Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/163

MOZART ilb Much of the delight which Mozart felt in the success of the opera arose from the fact that it enabled him seriously to contemplate marriage. Aloysia Weber had been faithless to him, but there was another sister — with no special beauty save that of bright eyes, a comely figure; and a cheerful, amiable disposition — Constanze, whom he now hoped to make his wife. His father objected to all of the Weber family, and there was some difficulty in obtaining the paternal consent ; but at last the marriage took place, on August 4, 1782. How truly he loved his wife from first to last, his letters abundantly show ; her frequent illnesses were afterward a great and almost constant source of expense to him, but he never ceased to write to her with the passionate ardor of a young lover. He says : " I found that I never prayed so fervently, or confessed so piously, as by her side ; she felt the same." And now for some time everything went smoothly in the modest little manage in Vienna. Mozart had plenty of lessons to give, but none of the commissions for operas which he would have wished. Passing over a visit to Leipsic — where he studied with the keenest delight a number of the unpublished works of the great Sebastian Bach — and to Berlin, he returned to Vienna, and at once set to work upon some quartets which the King of Prussia had ordered from him. " Cosi fan tutte," a comic opera, with the beauti- fully flowing music that only Mozart could write, but with a stupid plot that has prevented its frequent repetition in later times ; and the glorious " Zauberflote," written to assist a theatrical manager, Schikaneder, were his next works. At this time a strange melancholy began to show itself in his letters — it may be that al- ready his overwrought brain was conscious that the end was not far distant. Such lines as these, pathetic and sad in their simple and almost childlike expression, occur in a letter he wrote during a short absence from his wife, at Frankfort, in 1 790 : " I am as happy as a child at the thought of returning to you. If people could see into my heart I should almost feel ashamed — all there is cold, cold as ice. 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." On his return to Vienna pecuniary want was rather pressingly felt ; his silver plate had to be pawned, and a perfidious triend, Stadler, made away with the tickets, and the silver was never redeemed. On one occasion Joseph Deiner, the landlord of the " Silberne Schlange," chanced to call upon him, and was surprised to find Mozart and his wife Constanze danc- ing round the room. The laughing explanation was that they had no firewood m the house, and so were trying to warm themselves with dancing. Deiner at once offered to send in firewood, Mozart promising to pay as soon as he could. That grand work, the " Zauberflote," had just been completed when a strange commission was given him. One day a tall, haggard-looking man, dressed in gray, with a very sombre expression of countenance, called upon Mozart, bring- ing with him an anonymous letter. This letter contained an inquiry as to the sum for which he would write a mass for the dead, and in how short a time this could be completed. Mozart consulted his wife, and the sum of fifty ducats was mentioned. The stranger departed, and soon returned with the money, promis- ing Mozart a further sum on completion, and also mentioned that he might as