Mozart's widow turned his debts into a fortune
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died suddenly in 1791, he left debts and a widow with two small sons. Constanze Mozart secured a pension from the emperor, staged profitable memorial concerts and drove the publication of his music, and she ended up not just secure but wealthy.
Born Constanze Weber on 5 January 1762 in Zell im Wiesental, in what is now southwest Germany, she grew up mostly in Mannheim with three sisters, all trained singers. Her father was a double bass player, prompter and copyist, and his half-brother fathered the composer Carl Maria von Weber. When the 21-year-old Mozart visited Mannheim in 1777, he fell for her sister Aloysia, who turned him down. Years later in Vienna he lodged with the widowed Mrs Weber, and began courting Constanze, then 19, until her mother asked him to move out.
The romance was bumpy. The couple split briefly in April 1782 after Constanze let another young man measure her calves during a parlour game, and Mozart's father Leopold resisted the match. Things came to a head that summer when her mother reportedly threatened to send the police to bring her home, and on 4 August 1782 they married in a side chapel of St. Stephen's Cathedral. Leopold's consent arrived by post the following day.
She had six children in eight years, and only Karl Thomas and Franz Xaver survived infancy. Mozart's letters to her are unfailingly loving, often silly, once promising her more than a trillion kisses. She shaped his music too. Hearing Bach and Handel fugues from Baron van Swieten's library, she fell in love with counterpoint and scolded him for never writing his own fugues down, prompting the Fantasy and Fugue, K. 394. The soaring soprano solos of the Great Mass in C minor were written for her, and she sang them at its 1783 premiere in Salzburg.
After his death she sang Vitellia in his opera La Clemenza di Tito and later married the Danish diplomat Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, a Protestant, travelling to Pressburg in 1809 because Austria would not marry them. Their joint biography of Mozart, published in 1828, helped her husband's legend but also spread myths about him. She died in Salzburg on 6 March 1842.
Source: Constanze Mozart
