Mozart's Last Aria Read online

  MATT REES was born in Wales and read English at Oxford before moving to the Middle East to become a journalist. He is also the author of the award-winning Omar Yussef series, which follows a detective in Palestine, and is now published in twenty-two countries.

  Visit his website at www.mattrees.net

  ALSO BY MATT REES

  THE OMAR YUSSEF SERIES

  The Bethlehem Murders

  The Saladin Murders

  The Samaritan’s Secret

  The Fourth Assassin

  MOZART’S LAST ARIA

  MATT REES

  To Devorah, who is all the music I need.

  With thanks to: Dr. Orit Wolf, for showing how great musicians work; Louise and Dieter Hecht, for taking me high above the Karlskirche and demonstrating how scary old Vienna can be; and Maestro Zubin Mehta, who told me that he too would find it hard to live without Mozart.

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books.

  Copyright © Matt Rees 2011

  The moral right of Matt Rees to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-84887-915-7 (hardback)

  ISBN: 978-1-84887-916-4 (trade paperback)

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-457-1

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Map

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 December 1791 St Gilgen, Near Salzburg

  Chapter 2 Vienna

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  The Music

  Behind the Book: Mozart’s Last Aria By Matt Rees

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart, sister of the composer

  Johann Berchtold, Nannerl’s husband

  Karl Gieseke, an actor

  Magdalena Hofdemel, Wolfgang’s piano pupil

  Baron Konstant von Jacobi, Prussian ambassador to Austria

  Leopold II, Emperor of Austria

  Prince Karl Lichnowsky, a patron of Wolfgang

  Constanze Mozart, Wolfgang’s wife

  Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, Wolfgang’s youngest son

  Maria Theresia von Paradies, blind piano virtuoso

  Count Johann Pergen, Minister of Police

  Emanuel Schikaneder, theatrical impresario, actor

  Anton Stadler, musician and friend of Wolfgang

  Baron Gottfried van Swieten, head of the Imperial Library and chief of government censorship

  Vienna, 1791

  In October 1791 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the greatest musical genius the world has ever seen, told his wife he had been poisoned. Six weeks later, at the age of 35, he was dead.

  The truth, the truth, even if it be a crime!

  The Magic Flute, Act I scene 18

  PROLOGUE

  When she sang, it was hard to imagine death was so near.

  Her maid let me in at my usual time in the mid-afternoon. A soprano voice of considerable purity came from the front of the apartment.

  ‘Someone’s visiting her, Franziska?’ I asked.

  The maid shook her head. ‘She’s alone, sir.’

  I passed through the sitting room. She was singing Zerlina’s aria from Don Giovanni, in which the peasant coquette describes the desire beating in her chest. Her voice quietened for the last line, an invitation to the girl’s suitor: ‘Touch me here.’ A raw tone infiltrated as she repeated those words to a crescendo. The concluding note weakened and quavered.

  I heard a dry cough as I went through the door to Aunt Nannerl’s bedroom. Her thin hand conducted an imaginary orchestra through the coda.

  She laid her fingers on the bedspread and dropped her chin to her chest. Was she hearing the applause of an audience? Perhaps the effort of singing exhausted her.

  The lids of her blind old eyes flickered. I pondered the life she had led and all that she had seen, gone now forever. As a musician, I understood the secrets a composer hides in the pages of his score, locked away from those unable to comprehend the fullness of his creation. I had been less perceptive as a nephew, although I was hardly aware of it.

  My visits to her home near Salzburg’s cathedral had been so frequent, I would have been tempted to conclude that I knew everything there was of her to be learned. Her renown as a child prodigy on the keyboard, her adolescent performances with my father in Europe’s great cities. Marriage to a provincial functionary and elevation to the minor nobility, so that she had borne the title Baroness of the Empire since 1792. Then after her husband’s passing, her return to Salzburg where she taught piano until her eyesight failed.

  This presumption to summarize her seventy-eight years was, in fact, the thoughtless dismissal of an enfeebled old woman by a younger man. I say this with certainty, because today she revealed to me a life more fantastic even than her famous history would suggest.

  Her singing done, my aunt lay silent and still in the narrow bed. She wore a lace nightgown and a simple shawl around her shoulders. I kissed her dry cheek, drew up a chair, and recounted the gossip of the town. She didn’t register my presence.

  When I grew silent, she reached out, moving with a swiftness that surprised me, and pressed hard on my hand. Her fingers retained the power of a lifetime in which she sat at the piano three hours or more each day, exercising the skills that once entertained kings and princes and counts. ‘Play for me,’ she said.

  Her pianoforte was a fine old grand by Stein of Augsburg. I gave her the sonata in A by my father. I wished for her in her frailty to feel roused by the dance rhythm of its Turkish rondo. As I played, she fingered a gold cross inlaid with amber which she wore around her neck. Her blank, sightless eyes were wide. When I finished, she croaked out my name: ‘Wolfgang.’

  ‘Yes, dearest aunt,’ I replied.

  She turned to me as though she had expected
someone else to respond.

  When I first came to play for her, she told me that I reminded her of my father. In truth my hair and eyes are dark like my mother’s and my talent at the keyboard is of a kind that he would no doubt have described as mechanical. I have nothing of his genius. But I am named Wolfgang, and perhaps for Aunt Nannerl that much resemblance sufficed. Until that moment. I sensed that she spoke directly to the man thirty-eight years dead who had been her little brother. The man famed throughout Europe and even in America as an unmatched composer.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  ‘On that shelf. In a box inlaid with mother-of-pearl.’ Her hand lifted from the quilt with an unaccustomed grace that made me wonder if she were already dead and I was gazing upon her spirit, rising free of her fragile bones and decaying skin. I opened the casket and, beneath some old painted ribbons, I found a volume in nicked brown leather. I placed it in her grasp.

  ‘I’ll be dead soon enough,’ she murmured.

  ‘May the Lord forbid it, dearest Auntie. Don’t speak of such things.’

  She flipped back the book’s cover and ran her fingers over the dry, yellowed pages within. A quill pen such as few have used for years now had filled the book with lines slanting upward from left to right. I recognized the hand as her own, for she had often written to me as I toured the concert halls of Poland and Prussia. She turned a few pages and spread her bony fingers across the text. On the first line, I read a place and a date: Vienna, 21st December 1791.

  She shut the book with a clap that was like a cannon shot through the silence of her apartment. In the instant that it took me to blink in fright, the leather-bound volume swung toward me and dropped into my fumbling grasp.

  ‘Don’t show it to your mother,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ I smiled. ‘What secrets do you keep, Aunt Nannerl?’

  Her faint eyebrows lifted and I felt that a much younger woman fixed me with those melancholy brown eyes.

  ‘Upon my death I shall leave to my son Leopold all that I have,’ she said. ‘He’ll inherit my money, my few valuable pieces of jewelry. Also my papers, my diaries, my daily books. Mostly dull chronicles of the simple routines of Salzburg and the village where I passed my married life.’ She sucked for breath. Her head lapsed against the pillows.

  I lifted the volume in my hand. ‘But this—?’

  ‘Something different. Only for you.’

  ‘Is it about my father?’ I could ill disguise my eagerness, for I was just a few months old when he was taken from us. He has been with me always at the piano, though only as the mythic gods of Olympus could be said to have been with the Greeks when they ground wheat for flour.

  My aunt swallowed hard and coughed. I thought perhaps I had been mistaken. After all, when I used to ask her about my father’s last years in Vienna, she always pleaded that she hadn’t seen him after 1788, when my grandfather’s will was settled in her favor and a coolness arose between the siblings. She had remained with her husband in the village of St Gilgen. My father had continued his career in the opera houses and aristocratic salons of Vienna, until he was cut down three summers later in his thirty-sixth year.

  Her lips pursed, she gathered herself. ‘That book records the truth about events that have shaped your life – and all musical history.’

  ‘It is him,’ I said, striking the notched surface of the leather binding in excitement.

  ‘It’s his death.’

  ‘The fever? Yes, Auntie, I know.’

  She shook her head. The hair, which her maid had dressed high and old-fashioned even though she lay in bed, rustled across the pillow as if it were hushing me, commanding my silence.

  ‘His murder,’ she said.

  I heard a sound like the final exhalation of a dying soul. I couldn’t tell if it emanated from my aunt or from myself, or perhaps it was the grieving spirit of my poor father. I would’ve spoken, but my breath chilled, my ribs seemed to close in on my lungs and my cravat was suddenly tight around my high collar.

  Flicking her wrist in dismissal, Aunt Nannerl subsided onto her pillows.

  I hastened to my room in my dear mother’s house on Nonnberg Lane, almost at a run up the steep steps beneath the cliffs. The leather of my aunt’s diary darkened with the sweat of my palm, though the day was cold enough that the first snowfall threatened.

  At home, I wiped the perspiration from the cover onto the leg of my breeches, closed my eyes to whisper a Hail Mary for my father’s soul, and opened the book.

  Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart

  Salzburg, October 9 1829

  1

  DECEMBER 1791 ST GILGEN, NEAR SALZBURG

  As I returned from early mass at St Aegidius, snow screened the summit of the Zwölferhorn and layered the village in white silence. Approaching my door through the garden by the lakeside, I heard Little Leopold picking out one of my brother’s minuets on the piano. I smiled that this should be the only sound on the shores of the Abersee that morning. The snowfall smothered all but the essential music that joined me to dear Wolfgang. I wondered if he was watching the same gentle drift cover the streets of Vienna at that moment.

  In the hall, Lenerl took my fur and handed me a letter delivered by the village bailiff, who had returned from Salzburg late the previous night. I ordered a hot chocolate and pulled my chair close to the fire in the sitting room. I watched the snow gather in the window mullions, grinning each time the boy struck a false note in the drawing room.

  The discordant tune was hardly Little Leopold’s fault. The piano sounded ill enough when I played it. By the mountain lakes of the Salzkammergut, cold and damp had warped the instrument’s wood, made the keys stick, and moldered the hammer casings, so that a true note was rare enough. Even so the boy spent an hour each day at the piano, because he hoped to gratify me.

  To tell the truth, it pleased me that my son played only as well as a six-year-old ought. My brother, of course, composed his first dance at six, and it had been my departed father’s desire to recreate that prodigy in my first-born. But that was never my intention. I had come to resent the fact that true happiness was mine only when seated at the piano. Even when playing cards with friends or shooting a pistol at target practice, I moved the fingers of my free hand through an imaginary arpeggio, for if I didn’t I became distracted and irritable. The curse of the artist is to have the best part of one’s faculties occupied only with one’s craft. Friends and family skim your existence like a fisherman on the Abersee, while your real self is as inaccessible to them as the depths of the lake. But I had long since ceased to live the life of an artist, and I sometimes felt this preoccupation rather as a cripple might his useless foot.

  I beat a rhythm on the letter lying in my lap. Perhaps it carried news of my brother. In the winter, it was hard to keep up with events beyond the snowbound village. The latest news-sheet to reach us reported that Wolfgang had another original opera in production. Acquaintances returning from Vienna told me that his health wasn’t of the best. He was frequently sick, so I earnestly wished for tidings of his recovery in this letter. I felt sure I recognized the handwriting.

  For Madame’s personal attention

  Madame Maria Anna Berchtold von Sonnenburg

  Living at the Prefect’s House

  St Gilgen

  Near Salzburg

  I read my name as if it belonged to a stranger. A collection of surnames, earned by marriage to the man working alone on his accounts in the study across the hall. These things, which ought to have distinguished me, served only to make me anonymous. Before Berchtold had brought me to this remote village – thus adding a geographical anonymity, too – then I had a name that everyone knew and which I admit I still applied to myself in the privacy of these moments seated before the fire.

  Mozart.

  The memory of that name sounded in my head like a dream. The soft Z and disappearing T with which the French had pronounced it when we entered the salon of Louis XV at Versailles. The long English A I h
ad noted from the mouth of King George’s chamberlain announcing us at Buckingham House.

  Lenerl laid my hot chocolate on the table and curtseyed. ‘Will there be anything else, madame?’

  I lifted my chin to dismiss her.

  It was deluded to muse on my family’s long ago travels to Europe’s capitals. If I no longer bore the name, I had to acknowledge that even then I had been merely a Mozart. Only he had ever been ‘Mozart’. One might have addressed a letter in Milan or Berlin with that single word and it would have found my brother in Vienna. I had inherited the miniature watches and golden snuffboxes, gifts from delighted aristocrats in the time of our joint fame as touring child musicians. But my brother had retained the name.

  To the people of this village I wasn’t a Mozart. Few of them had ventured further than Salzburg, six hours’ journey away through the mountains. What could they know of the palaces of Nymphenburg and Schönbrunn where I had displayed my mastery of the keyboard, wandered the gardens, chattered with the king, worn clothes made for the empress’s children? The villagers’ lives didn’t extend beyond the church, the bathhouse where the surgeon pulled their teeth, and the stall by the lake where the sexton sold rosaries and devotional candles.