“Constanze Mozart is perhaps the most unpopular woman in music history,” writes H.C. Robbins Landon.[1] Indeed, a bitter array of invective has been directed against Constanze, the wife of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. According to Wolfgang Hildesheimer, “Although she lived to experience Mozart’s fame, to enjoy the financial benefits (doing her best to augment them), she never had a real understanding of her husband’s greatness, not even after his death, when his special prestige became obvious.”[2] Similarly, Arthur Schurig claims, “At no time in her life did she have an inkling of Mozart’s profound and solitary inner life.”[3] Schurig further asserts that “the marriage robbed [Mozart’s] artistic fertility of its intensity.”[4] Some have blamed Constanze for the financial troubles that plagued Mozart, while others have questioned whether Mozart and his wife were truly in love with each other. Constanze is sometimes accused of having an affair with one of Mozart’s pupils (who is said to have fathered Constanze’s second surviving child); and Mozart is sometimes accused of having an affair with another of his pupils.

Some recent scholarship, however, has taken a more sympathetic view of Constanze, dismissing many of the negative characterizations as unsupported gossip. For example, according to The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, the severe and pervasive criticisms of Constanze “were based on no good evidence, were tainted with anti-feminism and were probably wrong on all counts.”[5] Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile the conventional view of Constanze with the historical record of Mozart’s productivity as a composer. Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca note that “[m]ost of the works that immortalized Mozart’s name were composed in Vienna between the ages of 25 and 35, when the promise of his childhood and early youth came to fulfillment.”[6] This period of Mozart’s life coincides almost exactly with the years of Mozart’s marriage (1782-91).

Any serious effort to understand Mozart’s artistic and personal development must surely include piecing together a coherent picture of Constanze. Who was Constanze Weber Mozart? What was her role in Mozart’s life? How did she influence the way that we perceive Mozart today? This essay will explore these questions by presenting key facts about Constanze’s life before she met Mozart, during their courtship and marriage, and after Mozart’s death. In particular, I will examine Constanze’s understanding and appreciation of music.

Born in 1762, Constanze was the third of four daughters in a musical family. Her father, Fridolin Weber, was a court musician in Mannheim; her sister, Aloysia, became a professional singer; and one of her cousins was the composer Carl Maria von Weber. However, Constanze’s father was not financially successful, which was one of the reasons that Mozart’s father was deeply opposed to Mozart’s involvement with the Weber family. As Volkmar Braunbehrens explains, “Such a destitute family, whose artistic inclinations could not provide a decent livelihood, aroused deep misgivings in Leopold Mozart.”[7]

The manipulative nature of Constanze’s mother complicated Mozart’s courtship of Constanze and intensified Leopold’s suspicions about the Weber family. By the time Mozart and Constanze were considering marriage, Constanze’s father had died, leaving his wife with no income. Constanze’s mother contrived to have Mozart write a marriage contract, under which he agreed to marry Constanze within three years or else pay her 300 florins a year. To her credit, according to one of Mozart’s letters, Constanze then “asked her mother for the document and said to me, ‘Dear Mozart! I need no written assurance from you. I believe what you say,’ and tore up the paper.”[8]

Despite the awkward circumstances of their engagement, Mozart and Constanze married on August 4, 1782. During their nine years of marriage, the couple had six children, of whom two survived.[9] Braunbehrens points out that Mozart made only two trips without Constanze.[10] On one of the few occasions when the two had to be separated, Mozart wrote to Constanze, “My one wish now is to settle my affairs so I can be with you again. . . Even my work gives me no pleasure, because I am accustomed to stop working now and then and exchange a few words with you.”[11]

As for Constanze’s knowledge of music (and especially her role in Mozart’s creative life), it is important to remember that she grew up in a musical environment and was accustomed to a bohemian lifestyle. Although she did not receive training for a career in music, she was a soprano of some skill. When she and Mozart visited Salzburg in 1783, she sang one of the soprano parts in a performance of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor.[12] Constanze’s appreciation of music and belief in her husband’s work are evident in Mozart’s description of Constanze’s response when he played fugues by Handel and Bach at home. In a letter to his sister, Mozart wrote:

"When Constanze heard the fugues, she absolutely fell in love with them. Now she will listen to nothing but fugues… Since she has often heard me play fugues out of my head, she asked me if I had ever written any down, and when I said I had not, she scolded me roundly for not recording some of my compositions in this most artistic and beautiful of all musical forms, and gave me no peace until I wrote down a fugue for her."[13]

The role that Constanze played in Mozart’s domestic musical life can also be glimpsed in an anecdote written by Vincent and Mary Novello (who interviewed Constanze in 1829): “She told us that Mozart, when he finished an opera, brought it to her and begged she would study it, after which he would play it over and sing with her. . . .”[14]

Constanze’s services to Mozart’s work continued even after his death in 1791. “[W]e have her more than anyone to thank for the fact that so many works that were not printed during Mozart’s lifetime, even fragments, have been preserved in reliable editions, and that the holographs of so many compositions have survived,”[15] notes Braunbehrens. In addition, she contributed to an extensive biography of Mozart that was prepared by her second husband (Georg Nikolaus Nissen). She died in 1842, at the age of eighty.

This brief examination of the life of Constanze Weber Mozart shows that, contrary to prevailing opinions about her, Mozart’s wife played an important role in nurturing Mozart’s creativity and supporting him emotionally. Popular misconceptions have trivialized the significance of her contributions both to Mozart and to posterity; new scholarly efforts are required to develop a fuller understanding of Constanze’s rightful place in history.