"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:

"She is not satisfied with my being two hours every day with her,—I am to sit there the livelong day while she tries to be agreeable. But, worse still, she is seriously smitten with me. I thought at first it was a joke, but now I know it to be a fact. When I first observed it—by her beginning to take liberties, such as reproaching me tenderly if I came later than usual, or could not stay long, and similar things—I was obliged, to prevent her making a fool of herself, to tell her the truth in a civil manner. This, however, did no good, and she became more loving than ever. At last I was always very polite, except when she began any of her pranks, and then I snubbed her bluntly; but one day she took my hand and said, 'Dear Mozart, don't be so cross; you may say what you please I shall always like you.' All the people here say that we are to be married, and great surprise is expressed at my choosing such a face. She told me that when she heard anything of the sort she always laughed at it. I know, however, from a third person, that she confirms it, adding that we are to travel immediately afterwards. This did enrage me. I told her my opinion pretty plainly, and warned her not to take advantage of my good nature. Now I no longer go there every day, but only every two days, so the report will gradually die away. She is nothing but an amorous fool."

Life in Vienna has always been gay enough. In those days it was far from prudish and Mozart was always of unusual fascination for women. He loved frivolity and went about much, but he seems by no means to have deserved the reputation given him by the gossip of that time and this, that he was a confirmed rake. It is impossible for any one acquainted with Mozart's career and letters to accuse him of studious hypocrisy, and this accusation is necessary to support the theory that he was anything but a serious-minded toiler, and for his time and surroundings a well-behaved and conscientious man.

He finally left the home of the Webers and had previously written his father, as we have seen, that he was not at all in love with Constanze. But he was either in love with her without knowing it, or he soon tumbled headlong in love with her; for, soon after leaving the house, he plighted his troth with her.

He was some time, however, in mustering courage enough to break the news to his father. To a letter dated December 5, 1781, he added a vague hint of new ideas. This was enough to provoke his father's curiosity. It was satisfied in Mozart's long reply of December 15th:

"My very dearest father, you demand an explanation of the words in the closing sentence of my last letter. Oh! how gladly long ago would I have opened my heart to you; but I was deterred, by the reproaches I dreaded, from even thinking of such a thing at so unseasonable a time, although merely thinking can never be unseasonable. My endeavours are directed at present to securing a small but certain income, which, together with what chance may put in my way, may enable me to live—and to marry! You are alarmed at this idea; but I entreat you, my dearest, kindest father, to listen to me. I have been obliged to disclose to you my purpose; you must therefore allow me to disclose to you my reasons also, and very well-grounded reasons they are.

"My feelings are strong, but I cannot live as many other young men do. In the first place, I have too great a sense of religion, too much love for my neighbour to do so, and too high a feeling of honour to deceive any innocent girl. My disposition has always inclined me more to domestic life than to excitement; I never have from my youth upward been in the habit of taking any charge of my linen or clothes, etc., and I think nothing is more desirable for me than a wife. I assure you I am forced to spend a good deal owing to the want of proper care of what I possess. I am quite convinced that I should be far better off with a wife (and the same income I now have), for how many other superfluous expenses would it save! An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only half of life.

"But now, who is the object of my love? Do not be startled, I entreat you. Not one of the Webers, surely? Yes, one of the Webers,—not Josepha, not Sophie, but the third daughter, Constanze. I never met with such diversity of dispositions in any family. The eldest is idle, coarse, and deceitful—crafty and cunning as a fox; Madame Lange (Aloysia) is false and unprincipled, and a coquette; the youngest is still too young to have her character defined,—she is merely a good humoured, frivolous girl; may God guard her from temptation!

"The third, however, namely, my good and beloved Constanze, is the martyr of the family, and, probably on this very account, the kindest hearted, the cleverest, and, in short, the best of them all; she takes charge of the whole house, and yet does nothing right in their eyes. Oh! my dear father, I could write you pages were I to describe to you all the scenes I have witnessed in that house. She is not plain, but at the same time far from being handsome; her whole beauty consists of a pair of bright black eyes and a pretty figure. She is not witty, but has enough of sound good sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother. Her dress is always neat and nice, however simple, and she can herself make most of the things requisite for a young lady. She dresses her own hair, understands housekeeping, and has the best heart in the world. I love her with my whole soul, as she does me. Tell me if I could wish for a better wife. All I now wish is, that I may procure some permanent situation (and this, thank God, I have good hopes of), and then I shall never cease entreating your consent to my rescuing this poor girl, and thus making, I may say, all of us quite happy, as well as Constanze and myself; for, if I am happy, you are sure to be so, dearest father, and one-half of the proceeds of my situation shall be yours. Pray, have compassion on your son."

This news was answered by a simoom of rage from Salzburg. The father had a partial justification for his wrath in the fact that a busybody had carried to him all manner of slander about Mozart and, likewise, slander about Constanze. He writes reminding Wolfgang of his mistake about Aloysia, and mentions a rumour that Wolfgang had been decoyed into signing a written contract of marriage with Constanze. To this Mozart writes very frankly and in a manner that shows Constanze in a beautiful light:

"You are well aware that, her father being no longer alive, a guardian stands in his place. To him (who is not acquainted with me) busybodies and officious gentlemen must have no doubt brought all sorts of reports, such as, that he must beware of me, that I have no fixed income, that I would perhaps leave her in the lurch, etc., etc. The guardian became very uneasy at these insinuations. We conversed together, and the result was (as I did not explain myself so clearly as he desired) that he insisted on the mother putting an end to all intercourse between her daughter and myself until I had settled the affair with him in writing. What could I do? I was forced either to give a contract in writing or renounce the girl. Who that sincerely and truly loves can forsake his beloved? Would not the mother of the girl herself have placed the worst interpretation on such conduct? Such was my position. The contract was in this form:

"'I bind myself to marry Madlle. Constanze Weber in the course of three years, and if it should so happen, which I consider impossible, that I change my mind, she shall be entitled to draw on me every year for 300 florins.'

"Nothing in the world could be easier than to write this, for I knew that the payment of 300 florins never would be exacted, because I could never forsake her; and if unhappily I altered my views, I would only be too glad to get rid of her by paying the 300 florins; and Constanze, as I knew her, would be too proud to let herself be sold in this way.

"But what did the angelic girl do when her guardian was gone? She desired her mother to give her the written paper, saying to me, 'Dear Mozart, I require no written contract from you. I rely on your promise.' She tore up the paper. This trait endeared Constanze still more to me."

The correspondence between father and son waxed fast and furious. Mozart does not attempt to defend Madame Weber or the guardian, but he will not have a word said against the devotion and honour of his Constanze. Jealous perhaps of the activity of the prospective father-in-law, Madame Weber now began to go into training for a traditional rendition of the role of mother-in-law. She made the life of her daughter and of Mozart as miserable as possible, and fixed in them the determination that, whatever happened, they would not live with her after they were married. Mozart and his sweetheart made a determined combination to win the affection of Mozart's sister, and Constanze sent to Nannerl many a little present, apologising because she was too poor to send anything worth sending. Finally she was bold enough to enclose a letter to Nannerl. The composition of such a letter under such circumstances is, at best, no easy matter, and I cannot help thinking that Constanze has evolved a little model:

"MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND:—I never should have been so bold as to yield to my wish and longing to write to you direct, if your brother had not assured me that you would not take amiss this step on my part. I do so from my earnest desire to make acquaintance, by writing at least, with a person who, though as yet unknown to me, bears the name of Mozart, a name so precious to me. May I venture to say that, though I have not had the pleasure of seeing you, I already love and esteem you as the sister of so excellent a brother? I therefore presume to ask you for your friendship. Without undue pride I think I may say that I partly deserve it, and shall wholly strive to do so. I venture to offer you mine, which, indeed, has long been yours in my secret heart. I trust I may do so, and in this hope I remain your faithful friend, CONSTANZE WEBER.

"My compliments to your papa."

With so much quarrelling going on around them and concerning them, it is small wonder that the two lovers were finally nagged into the condition of such nervousness that they fell to quarrelling with each other. One feud adds spice to the very first of these letters to Constanze, which she so carefully guarded,—Aloysia Weber seems never to have preserved any of Mozart's correspondence. It throws also a curious light on the social diversions of Vienna society at that time.

"VIENNA, April 29, 1782.

"MY DEAR AND BELOVED FRIEND:—You still, I hope, allow me to give you this name? Surely you do not hate me so much that I may no longer be your friend, nor you mine? And even if you do not choose henceforth to be called my friend, you cannot prevent my thinking of you as tenderly as I have always done. Reflect well on what you said to me to-day. In spite of my entreaties, you have met me on three occasions with a flat refusal, and told me plainly that you wished to have no more to do with me. It is not, however, a matter of the same indifference to me that it seems to be to you, to lose the object of my love; I am not, therefore, so passionate, so rash, or so reckless, as to accept your refusal. I love you too dearly for such a step. I beg you then once more to weigh well and calmly the cause of our quarrel, which arose from my being displeased at your telling your sisters (N.B., in my presence) that at a game of forfeits you had allowed the size of your leg to be measured by a gentleman. No girl with becoming modesty would have permitted such a thing. The maxim to do as others do is well enough, but there are many things to be considered besides,—whether only intimate friends and acquaintances are present,—whether you are a child, or a girl old enough to be married,—but, above all, whether you are with people of much higher rank than yourself. If it be true that the Baroness [Waldstaedten] did the same, still it is quite another thing, because she is a passee elderly woman (who cannot possibly any longer charm), and is always rather flighty. I hope, my dear friend, that you will never lead a life like hers, even should you resolve never to become my wife. But the thing is past, and a candid avowal of your heedless conduct would have made me at once overlook it; and, allow me to say, if you will not be offended, my dearest friend, will still make me do so. This will show you how truly I love you. I do not fly into a passion like you. I think, I reflect, and I feel. If you feel, and have feeling, then I know I shall be able this very day to say with a tranquil mind: My Constanze is the virtuous, honourable, discreet, and faithful darling of her honest and kindly disposed,

"MOZART."

This letter seems to have ended the quarrel—the only one we know of their having. For, a week later in a letter to his father, Mozart implies that Constanze and he are once more on excellent terms; also that Nannerl had answered Constanze's letter with appropriate courtesy.

Meanwhile, in spite of the excitement of producing his opera and fighting the strong opposition to it, Mozart is still more deeply absorbed in gaining his father's consent to his marriage. He briefly dismisses his account of his opera's immense success and bends all his ardour to winning over his father. The agony of his soul quivers in every line. Vienna is alive with gossip. Some say that he and Constanze are already married. He fears to compromise the woman he loves. He hints that if he cannot wed her with his father's blessing he will wed her without it.

Meanwhile, the young woman's mother had by this time, got the bit fast in her teeth. Now, the Baroness Waldstaedten had been touched by the troubles of the young lovers and had invited Constanze to visit her for some weeks. This excited the mother's apprehension, perhaps not unwisely in view of the levity of the baroness' standards of conduct, and she insisted upon Constanze cutting her visit short.

When Constanze refused this, Frau Weber sent word that if she did not return immediately, the law would be sent for her. This threat drove Mozart to desperation, and the marriage degenerated into a race between the priest and the policeman. Fortunately the priest won. The baroness wrote in person to the father for his consent, advancing Mozart 1,000 gulden to cover the 500 gulden which Constanze would have as a marriage portion; and secured their release from the delayful necessity of publishing the banns.

Romeo and his Juliet were married on August 4, 1782. Shortly after the wedding the father's consent arrived. It was a rather stingy consent however, and warned Mozart that he could not expect pecuniary assistance and that he ought to tell Constanze of this fact.

There was an implied insult to the girl's love in this ungracious remark, and it stung Mozart deeply. For Constanze, who had torn up the contract of betrothal on a previous occasion, had not been the girl to take money into account.

Three days after the wedding Mozart wrote to his father a long account of it with a promise that he and his bride would take the first opportunity of asking forgiveness in person. "No one attended the marriage but Constanze's mother and youngest sister, Herr von Thorwarth in his capacity of guardian, Herr von Zetto (Landrath) who gave away the bride, and Gilofsky, as my best man. When the ceremony was over, both my wife and I shed tears; all present (even the priest) were touched on seeing the emotion of our hearts. Our sole wedding festivities consisted of a supper, which Baroness Waldstaedten gave us, and indeed it was more princely than baronial. My darling is now one hundred times more joyful at the idea of going to Salzburg; and I am willing to stake—ay, my very life, that you will rejoice still more in my happiness when you really know her; if, indeed, in your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled, honest, virtuous, and pleasing wife ought to make a man happy."

Now we enter upon the test of this romantic devotion—this wedlock of the twenty-six year old musician and the maiden of nineteen, who married in spite of the opposition of both families and in spite of the poverty that awaited them. There are many accounts of the domestic career of these two, written in a tone of patronage or cynicism. But this tone is gratuitous on the part of those who assume it. As thorough a study of the facts and documents as I can make, shows no ground whatsoever for refusing to accept this love-match as an ideal wedding of ideal congeniality, and mutual and common devotion.

Poverty came with all its vicissitudes and settled upon the hearth, but we ought not to forget that both Wolfgang and Constanze had always been poor; that they were used to poverty, and were light-hearted in its presence. When they had no money to buy fuel, they were found dancing together to keep warm. Surely, for two such hearts, poverty was only a detail, and could in no sense be counted of sufficient weight to counterbalance the affection each found in each.

As for Mozart's career we must feel that no amount of wealth would have availed against his improvidence and his extravagance in the small way in which fate permitted him to be extravagant. Nor could a life of bachelorhood or a life with some woman married for money conceivably have made him produce greater compositions—for no greater compositions than those he produced during his married life have ever been produced by any composer under any circumstances. Let us then read without conviction such accounts as we may find tending to belittle the goodness or cheapen the virtues of Constanze or of Mozart.

The Webers had lived at Vienna in a house called Auge Gottes, and Mozart used to refer to his elopement as "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Auge Gottes," as a pun on the name of the opera that had made his marriage possible, "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail." It is a curious coincidence that the name of the principal character of this opera was Constanze, and that she was a model of devotion through all trials. Once away from the wrangling mother-in-law, the young couple enjoyed domestic bliss to the height. Later, mother Weber seems to have reformed and to have become a welcome guest in Mozart's house, where Aloysia herself became also a cherished friend.

Nothing could exceed the tenderness of the lovers for each other. It continued to the last. Constanze was so watchful of him that she cut up his meat at dinner when his mind was on his compositions, lest he might cut himself. She used to read aloud to him and tell him stories and hear his improvisations and insist upon their being written out for permanence. While the wife was showing all this solicitude, the husband, genius though he was, was showing equal tenderness to the wife.

All Vienna gossiped about his devotion. When she was ill, he was the most assiduous of nurses, and on one occasion got so into the habit of putting his fingers to his lips and saying "Psst!" to any one who entered the room where she was sleeping, that, on one occasion, on being spoken to in the street, he involuntarily placed his finger on his lips and gave the warning signal. When he was called away from home early, before she was awake, he would leave such a note for her as this: "Guten Morgen, liebes Weibchen, Ich wuensche, dass Du gut geschlafen habest" etc., or, as it runs in English: "Good morning, my darling wife! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household worries till I come back. May no evil befall you! I shall be home at—o'clock punctually."

Two weeks after the marriage we find Mozart writing to his father in this tone:

"Indeed, previous to our marriage we had for some time past attended mass together, as well as confessed and taken Holy Communion; and I found that I never prayed so fervently nor confessed so piously, as by her side; and she felt the same. In short, we were made for each other, and God, who orders all things, and consequently this also, will not forsake us."

They looked forward with great eagerness to visiting Salzburg, and it is not the least evidence of the kindness of Constanze's heart that one of her chief ambitions seems to have been the winning over of the father and the sister. The visit home was to be in November, 1782, but the weather grew very cold, and the wife's condition forbade. Mozart writes to his father that his wife "carries about a little silhouette of you, which she kisses twenty times a day at least." His letters are full of little domestic joys, such as a ball lasting from six o'clock in the evening until seven in the morning,—a game of skittles of which Constanze was especially fond,—a concert where Aloysia sang with great success an aria Mozart wrote for her,—and financial troubles of the most petty and annoying sort.

In June, 1783, Mozart writes his father asking him to be godfather to the expected visitor, who was to be named after the grandfather, either "Leopold" or "Leopoldine," according as fate decided. Fate decided that the first-born should be a son, and the young couple started gaily to Salzburg, for a visit.

But fate also decided that the visit should not be in any sense a success. Even as they set forth, they were stopped at the carriage by a creditor who demanded thirty gulden [about $15], a small sum, but not in Mozart's power to pay. At Salzburg, Mozart's father and sister seemed not to have outdone themselves in cordiality, and, worst of all, "the poor little fat baby" died after six months of life.

There is little profit and less pleasure in describing the financial troubles of the young couple. They are generally blamed for extravagance and bad management, for which Constanze is chiefly held responsible; but there are many reasons for disbelieving this charge, perhaps the chief of all being old Leopold Mozart's own statement that when he visited them he found them very economical. That was praise from Sir Hubert.

Of Mozart's devotion to his wife in the depths of his heart, there can be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous, beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional of his excursions from the path of rectitude, and found forgiveness there! "He loved her dearly, and confided everything to her, even his little sins, and she requited him with tenderness and true solicitude."

She always said, "One had to forgive him, one had to be good to him, since he was himself so good."

Four children were born to the devoted couple, all sons; the first child lived, as we have seen, only six months; the second was named Carl; the third was named Leopold; the fourth, Wolfgang Amadeus. Nohl says, "His wife's recovery on these occasions was always very tedious."

In 1787 Mozart's father died, and his letters to his sister show the depth of his grief. Nannerl had married three years before. Her first lover had relinquished her on account of her poverty, but she had captured a widower of means and position.

Mozart's letters to Constanze are not very numerous, because he was away from home neither often nor long. But they make up in tenderness and radiant congeniality what they lack in numbers. In 1789 he decided that a concert tour was necessary to replenish his flattened resources and to take him out of the rut in which the emperor was gradually dropping him as a mere composer of dance music for masked balls at the court. Mozart travelled in the carriage of his friend and pupil, Prince Carl Lichnowsky; and those who consider railroad travelling unpoetical will do well to read in Mozart's and Beethoven's letters the vivid pictures of the downright misery and tedium of the traveller of that time, even in a princely carriage, to say nothing of the common diligence. Mozart wrote to his wife frequently, and always in the most loverly fashion. He ends his first letter on this journey as follows:

"At nine o'clock at night we start for Dresden, where we hope to arrive to-morrow. My darling wife, I do so long for news of you! Perhaps I may find a letter from you in Dresden. May Providence realise this wish! [O Gott! mache meine Wuensche wahr!] After receiving my letter, you must write to me Poste Restante, Leipzig. Adieu, love! I must conclude, or I shall miss the post. Kiss our Carl a thousand times for me, and [ich bin Dich von ganzem Herzen kuessend, Dein ewig getreuer Mozart] I am, kissing you with all my heart, your ever faithful,

MOZART."

"Adieu! aime-moi et gardez votre sante, si precieuse a votre epoux." In his next, three days later, he says:

"MY DARLING WIFE:—Would that I had a letter from you! If I were to tell you all my follies about your dear portrait, it would make you laugh. For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say to it, God bless you, my Stanzerl! God bless you Spitzbub, Krallerballer, Spitzignas, Bagatellerl, schluck, und druck! and when I put it away again, I let it slip gently into its hiding-place, saying, Now, now, now, now! [Nu—nu—nu—nu!] but with an appropriate emphasis on this significant word; and at the last one I say, quickly, 'Good night, darling mouse, sleep soundly!' I know I have written something very foolish (for the world at all events), but not in the least foolish for us, who love each other so fondly. This is the sixth day that I have been absent from you, and, by heavens! it seems to me a year. Love me as I shall ever love you. I send you a million of the most tender kisses, and am ever your fondly loving husband."

Again three days, and we find him writing at midnight to his "liebstes bestes Weibchen" an account of his activities:

"After the opera we went home. Then came the happiest of all moments to me; I found the long ardently wished-for letter from you, my darling, my beloved! I went quickly in triumph to my room, and kissed it over and over again before I broke it open, and then rather devoured than read it. I stayed a long time in my room, for I could not read over your letter often enough, or kiss it often enough.

"Darling wife, I have a number of requests to make of you:

"1st. I beg you not to be melancholy. 2d. That you will take care of yourself, and not expose yourself to the spring breezes. 3d. That you will not go out to walk alone,—indeed, it would be better not to walk at all. 4th. That you feel entirely assured of my love. I have not written you a single letter without placing your dear portrait before me. 5th. I beg you not only to be careful of your honour and mine in your conduct, but to be equally guarded as to appearances. Do not be angry at this request; indeed, it ought to make you love me still better, from seeing the regard I have for my honour. 6th. Lastly, I wish you would enter more into details in your letters. Now farewell, my best beloved! Remember that every night before going to bed I converse with your portrait for a good half-hour, and the same when I awake. O stru! stru! I kiss and embrace you 1,095,060,437,082 times (this will give you a fine opportunity to exercise yourself in counting), and am ever your most faithful husband and friend."

Some of his letters are apparently lost, for one dated May 23d gives a list of the letters he had written to his wife—eleven in all (one of them in French)—between April 8th and May 23d. He complains bitterly that in this same time he had only six from her. There is worse news yet to add, seeing how poor they were:

"My darling little wife, when I return, you must rejoice more in me than in the money I bring. 100 Friedrichs-d'or don't make 900, but 700, florins,—at least so I am told here. 2d. Lichnowsky being in haste left me here, so I am obliged to pay my own board (in that expensive place, Potsdam). 3d.——borrowed 100 florins from me, his purse being at so low an ebb. I really could not refuse his request—you know why. 4th. My concert at Leipzig turned out badly, as I always predicted it would; so I went out of my way nearly a hundred miles almost for nothing. You must be satisfied with me, and with hearing that I am so fortunate as to be in favour with the king. What I have written to you must rest between ourselves."

His disappointment at the meagre financial returns from his tour was embittered by the serious illness of his Constanze and the drain upon his sympathy, his time, and his money. It was necessary for him to despatch in various directions a series of those pathetic begging letters that make up so much of his later correspondence.

Shortly after the failure of his concert tour, desperation goaded him to set forth again. He writes again to his Herzens Weibchen or his Herzaller-liebstes with renewed hope:

"I am quite determined to do the best I can for myself here, and shall then be heartily glad to return to you. What a delightful life we shall lead! I will work, and work in such a manner that I may never again be placed by unforeseen events in so distressing a position. Were you with me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet here, but all seems to me so empty. Adieu, my love! I am ever your loving Mozart.

"P.S.—While writing the last page, many a tear has fallen on it. But now let us be merry. Look! Swarms of kisses are flying about—Quick! catch some! I have caught three, and delicious they are."

This tour was again unsatisfactory. He came back almost poorer than he went.

In March, 1791, Constanze had to go to Baden to take the waters for her health. Mozart wrote a letter in advance engaging rooms for her, and taking great care that they were on the ground floor. While Constanze was at Baden, Mozart was getting deeper and deeper into financial hot water, but his letters betrayed great anxiety that she should not be worried, especially as she was about to become a mother again. One of his letters to her was as follows; part of it is French, which I have not translated, and the rest in German, part of which also it seems more vivid to leave in the original:

"MA TRES-CHERE EPOUSE:—J'ecris cette lettre dans la petite chambre au Jardin chez Leitgeb [a Salzburg horn-player]; ou j'ai couche cette nuit excellement—et j'espere que ma chere epouse aura passe cette nuit aussi bien que moi. J'attend avec beaucoup d'impatience une lettre que m'apprendra comme vous avez passe le jour d'hier; je tremble quand je pense au baigne de St. Antoine; car je crains toujours le risque de tomber sur l'escalier en sortant—et je me trouve entre l'esperance et la crainte—une situation bien desagreable! Si vous n'eties pas grosse, je craignerais moins—mais abandonons cette idee triste!—Le ciel aura eu certainement soin de ma chere Stanza Maria!...

"I have this moment received your dear letter, and find that you are well and in good spirits. Madame Leitgeb tied my neck-cloth for me to-day—but how? Good heavens! I told her repeatedly, 'This is the way my wife does it,' but it was all in vain. I rejoice to hear that you have so good an appetite;... You must walk a great deal, but I don't like you taking such long walks without me. Pray do all I tell you, for it comes from my heart. Adieu, my darling, my only love! I send you 2,999 and 1/2 kisses flying about in the air till you catch them. Nun sag ich dir etwas ins Ohr—du nun mir—nun machen wir dass Maul auf und zu immer mehr—und mehr—endlich sagen wir;—es ist wagen Slampi—Strampi, du kannst dir nun dabei denken was du willst das ist ebben die Comoditaet. Adieu, 1,000 tender kisses. Ever your Mozart."

It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears. Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with her punishment, and suggesting that the man's wife would probably assist her if informed.

It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a domestic tragedy. Frau Hofdaemmel was a pupil of Mozart's whose husband grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her almost to death, and then committed suicide. The story gradually grew up that Mozart was the cause of the man's jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he later discarded after Koechel, another biographer, had succeeded in proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart's death. Hofdaemmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan. There was, however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin, who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in 1789—90. She sang in his "Entfuehrung," and it was said that his friends had to help him out of his entanglement with her. But Jahn scouts the idea.

Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was writing was an omen of his own end. Shortly before his father had died, Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death when it should come, and speaking of death as "this good and faithful friend of man," and adding: "I never lie down at night without thinking, young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns."

Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive, but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.

After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister, Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart, even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die. When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:

"I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?"

Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of "these unchristian Fathers" to do as she wished.

After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5, 1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!

Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease, thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to die with him. Her grief was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a pauper's grave, three corpses deep.

It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house. She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.

There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr. Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure, speaks of Constanze as "indifferent to the disposition of the mortal remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated."

For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician, there is a superfluity of proof.

After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he granted. Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to "our Raphael of Music," her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children he left fatherless and penniless.

For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a councillor from Denmark, George Nicolaus von Nissen. He undertook the education of her two boys, and won her hand. She lived with him in Copenhagen till 1820, when she returned to Salzburg. The quaintness of this affair should not blind us to the unusual depth of affection it revealed. Constanze inspired even her new husband with such devotion to Mozart's fame that Nissen wrote a biography of his predecessor in her affections.

There cannot be many instances of a second husband writing a eulogistic biography of the first, but Nissen wrote his with a candour and enthusiasm that spoke volumes for his goodness and for that of Constanze. He died, however, before the biography was completed, and Constanze finished it herself. She includes in the publication a portrait of Nissen and a tender tribute to his memory. Many of the most beautiful anecdotes of Mozart's life we owe to Nissen's gentle unjealousy, and Constanze could frankly sign herself "widow of Staatsrath Nissen, previously widow of Mozart."

She includes an anonymous poem on Mozart's death, beginning:

"Wo ist dein Grab? Wo duften die Cypressen?"

Which is in its way evidence enough that she did not hold herself, or her "indifference," responsible for the dingy entombment of this genius, and the disappearance of his grave. As her last words to the public she says: "May the reader accept this apologetic, this intimate love-offering, in the spirit in which it is given. Salzburg, 1828." What reader can refuse this sympathy to one who felt and gave so much to one who craved sympathy as the very food of his soul?

When Constanze was elderly and the second time widowed, she was, according to Crowest, visited by an English lady and her husband—an eminent musician—both of whom were anxious to converse with the relict of the great master. Notwithstanding the years that had passed, Frau Nissen's enthusiasm for her first husband was far from extinguished. She was much affected at the regard which the visitors showed for his memory, and willingly entered into conversation about him.

"Mozart," she said, "loved all the arts and possessed a taste for most of them. He could draw, and was an excellent dancer. He was generally cheerful and in good humour; rarely melancholy, though sometimes pensive. Indeed," she continued, "he was an angel on earth, and is one in heaven now."

Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight. Composers' widows live long.

Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights, for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.



CHAPTER XIV.

BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE

"No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of it, his success and his immortality."

So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven well and loved him well, and as mutely as "a violet blooming at his feet in utter disregard."

Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius. He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose—all the brutal epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.

A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.

Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant Haendel, despised the pleasures of the table; he substituted a passion for nature. "No man on earth can love the country as I do!" he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed "Lorchen," seems to have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.

Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the cafe where Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation. Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch, whom eventually she married. Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish Jeannette d'Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love ditties. Then came Fraeulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the Wertherlike fashion.

Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that "In Vienna, at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know, each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank."

To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: "A New Year's gift for the tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend, Beethoven."

There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, "because he was very ugly and half crazy," as she told her niece.

An army captain cut him out with Fraeulein d'Honrath; his good friend Stephan von Breuning won away from him the "schoene und hochgebildete" Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged; she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fraeulein Therese von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the "volatile Therese who takes life so lightly." She married the Baron von Droszdick. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: "Farewell, my dearest Therese; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer. Think of me kindly, and forget my follies." She had a cousin Mathilde—later the Baroness Gleichenstein—who also left a barb in the well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fraeulein Roeckel.

The Hungarian Countess Marie Erdoedy (nee Countess Niczky) is listed among his flames, though Schindler thinks it "nothing more than a friendly intimacy between the two." Still, she gave Beethoven an apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a servant extra money to stay with him—a task servants always required bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a menage could not last, as Beethoven was "too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too easily injured and too hardly reconciled." Beethoven dedicated to her certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his letters he calls her his "confessor," and in one he addresses her as "Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Graefin," showing that she was his dearie to the fourth power.

Also there was Amalie Sebald, "a nut-brown maid of Berlin," a twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge in 1812, Beethoven says:

"Two affectionate words for a farewell would have sufficed me; alas! not even one was said to me! The Countess von der Recke sends me a pressure of the hand; it is something, and I kiss her hands as a token of gratitude; but Amalie has not even saluted me. Every day I am angry at myself in not having profited by her sojourn at Teplitz, seeking her companionship sooner. It is a frightful thing to make the acquaintance of such a sweet creature, and to lose her immediately; and nothing is more insupportable than thus to have to confess one's own foolishness.... Be happy, if suffering humanity can be. Give, on my part, to the countess a cordial but respectful pressure of the hand, and to Amalie a right ardent kiss—if nobody there can see."

In Nohl's collection of Beethoven's letters is an inscription in the album of the singer, Mine. "Auguste" Sebald (a mistake for "Amalie"). The inscription reads, as Lady Wallace ungrammatically Englishes it:

"Ludwig van Beethoven: Who even if you would Forget you never should."

In another work, Nohl mentions the existence of a mass of short notes from Beethoven to her, showing "not so much the warm, effervescent passion of youth, as the deep, quieter sentiment of personal esteem and affection, which comes later in life, and, in consequence, is much more lasting." One of the letters he quotes. It runs:

"What are you dreaming about, saying that you can be nothing to me? We will talk this over by word of mouth. I am ever wishing that my presence may bring peace and rest to you, and that you could have confidence in me. I shall hope to be better to-morrow, and that we shall be able to pass a few hours together in the enjoyment of nature while you remain here. Good night, dear Amalie; many, many thanks for the proof you give me of your attachment to your friend,

"BEETHOVEN."

There are other of these notes in Thayer's biography. She seems to have called the composer "a tyrant," and he has much playfulness of allusion to the idea, and there is much about the wretchedness of his health. Amalie Sebald seems to have been of great solace to him, but, like all the rest, she married some one else, Justice-councillor Krause.

It was for her that Beethoven composed his cycle of songs, "To the far-away love" [An die ferne Geliebte], according to Thayer; and of her that he wrote to Ries: "All good wishes to your wife. I, alas, have none; I have found but one, and her I can never possess."

Years later he said to his friend Giannatasio that five years before he had loved unhappily; he would have considered marriage the happiness of his life, but it was "not to be thought of for a moment, almost an utter impracticability, a chimera." Still, he said, his love was as strong as ever; he had never found such harmony, and, though he never proposed, he could never get her out of his mind.

In 1812 Carl Maria von Weber was in Berlin, and became ever after a devoted admirer of Amalie's virtues, her intellect, and her beauty.

Five years later we learn of Beethoven's receiving letters and presents from "a Bremen maiden," a pianist, Elise Mueller. And there was a poetess who also annoyed him.

In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of "the beautiful and amiable" Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz. He had met her in 1812, and admired her playing. As late as 1826 we have letters from her, inviting him to visit her in Gratz. But in 1817—he being then forty-seven years old—the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler, who observed it, called it an "autumnal love," though the woman's son later asserted that it was only a kinship of "artistic sympathy,"—in fact, Beethoven called her "a true foster-mother to the creations of his brain." Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after she married. Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of Bettina Brentano von Arnim. This freakish young woman had some acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged to have been sent to her by him. She also gave the world certain letters said to have come to her from Beethoven. It has been pretty well proved that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of Goethe's "garden of girls" before he ever met Bettina. But she appears to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's life, "a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty, her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths."

Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were always with women of high degree. But others have called him a "promiscuous lover," because he once used to stare amorously at a handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil Ries, who wrote: "Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly respectable daughters." In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion to these girls. But such a flirtation means little, and besides they were beauties, these daughters of the tailor. And Beethoven's own mother was a cook.

Ries describes him as a sad flirt. "Beethoven had a great liking for female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass, and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was observing him. He was always falling in love with some one, but generally his passion did not last long. Once when I teased him on his conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted him longest, and most seriously of all—namely, seven whole months!"

Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven's directions— "amoroso," "a malinconico" and the like.

Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of the composer's outrageously unkempt hair, and asked a friend to get her one. At his suggestion, Beethoven, who was a practical joker of boorish capabilities, sent her a tuft from the chin of a goat. The trick was discovered, and the scorned woman vented her fury in a letter; the repentant Beethoven made ample apology to her, and spent his wrath on the head of the suggester of the mischief.

Crowest spins a pretty yarn of Beethoven's acting as "postillon d'amour" by carrying love letters for a clandestinely loving couple.

Many of his own love-longings were couched in the form of the dedications prefixed to his compositions. The piano sonata, Op. 7, was inscribed to the Countess Babette von Keglevics, later the Princess Odeschalchi, and is called for her sake "der Verliebte." Other "gewidmets" were to the Princesses Lichtenstein and von Kinsky, to the Countesses von Browne, Lichnowsky, von Clary, von Erdoedy, von Brunswick, Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his "liebe, werthe, Dorothea Caecilia"), and to Eleonora von Breuning.

All these make a fairly good bead-roll of love-affairs for a busy, ugly, and half-savage man. It is not so long as Leporello's list of Don Juan's conquests, "but, marry, t'will do, t'will serve." I find I have catalogued twenty-six thus far (counting the tailor's three daughters as one). And more are to come.

And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you'll find Von Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that "Beethoven was never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love passages in his life," while Francis Hueffer can speak of "his grand, chaste way." On this latter point there is room for debate. Crowest adopts both sides at once by saying: "In the main, authorities concur in Beethoven's attachments being always honourable. There can be no doubt, however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side." Thayer takes a middle ground,—that, in the Vienna of his time and his social grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan, while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind. He could not endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased him. All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man's wife, and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair.

Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To say, "Poor Beethoven!" is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there was no Fraeulein Androcles to take it away.

Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he says: "She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend. Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the mute image of her that my fancy paints."

This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of his life-long griefs—lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.

And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he said, inter lacrimas et luctum.

The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve his turn on earth in spite of all. He was the very King Lear of music, trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.

To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while longingly sought. I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been. There were two others whom he deeply loved. One of these was the famous Italienne, whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication of his "Moonlight Sonata" (Op. 27, No. 2)—"alla damigella contessa Giulietta Guicciardi." It was in 1802, when he was thirty-two and she eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so passionately despairing in its close. She had been his pupil. She told Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put her own name over the "Moonlight Sonata" instead.

It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:

"Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though you know I am not one by nature. This change has been wrought by a dear, fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me. After two years, I bask again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of my rank in life. Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so I must drag along valiantly. But for my deafness, I should long ago have compassed half the world with my art—I must do it still. There exists for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art. I will meet my fate boldly. It shall never succeed in crushing me."

But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven's sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise. Three years after, at her father's behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money. Twenty years afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books which his deafness compelled him to use: "I was well beloved of her, more than ever her husband was loved. She came to see me and wept, but I scorned her." (He wrote it in French, "J'etais bien aime d'elle, et plus que jamais son epoux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la meprisais"), and he added: "If I had parted thus with my strength as well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better things?"

Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those three famous letters, or rather the one with the two postscripts, found in the secret drawer of an old cabinet after his death, and addressed to his "unsterbliche Geliebte." They were written in pencil, and either were copies or first draughts, or were never sent. They show his Titanic passion in full flame, and are worth quoting entire. Thayer gives them in an appendix, in the original, but I quote Lady Wallace's translation, with a few literalising changes:

"My angel, my all, my self—only a few words to-day, and they with a pencil (with yours!). My lodgings cannot be surely fixed until to-morrow. What a useless loss of time over such things! Why this deep grief when Necessity decides?—can our love exist without sacrifices, and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah, God! contemplate the beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love demands all, and rightly; so it is with me toward you and with you toward me; but you forget so easily that I must live both for you and for myself. Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little as I should.

"My journey was terrible. I did not arrive here till four o'clock yesterday morning, as no horses were to be had. The drivers chose another route; but what a dreadful one it was! At the last stage I was warned not to travel through the night, and to beware of a certain wood, but this only incited me to go forward, and I was wrong. The carriage broke down, owing to the execrable roads, mere deep rough country lanes, and had it not been for the postilions I must have been left by the wayside. Esterhazy, travelling the usual road, had the same fate with eight horses as I with four. Still I felt a certain degree of pleasure, which I invariably do when I have happily surmounted any difficulty. But I must now pass from the outer to the inner man. We shall soon meet again; to-day I cannot impart to you all the reflections I have made, during the last few days, on my life; were our hearts closely united for ever, none of these would occur to me.

"My breast is overflowing with all I have to say to you. Ah! there are moments when I find that speech is nothing at all. Take courage! Continue to be ever my true and only love, my all! as I am yours. The rest the gods must ordain—what must and shall become of us.

"Your faithful LUDWIG."

"Monday Evening, July 6th.

"You grieve! My dearest being! I have just heard that the letters must be sent off very early. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days when the post goes to K——from here.

"You grieve! Ah! where I am, there you are also with me; how earnestly shall I strive to pass my life with you, and what a life will it be!!!! Now!!!! without you and persecuted by the kindness of people here and there, which I as little wish to deserve as they do deserve—the servility of man towards his fellow man—it pains me—and when I regard myself as a part of the universe, what am I? what is he who is called the greatest?—and yet herein is shown the godlike part of humanity! I weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till probably Saturday. However dearly you may love me, I love you more fondly still. Never disguise yourself from me. Good night! As a patient at these baths, I must now go to rest." [A few words are here effaced by Beethoven himself.] "Oh, God, so near! so far! Is not our love a truly celestial mansion, but firm as the vault of heaven itself?"

"Good Morning, July 7th.

"Even in my bed, still my thoughts throng to you, my immortal Beloved!—now and then full of joy, and yet again sad, waiting to see whether Fate will hear us. I must live either wholly with you, or not at all. Indeed, I have resolved to wander far from you till I can fly into your arms, and feel that they are my home, and send forth my soul in unison with yours into the realm of spirits. Alas! it must be so! You will take courage, for you know my fidelity. Never can another possess my heart—never, never! Oh, God! why must one fly from what he so fondly loves? and yet my existence in W——was as miserable as here. Your love made me at once the most happy and the most unhappy of men. At my age, life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual relations? Angel! I have this moment heard that the post goes every day, so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner. Be calm! for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm contemplation of our existence. Be calm—love me—to-day—yesterday— what longings with tears for you—you! you!—my life!—my all! Farewell! Oh! love me well—and never doubt the faithful heart of your beloved L.

"Ever thine.

"Ever mine.

"Ever each other's."

These impassioned letters to his "immortal beloved" were believed by Schindler to have been intended for Giulietta, and dated by him at first in 1803 and then in 1806. But Thayer, after showing how careless Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters could not have been written before 1804. Since Giulietta was married Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose life he hoped to share.

Who then remains? Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have been another Therese, the Countess Therese von Brunswick. She was the cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Therese "adored him." About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother, "Kiss your sister Therese," and later he dedicated to her his sonata, Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of Therese, Thayer says that she lived to a great age—"ca va sans dire!—" and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps that she did not dare?

Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something more definite to Thayer's argument—if one is to believe a book I stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of the Beethoven bibliographies. The book bears every sign of telling the truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction. It is by Miriam Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Therese well for many years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her "the most remarkable woman I have ever known."

"She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and Beethoven," he went on, "and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful in her youth. Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness, because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a beatified spirit."

He told Fraeulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Therese and Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him, but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed out bareheaded into the storm.

Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health. "Without hat! Without cloak! Good heavens!" she cried. Seizing them, she rushed after him—she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like a valet! A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and ordered her to her room. But the lessons continued, and in Therese's diary Beethoven appeared constantly as "mon maitre," "mon maitre cheri."

She was doomed to a long jealousy. She saw Beethoven fall in love with her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi. Giulietta came to her for advice, saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for "that beautiful horrible Beethoven—if it were not such a come-down." She did not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly.

The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher. Beethoven came to dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of Therese. One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song of love to her. One day he said, suddenly:

"I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe the flower growing by the way."

It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged. Only her brother Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret. They dared not tell Therese's mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and thorough zest. Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the delay and the secrecy. But the sun broke through again. For four years of his life the engagement endured. Beethoven, it seems, at last grew furious. He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy snapped the bond with Therese. As she herself told Fraeulein Tenger, "The word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him. I was terribly frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled."

Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Therese had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed love in the girl's heart. Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his art, as any wife must have done. But now she returned him his letters. He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his "immortal beloved," which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him. As for Therese, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told Fraeulein Tenger:

"I have read it so often that I know it by heart—like a poem—and was it not a beautiful poem? I can only humbly say to myself, 'That man loved thee,' and thank God for it."

She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and on it an inscription from Ludwig:

"L'immortelle a son Immortelle. LUIGI."

These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request that it be placed under her head in her coffin.

When Fraeulein Tenger had first met the countess as a child she had been asked to go every year on March 27th and lay a wreath of immortelles on Beethoven's grave. The acquaintance continued, and they met again at long intervals till the countess's death in 1861. Fraulein Tenger wrote her book in her old age when she had lost her diaries, but enough of her reminiscences remain to prove Thayer's ingenious guesses correct.

Therese von Brunswick was Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," and the picture found with the letter was her portrait. It was painted by Lampi, when Therese was about twenty-eight; and on the frame can be seen still the words:

"To the rare genius, to the great artist, to the good man, from

T.B."

The picture is in the Beethoven Museum at Bonn, and in the National Museum at Pesth is a bust of Therese in her later years, erected in her honour because she organised out of her charity the first infants' school in the Austrian empire, and did many other good works. It is both pity and solace that the noble woman did not wed Beethoven. She was his muse for years. That was, as she said, something to thank God for. She was also a beautiful spiritual influence on him.

Once the Baron Spaun found Beethoven kissing Therese's portrait and muttering: "Thou wast too noble—too like an angel." The baron withdrew silently, and returning later found Beethoven extemporising in heavenly mood. He explained: "My good angel has appeared to me."

In 1813 he wrote in his diary:

"What a fearful state to be in, not to be able to trample down all my longings for the joys of a home, to be always revelling in these longings. O God! O God! look down in mercy upon poor, unhappy Beethoven, and put an end to this soon; let it not last much longer!"

And so Beethoven never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.

But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed. He could write to Gleichenstein:

"Now you can help me get a wife. If you find a pretty one—one who may perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me. But she must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful; if I could, I should fall in love with myself."

One feels here a touch of disdain and frivolity. Yet he could grow fervid in such an outcry as that of his forty-sixth year:

"Love, and love alone, can give me a happy life. O God! let me find her who will keep me in the path of virtue, the one I may rightly call my own."

Again, he could coldly rejoice that he had not sacrificed any of his individuality, or any of his devotion to music, to Giulietta Guicciardi. And the diary of Fanny Giannatasio, whose father took care of Beethoven's nephew, quotes a conversation Beethoven held on the subject of wedlock. According to this, he said that marriage should not be so indissoluble, liberty-crushing a bond; that a marriage without love was best, but that no marriages were happy. He added:

"For himself he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had become his wife, whom he had passionately loved in former days, and thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess."

To this cynic wisdom, the poor Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, whose love for Beethoven would never have been known had not her diary enambered it for publication after her death, adds the words: "I will not repeat my answer, but I think I know a girl who, beloved by him, would not have made his life unhappy."

Ay, there's the rub! Could any one have woven a happiness about the life of that ferocious master of art, that pinioned, but struggling, victim of fate?



CHAPTER XV.

VON WEBER—THE RAKE REFORMED

"Though thou hast now offended like a man. Do not persever in it like a devil; Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul, If sin by custom grow not into nature."

Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus"

Few novels are so brilliantly written, or so variously absorbing, as the life of Von Weber, written by his son, the Baron Max Maria von Weber. For years the son had resisted the urgence of his mother to undertake the work, fearing that partiality would warp, and indelicacy stain, any such memorial of a father who had lived so lively a life. When at last the work was begun and done, it was a miracle of impartiality, of frankness which seems complete, of sins confessed and expiated in their confession, and of trenchant characterisation, which one will hardly find surpassed outside of Dickens.

The Von Webers are the most numerous musical dynasty after the Bachs. We have already seen something of the fortunes of the family into which Mozart married. The father of Mozart's wife was the older brother of Franz Anton von Weber, father of Carl Maria. This Franz Anton was a strange mixture of stalwart and shiftless qualities. He gave up his orchestral position to fight against Frederick the Great, and brought home a red badge of courage. It is wonderful, by the way, how many musicians have earned distinction as soldiers—what, indeed, would the soldiers do without music?

Later Franz Anton entered civil service, and succeeded to the position of Court Financial-Councillor Fumetti, and married his beautiful daughter, Maria Anna. But Franz Anton was so rabid a fiddler that he used to be seen playing his violin in public places, followed by his large family of children, or even sawing away in the open fields, to the neglect of his work and finally the loss of his position. Thereupon he decided that his large family should help in its own support, and dragged them one and all upon the stage. The proud mother saw her fortune squandered, and her pride massacred. She died some years later. Franz Anton's heart was too industrious to remain idle long, and, though he was now fifty years of age, he somehow won the hand of Genofeva von Brenner, who was only sixteen years old. It is gratuitous to say that the young girl was not happy. In 1786 she bore him the child who was to realise the father's one great and vicarious ambition: to bring a musical genius into the world.

While Carl Maria von Weber was still a babe, Franz Anton started once more after the will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical fame, with his "Weber's Company of Comedians." Genofeva, sickly and melancholy, dragged herself about with the troupe until Carl Maria was ten years old, when her health gave way, and the travel was discontinued. Poverty and consumption ended her days two years later. Within a year Franz Anton was betrothed to a widow, whom, strange to say, he never married.

Again Franz Anton, the Bedouin that he was, dragged his son back into the nomad life. The boy seemed astonishingly stupid in learning music, though the father encouraged him with intemperate zeal. Meanwhile Carl's character was forming, and he was becoming as brilliant as the mercurial life he was leading, and at the same time as irresponsible. Like his relative, Mozart, he was precocious at falling in love. Perhaps his first flame was Elise Vigitill, in whose autograph album he wrote:

"Dearest Elise, always love your sincere friend, Carl von Weber; in the sixth year of his age; Nueremberg, the 10th of September, 1792." We hear of no more sweethearts for eleven long years. When Carl Maria was seventeen, Franz Anton left him in Vienna, where he plunged into dissipation at a tempo presto appassionato. As his son writes, "through carolling, kissing, drinking Vienna, he wandered with a troop of choice spirits, drinking, kissing, carolling." The intoxicating draught of pleasure quaffed in the lively capital fevered the lad's blood, and the ardent imaginative temperament burst forth in that adoration of female beauty which strewed his life's path with roses, not without thorns. His teacher, Abbe Vogler, however, secured him a position as conductor at the Breslau opera, and he was compelled to tear himself away from a sweetheart of rank, who was somewhat older than he. His father went with him, and by his bumptiousness brought the boy many enemies, and, through his speculations, many debts in addition to those he acquired for himself. Here another entanglement awaited him. His son tells it thus:

"Many a female heart, no doubt, both within the theatre and without its walls, was allured by the sweet smile and seductive manners of the pale, slender, languishing, but passionately ardent young conductor; whilst his own heart seems to have been more seriously involved in an unfortunate and misplaced attachment for a singer in the theatre. This woman was married to a rough drunkard who mishandled her. The couple were daily falling more and more into an abject state of poverty. Young Carl Maria pitied the woman; and pity was soon transformed in the feeling next akin."

"That she was an unworthy object of either pity or affection is very clear: she misused his goodness of heart, gnawed incessantly at his slender purse, and quickly plunged him into a slough of difficulties nigh equal to her own."

Various misfortunes and indiscretions brought Von Weber to the loss of his post. But a woman intervened to save him from disaster. This was a Fraeulein von Belonda, maid of honour to the Duchess of Wuertemberg, who took a deep interest in Carl, and persuaded the duke to make him musical director. The continual successes of the French armies overrunning Europe forbade the duke to keep up his retinue of artists. But he secured Weber a post at Stuttgart as private secretary to his brother, Ludwig, another younger brother of the King of Wuertemberg, a monster of corpulence, who had to have his dining-table made crescent-wise that he might get near enough to eat. Into the circle of these two unlovable figures and their ugly court Weber was thrust.

"Thus then the fiery young artist, his wild oats not yet fully sown, plunged into a new world, where no true sense of right or wrong was known; where virtue and morality were laughed to scorn; where, in the chaotic whirlpool of a reckless court, money and influence at any price were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the times, the insecurity of conditions, and the ruthless despotism of the government, the sole watchword of existence, from high to low, was 'Apres moi, le deluge!'" The Prince Ludwig was a great spendthrift, and was continually appealing to his brother for funds. It was poor Weber's pleasant task to be the go-between, and to receive on his head the rage of Behemoth. Again to quote the vivid language of the Baron Max:

"The stammering, stuttering, shrieking rage of the hideously corpulent king, who, on account of his unwieldy obesity, was unable to let his arms hang by his side, and who thus gesticulated wildly, and perspired incessantly, and had the habit, moreover, of continually addressing his favourite, generally present on these occasions, with the appeal, 'Pas vrai, Dillen?' after each broken sentence,—would have been inexpressibly droll, had not the low-comedy actor of the scene been an autocrat who might, at a wink, have transformed laughter into tears. But there was a demoniacal comicality about the performance, which, if it did not convulse the spectator, made him shudder to his heart's core.

"Weber hated the king, of whose wild caprice and vices he witnessed daily scenes, before whose palace-gates he was obliged to slink bareheaded, and who treated him with unmerited ignominy. He was wont, in thoughtless levity of youth, to forget the dangers he ran, and to answer the king with a freedom of tone which the autocrat was all unused to hear. In turn he was detested by the monarch.

"The royal treatment roused young Carl Maria's indignation to the utmost; and his irritation led him one day to a mad prank, which was nigh resulting in some years' imprisonment in the fortress of Hohenasberg, or of Hohenhaufen. Smarting under some foul indignity, he had just left the private apartment of the king, when an old woman met him in the passage, and asked him where she could find the room of the court washerwoman. 'There!' said the reckless youth, pointing to the door of the royal cabinet. The old woman entered, and was violently assailed by the king, who had a horror of old women; in her terror, she stammered out that a young gentleman who had just come out had informed her that there she would find the 'royal washerwoman,' The infuriated monarch guessed who was the culprit, and despatched an officer on the spot to arrest his brother's secretary, and throw him into prison.

"To those who have any idea how foul a den was then a royal prison, it must appear almost marvellous that Carl Maria should have possessed sufficient equanimity to have occupied himself with his beloved art during his arrest. But so it was. He managed to procure a dilapidated old piano, put it in tune with consummate patience, by means of a common door-key, and actually, then and there, on the 14th of October, 1808, composed his well-known beautiful song, 'Ein steter Kampf ist unser Leben.'

"The storm passed over. Prince Ludwig's influence obtained the young man's pardon and release. But the insult was never forgotten by the king: he took care to remember it at his own right time. Nor had prison cured Carl Maria of his boyish desire to play tricks upon the hated monarch, when he conceived that he could do so without danger to himself."

Carl proceeded to make himself an appropriate graduate of such a university of morals, and devoted himself to wine, women, and debts, with a small proportion of song. He belonged to a society of young men, who called themselves by the gentle name of "Faust's Ride to Hell." He now began also the composition of an opera, "Sylvana." This brought him into acquaintance with operatic people, and he fell under the charm of that "coquettish little serpent Margarethe Lang."

"To stem such a passion, or even to have given it a legal form, would have been merely ridiculous and absurd in the eyes of the demoralised circle by which he was surrounded. Gretchen possessed a little plump seductive form, was about twenty years of age, and, in addition to her undoubted musical talent, was endowed with a fund of gay, sprightly humour, wholly in sympathy with the youth's own joyous nature. She became the central point of all his life and aspirations."

Thus the biographer describes the new dissipation, which carried Carl away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, while Gretchen played Antony.

The last straw upon Carl's breaking back was the arrival of his father, who descended upon him with a bass viol, an enormous basket-bed for his beloved poodles, and a large bundle of debts, as well as an increased luggage of eccentricities. While Weber was trying to secure loans to pay off one of his father's debts, he was innocently implicated in a scandal of bribery, by which it was made to seem that he had offered a post in the prince's household, in return for an advance of money. The king had been driven to despair by the disasters of the German army, and the increase of discontent of the German people, and desired to gain a reputation for virtue by the comfortable step of reforming his brother's household. Learning of the proffered bribe, in which Weber seemed to be concerned, but of which he was perfectly innocent, the king had him arrested during a rehearsal of his opera "Sylvana," and had him thrown into prison for sixteen days. When at last he was examined, there was nothing found to justify the accusation of dishonesty, he was released from the prison for criminals, and transferred to the prison for debt, and then a little later he and his father were placed into a carriage and driven across the border to exile.

This sudden plunge from the froth of dissipation to the dregs of disgrace was a fall that Weber could never thereafter think or speak of, and every mention of it was forbidden.

Almost from this moment Weber's life is one of seriousness, with an occasional relapse into some of his old qualities, but never a complete laying aside of earnestness. He gained friends elsewhere, and finally settled in Darmstadt, where he still found women's hearts susceptible, in spite of his small, weak frame, his great long neck, and his calfless legs, of which he writes: "And, oh, my calves, they might have done honour to a poodle!"

Eight months after his banishment, his opera "Sylvana" was produced at Frankfort, the first soprano being Gretchen Lang, and the part of Sylvana being taken by Caroline Brandt, of whom much more later. At Munich the next year, he found himself in high favour with two singers. They were vying with each other for him, while two society beauties exerted their rival charms. Weber was kept busy with his quadruple flirtation. He was driven into cynicism, and his motto became "All women are good for nothing" ("Alle Weiber taugen nichts"), which he used so often that he abbreviated it to "A.W.T.N." In the columns of his account-book he was provoked to write: "A. coquettes with me, though she knows I am making love to her friend. B. abuses N., tells me horrid stories of her, and says I must not go home with her." He took a journey to Switzerland, where the beautiful Frau Peyermann occupied his heart long enough to inspire him to the scene in "Athalie," and to his song, "The Artist's Declaration of Love." He wandered here and there, for about three years, and his biographer, Spitta, thus portrays him:

"Roving restlessly from place to place, winning all hearts by his sweet, insinuating, lively melodies, his eccentricities making him an imposing figure to the young of both sexes, and an annoyance to the old, exciting the attention of everybody, and then suddenly disappearing, his person uniting in the most seductive manner aristocratic bearing and tone with indolent dissipation, his moods alternating between uproarious spirits and deep depression,—in all ways he resembled a figure from some romantic poem, wholly unlike anything seen before in the history of German art."

In 1813 he found himself at Prague, with the post of musical director to the opera. In the company were two women who took hold of his heart; one, a spirit of evil, the other an angel of good. The former was Theresa Brunetti, wife of a ballet-dancer, and mother of several children, the acquisition of which had robbed her of neither her fine, plump figure, nor her devotion to the arts of coquetry. There is no improving upon the description of Max von Weber as given of this entanglement, so here it is at length, with all its frankness of exposure and its writhing humiliation:

"He soon conceived for the handsome seductive woman a passion, which seemed to have deprived his otherwise clear mind of all common sense and reason, and which neither the flood of administrative affairs nor the cold breath of duty could extinguish. Vain were all his efforts to conceal it. In a very short time it became the topic of general remark; excited the ridicule or grave anxieties of his friends; involved him in a thousand disagreeable positions; lowered his character, without the slightest compensating advantage to his artistic career; and nigh dragged him down into an abyss beyond hope of rescue.

"The new opera-director was soon lodged in the house of the careless husband of the light woman. She herself may have had some inclination for the man. But as soon as she felt her true power over him, she held out her fair hand only to lead him into a life of torment.

"The woman's power over her poor victim was immense. He was dragged in her train, against his better reason, to country excursions, suppers, balls, at which, whilst he watched her every look, her every breath, to discover her slightest wish, although nigh dead with fatigue, she would be bestowing her attention on other men, wholly regardless of her slave. Now again he would scour the town, in scorching heat or drenching rain, frequently sacrificing the only moments he could snatch from business for his dinner, to procure a ribbon, a ring, or some dainty, which she desired, and which was difficult to obtain; and on his return she would receive him perhaps with coldness and toss the prize aside. Sometimes, when the proof became too evident that she had duped, deceived, betrayed him, the scenes between the two were fearful; and then she would cleverly find means of asserting that it was she who had the best right to be jealous, and thus turn the tables on him. By every thought, in every action, in every moment of his life, there was but one feeling ever present—'How will she receive me?'

"Even in his account-book, now so often neglected, are to be found the lamentations of his despairing heart over her unworthiness; and again, but a few hours later, expressions of delight that she had smiled on him. There is something terrible in the bitter slavery to which his better nature was condemned by this wild passion. One day he writes: 'A fearful scene.... The sweetest dream of my life is over. Confidence is lost for ever. The chain is broken,' On the next: 'A painful explanation. I shed the first tears my grief has wrung from me.... This reconciliation has cleared the thunder from the air. Both of us felt better,' And then again: 'My dream is over! I shall never know the happiness of being loved. I must for ever be alone! ... She can sit near me, hours long, and never say one word; and when some other man is mentioned, burst out in ecstasy. I will do all I can to please her; but I must withdraw within myself, bury all my bitter feelings in my own heart, and work—work—work!'" It was in the fall of 1813—prosit omen!—that Von Weber met the Brunetti. In the next year he was still clinging to her whom the biographer calls "the rotten plant," and wrote in a note-book: "I found Calina with Therese, and I could scarcely conceal the fearful rage that burned in me." Or an elegy like this: "No joy without her, and yet with her only sorrow."

Cupid has always been jealous of the cook. On Therese's birthday, Carl presented her with a double gift, first a gold watch with a cluster of trinkets, each of them a symbol of love; with this cluster of trinkets, something very rare and costly in Prague—oysters. Therese glanced—merely glanced—at the jewelry; she fairly gobbled the oysters. Carl's love had survived his jealousy of Calina, but he could not endure a rivalry with mollusks. As his son explains: "On a sudden the scales fell from his eyes." Ought he not rather have said, the shells?

Lacking even this ogress for an idol, poor Carl was lonely indeed. Even music turned unresponsive, and success was only ashes on his tongue. Then faith gave him, unsought, ability to revenge himself on the Brunetti. She had despised him as a mere genius toddling after the frou-frou of her skirts, but she began to prize him when she saw him casting interested looks in another direction. Now it was her turn to writhe with jealousy, and to writhe in vain. Her storms and tirades had more effect upon him than his pleas had had upon her. But whereas she had formerly been insouciante and amused at his pain, her pain hurt him to distraction, broke down his health, and drove him to ask for a leave of absence, that he might recover his strength. When he went away, he carried with him in his heart a new regret, sweetened, or perhaps embittered, by a tinge of new hope. But he could not know that he had reached the end of the worthless pages of his life, and that the new leaf was to be inscribed with a story of happiness, which was by no means untroubled, but yet was constructive happiness, worth-while happiness.

In the year 1810 his opera "Sylvana" had been sung, as I have said, with Caroline Brandt in the title role. When, in 1813, he was given the direction of the opera at Prague, though he fell into the clutches of the Brunetti, he had unconsciously prepared himself a better, cleaner experience by engaging for the very first member of his new company this same Caroline Brandt, who happened to write him that she happened to be "at liberty," as they say.

Like Carl himself, she had known stage-life from childhood, being the daughter of a tenor, and appearing on the stage at the age of eight. She is described as "small and plump in figure, with beautiful, expressive gray eyes and fair wavy hair, and a peculiar liveliness in her movements." She was a woman of large and tender heart, electrified with a temper incisive and immediate. She was an actress of genuine skill, "her sense of grace and beauty in all things infallible." She did not appear at the theatre in Prague until the first day of January, 1814. She bore a curious resemblance to Therese Brunetti in a fresher edition, and was not long in giving that lady a sense of uneasiness. The oysters, as we have seen, had given the Brunetti the coup de disgrace.

Caroline won the poor director's gratitude first by being quick to adopt suggestions, and to rescue him from the embarrassments buzzing about the head of an operatic manager. She was glad to undertake tasks, and slow to show professional jealousy. She lived in seclusion with her mother, and received no visits. Even the young noblemen could not woo her at the stage door, though the Brunetti advised her to accept the advances of a certain banker, saying: "He is worth the trouble, for he is rich."