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"Most
painfully affected of all by Mozart's fatal illness was Fraulein Nanina
Gottlieb..."
From
Joseph Deiner's Memoirs, related at Vienna, 1856
http://www.amazon.com/My-Mozart-ebook/dp/B0089F5X3C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1340501338&sr=1-1&keywords=My+Mozart
Chapter
One
"Mozart,
Ich liebe dich. I love you. Love you."
"Come
here, Nanina Nightingale. Come and give your poor old Maestro some of your
‘specially sugary sugar."
My
mouth on his‑‑the friction produced warmth and sweetness, with a decided
undertone of the expensive brandy he liked, flowing from his tongue to mine. I
slid my arms across the brocade of his jacket, none too clean these days, and
swayed a slender dancer's body against him.
Let
me assure you that my sophistication was assumed. It really doesn't matter -
then, or now. I was young, foolish, and drowning in love. I was seventeen. He was
thirty five.
He
had once been boyishly agile, doing handsprings over chairs, turning cartwheels
of joy at a prima donna’s kiss or a perfect performance of his own celestial
music. He was never tall, and was, like most men of his age, working on a bit of
a belly. Still, he kept more or less in shape by a daily regimen which included
running from bailiffs, dashing out the back doors of taverns to avoid payment,
and climbing in and out of the bedroom windows of adventurous (and talented)
musical gentlewomen.
I
believed he knew everything--that he could see right through me with those
bright blue eyes. He probably could. He'd been my music master--and, more--my
deity, ever since I'd met him, in my ninth year.
His
jacket, now spotted and stained, must have been fine enough to wear in the
presence of the Emperor. Bright blue, it perfectly matched his eyes. I can
still feel the fabric sliding under my fingers as my arms passed over his
shoulders and around his neck.
I
can still see him‑‑a woolly frizz of blonde hair, long, aquiline nose--a ram
that had once been an angel. Sometimes, when he was loving me in some
exquisitely naughty way and joyfully smiling as he did it, I could almost see
horns.
So
you will understand exactly how I loved him, so that you will know that it was
a real passion, I'll tell you that I adored the feel of him, the smell of him,
the taste of him. They've tried to turn him into a tinkling porcelain angel,
but I'm here to tell you, here and now--he was not.
Mozart's
eyes were big, slightly protuberant, and as I’ve said, so blue. Alarming, those
eyes! Once they'd shone with the pure light of genius, radiant and blissful as
a summer noonday. Lately, they were simply wasted. My adored Maestro was mostly
either drunk or hung over.
He'd
fallen from grace. Everyone knew it. Creditors hounded him. There were too many
wild parties, not enough money. His wife
had given up coping, had gone back to the Baden spa where she had an on-going
romance with a big, handsome Major.
And
who could blame her? Pretty Constance, in the last ungainly stages of yet
another pregnancy, fleeing Vienna after a winter of freezing and begging for
handouts...
Even
a seventeen year old idolater could recognize her defection for simple self‑preservation.
I didn't judge her. I didn't judge myself. I was simply glad to have her out of
the way. When she was gone, he was restless, at loose ends, spending most of
his time hanging around our theater. Of course, nothing could have suited me
better.
Oh,
I can still hear my painted Mama lecturing, telling me all about Wolfgang's
debts, his drinking, and his wife. If I must go whoring, why couldn't I be
sensible, make it pay?
Naturally,
I knew that the lady who filled his mind was one of his damned piano pupils.
She was struggling with a very real fear of her husband and with her own
natural chastity. Dear Mozart always imagined that if a lady played his music
with "taste and feeling", she belonged to him in a deeper and more
complete sense than she could ever belong to a mere husband. The notion proved
in every case disappointing, and, in the final exercise, fatal.
He
often held forth upon "acting like a Kapellmeister/ dressing like a
Kapellmeister", long after he'd been ejected both from the court and the
wider world of gentlemanly convention. When sufficiently drunk, he used to
amuse everyone at The Serpent, clowning with a violin like some impoverished,
itinerant musiker.
One
night, a pair of Englishmen who'd been dining there dropped a handful of
kreutzers and asked in broken German if he knew the way to "the house of
Kapellmeister Mozart." As the regulars roared, Mozart answered with the
filthiest English curse he knew and haughtily stalked away, leaving the money
on the floor. The waiter, Joseph Deiner, God bless him, scooped it up and applied
it to Mozart's perennial bill.
*
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It's
hard to tell how you will like a true story, but to my mind, all the best tales
grow. Have patience. This, I assure you, is a love story.
*
* *
I
was born a musiker, a poor, pretty, talented girl who could have become an
actress or a singer, a dancer or a prostitute. When I was seventeen, with no
parents and working for Emmanual Schikaneder, I'm afraid the latter was the
fate most likely.
Today
my beauty and voice are gone. Memories are all that remain. Except for my old
friend Joseph, it was lonely for a very long time, but lately troops of well
meaning Volk have been knocking on my door,
bringing little presents and asking questions about the old days.
"Fraulein
Gottlieb," they say, "you were the Magic Flute's first Pamina. Tell us about the way it was. Tell
us about the great genius, Mozart."
I
hardly dare speak. Once well begun, this old woman might ramble straight
through from beginning to end. My adored, long dead Maestro has become famous,
a kind of Martyr to Art. I have no wish to stain the marble purity of the image
that his wife, with so much skill and determination, has spent the last thirty
years creating. I understand the theater of life, this proscenium beneath the
arching sky. Sometimes--paradoxically--honor requires a lie.
So,
to such visitors, I say the obvious, about how poorly his talent served him
while he lived. Then they reply, as if this makes up for the pain: "His music survives."
For
a performer like me, it's the opposite. In that most present of present
moments, we are the lark of song, the erotic geometry of dance, the drum beat
of declamation. For a performer there's nothing beyond the flashing now, and
when we grow old all that is left for us is the rusty rumination of some aged member
of a long ago audience.
This
being so, I'll tell you who I am, or rather who I was: Fraulein Anna Gottlieb,
Nanina to my long dead friends. I was a performer once admired, first as a
dancer, then as a singer, and last, when I grew older, as a comedienne who had
learned all about getting belly laughs from those two great clowns of the
Volksoper stage, Barbara Gerl and Emmanuel-The-Devil-In-Human-Form Schikaneder.
I was the darling of the fickle Viennese for years...
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