HOME | BIOGRAPHY | COMPOSITIONS | SELECTED ESSAYS | BIBLIOGRAPHY | RELATED SITES
HOME | BIOGRAPHY | COMPOSITIONS | SELECTED ESSAYS | BIBLIOGRAPHY | RELATED SITES
Agnus Selby has done what no professional musicologist or historian has ever found the time to do. She has written a full, detailed biography of Constanze Mozart.
An amateur biographer -- in every good sense of the word -- Selby took a nascent curiosity about Constanze's role in Mozart's life and transformed it into a crusade, convinced that history and historians in particular had done her subject wrong. “Although much respected during her lifetime,” Selby writes, “Constanze's reputation suffered greatly during the twentieth century. Some historians have written in such vitriolic terms as to test the boundaries of both credibility and scholarship. There seems to be no explanation for this phenomenon.”
Selby's book provides a much-needed antidote. And though recent writers, including H.C. Robbins Landon and Volkmar Braunbehrens, also have risen to Constanze's defense, Selby is the first to free her subject from the constraints of Mozartean biography.
Constanze survived her first husband by more than 50 years. She was born during the Seven Years War, came of age during the Enlightenment, survived Napoleon and the incursions of his Grand Armée, and witnessed the birth of the age of revolution. She lived in Vienna and Copenhagen and, with her children, toured Europe.
Her life, even without Mozart, was a remarkable one.
Selby uses the year 1791, reasonably, to divide her book into two sections. Unfortunately, before that date the details of Constanze's life are difficult to discern, and Selby must tell her story from Mozart's point of view. For those familiar with the composer's life, this is old ground.
Things get more interesting after Mozart's death. Selby's well-researched discussion of 18th-century attitudes toward death and burial is fascinating, and sheds much light on the circumstances of Mozart's burial and those of Constanze and other family members many years later. After 1791, too, Selby takes her readers into fresh territory. Details of Constanze's efforts to keep Mozart's music and name before the public, her negotiations with music publishers, her relationship with Georg Nikolaus Nissen and the lives of her two surviving children will be new to most readers.
The book has its flaws. Selby's writing style is a bit stiff. And in trying to deal with an almost complete lack of documentation, she often resorts to speculation. Phrases such as “it seems reasonable to assume” and “it is not hard to imagine” occur frequently.
On the other hand, much of her speculation is based on common sense. For example: Biographers have always assumed that the Mozarts, during their visit to Salzburg, were unaware that their infant son Raimond had died back in Vienna. No letters survive to contradict this. “But,” Selby writes, “it is inconceivable that the parents were not informed, when it took only two days for letters to reach Salzburg.” If Wolfgang and Constanze had known about Raimond's death, she argues, that would go a long way toward explaining the long stay in Salzburg and the unprecedented lack of musical output on Mozart's part.
More biographies of Constanze by others may eventually come along. In the unlikely event that new documentation surfaces, they may contain more detail and speak with greater authority. But Selby's biography is the first in recent memory, perhaps ever, and she has accomplished what she set out to do.