Read on to discover how Mozart's marriage, hastily organised, stopped a call to the police by his mother-in-law to be...
Mozart's marriage: a nosy maid reports a scandalous living situation
I can think of no better way through this than to marry Constanze tomorrow morning... Or even today if that’s possible.’ Mozart penned these words in a letter to the Baroness von Waldstätten, his patron, in the summer of 1782. And when he wrote them he was in a decidedly tricky situation. Hours earlier he had been visited by a maidservant of Frau Cäcilia Weber, to whose daughter Constanze he was betrothed.
Ostensibly there to deliver music, the maid also brought some startling information with her. Frau Weber, evidently convinced that Constanze and Mozart were co-habiting prior to becoming man and wife, was insisting that Mozart ‘send Constanze back’ to the family home a short distance away. If the composer didn’t, she would call in the police to ‘recover’ her daughter from Mozart’s lodgings. And forcibly restore Constanze to the moral sanctuary of the Weber residence.
'Can the police here just walk into any house they like?'
Mozart’s initial reaction was to panic. ‘Can the police here just walk into any house they like?’, he asked the Baroness in his anxious letter. Would ‘the stupid Madame Weber’ really be so idiotic as to make private affairs public, bringing ‘disgrace’ on the family and ‘shame’ to the daughter whom she claimed to be protecting? Or was Frau Weber simply bluffing, hoping that her threat would be enough to bring Constanze home again?
Mozart was right to worry about Frau Weber’s covert ultimatum... Not least because there were elements of truth in her analysis of Constanze’s situation. Her daughter and Mozart had become romantically attracted when, on arriving in Vienna a year earlier, the composer rented a room with the Webers. ‘Fool’s talk’ (as Mozart put it) ensued. And Frau Weber asked Mozart if he would move out to silence the malicious tongue-wagging. Now, it seemed, Mozart and Constanze were actually living together at his new address, inviting the scandalised opprobium of Viennese society. How could this possibly be tolerated?
Mozart's marriage in the making... with or without the police
Mozart did not wish the situation to continue. He had already extolled Constanze in a series of letters to his father, claiming she ‘knew all about housekeeping’ and had ‘the best heart in the world’. Ever judgemental, however, Leopold was by no means happy with his son’s behaviour, and suspected Constanze of being ‘a schemer’. But Mozart was not to be deflected. On 27 July he wrote to Leopold, asking for consent to marry. His heart was ‘in turmoil’, his head ‘in a spin’, he wrote, from the maelstrom of rumour and innuendo surrounding his relationship with ‘my beloved Constanze’.
At this point, Frau Weber’s bombshell message landed. With police action threatened, Mozart could wait no longer, and parental consent became irrelevant. He may also have been worried that further indecision might seriously destabilise his relationship with Constanze, which had not always been entirely plain sailing. Three months earlier, the pair had quarrelled over an incident at a social gathering, Mozart complaining that Constanze had allowed a male participant ‘to measure the calves of your legs’ during a parlour game. The couple briefly separated before all was forgiven.
Mozart's marriage: 'They saw how deeply moved we were in our hearts'
Whatever the precise balance of motivations, the wedding was swiftly booked, and took place on 4 August 1782 at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. A small number of witnesses was present, including Constanze’s mother and her youngest sister Sophie. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the recent turbulence surrounding the young couple – Mozart was 26, his bride 20 – it was an emotional occasion.
‘Both my wife and I were crying,’ Mozart later described in a letter to his father. ‘And everybody else, even the priest, began crying too, when they saw how deeply moved we were in our hearts.’