January 2016 - Soup and Nuts

Were you born on January 5? If so, then you share your birthday with Maria Constanze Weber, who, in 1782 became the wife of some fella named Mozart.

Constanze was only 15 years old when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, accompanied by his mother, made her acquaintance in 1777 in Mannheim. She was, however, not the focus of his attention; rather, Mozart, fresh from a recent tryst with his cousin in Augsburg, was suddenly smitten by her older sister, Aloysia. Mozart and his mother stayed with the Weber family until the spring of 1778 when he moved on to Paris in search of work with his mother in tow.

Constanze would not see Mozart again until 1781 after he was released by the court of Count Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. (In actuality, he was quite literally booted in the ass as he left by the Count’s deputy, Arco, after going on an acerbic and ill-advised tirade of complaints and uncomplimentary observations.) By this time, Aloysia was married and Mozart had no real interest in rekindling the romance. Instead, he his gaze was captured by the attractive, 19 year-old Constanze.

Mozart’s father, Leopold, was not a fan of the Webers, in part because they were not of the same social station. This disapproving attitude gave him license to complain about Constanze to Mozart. Mozart was cowed by Leopold’s opinion of Constanze and made an effort to downplay any relationship that he might be having with her.

Mozart also tried to keep the relationship secret from her family as well. Naturally, courting shenanigans are difficult to keep under wraps, and Constanze’s mother got wise to the affair and asked Mozart to leave, whereupon he moved into an apartment in downtown Vienna on a street called Graben. (Graben, or ditch in German, got its name from the trench that lay in that area during its time as a walled Roman settlement called Vindobona.) All this time, Leopold was making much hay about the Mozart-Constanze affair, and all the while Mozart kept his cool and continued to downplay the relationship. In a letter, he wrote to his father,

“She’s only pretty in that she has two small black eyes and a good figure.”

Leopold was neither fooled, nor amused, and eventually Mozart opened the floodgates and simply told him that he was going to marry Constance in a way that was sure to return to Leopold all the frustrations that Leopold has heaped onto him over the years:

“I’ve decided to, first, make sure I’ve got some money coming in — it’s not too hard to survive here with the odd Godsend — and then, to get married… But who’s the girl I love? Well, don’t blow your top. ‘Surely not one of the Webers?’ Yes, actually, one of the Webers. Not Josepha, not Sophie… Constanze!”

Constanze married Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart on August 4, 1782, in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in downtown Vienna only a few blocks from Graben.

St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna is difficult to photograph, except possibly from space. (Source: Wikipedia) — St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna is difficult to photograph, except possibly from space. (Source: Wikipedia)

By this time her husband’s career was really beginning to take off, and his recent opera, Abduction from the Seraglio, was packing opera houses and garnering the enthusiastic praise of Emperor Joseph II himself. Constanze used her fine business sense to manage the house.

On June 17, 1783, Constanze gave birth to her first son, Raimund Leopold Mozart. She and Mozart left the baby in care and traveled to Salzburg to visit Leopold; however, they received word soon afterward that young Raimund had died. On the journey back, they stopped in Linz, where Mozart, seeing an opportunity, wrote the entire Symphony No. 36 in C in just a few days, and it was performed on November 4, 1783.

Constanze’s second child, Karl Thomas Mozart, survived into adulthood and was quite a good pianist himself. He never became a composer, but he did get into trading and helmed a failed business venture. Nevertheless, he made enough from royalties on other things to buy a place in the country, which he bequeathed to the village of Caversaccio in Italy after his death in 1858.

Her third and fourth child survived one month (Oct – Nov 1786) and six months (Dec 1787 – Jun 1788), respectively, and her fifth child was born and died on the same day in 1789.

Her sixth and final child, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (but called Wolfgang), followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a composer and conductor himself. He did not, however, achieve the same acclaim as his father, although he was able to compose no fewer than 30 pieces of music in his own right. Mozart would never see any of his success, though, because he died on December 5, 1791, only two months after young Wolfgang’s birth.

Elizabeth Berridge portrayed Constanze Mozart in the 1984 film, Amadeus. (Source: amadeus-live.com) — Elizabeth Berridge portrayed Constanze Mozart in the 1984 film, Amadeus. Berridge is probably a bit more attractive than Constanze was, but she’s still pretty close in appearance. (Source: amadeus-live.com)

Young Wolfgang died in 1844, and was survived only by his older brother, Karl. Karl, in turn, died in 1858. Neither Wolfgang nor Karl ever married or fathered children, so, as a result, with the death of Karl Mozart followed the death of the direct line of Mozart.

Constanze, again using her fine business acumen, parlayed the enormously popular musical legacy of her husband in a reversal of the crippling debts he left. She had a small career in music, and was even featured in her husband’s performances—even premieres—as a singer. After Mozart’s death, she continued singing, performing with her sister, Aloysia, in 1795.

She married again in 1809 to Georg Nissen, a diplomat from Copenhagen. She and Georg lived in Copenhagen until 1820, and then moved to Salzburg where they both penned biographies of Constanze’s late husband. Georg died in 1826, his tombstone reading, in part, “The husband of Mozart’s widow”. Constanze lived out her remaining years in Salzburg with Aloysia (who died in 1839), and Sophie. Constanze died on March 6, 1842, just two years before her son, Karl. Sophie died four years later in 1846.

Resources

Count Hieronymus von Colloredo, Wikipedia

Constanze Mozart, Wikipedia

Aloysia Weber, Wikipedia

Sophie Weber, Wikipedia

Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, Wikipedia

Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, Wikipedia

Karl Thomas Mozart, Wikipedia

Mozart and His Times, Google Books

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wikipedia

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, MusOpen

Symphony no. 36 in C ‘Linz’, K. 425, MusOpen

Works, 1781 – 1785, The Mozart Project

Graben, Vienna, Wikipedia

Vindobona, Wikipedia

Mozart’s biography: tragedy strikes (1774 – 1778), Classic FM

Mozart’s biography: duels and his first son (1779 – 1783), Classic FM

Mozart and Constanze Weber – how Mozart met his wife, Classic FM

Maria Anna Mozart, Nannerl.net

Elizabeth Berridge (Media Gallery), Amadeus Live

If you were born on January 3, then you share your birthday with literary legend J.R.R. Tolkien. As the hobbits of Hobbiton might have said, today would have been his twelvety-fourth birthday.

Tolkien was born on this day in 1892 in what is now South Africa. The map of the area was quite a bit different then than it is now, and the nation of his birth then was called Orange River Free State, and lay northwest of the mountains of present day Lesotho. In fact, the South African state is still called Free State—a political and cartographic legacy of those days of political upheaval and change.

map-south-africa-1892 — Southern Africa in 1892. Tolkien was born near the center of the yellow country, then called Orange River Free State.

At the age of three, Tolkien was moved to England with his mother and brother. Later, he would spend time on the farm of Jane Neave, his aunt. The name of the farm was (and still is) Bag End Farm, and was the inspiration and namesake of location in The Hobbit. Bag End Farm was located west of Stratford-upon-Avon, UK (the birthplace of Shakespeare) in Dormston. Darmston is little more that a quaint, rural hamlet that boast the lush, idyllic landscape that came to appear in his most famous works. Author Andrew Morton notes,

“Jane had done her research; having sifted through the deeds, it was she who discovered that the charmingly English name Bag End was the original, and, according to locals, proper name of her farm. It may even be that the words ‘Bag End’ and his recently discovered Yorshire dialect word ‘baggins’ started to from an alliance in his linguistic imagination.”

It looks as if Bilbo Baggins might have gotten his name form the name of a farmstead as spoken in a thick, rural Yorkshire accent.

Tolkien was a gifted linguist, and was exposed to interesting languages early on. In addition to the panoply of dialects around him in England, he was exposed to constructed languages. Constructed languages are made-up language, but they are not mere babble like “speaking in tongues”; rather, they are designed and assembled with a specific vocabulary and grammar. Often the vocabulary is small and the grammar is simplistic for practical reasons, but this need not be so. Tolkien created his own languages after an encounter with Animalic, created by two cousins in the midst of the study of classical languages. Naffarin was the first constructed language to be his own creation. In later years, he would construct an impressive array of languages for use in his stories: Elvish (Primitive Quendian, Common Eldarin, Quenya, Goldogrin, Noldorin, Telerin, Ilkorin, Doriathrin, Avarin, and Sindarin), Rohirric, Haladin, Dunlendish, Drûg, Haradrim, Adûnaic, Easterling, and Valarin, which he divided into three branches: Oromëan, Aulëan, and Melkian. Most of these languages were developed from Tolkien’s own exposure to Germanic tongues such as Anglo-Saxon (now Old English), Gothic, and Old Norse, which are rich in linguistic complexities and still confound and frustrate learners today.

Tolkien served in World War I as a Lieutenant (officers were routinely drawn from the upper class, while the trenches were similarly routinely filled with the social dross of the labor class). After only a few months in the field, Tolkien had lost a number of close friends in battle, and eventually fell ill to a louse-vectored illness and sent home to England to recuperate. Soon after his departure, his battalion suffered catastrophic losses in personnel and materiel. Said Tolkien in the preface of the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:

“By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”

Tolkien would use these horrific experiences to inform the hardships of battle laid out in his epics.

Tolkien remained in the military until 1920, and then began a civilian career, eventually becoming the youngest professor at the University of Leeds where he made translations of important Anglo-Saxon classics, including Beowulf, which took six years to complete and was not published until 88 years later in 2014 (posthumously by his son, Christopher). In 1925 he moved on to Pembroke College, a constituent college of Oxford (and not to be confused with the Cambridge constituent by the same name), where he began to write his magnus opus, completing The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, and The Two Towers. He did not complete The Return of the King until 1948.

J.R.R. Tolkien died on September 2, 1973. On the tombstone he shares with his wife of 55 years, Edith, he had applied the epithets Lúthien and Beren, drawn from his Legendarium, a reference to eternal love and sacrifice for its sake.