If composers’ wives could be the ultimate muse, some were coerced into giving up their own careers to support their husbands’, as David Nice finds out

By David Nice

Published: Monday, 07 August 2023 at 14:59 PM


A wife as nothing more than helpmate, comfort, cushioner: how long ago did that go out of fashion? Probably more recently in the world at large than it did in the sphere of the arts – composers, artists, writers generally moved in more liberated, more Bohemian circles than their contemporaries in the standard professions.

Schumann’s Clara was a pianist of astonishing skill and sensitivity, all reports attest, a muse not only to Robert but also, extending after his death, to their friend-in-common Johannes Brahms.

Carl Nielsen’s Anne Marie enjoyed as high a reputation in the field of sculpture as he did in music, at least during their lifetimes. Yet there were still limits we wouldn’t think acceptable today: ‘There isn’t room for two artists in this relationship’; ‘My career comes first’.

No doubt it happens, but the woman will often think twice at such an ultimatum, or else make a decision to make the greater of the pair her life project to support and follow of her own free will (the same is true of gay marriages and relationships). A recipe for unhappiness in the first case was true for Alma Mahler; by all accounts, Pauline Strauss herself made the decision to give up a strong career as a fine soprano.

Yet even Pauline still suffers from the male perspective, as Garsington Opera’s 2015 production of Strauss’s autobiographical marriage-opera Intermezzo set me thinking. By coincidence, there were two other circumstances around the same couple of weeks last June which prompted the current train of thinking – the first involving an ideal but very human helpmate (Constanze Mozart), the second that aforementioned Danish sculptor.

In David McVicar’s tense and perceptive production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) at Glyndebourne, an offstage wind band played part of the ineffable Adagio from the B flat major Serenade, K361. A quick checking of dates after the performance confirmed that the Serenade was composed only slightly earlier than Entführung, the masterpiece of 1782.

The previous December, Mozart announced to his father that he wanted to marry one of the three ‘Weber women’ – not the eldest, Josepha, who had driven him to distraction, but ‘the Martyr of the family’, Konstanze (the name of the opera’s heroine).

The letter of 15 December 1781 is typically perceptive and sensitive, one of many contradicting the image of the scatological numpty projected in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Wolfgang tells Leopold that while he has the same sexual drive as any young man, he has been too religious and decent ‘to seduce an innocent girl’ and too concerned for his health ‘to play around with whores’: ‘as my personal disposition is more inclined to a quiet and domestic life than towards noise and excitement…

In my eyes, an unmarried man lives only half a life’. Konstanze is ‘the most kindhearted, the most skilled’ of the sisters, he goes on, with ‘no great wit but enough common sense to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother’ and ‘two little black eyes and a graceful figure’ which are ‘her whole beauty… I love her and she loves me with all her heart.’

As in most marital relationships of the 18th and 19th centuries, we’d like to hear more from the woman’s side, of course. But there is enough evidence to prove that Konstanze was a resourceful and spirited individual, who cared for her husband’s legacy long after his death. The wedding took place on 4 August 1782 in Vienna’s Stefansdom.

Constanze Mozart n e Weber (1763?1842), W.A. Mozart's wife, 1802. Found in the collection of the Mozarteum (ISM), Salzburg. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Konstanze Mozart ne Weber © Getty Images

I’d always wondered why the (semi) comic opera of that year and the most sublime of all the wind serenades were the first of Mozart’s works to have that at-one-with-the-world aura we know so well from the mature masterpieces, a radiance only very fitfully to be found in the riven genius of his first great opera Idomeneo. Last year’s discovery reinforced a hunch: Konstanze’s role as muse as well as wife had a more profound effect on the music than we can ever realise.

In the case of Pauline Strauss, née de Ahna, a major-general’s daughter just like Alice Elgar, we know exactly the effect on the music. Strauss created a series of musical portraits, filtered through a satirical or mock-epic imagination. There’s the woman of infinite variety portrayed in the most complex and difficult violin solo ever written for an orchestral leader in the symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life); Strauss himself is the hero, but only in part and very much with tongue in cheek.