mother and sister, and his cousin (with whom he enjoyed a somewhat non-familial relationship), the Weber sisters were the primary female influences in his life. Many scholars have suggested that his particular gift for understanding his female operatic characters may well have been influenced by his time with, and within, this family.

But this story, while full of Mozart, is not Mozart's. It's the story of the family -- indeed, almost the organism -- that became part of his life. Stephanie Cowell captures the essence of that family astonishingly well. Allowing for some artistic license where interpretation serves the story better than known fact, she has created an extremely plausible collection of women, giving them enough personality to make them distinguishable and yet never truly separating any one from the Weber nucleus until the end.

Thankfully, she doesn't fall prey to the "Amadeus" syndrome, and gives us instead Mozart the dignified, sometimes even stodgy, young man he actually was. Yes, there is dancing and gaeity and sex (and not just for Wolfgang) and bathroom humor. There is also the upright indignation (present in his actual letters) when he discovers his bride-to-be (Constanze, that is) has let a man measure her calf in public.

The settings as well as the characters come alive in her remarkably vivid descriptions -- the smells, sights and sounds of both the cities and the homes that Mozart, Constanze and the rest inhabit are full of an attractive immediacy.

But the true marvel lies in Ms. Cowell's description of Mozart's music: Specifically, the songs and arias for soprano and the effect performing them has on the young Weber girls. Much has been written about a composer and his inspiration, but rarely does anyone capture the spirit of what it might be like to be that inspiration, of inhabiting, and being inhabited by, that music. Ms. Cowell, an operatic soprano herself, not only knows this mystery but depicts it beautifully.

Wisely, Ms. Cowell does not let us truly get to know Constanze until the final third of the book; after all, to Mozart, she was merely his beloved's younger sister until his arrival in Vienna. Ms. Cowell makes Wolfgang's rediscovery of Constanze, and the blossoming of their romance, entirely believable and even charming.

Finally, this is a romance. Over the years, Wolfgang and Constanze's feelings for one another have been subject to speculation and doubt... using sprinklings from actual correspondence and more than a dash of inspiration, Ms. Cowell has concocted a story that could make a believer out of the staunchest cynic.

Posted on June 23, 2004 to inconstant reader

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