00:00:00.000Hi everyone. Before we get into today's episode, I would like to shout out Operation Olive Branch.
00:00:05.680Operation Olive Branch is a volunteer-powered grassroots collective effort to connect with
00:00:09.960and amplify Palestinian voices in an effort to support their critical needs,
00:00:14.280which include but are not limited to their mutual aid requests. Operation Olive Branch has collected
00:00:19.440the mutual aid campaign information of over 800 families on a detailed spreadsheet in hopes of
00:00:24.800enhancing the family's accessibility and reach to potential donors and advocates. These pre-existing
00:00:29.700campaigns are created and managed by the families themselves. Operation Olive Branch's role is simply
00:00:35.160to amplify them. The other leg of their operation occurs on social media where a growing number of
00:00:40.360advocates share their privilege and reach by making videos and hosting live streams to raise
00:00:44.440funds for these families. You can find this spreadsheet of mutual aid requests as well as
00:00:48.840more information about Operation Olive Branch at Operation Olive Branch on Instagram and TikTok
00:00:53.660or visit linktree slash opolivebranch. I've put these links in the show notes for this episode as
00:00:59.220well. Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast.1.00
00:01:14.460My name is Anne Foster, and I wanted to shout out, I should have done it last week, but I
00:01:18.400forgot to, the new theme music that we have for this season. So we've, you know, we're stepping
00:01:24.200lots of things up this season. We have new beautiful artwork by Deborah Wong, and we have
00:01:28.100a new theme song performed by actual musicians. And so they are a group called the Severn Duo
00:01:34.320for the first, what, four years of vocal history. It was kind of, I don't know, it was just a clip
00:01:40.680art piece of music that I chose when I did the first episode. And that became the theme song
00:01:45.700of the show. And I know there's so many podcasts I listen to that have theme music and I find it
00:01:50.620reassuring. And so I hope that this one feels like the old one, but now it's stepped up in this
00:01:55.820beautiful way by the Severn Duo who are a group based in the UK and they could play at your
00:02:01.000wedding. They can do recorded music for you. You go to severnduo.com to learn more about them.
00:02:06.980And also it was just, it was important to me as we were getting ready for the season
00:02:10.380to take the opportunity to extend the overall framework of the show, which is really like
00:02:15.980real human people doing work to the music as well. So in terms of that, I mean, I,
00:02:22.460avalee malik from the wardery is a real human being who i get to do the transcripts which
00:02:27.480you can find on advogarhistory.com like i say at the end of every episode christina lumagi is a
00:02:33.680real person doing the editing and also all of the artwork that i have on merch is in our two merch
00:02:40.800stores is designed by human artists it's just you know there's so many things coming out right now
00:02:45.600people talking about like ai and what can you do to help and stuff and it's always been important
00:02:49.680to me to support real people. And now that extends to the theme song as well. Oh, and I will also say
00:02:56.140in terms of like crediting people where credit is appropriate. So the picture that we have for
00:03:02.960this season is of my face, which you might not be familiar with my face or what I look like, but
00:03:09.480you are because it's always incorporated into the artwork of the show. So I took my face and put it
00:03:15.540over a famous painting of Marie Antoinette. So again, Debra Wong is the artist who did the
00:03:20.260artwork of me. And if you want to see the complete artwork that Debra did, if you go to
00:03:25.800patreon.com slash Anne Foster writer on your computer, it's the header image. So it's kind
00:03:30.820of like me looking like Marie Antoinette eating some cake. There's five cakes in front of me.
00:03:36.360My cat Hepburn is there. It's a beautiful piece of work. And it was inspired by a real human
00:03:41.100artist. His name is Elizabeth Wigley Le Brun, who is a contemporary of Marie Antoinette.
00:03:46.040They were pals. And so Marie Antoinette, ostensibly the patron saint of this season,
00:03:53.800the theme of this season. And I do mean that she is like, that's why it's one of her portraits
00:03:58.460that inspired this artwork that we have. Because everything's building up to telling Marie Antoinette's
00:04:06.000But her story is so intimately connected with what was happening around the world, like the French Revolution. And the French Revolution was inspired by other revolutions that were happening in other places. And that's why we're looking at not Versailles. We're not talking about that time she did cosplay as a young shepherdess, although we are going to be getting into that stuff in later episodes.
00:04:26.600If you're like, but I want to hear about Marie Antoinette now, I do recommend some of my podcast friends are Katie and Nathan from the Queens podcast, which if you don't listen to them, it's got a very similar vibe to Vulgar History, except there's two of them talking.
00:04:42.200They did a really good episode about Marie Antoinette several years ago, debunking a lot of stuff about her and just kind of celebrating who she really was.
00:04:54.920nay so we have done similar sorts of things in this podcast although this is again you know
00:05:01.780season seven and things are stepping up in different ways like I did the Mary Queen of
00:05:06.040Scott series I did the Lady Jane Grey series so the closer we get to Marie Antoinette the more
00:05:11.720it's going to be similar to those series where we're going to look at like her family and her
00:05:15.080friends but we're like starting out pretty far flung just kind of being like the world the society
00:05:21.720It's like if somebody was doing a biographical podcast about me, and they'd be like, oh, well, she lives in Saskatoon in Canada, they might want to start with like, the founding of Canada or like the fur trade, like, just kind of like to establish like, what is this world that I live in? What does it look like? And Marie Antoinette is similar.
00:05:39.760but speaking of previous seasons that we've done so um season i think three was lady jane gray how
00:05:47.720to lose a queen in nine days and there's a new series on i believe it's amazon prime called my
00:05:53.320lady jane which is based on a book um that sort of takes lady jane gray's story and gives it
00:05:58.060kind of a whimsical supernatural sort of the princess bride sort of vibe anyway there's a tv
00:06:03.240show. So I love to see Lady Jane Grey having a whole TV show about her. Some of the sort of0.74
00:06:10.360teaser art they have about it showed her standing with her sisters, Lady Catherine Grey, Lady Mary
00:06:15.080Grey, heroines we've also talked about on this podcast before. Recently, another previous Vulgar
00:06:20.580History heroine, La Chevalier d'Anne, made quite a substantive appearance on the TV show Franklin,
00:06:27.240of benjamin franklin starring michael douglas on apple tv plus and then also in june next month
00:06:35.140there's a new movie coming out called firebrand which is the story of katherine parr who we've
00:06:39.980also talked about in vulgar history she's the sixth wife of henry the eighth um and also anne
00:06:45.340askew who we've talked about in the podcast is in this movie so it's like a beautiful time for
00:06:50.660vulgar histories, um, subjects who are often not the most famous of women to suddenly
00:06:57.760be on TV and movies. And one loves to see it. Every time one of my girls is on a TV show or
00:07:02.940movie, it just makes me so happy. So I'm hoping still one day, I mean, I will lose my mind if,
00:07:08.560and when there's a Fred again, verse Brunhild TV show. Oh, and I forgot to say there's also
00:07:15.460in terms of vulgar history, heroines being on things. There's a show on stars that just wrapped1.00
00:07:19.680up mary and george this like very audacious and fun and sexy tv series starring julian moore and
00:07:27.260nicholas gallant scene which features in several episodes francis howard the original um fairy
00:07:33.160godmother of the show so she's on there as well so just like it's great and that connects with
00:07:38.720today's topic which is constanza mozart who appears in a movie called amadeus because
00:07:45.920Constanza Mozart famous last name was the wife and then widow of Amadeus Mozart and in the movie
00:07:51.660Amadeus she made quite an effect on me I watched that movie a couple years ago as part of our
00:07:57.240Patreon series that I do called Vulgar Peace Theater where my friends Lana and Allison and I
00:08:02.640watch a costume drama and then kind of talk about it and have a nice time and Constanza's role in
00:08:07.060that was she was she was fun and cute and flirty very low-cut gowns very tits out sort of attitude0.67
00:08:14.000um but i've never really learned about what she was like at all i do want to mention in terms of
00:08:21.700that in terms of the amadeus vulgar peace theater episode if after you listen to this you want to
00:08:26.060hear my take on that movie that is available on patreon for anyone who pledges at least five
00:08:31.480dollars or more you can hear that and all the other episodes of vulgar peace theater anyway
00:08:36.900anyway so today's guest um talking about Constanza Mozart is Kristen Francine and it was a beautiful
00:08:45.620moment of synchronicity when I was working on planning this season uh actually she reached
00:08:49.920out to me saying like hey I've just updated this encyclopedia entry about Constanza Mozart or
00:08:54.940someone is that somebody like to have on the podcast and I thought well that's exactly the
00:08:58.300sort of person I want to talk about this season which is kind of like a lesser known woman who
00:09:03.460is living during the 18th century, this revolutionary era, and also who is connected
00:09:08.760to Marie Antoinette in ways we're going to get to at the end of this episode.
00:09:13.840So Kristen was a postdoctoral fellow in history at Concordia University. She's an alumni of McGill
00:09:18.920University in Musicology. One of her specialties is gossip in music history. When I read that
00:09:24.280one, she first reached out to me. I was like, had I known when I was doing my undergraduate
00:09:29.220degree in history that you could then go on to specialize in gossip and music history or like
00:09:35.020one of my previous guests did um to do your phd in bush ranging and banditry i didn't know but now
00:09:42.080you know if anyone out there is a history bachelor student like choose something real weird and you
00:09:49.440can do a master's in it or even a phd in it anyway she explains her this her research interest a lot
00:09:56.020better than I just did in the episode. Um, and one final, uh, caution, I guess I'm going to say
00:10:03.280coming up in this episode, I draw a parallel between the certificate of Gonzales and Mozart
00:10:08.540and, uh, the 1976 BBC miniseries, I Claudius, which I was watching and obsessing over while
00:10:18.200I was preparing this season. It has nothing to do with Marie Antoinette. That just happens to be
00:10:23.320the TV show that I was finding comfort in while I was recording this. So it's a 1976 British
00:10:28.820miniseries available on the Acorn streaming service. Um, is it with the ancient Roman
00:10:34.340royal family? So like Augustus, Tiberius, Livia, Agrippina, who has been in a vulgar history. So
00:10:42.020I guess I could kind of count that for myself as an appearance of a vulgar history girly.
00:10:46.260And I think, anyway, I want to clarify what that is because in several episodes coming up this
00:10:51.660season, including this one, I'm going to just like drop into a conversation comparisons to
00:10:56.340I, Claudius. You might be like, what is she talking about? But now you know what I'm talking
00:11:01.700about. And in fact, if you look up on Instagram, I've made a bingo sheet for season seven, part
00:11:07.420one of vulgar history. And one of the squares is in fact, and brings up I, Claudius, because this
00:11:12.600is why I'm preparing you. I'm going to bring this up at unexpected times, various episodes. I don't
00:11:18.780if you can hear that. That's Hepburn, my cat, the famous cat from the image at patreon.com
00:11:24.600slash Anne Foster Writer. It's a really good likeness of her. Anyway, she's excited. Here
00:11:29.620is Kristen Franzine talking about Constanza Mozart. So I'm joined today by Kristen Franzine
00:11:39.320to talk about Constanza Mozart. She has a lot more names than that, but we're just going
00:11:45.380to go with Constanza Mozart. Welcome, Kristen. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is fun.
00:11:51.300Yeah. Could you first? Well, actually, you were the one who approached me to suggest this. So
00:11:54.500I'm excited you're here because it fits in so perfectly with the theme of the season. Yeah.
00:11:59.640Can you explain your interest in Constanza Mozart, how you first started reading up on her?
00:12:06.400yeah so I I work on the history of gossip and anecdote in classical music and first of all
00:12:15.280amazing that's amazing I keep finding historians who have these specialties where I'm like if I
00:12:20.220had known that you could specialize like that when I was in my undergraduate I might have made
00:12:24.140different choices okay so the history of gossip and anecdote yeah I did not know that this was
00:12:28.680something you could do. And then I was writing my dissertation on early 20th century queer
00:12:37.780writings on 18th and 19th century music. And I kept running into all of these folks in like 1910
00:12:44.600who were sharing gossip about composers and singers and different things. And I'm like,
00:12:51.320how do I write about this? Because it's not really a traditionally accepted historical source.
00:12:58.300They're just sort of talking, you know, and sharing stories.
00:15:43.020A lot of these rumors and stories that we hear, particularly about Mozart, but sometimes about other composers of this time period as well.
00:15:51.580A lot of them are emerging when people who knew these guys are still alive and still active.
00:15:59.600And in some cases, taking part in, you know, sharing their stories.
00:16:04.320And so, yeah, it's I think it's fair to be very skeptical of a lot of the things Constanza says when she's interviewed, you know, in the 1820s about Mozart, because it's been a few decades and there's been various accumulated myths and stories and rumors and everything.
00:16:24.680But yeah, I also think it's interesting to think about like, where is her agency in this process? And like, how does she go from becoming this widow who's sharing these stories to the subject of things like Amadeus and various other fictions where sort of her character is also kind of heavily dramatized and fictionalized and reinterpreted over the decades?
00:16:52.820yeah i was just gonna mention i was gonna mention amadeus um as part of this podcast i have i do a
00:16:59.480series on patreon where we watch costume dramas and talk about them and amadeus is one of the
00:17:03.880first films we did so my knowledge of the life of mozart um salieri and constanza comes entirely
00:17:12.320from that movie i've never read up on any of them so i'm just kind of like that was the story
00:17:16.480yeah that's what it was like it's a fascinating uh fascinating thing that definitely sort of fits
00:17:24.800into this larger trajectory of how how all of those all of their stories have been told
00:17:31.440well and i think i mean amadeus it's a movie from i think exactly but it's like the early 80s
00:17:37.180so it's an older movie at this point but i think it really set the scene for people like myself
00:17:43.740just casual people who are into they're like okay now i know the story of mozart salieri and
00:17:48.200constanza because i watched that movie like it's sort of set an understanding for i think a
00:17:52.480generation of people being like okay that's what it was i think seth meyers has a recurring joke
00:17:58.700on the late night where he's like it comes up now and then where it's like oh you have a
00:18:05.780substitute teacher in high school guess we're gonna watch him it is and yeah um yeah and i just
00:18:12.920saw sky tv is making a mini series based on amadeus like this year okay yeah okay the for
00:18:21.000the 40th anniversary of the film um they're they're doing a limited series and they're very
00:18:27.340much advertising it as sort of being about mozart and salieri and constanza and so i'm very interested
00:18:34.920how it will sort of expand upon things in the film and the play yeah well and also just coming to it
00:18:42.900because if it's based on the like Amadeus listeners um is a play it's a it was a play
00:18:48.980that was made into a movie that reimagines the life of Mozart and his rivalry with Salieri who
00:18:53.640was another composer um and making it a dramatic story like I'm sure making stuff up taking some
00:18:59.340of the stuff you're talking about the gossip and the legends and really playing them as if they're
00:19:03.740true yeah so it's it'll be interesting to see a new adaptation if it's an adaptation of that same
00:19:08.500play. It's going to hit the same story beats, I would imagine. Yeah, I'm very curious what they'll
00:19:15.260do. And yeah, it's a just to sort of build on your explanation there. It's a fascinating play. And in
00:19:24.260this larger project that's mostly about Salieri, I've sort of been in denial whenever I apply for
00:19:29.540grants and things about like, no, there's way more to it than just Amadeus. There's this whole history
00:19:34.780of fictions and anecdotes and gossip and things, but I am, like, there will be a chapter in the
00:19:41.440book I'm working on about Peter Schaffer, the playwright who wrote Amadeus and adapted it for
00:19:48.200the film. And he wrote a number of essays and interviews and things about his research process
00:19:55.800and sort of the process of writing historical fiction and sort of what do you play up for
00:20:02.460dramatic effect and how do you change things and I think it's because it's had this long history
00:20:09.360as a play and a film and now this new adaptation and it still frequently gets performed in various
00:20:17.420theaters I just saw it in Salzburg back in January um in Salzburg yeah in Salzburg yeah
00:20:22.820because it sort of has this staying power I think there's there's the risk as you mentioned that
00:20:29.220people sort of watch it and they're like oh yeah that's how things were in the 1780s but there's
00:20:34.060also the opportunity to think about like how does historical fiction work and how does how do these
00:20:39.980rumors work in in different contexts well and this is part of what's what's really interesting to me
00:20:45.800about the way that you've described your your research and everything because a lot of like
00:20:50.980especially this season where i'm looking at some like native american stories and things like that
00:20:54.880like oral history or like the oral history of like enslaved people and how their families
00:20:59.740through oral storytelling would continue on and also how like the great men of history quote
00:21:06.060unquote can be very uh careful about writing their legacies and not writing down some other things so
00:21:11.920you have to rely on things like gossip when you're looking at for instance like Thomas Jefferson's
00:21:16.960relationship with Sally Hemings oh yeah like he he never wrote about that but there was so many
00:21:21.760gossip. So like looking at like some gossip stuff is made up, but also sometimes that's the way to
00:21:26.900get some information, some truth that is not being recorded in other ways. So that's, that's
00:21:33.100such an interesting thing. Yeah. And I think Constanza sort of falls kind of in between those
00:21:39.900kind of things, because on the one hand, she is the one sort of protecting the legacy and deciding
00:21:45.960what to share and what not to share. And there are things, there are Mozart's letters. There
00:21:52.240are some that she chooses not to have published. There are others that she kind of surprisingly
00:21:57.220does, but she also like was there and is clearly aware of, you know, public interest in sort of
00:22:08.080anecdotal stories that are impossible to back up, you know, about, you know, how Mozart wrote
00:22:14.600specific operas and things like he didn't write about some of that and so she's saying like oh
00:22:20.480yeah we were sitting at home drinking punch and he was writing the overture to don giovanni or
00:22:25.260something and it's like well that's impossible to verify i don't know if that happened no exactly
00:22:31.100and that's where i've been really just especially this season some of the stories that i was just
00:22:35.420giving as examples like i'm really i'm coming to rely on oral storytelling and gossip and things
00:22:42.220like that when where it's like well a historian can't verify this but it's like well that doesn't
00:22:46.080mean it didn't happen that doesn't mean it's not true so just kind of like giving credence to
00:22:50.260and respecting sometimes somebody's personal anecdote or the oral storytelling because
00:22:55.660why not you know it's like either that's true or we don't know what happened so let's go with this
00:23:00.420suggestion of what happened yeah well and all of these anecdotes you know the ones coming from
00:23:06.500Constanza and about her and about other people, like this whole economy of sort of publishing
00:23:13.480anecdotes in the early 19th century in sort of music publications, newspapers and magazines and
00:23:21.880things. Like, because there's this focus on publishing, what we get now is the written down
00:23:28.340version of what was originally an oral story. And sometimes maybe the written down version that has
00:23:33.400passed through several hands and you know perhaps some editor you know or someone thinks like oh
00:23:40.940but this reminds me of this other thing that would make a better story and so it's it's interesting
00:23:46.360because it clearly comes from kind of the oral kind of an oral tradition of telling stories and
00:23:53.040anecdotes and things but it's also mediated by the press and it's mediated by what you're allowed
00:23:58.720to publish in different cities and different things and then how news circulates. Yeah, I gave
00:24:06.480a talk yesterday here at Concordia about this British newspaper that clearly had heard that
00:24:15.580Salieri had died. He hadn't. This was in 1823. So this was two years before his death. But they ran
00:24:22.500an obituary. And then in the next issue, their correspondent from Vienna clearly wrote to them
00:24:29.220and was like, actually, he's still alive. He's been hospitalized. You know, this is what's going
00:24:34.320on. So, yeah, you have these cases, you know, in the press, which is publishing these anecdotes
00:24:40.360where news travels slowly. And sometimes there's a lot of speculation about when someone, you know,
00:24:47.740someone at one of these newspapers or magazines hears a story that seems authoritative you know
00:24:54.000they hear it from some source that they trust and they but they assume like oh well this was
00:24:59.360this had to be months ago you know or weeks ago depending on you know how fast someone gets across
00:25:05.400Europe and by the time we're publishing it this must have happened and so sometimes you do get
00:25:10.840these kind of wild stories about concerts and about you know people traveling and people being
00:25:17.880you know run out of town and different things because there's these sorts of speculation based
00:25:24.120on available information if i can just like really dive into the history nerd angle with you
00:25:32.400and the listeners you know what fast forward if you want so i've been watching i claudius the
00:25:38.120miniseries about like ancient Rome and stuff and so as I've been watching it I've been sort of like
00:25:43.300looking up like well what were you know how do we know the things and so it's very much like so it's
00:25:48.100based on this novel by Robert Graves from the 1930s but he was pulling directly from the things
00:25:54.160that people wrote maybe like a generation after the Julio Claudians were actually around which
00:25:59.760were people who hated the Julio Claudians trying to make them sound as decadent and like sexually
00:26:05.160deviant as possible. And Robert Graves was like, okay, I'm going to just take that as fact, like
00:26:10.280for his novel. And then, but so things like facts about, you know, Caligula or something like these
00:26:16.260are such famous people like, oh, this is what he was like. And here's how all these people poison
00:26:20.400all these people where it's like, well, actually we're like, well, these are the sources. It's
00:26:24.280like, no, but they're just like, you're saying like, those are gossip. Like those, those are
00:26:27.500biased. And that was something I remember, like I did a history undergraduate degree. And in one
00:26:31.920of the very first classes they're saying like oh all history is has got some bias whoever's
00:26:37.140writing it now is like what it's not objective so just like the fact even some you know well-known
00:26:43.900stories or like cleopatra or something it's like the things that were written that people accept
00:26:49.460as fact are like those were anecdotes those were gossip as well but because we don't have anything
00:26:55.700else from that long ago we accept them as fact so what you're saying about the the way that these
00:27:00.580anecdotes are written down like this is it feels to me like the closer we get to contemporary or
00:27:05.640to modern times the more people are like oh well we have to be more doubtful like is this true
00:27:11.440but when you go back to the classic world it's like it's true sure it's true it's it's really
00:27:15.640old like we believe it yeah it's been repeated enough times that it sort of takes on a kind of
00:27:23.140authority so that's like one of the things like when you first got in touch with me and I saw that
00:27:29.780you were doing this history of gossip and stuff I was like this is fascinating like what an
00:27:34.300interesting thing because even you see that today in you know blind items about celebrities and
00:27:39.140stuff which some people take as truth and some of them are true and some of them aren't true it's
00:27:43.940just it's interesting when you see how people present themselves versus what the rumors are
00:27:48.160and the truth is somewhere in the middle Constanza yes we should actually talk about
00:27:54.220constanza we should talk about constanza but i mean we talked a lot about i mean she married
00:28:00.520like spoiler she married mozart and then she was responsible for sort of maintaining his legacy
00:28:05.780and after because she outlived him by quite a while but who who was she where was she born
00:28:12.420what was her family like what's the situation yeah so she's she's born in zel in 1762 and that
00:28:20.940is in what is now germany yeah or austria yeah leave germany um geography not my strong no but
00:28:30.800also it's like back then it wasn't germany yes and well the thing is back then and this is something
00:28:36.880that comes up a lot in the literature on saliri like if you speak german you're and you're living
00:28:42.480in sort of areas controlled by the austro-hungarian empire you're just referred to as german like
00:28:48.140in the in the you know in the the second half of the 18th century and so there's a lot of
00:28:56.300things i've been reading lately where people are talking about oh yes you know our great
00:29:01.900german composers and i'm looking and i'm like well they were born in italy and they were born in
00:29:06.740you know what's now ceccia and different things like oh but they were working in vienna in german
00:29:12.160So they're German. Okay. But anyway, so she's, she's born in the early 1760s and 1762. And from a musical family, her father was a singer and a copyist. And actually, in a bit later on, spoiler, Mozart is interested in one of her older sisters first.
00:29:34.920And so when Mozart first meets all of the Weber's, her family, her maiden name is Weber, he writes to his father, Leopold, that the Weber family, they kind of remind him of his own family, that you've got this musical father and these siblings who are, you know, professional musicians.
00:29:58.840and the family, they're, they're in Zelle. Some of the things I read talk about how her father,
00:30:08.580Friedelin Weber, there was some kind of scandal or something. They, they leave Zelle and go to
00:30:14.500Mannheim. And there were six kids total in the family, four daughters and two sons. The,
00:30:52.860become professional singers and aloysia in particular is involved in kind of italian
00:31:00.060language opera which was big and then that's sort of her professional career is the how
00:31:09.460the webers first come into contact with mozart so like he got this job at court great you know
00:31:17.520that's a job he's being paid money but like how for a musician just from the movie Amadeus um I
00:31:25.380know that um it can be you're working job to job often when you're a musician in this era unless
00:31:31.080you're like under the patronage of one of the monarchs or that sort of thing so they have all
00:31:35.240these you know these four daughters you have to raise is that part of why they start being
00:31:40.020musicians as well just to make more money just for the family like is it sort of how how poor
00:31:45.600are they, I guess is my question. They're not poor. And I think that's something important
00:31:50.740to stress actually about the Weber's, but about the Mozart's as well. Because again, if you watch
00:31:57.800the movie or the play Amadeus, towards the end of Mozart's life, they're depicted as in a kind of
00:32:04.880extreme poverty. The thing is, in this time, I shouldn't phrase this only in this time and place,
00:32:13.300But like because of how credit works and because of how like payment works, if you're involved with a theater, you know, if you're paid out of the ticket sales or whatever, you can accrue quite a lot of debt and be like bourgeois or like middle class, like class wise and still be sort of getting by on credit.
00:32:37.580And, you know, this is a time before debit cards. This is a time where a lot of money moves around before it actually gets to your hand. And so there are letters that Mozart famously writes, you know, asking some of his fellow Masons for money.
00:33:01.220And if you read them in isolation, it sounds like, you know, they're in extreme poverty and he's asking for, you know, these huge sums of money.0.56
00:33:12.180And it's like, well, yeah, because they have debts and they have costs associated with Wolfgang and Constanza's health and the children's health and different things.
00:33:22.700but the expectation is like okay he's working on an opera and when he gets you know the opera takes
00:33:29.180off then he'll be able to pay everyone back and it's fine and that's just sort of how being in
00:33:34.720the theater worked um there are similar issues earlier in the 18th century with George Friedrich
00:33:44.600Handel in in London where on paper you know his banking records survive so on paper there are
00:33:52.360times where it looks like he doesn't have a lot of money, but he's living in a very fancy,
00:33:56.380like a very nice house and all of these things. And it's because like, yeah, when the ticket
00:34:00.340sales from the theater come in, then, you know, everybody gets paid and everything's fine. And he
00:34:05.220has cash again. And so I think it's, there's a couple of things going on with the Vabors
00:34:09.920in this period that Friedland does have a fairly stable job as a singer at court and as a copyist.
00:34:18.860I mean, you don't make loads of money as a copyist, surely not as much as the composers and performers and things, but you'll always have work. Everything needs to be written out by hand.
00:34:33.380But I do suspect that part of the reason there was this interest in sort of encouraging the children to become, to train in music and become singers, part of it is definitely financial.
00:34:49.980Part of it is also in part because of people like the Mozarts in the sort of early, you know, 1760s into the 1770s.
00:35:05.040You have this awareness of these sort of extraordinary child musicians and this idea that like, oh, you can, you know, the whole family can go on tour and perform and, you know, get attention and perhaps some money and connections and things.
00:35:24.860And Josefa and Aloysia, they don't seem to have been kind of child prodigies to the extent that Wolfgang and Danelle Mozart were, but they were clearly like musically gifted from a young age.
00:35:42.420They, you know, singers, opera singers then and now often sort of begin their training and their career and they're studying quite young.
00:35:52.380So, yeah, yeah, that's a that's a great question about sort of the finances.
00:35:56.860And of course, there would also be the awareness with four daughters in this period that you would be thinking about, you know, they're going to have to get married and there's going to need to be some kind of arrangements made for that.
00:36:11.320but they're not they're not singing you know they're not like street singers you know like
00:36:16.080they're not just like day-to-day like the whole well like you said like the father has this stable
00:36:21.380job and then they're there and once you're in that world i would presume you would be interacting
00:36:26.360with maybe the sorts of people who would want to marry a woman who's a talented singer and
00:36:30.840who's maybe like a more rich type person perhaps not necessarily a wealthy person but probably
00:36:39.580someone else in the arts so looking at the the webers um i am blanking on what sophie the
00:36:48.580youngest what her husband did but josepha eventually marries an actor aloysia spoiler
00:36:57.060alert does not marry mozart and and marries a painter and and he might act also i'm just looking
00:37:05.380up Sophie Sophie's husband was a composer tenor and choir master okay yeah so they all married
00:37:11.920artists you know in that you know I I often say when people ask you know how much of how
00:37:19.600Mozart and Constanza are depicted in Amadeus is true I often say like well there's a lot
00:37:24.820there's a lot of fiction but you also have to remember like these are theater people like like
00:37:29.600think of think of the sort of you know your friend in a band or the you know theater in in
00:37:36.840your area like all of that kind of theater person you know drama and whatnot like that was happening
00:37:45.320then too to some extent you know weird messy relationships and breakups and things like yeah
00:37:52.440that is not new oh no exactly so they meet Mozart in the context of being musicians
00:37:59.140yes like he comes because he's like oh a family band like like my family like i'm just gonna go
00:38:05.400like he came to visit them and he came to stay with them is that right he was like boarding
00:38:09.560with them or something yeah so it's it's it's sort of the the chronology of when he's living
00:38:15.100with them and when he's not is sometimes a bit hard to track because he originally meets them
00:38:21.040in manheim um in 1777 and he he comes to manheim so manheim had like this very rich court that uh
00:38:34.960supported like a quite famous orchestra in and the theater and so mozart um in the 1770s he is
00:38:47.280He is a young man. He is no longer sort of touring as a child prodigy with his sister.
00:38:53.780And he's looking for a job. And he does not especially want to stay in his hometown and work for the prince archbishop there.
00:39:05.120And so he's looking for places where he can get a stable job as a composer.
00:39:11.180so yeah there's this sense that like great there's this this singer he's acquainted with
00:39:18.220that he's kind of into there's this court maybe he can do a job as a composer there
00:39:24.060and so yeah he's he's kind of close with the family then for a variety of reasons some of
00:39:33.180which having to do with sort of musical politics some of which having to do with
00:39:38.880Leopold, Mozart's father, is like not too keen on the prospect of his son kind of rushing into
00:39:46.240marriage with the singer. Which is Constanz's older sister, again, just to clarify. She's like
00:39:52.840this 15-year-old, also singer, but Mozart is focusing on her older sister. Yes. Yeah. No,
00:39:58.620I should clarify who Mozart is into at any given time. But yeah, so Mozart and his mother,
00:40:06.900who's traveling with him, they go on to Paris to try and kind of work some connections there.
00:40:14.180And the Weber's wind up a couple of years later, moving to Vienna. And part of that is for
00:40:24.440Aloysia and Josefa's careers. Part of that is Fridolin dies. And so the family now is very
00:40:33.460dependent on the the daughter's singing careers and so you know Vienna is the place where there
00:40:41.400are these uh you know a number of theaters and opera companies and various things and so they're
00:40:49.040in Vienna and then that's when Mozart ends up boarding with them because he eventually gets to
00:40:55.720Vienna and yeah again recurring theme looking for a job looking for connection professional
00:41:02.840connections in the industry and, you know, setting up concert series and trying to make
00:41:09.740connections at the theater and sort of all of the things you do when you're new to a city and
00:41:14.760trying to get set up. It's also during this time that Aloysia has gotten married to Josef Lange.
00:41:26.420Mozart is sometimes boarding with the Weber's, sometimes not.
00:41:32.480And he starts to express interest in Constanza.
00:42:12.680Marrying your, your landlady's daughter and all of this, you know, we talked quite a bit
00:42:18.500at the beginning about all of the, the place of gossip in, in how we think about all of these
00:42:25.160people. And this is where we first start to get kind of inklings in the historical record that
00:42:33.040there is some gossip circulating. So Leopold Mozart, Mozart's father back in Salzburg is
00:42:41.980clearly starting to hear some things about that his son is, you know, having some kind of
00:42:50.160relationship with this other Weber daughter. And also that, you know, his son went off to Vienna,
00:42:57.340to the big city and is, you know, living this life. And it's unclear what happens first,
00:43:06.500as far as Mozart does send a letter late in 1781 telling he sort of goes on about a number of
00:43:17.440things musically and at the theater and and then at the end is sort of like oh yeah by the way I'm
00:43:23.220I'm I'm going to marry someone you know I bet you'll never guess who like one of the Weber's
00:43:28.920and he sort of goes through all of the Weber sisters and is sort of mildly dismissive about
00:43:35.020all of them and then it's like oh but yes I'll marry Constanza at the same time yeah there clearly
00:43:41.320is some kind of negative gossip about Constanza's character and it might just be that she's like
00:43:49.280living with this guy and they're not married yet but there's clearly some kind of rumors
00:43:55.640that are getting back to Salzburg because Mozart sends these letters you know praising Constanza's
00:44:03.340character and oh she'll be such a good wife and she makes some bonnets or some kind of hat that
00:44:10.680she sends as a gift to Nanel to try and like win her over it's like okay but it says here and again0.90
00:44:17.860like I have your article about her open but I also Wikipedia open and it says Constanza had permitted
00:44:22.740another young man to measure her calves in a parlor game that that did happen yes um I was
00:44:28.940going to get to that yeah okay I was just wondering if that was the scandal yeah yeah that is that is
00:44:34.360part of it that seems to have been more of a source of tension between the Mozart between
00:44:42.400Wolfgang and Constanza okay this wasn't like the thing that the dad was like her calves were
00:44:47.540measured don't marry her I don't know that that story in particular got to Leopold I'm not sure
00:44:54.540But that is mentioned in a letter from Wolfgang to Constanze, kind of about like, well, I don't know, like basically, you know, the woman I marry needs to be respectable, which is like, again, all of these people are like going to going to parties.
00:45:16.380And, you know, the 1780s in Vienna in sort of the artistic scene, like this would not like these sorts of flirtatious party games would not have been unusual at this time.
00:45:33.020Well, and I think if you're going to marry anyone from that community, like they're all at these parties.
00:45:37.260Like if you want a wife who doesn't do this stuff, then like don't marry someone from the artistic community of Vienna in the 1780s.
00:45:43.760Well, and this comes up, I don't know if this is in the Wikipedia article, but it's in the letter that Mozart wrote.
00:45:49.900So at this party, the Baroness Wotstetten, I'm pronouncing that wrong, but this noble woman who was a friend of the Mozart family and with whom he and Constanze for a time both lived, she, I believe she was the host of the party.
00:46:11.060she also like took part in the same game and like also had her calves measured by some party guests
00:46:18.020and Mozart kind of dismisses this as like well she's old and you know nobody takes that seriously
00:46:24.580but so yeah no this was the sort of thing that went on at parties just measuring calves whatever
00:46:33.340or get your calves out measuring calves yeah that's uh i'm i'm amused by the like specificity
00:46:41.120of this like that it wasn't just like oh they were you know flirting or something or whatever
00:46:46.400specifically the calves i think it's because you would have to like lift your skirts i don't know
00:46:52.660i i appreciate that detail as a lover of just weird scandal um so the mozart's dad was like
00:46:59.800are you sure you're going to marry her? And he's like, yes. But then he's like,
00:47:03.480Constanze, can you not have your calves measured, please? Yeah.
00:47:07.860But the courtship continues and they do get married.
00:47:12.380Yes. In 1782. And in the year following that, they actually visit Salzburg. So Constanze
00:47:21.760meets her father-in-law and her sister-in-law. Anna Maria, Mozart's mother,
00:47:44.040She sings in a performance of a mass that Mozart writes
00:47:48.920for her to sing the soprano solo in, the C minor mass.
00:47:54.720So it's an interesting thing thinking about, again,
00:47:59.280the sort of gossip that develops around Constanza and around the Mozart family as a whole.
00:48:06.140We don't know. And this is something a lot of Mozart biographers bring up. I'm thinking of the
00:48:13.020conductor, Jane Glover, has a book called Mozart's Women that's about Manel and the Weber's and
00:48:21.260various other singers that Mozart worked with and female characters in his opera. When she's talking
00:48:27.920about Leopold's feelings about Constanze and about the rest of the Weber family, something
00:48:34.260she really brings up is that whenever the Mozarts and Leopold are visiting, so when
00:48:44.580they come to Salzburg or a couple of years later, when he comes to Vienna to visit, we
00:48:51.040don't have their thoughts from that time because most of what we know about um in particular
00:48:59.700leopold and wolfgang's thoughts from this period are letters that they're writing when they're
00:49:06.020separated so like when they're actually in the same room we don't know how they felt about it
00:49:12.040you know yeah so they got married and this is where like again i have your article is very
00:49:18.840much kind of like thematic the wikipedia article is more sort of like chronological which is where
00:49:23.020but it skips right from um they got married and then he died but they're married for nine years
00:49:28.700so what was that what do you know about that time period they're mostly based um their sort of home
00:49:34.860bases in vienna where mozart is concertizing he's he's giving a lot of piano uh solo piano
00:49:42.940concerts. He's writing operas. Most of the operas of his that are still performed today
00:49:51.940were written for theaters in Vienna. He's attempting to, and to some extent, succeeding
00:49:59.520at getting sort of semi-permanent and then permanent positions at either at court or with
00:50:07.460with a church. The thing is, and I think the reason a lot of narratives kind of skip from
00:50:15.420their very dramatic, very gossipy courtship to they're married and then Mozart dies is because
00:50:24.420the bulk of the anecdotes that sort of develop later, there's a lot of focus on the circumstances
00:50:34.200of Mozart's death and the fact that Constanza and her younger sister Sophie were present there.
00:50:40.880And so there's like lengthy accounts that get kind of semi-fictionalized in retellings
00:50:48.380about that. But like what's actually happening in the 1780s is...
00:50:53.880What I'm seeing is she was constantly pregnant for those nine years.
00:50:57.280Yes. Yeah. She had six children of whom two survived to adulthood.0.99
00:51:04.200Carl Thomas and Franz Xavier Wolfgang. And yeah, and this is something I think about a lot with her, when we think about her reputation and the fact that for some chunks of time in the late 1780s and early 1790s, sometimes much is made of the fact that she, oh, she's off at the spa.
00:51:30.180She's often in Baden, taking the waters, as they would have said. And there are some biographers, mostly early 20th century male biographers of Mozart who make a big deal about like, oh, she had these sort of vague illnesses and she was off at the spa and, you know, she was never sick again during her second marriage.
00:51:53.180and it's like well she was never pregnant again during her second marriage and she was pregnant
00:51:57.500six times in her 20s so in in an era where like every time you're pregnant you're taking your
00:52:03.460life in your hands because yeah doctors aren't washing their hands and all these things that
00:52:08.700like yeah there's no very little sense of like painkillers which blows my mind like when we see
00:52:15.540these yeah these these families you know where you know the wife or if the wife dies and you
00:52:25.060know the father remarries I'm thinking of like the box where like Johann Sebastian Bach was married
00:52:30.320twice and like combined total of 20 kids in in that and like not all of them survived to adulthood
00:52:39.060and it wasn't like because there was such an age difference between sort of the older and the
00:52:44.300younger it wasn't like there were 20 kids in the house at the same time but that is still like
00:52:48.660you're the there are a lot of kids being born someone is pregnant a lot of the time well no
00:52:56.940and then i would think like in terms of concerns that what you're saying like she would she would
00:52:59.920take the water she's having health issues it's like yeah because she was constantly pregnant0.83
00:53:03.400for nine years many of the children died she would be dealing with with a combination of
00:53:08.340postpartum and like literal grief constantly it's like yeah good for her go take the water
00:53:14.180like you need to take some time for yourself please well and and part of this is we have
00:53:20.280we have Wolfgang's letters to her when she's in Baden which are a great source for like
00:53:26.260what he's doing in Vienna as far as the theater and and there's a lot of kind of mention of
00:53:32.580various pieces of his that are being performed and musicians he's working with and this sort of thing
00:53:38.360And but we don't her responses have not survived from from this period.
00:53:45.580We have letters of hers from from later in her life when she's dealing with publishers and writing to her sons and various things.
00:53:52.780But we don't have her letters to Mozart. And I think that's a place where people have been able to read into that what they want.
00:54:03.020If they want to see her as sort of this either really frivolous or perhaps uncaring spouse that, you know, her husband is writing these great operas and, you know, she's off at the spa, you can read things that way.
00:54:17.540By the same token, he writes to her, like, pretty constantly.
00:54:23.740And I think Rudolf Angermiller, who wrote the version of the Grove Encyclopedia article that I expanded upon in my research on Constanza and gossip, like, he really reads these as, like, a sign of how strong their marriage was.
00:54:44.000yeah it's that just like texting you 25 times a day like to be writing letters all the time it
00:54:49.940shows he's thinking about her he wants her to know what he's up to yeah yeah and and he trusts that
00:54:55.780like you know she gets it like she's also from this musical family she knows how the opera works
00:55:01.940she there are stories about other other composers i'm thinking of joseph hayden who was who was
00:55:09.240older than than Mozart but a good friend of his and there are all of these stories about how his
00:55:14.740wife really didn't care about about music at all and wasn't particularly interested in what her
00:55:20.380husband was writing and like clearly at least from what we can read from Mozart's side of things
00:55:28.540you know yeah he he takes it for granted that she she cares and she wants to know and she wants to
00:55:34.380be sort of kept in the loop and well and she gets it like she knows growing up with her dad and her
00:55:39.560family she knows the importance of like oh I applied for this job or I just got this commission
00:55:43.580and I'm writing this like she would know both the business side of being a musician and also
00:55:47.240the artistic side so I think in terms of a marriage where we this period of time we don't
00:55:52.100know a lot but I think what you said that's really interesting like other composers didn't
00:55:56.060have a partner who was from this world and got it so like that was part of what she brought to
00:56:00.180the table was that there could be peers in that way. Like she would understand what he's doing.
00:56:05.900Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that I think comes into play after Mozart's death is that
00:56:13.680she is able to leverage a lot of these connections. Like she is able, you know,
00:56:19.700she petitions the court for a pension and she writes to publishers about, you know,
00:56:26.400publishing very you know selling various scores and things he's written eventually her second
00:56:34.660husband starts writing a mozart biography and she sort of pulls together uh what what papers
00:56:41.380she has as far as letters and documents and things so i have a question so in his life
00:56:48.340mozart like now even people who aren't super knowledgeable about classical music know mozart
00:56:54.760like that's the name it's like he's such a famous person but in his time was he just like one of
00:56:59.800many composers like it wasn't like oh my god it's Mozart like it's Taylor Swift like how famous was
00:57:06.140he? I don't know that he was quite Taylor Swift level but I don't know that any composer what I
00:57:12.660mean it then as now you know people people would go to the opera to see their favorite singer you
00:57:18.540know, they would go to Cia Lloyce Yovana or Caterina Cavalieri or different people like,
00:57:24.080but he was famous. I mean, he was, he was known as a child prodigy. He was, his music was well
00:57:30.560known. He put on various subscription concerts where people would, you know, he would organize
00:57:38.400the concert and then people would buy tickets and things. So he, he was very, very well known
00:57:44.640as a composer now there wasn't the kind of view i think a lot of people have of of folks like like
00:57:53.120mozart and and beethoven and that now classical composers um who are sometimes considered you
00:58:00.340know timeless you know geniuses or anything like no at the time they were they were working
00:58:06.040musicians they were people you know and i think that's important to remember that there
00:58:10.520a lot of the myth making of sort of like divine inspiration and this sort of stuff that came later
00:58:18.040yeah some of that came during Constanza's lifetime for sure like you get some kind of
00:58:24.460very flowery writings about Mozart's music in the the 1820s and 30s but at the time
00:58:33.620um yeah i mean there was there was a sense that um you know someone like mozart working in a
00:58:44.060variety of musical genres and writing some some popular some very popular operas and things like
00:58:51.320yeah like brilliant composer but not necessarily you know transcendent genius and not necessarily
00:58:59.180apparently obviously more brilliant than someone like salieri for example well and that's kind of
00:59:09.300like just to bring it back to amadeus again um like what i got from that film is kind of at the
00:59:16.220time it's like salieri was they were on par with each other it's like oh i'm gonna go see this show
00:59:21.440it's by salieri i'm gonna see this one it's by mozart like and now like mozart is like the guy
00:59:25.880he's so famous and Salieri is kind of like oh wasn't he a character in Amadeus like his music
00:59:29.880is not seen as as timeless as whatever but so Mozart that's just what I kind of wanted to build
00:59:35.780a picture for myself so Constanza is just kind of like giving birth having children mourning dead
00:59:41.140babies for nine years and Mozart is just like supporting the family like being a working
00:59:46.700medium famous composer guy basically yeah and then he dies of what murder by salieri
01:00:00.580probably rheumatic fever um okay definitely almost certainly not murder um okay okay he
01:00:07.960he had been ill several times as a small child and it's likely that he basically had some
01:00:18.760pre-existing conditions which which feels weird to think about now that we've all been thinking
01:00:24.760about these sorts of things you know since 2020 about comorbidities and things but like yeah yeah
01:00:30.620from what, you know, diagnosing historical figures is always difficult, but from what I've read of
01:00:39.520some of the kind of medical historical literature, it seems likely that it was, it was a recurrence
01:00:45.600of something he had, he had previously suffered. So he fell ill and he's quite young when he died.
01:00:54.060I know you have, he is almost 36. He is. Yeah. So super young, super young. Um,
01:01:00.620she's slightly younger than that because she's slightly younger than him two surviving children
01:01:05.360very young and you were saying like his death there was lots of people were there at his death
01:01:10.680or we have a lot of records about his death we have a lot of stories about his death um because
01:01:16.340uh a couple things were sort of going on um when when he fell ill first of all he had just written
01:01:26.180a phenomenally successful German comic opera, The Magic Flute. And so people were talking about
01:01:34.380that and, you know, singers and Emanuel Schickeneder, the actor and theater owner, and the
01:01:43.280person who wrote the libretto, the text for The Magic Flute, you know, we had these people stopping
01:01:47.420by. One of his sisters-in-law, Josefa, actually premiered the role of the Queen of the Night
01:01:53.260in the magic flute so that that aria and i am so not going to pretend to be a singer and try and
01:02:00.100hit that high note but the the very difficult german aria that like if you know one part of
01:02:07.080the magic flute it's like the soprano singing this very kind of angry sounding
01:02:11.580where it's like where it's like i'm gonna sing it very low it's like
01:02:14.740uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and then it goes, uh, uh, uh, and it goes like higher and
01:02:19.780higher. Yeah. That one. Yeah. That was, that was Yusufa, uh, saying that. Okay. She had that
01:02:27.960range. She had that Mariah Carey whistle range. Okay. She could pull that off. And so, so yeah,1.00
01:02:33.560so you had this, this theatrical success and you also have something that has made
01:02:39.500centuries of a really good story in that Mozart also received an anonymous commission
01:02:48.080to write a requiem, a mess for the dead. That's an Amadeus. Yes. Okay. I'm familiar.
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01:14:53.900that there is an interest in Mozart's music
01:14:59.780kind of generally, but specifically that,
01:15:03.760you know, oh, he wrote, you know, chamber music.
01:15:07.280And if you and your family play string instruments,
01:15:09.820you know, you can play this stuff at home.
01:15:11.540And, and, and Constanza is really leveraging her, her husband's fame and, and reputation and the professional connections that, that both of them had in this world to say like, this, this music is clearly worth something and I would like to be paid for it, please.
01:15:35.320yeah well no and that's I love that well it's kind of this time where you're saying sort of
01:15:41.360like copyright is sort of like in flux and like what does it mean but she's just like how am I
01:15:45.280going to make money it's not like well I'm going to start I don't know performing myself or doing
01:15:49.800more music myself she's like no like Mozart left this legacy and I'm going to find a way to turn
01:15:55.180that into like a family yeah she does also perform herself so she and she and Aloysia
01:16:02.240go on a couple of concert tours in sort of the middle middle of the 1790s
01:16:09.580sometimes performing in full operas sometimes giving concerts and so there is this sense of
01:16:17.000sort of like yeah what what can she leverage as a as a widow and as as a quite young widow with
01:16:25.880with musical training and connections to support the family she also her writings on her relationship
01:16:34.640with her sons are quite interesting and I think speak to how she's thinking about
01:16:43.280like their education because they are um young in in 1791 Carl Thomas is seven six or seven
01:16:54.820And Franz Xavier Wolfgang is like, I want to say like four months old, like under a year old.
01:17:01.500And so she's like, we're going to like next generation musical family, like let's get these guys trained in music as well.
01:17:07.640Or just kind of like broad general education.
01:17:09.940She sort of goes back and forth on it.
01:17:11.960So there are times when she's kind of very invested in sort of getting them out there, possibly performing or different things.
01:17:22.580but she's also very aware that like in part because wolfgang was so famous so well known
01:17:31.680and has this reputation like she doesn't she seems to have been aware that there would be
01:17:39.420some kind of pressure placed on the next generation like are they going to be child
01:17:44.900prodigies too like yeah well and there's this fascinating thing that happens so carl thomas
01:17:52.800had some early training in music and seems to have been a very keen pianist but at some point
01:18:00.840she sort of decides like no you should you should go into the civil service basically you should
01:18:06.620you know he he winds up sort of becoming a kind of accountant and like a translator of government
01:18:12.500documents for the Habsburgs in Italy. So he, he, as an adult, he, he's off in Milan being,
01:18:19.420being an accountant. More stable career, more stable career. Yeah. Yeah. I think of that,
01:18:25.100you know, sort of the flip side of running away to join the circus. If your parents are artists,
01:18:29.660you know, you want the, the stable job, but the younger son, Franz Xavier Wolfgang,
01:18:36.360seemed to have developed some some level of musical talent quite early and at some point
01:18:44.020Constanzo decides like yes this is the one this is the one who will be a musician
01:18:48.360and he studies with some some big names in Vienna Albrechtsberger who also taught Beethoven for a
01:18:56.900time and Salieri interestingly enough and and Salieri wrote wrote him what I have described
01:19:04.320to friends as the most optimistic letter of recommendation in music history where he was
01:19:10.320applying for a job and salary wrote this letter basically saying yes he studied with me and i
01:19:17.200predict that one day he will become you know the equal of his celebrated father or something and
01:19:21.600it's like oh dear that's there's you can't live up to that kind of pressure but if he if he works
01:19:31.020hard maybe he will become yeah he um and and he worked as a composer and and teacher in in various
01:19:42.860cities in sort of what is now ukraine and lithuania the ways in which kind of thinking about
01:19:50.880like positioning franz-lavier wolfgang as a composer and kind of connecting him to people
01:19:59.720like Salieri and people like Joseph Haydn, like there's a very famous concert of Haydn's music
01:20:07.860where Franz Xavier is, he's like a little kid. I don't think he's a teenager yet at that point,
01:20:14.520but like a piano concerto by him is performed. And so like, yeah, the children's education
01:20:23.740is sort of important kind of as a parent, but it's also part of this, like, how do you negotiate
01:20:31.540the family reputation and stability and legacy? Well, and part of what I'm curious to know,
01:20:40.480your thoughts about her efforts to have a biography of Mozart completed. And if that's
01:20:46.220partially, and there doesn't need to be just one reason, I'm sure part of it is just like,
01:20:49.660she wants him to be known but also the more I would guess the more he's known the more valuable
01:20:56.260his the publishing like his music might be played more often she wants to make him more famous so to
01:21:02.280kind of make what she has her business the like Mozart legacy like the more he's known the more
01:21:10.420she can make money by like having her son do concerts and like selling his music is that part
01:21:15.760of why you would imagine she I think so and I think it's also realizing that as we get kind of
01:21:24.380more into the 19th century here so just to situate us time-wise in Constanza's life
01:21:31.340she meets Georg Niklas Nissen her the man who will become her second husband in the late 1790s
01:21:41.760around 1797 they're eventually married um sorry i want to point out um he was initially one of
01:21:49.460her money-making ventures where she took in tenants so he was a tenant so again this is
01:21:53.980this is her game plan it's just like seduce a person who is a tenant in my home it's worked0.94
01:21:59.580for her twice i don't i don't know i mean there was a a good long time between like when they0.63
01:22:06.100met and where that when they got married so I don't know um the the level of seduction game
01:22:11.380oh for sure I'm being facetious but I just think she's like this is my strategy this is how I know
01:22:17.080to find a husband and it's based on when someone's a tenant in my home I get to know them really well
01:22:22.440and then that's how I mean if you're also thinking about like yeah opportunities that men and women
01:22:29.080have to socialize to get to know each other yeah yeah yeah absolutely and nissen um was
01:22:39.040a diplomat from copenhagen and was also clearly a very keen fan of music um i don't know that he
01:22:49.940was a musician himself but he started writing a biography of mozart and a lot of biographers
01:22:58.740get kind of weird about this, that like, oh, did she marry him and then make him write this
01:23:03.080biography? Speculating about like, did he marry her because she was Mozart's widow? And I don't
01:23:10.400know. I don't know that we, we know these things. At least they, they haven't come up in the family
01:23:18.680letters. But, but it is interesting thinking about, again, like we were saying, the sort of
01:23:27.820resources available to the widow you know the wife and then the widow of a a great man is sort
01:23:35.480of like okay it's the early 19th century and there's there's this interest in Mozart's music
01:23:42.500but there's also this increasing interest in biography and biographies of all sorts of people
01:23:50.600Like not just, you know, royalty or saints or these sorts of things, but like biographies of famous musicians and this increasing curiosity about, well, I really like this opera, this symphony or whatever.
01:30:34.440not so much because of the claim of rivalry,
01:30:37.460because that kind of has its own history as gossip,
01:30:41.840But sort of, well, how would like, you know, Constanza is commenting on this, you know, detail of, you know, kind of theatrical politics and how would she know and, you know, did Salieri really start writing it and then give up and all of this?
01:31:02.440Well, in the 90s, there's a Salieri scholar named John Rice who found Salieri's sketches
01:31:10.600for a couple of numbers for the story that would later become Mozart's Così Fan Tutte.
01:31:17.560So Constanza may or may not be a reliable source on how Mozart felt about his professional
01:31:26.220Yeah, you have a bad day at work and you vent about people.
01:31:29.320It doesn't mean you're like enemies for all time.
01:31:32.440But it is interesting that like this little story about, you know, who's going to write this opera, that there does seem to be some documentation that like, okay, Salieri was going to write it and he gave up on it or was busy with other things or whatever. And okay, now Mozart writes it.
01:31:50.540I love the way that you describe that. It's just like people sort of discounted the story and that's like, oh, surprise. Actually, Salieri did start writing it.
01:31:56.580Yeah. And like, I do want to stress there just because I know there's all this kind of myth making about Mozart and Salieri totally separate from Constanza. But just stress that like, that's also how a lot of opera in the 1780s worked was, yeah, like poets and composers would get commissions to write a particular, you know, piece for, for a particular kind of group of singers.
01:32:26.580for like you know the next season or whatever and yeah sometimes things wouldn't work out
01:32:31.900it would kind of fall apart and sometimes works that people had written earlier would sort of be
01:32:37.060reworked into new productions in in different cities or in a different language or like
01:32:44.400these things that I think a lot of people today think of as sort of monumental like this is what
01:32:52.120the magic flute is or this is what marriage of figaro is to think of another mozart opera
01:32:57.640um at the time the these works were very malleable and depending on who was around
01:33:06.940there are some famous cases of 18th century singers kind of demanding regardless of the
01:33:15.600rest of the opera well i want this kind of aria because i want to show off i can sing this or
01:33:20.860there's a case it's a bit earlier than Mozart but there's a case I think in London in the 1730s
01:33:28.260of a famous singer who whenever he entered a scene he had to like be on horseback and
01:33:36.580and it did not matter if it did not make sense for the plot of the opera for like the singer
01:33:42.580to enter on a horse but like yeah so these things were very flexible and there was a lot of
01:33:48.200understanding in the theater that you know you go with what worked so constanza herself so she's in
01:33:55.560salzburg um later in life living with uh some of her sisters and then she's 82 or no 80 when she
01:34:03.780dies when she dies yeah so and she spent most of her life just working on kind of like the mozart
01:34:09.740legacy and making a business of that and very successfully like you said like living financially
01:34:15.260comfortably. Yeah. And then, well, I think I want to move on to, to the scandalousness scale,
01:34:24.460but that's going to open up some other avenues of discussion of things that I'd like to ask you
01:34:29.680about. But so the first category in the scale, and these are all one, zero to 10 categories.
01:34:36.220The first one is scandalousness. How scandalous was she seen by the society in which she lived?
01:34:42.600And I feel like there would be a different number for pre-marriage versus post-marriage.
01:35:09.720Like, she's not, she's not extraordinarily scandalous, or at least there's not sort of any big documented scandals beyond the, you know, having the party guests measure her calves.
01:35:23.020when she's engaged um and and and some gossip and and kind of stray references and letters that
01:35:32.400you know possibly you know i she and or mozart may have had some some affairs but like nothing
01:35:43.300is documented and a lot of it really a lot of the speculation in that direction really feels to me
01:35:50.200like something that might be more relevant to the sexism question of yeah well and you just
01:35:56.900mentioned and I want you to explain this so her reputation like we've been talking about this0.95
01:36:00.760woman who you know she had fun as a young woman she married Mozart he died she made these sound
01:36:06.000business decisions but her legacy especially in Mozart biography sort of presents her as this kind0.68
01:36:11.840of like silly flighty airhead kind of trashy person that's kind of how she appears in Amadeus
01:36:19.240the movie although i appreciate her in that movie because she just supports him and loves him but how0.86
01:36:24.980has her reputation suffered like how is she written about yeah yeah so it really fluctuates
01:36:34.980after after her death um and it really depends i think when you're talking and where you're talking
01:36:41.940So you get depictions of her in German and English language fiction in the 19th century, where she's depicted quite positively.
01:36:54.280Like she's, you know, with Mozart while he's writing these great operas and she's sort of dealing with his sort of flighty moods as an artist and whatnot in these fictions.
01:37:05.480And then in the 20th century, I think as you get more kind of, I'll say psychological biographies, but like these biographies of Mozart and the end of other kind of great men composers, where you have this idea that sort of they are, you know, the great genius, you know, nobody understands them.
01:37:30.400They're working alone, even if they have, you know, partners and kids and siblings and all that.
01:37:36.560But they're alone, you know, writing their great works that nobody understands.
01:37:41.300And I think there's a way to read Constanza in those biographies that is quite negative because she wasn't a professional singer.
01:37:53.080And she wasn't, you know, single handedly keeping the family out of debt all the time and everything.
01:38:00.400That there's a way to look at Mozart and the singers, the other female musicians that Mozart would have worked with at the opera, not just Aloysio and Yosefa, but other people, and think like, well, why didn't Mozart marry, you know, a sort of musician on his level?
01:38:25.340Or why, you know, why was, you know, why was Constanza sick all the time, which is 100% a case of like, biography being written by men, because I feel like the first time I like in undergrad, I took a class on women in music, and I wrote a paper for that class about Constanza.
01:38:47.200and yeah the first time i was reading kind of just the timeline of her life i'm like
01:38:53.840she was pregnant like all the time in her first marriage yeah like there's a really easy answer
01:39:00.440to like why was she like sick and it's like pregnancy in the 18th century um and so you get
01:39:08.600these these biographical narratives about her in the 20th century that are very much either that
01:39:14.560she wasn't worthy of Mozart or that she didn't know how to manage money um and and part of that
01:39:21.680is kind of kind of cynicism or skepticism about like how good she gets at managing money later
01:39:29.000on and it's like well but she's on her own like I mean she she eventually remarries but she's like
01:39:35.020having to take care of herself and two children like pretty suddenly so yeah you get this this
01:39:42.580image of her as sort of unworthy and I think a lot of the sort of frivolous for lack of a better
01:39:50.440word like silly party girl narrative kind of fits into that is that she's you know she's not seen as
01:39:57.620a kind of great musician she's blamed for in some of this literature for enabling Mozart's
01:40:07.240kind of own frivolity which I don't think he needed any help um and I I could I could easily
01:40:14.600see like if she were like let's say she was like just always perfect at managing money I could see0.98
01:40:24.000an alternate universe in which she is blamed for being you know kind of a true or controlling1.00
01:40:31.380or whatever like there are other ways to blame women for their their husbands yeah well no and
01:40:38.220I think it I mean it comes down we'll get to the sexism score later but it's just kind of like
01:40:41.700people wanted I don't know I don't know for some reason it seems like they just need Mozart to be
01:40:48.520this like singular figure so the fact that he had a wife you have to set her up as being he had a
01:40:54.400wife but not really she didn't support him she didn't help him and so you just kind of have to
01:40:59.060look at the what we know about constanza and then just make that seem bad somehow yeah and i mean
01:41:05.260it's totally possible that given what we know of like mozart's love of like parties and dirty jokes
01:41:16.240and all kinds of things that yeah i i bet they had a lot of fun um when they were like well and
01:41:24.600not dealing with the loss of four children um like i'm i i like yeah i i just i don't think
01:41:34.660it's necessarily the place of musicologists and historians to cast like moral aspersions i'm like
01:41:42.140was constanza a good wife or like like was this a happy marriage well enough part of what you said
01:41:48.920earlier it's just like the fact when she was taking the waters he wrote her lots of letters
01:41:52.680and we don't have the responses where it's like she didn't love him back why where are her
01:41:57.820responses like just sort of like taking what we see and applying psychological context to them
01:42:04.800where it's like he sent her letters if she responded or not like maybe she was there
01:42:10.060dealing with profound grief and health problems and maybe he was she liked getting the letters
01:42:15.860and maybe he didn't expect a response I don't know like just to sort of be like she ignored him
01:42:20.280or whatever i mean she she because he does say like oh i've received your letter or like when
01:42:25.820she doesn't write he comments on it so like yeah she clearly was responding and whether it's a
01:42:31.700matter of he didn't save her letters or she didn't save her you know letters they also moved
01:42:37.780apartments a lot and so like it's totally possible that you know there were more and more letters that
01:42:46.400just got lost or yeah downsized I'm I'm in the middle of moving myself right now myself and so
01:42:53.020like right now my my whole life is like stacks of books in my apartment um that I need to pack
01:42:59.980and it's like yeah like not everything you know makes every move and not everything is going to
01:43:06.860survive you know a couple hundred years of history yeah well it just seems sort of like it's I mean
01:43:13.120I see this nowadays with so many, um, public women figures who are hated no matter what they
01:43:22.000do. And so it's like, they can't, if they change what they do, people are going to hate them for0.97
01:43:28.080that. Or it's, it's like, it's not about what you do. It's just about conceptually people hate the
01:43:32.580concept of a powerful woman or of a woman. And so they just point out what you do is the things to
01:43:38.960criticize like for instance okay i'll speak for myself on this podcast um there's people who
01:43:43.600don't like the way that i talk informally on the podcast but if i spoke i know that there's people
01:43:49.740who speak more scripted on podcasts and they get criticism being like you're so scripted
01:43:53.280where it's just like oh no you just hate a woman talking like yeah well and i think i've thought
01:44:00.200about this too because i do think it's worth emphasizing that a lot of the anecdotes that
01:44:07.920Constanza did tell about Mozart's life like some of them we know are false or are as I said
01:44:15.420unverifiable but she was not alone in the landscape of people marketing anecdotes about like their
01:44:24.060friends or partners the great composers to do this and also like I don't think necessarily
01:44:34.300definitely not in the 1790s i don't know about later but like she was not necessarily thinking
01:44:43.360about like i am personally going to control the mozart family legacy for all time like yeah i mean
01:44:48.680she was involved with the creation of the the mozartam organization uh or the choir that would
01:44:56.280eventually become the the Mozart research organization in Salzburg but like sometimes
01:45:04.540people talk about her activities in promoting and preserving and and controlling the family legacy
01:45:11.560as though like oh she just wanted to make herself look good and it's like I don't know that somebody
01:45:18.180in let's say 1795 is thinking about like oh i want some academics in you know 1970 or 2024
01:45:29.100to like think well of me i don't think that's how anything worked i think she's more like
01:45:34.820i want to pay my rent i want to like exactly yeah i think it was much more um she was thinking about
01:45:44.300herself in that time and place. The next category is the scheminess, which you've listened to other
01:45:49.780episodes and I've explained it to you, but just so the listeners know, like this is a positive thing.
01:45:54.640A person with a plan, a person who's able to see what life situation they're in and they can pivot
01:46:00.440and they can find ways to succeed rather than like having life happen to them. And I feel like this
01:46:06.580would be a high score for her. Yeah. I I'm leaning towards nine or 10 for this. Um, let's, let's
01:46:12.980they're on the side of 10 honestly sure because yeah between the sort of details of like
01:46:20.300getting the requiem done and then also getting um getting nissen's book out in so he her second
01:46:28.720husband also dies before finishing um his great work of mozart biography and so like getting
01:46:38.080getting that into the world in in some form but also just generally like that here is someone
01:46:48.140who is who who marries at 19 whose older sisters have these more obvious professional careers and0.99
01:46:58.540public persona or public space in the public sphere. And she, after this very tragic life
01:47:11.120circumstance, finds herself mobilizing what she has, the tools that she has, the connections that
01:47:19.360she has, you know, her, her own family to make it work and to make it work quite well
01:47:27.360and to exist in sort of the, the public space of people who know music and people who are
01:47:38.520curious about Mozart's music and, and to exist at a time, I mean, some of this is sort of
01:47:45.840the luck of when she's around but that she's in a time when that is possible when there is
01:47:53.740publishing when there is interest in the work of music from you know the past few decades and that
01:48:02.740and that she's able to to mobilize that to to make use of that yeah I think like exactly like I think
01:48:09.820it is to her benefit that that was the time and place where she was alive but another person in
01:48:14.560her situation might have wound up penniless. Like if someone didn't put those dots together,
01:48:19.380if someone didn't leverage these specific connections, like I could see another narrative
01:48:24.620where she dies, you know, in debtor's prison or something, but she didn't. And it's not like there
01:48:30.360was the luck of when, when she lived, but also her own persistence and her intelligence. Yeah.
01:48:36.580And I've, I've thought a bit about, oh no, I'll save that. I'll save that for significance.
01:49:10.020But so many of these stories about, you know, Mozart at parties, improvising music, or, you know, staying up late at night, like I said, drinking punch and finishing an opera and all of this, like so many of that, those images persist.
01:49:27.260I mean, we see them in things like Amadeus, but we also see them in things of just like how people talk about like classical composers and, you know, what it means, you know, what it means to be a famous musician.
01:49:42.840And in this time, I was going to say earlier, but I think it fits better here. I've often wondered if Mozart lived longer or flip side, if Constanza, you know, died younger, would we have the same image of Mozart that we do?
01:50:03.620You know, if either he had lived long enough to sort of have a role in shaping his own legacy and not have this sort of narrative of tragic, you know, death at a young age and all of that.
01:50:20.280or if Constanza, as you say, hadn't been able to mobilize all of this and hadn't been a part of
01:50:31.400this industry of music biography and musical anecdotes and publishing. Yeah. What would
01:50:38.620what would our kind of prevailing image be and our narrative? I think it'd be quite different.
01:50:44.640i think so too and i mean again like mozart is such a like even i don't know like i don't know
01:50:50.920when i first heard of mozart but like i think i just knew oh that's a famous composer um that's
01:50:55.840just you just like there's that thing where it's like baby mozart like play mozart music to your
01:50:59.560like unborn children and stuff like he is the guy where it's just like mozart he's the guy
01:51:05.660like kind of like shakespeare is the guy for like plays mozart is the guy for music and that's
01:51:11.140largely as you've been explaining so eloquently like because of um well he died young but also
01:51:17.580constanza's non-stop work and so it's interesting like her significance is that she solidified that
01:51:24.800legacy for him like not for herself yes yeah and and how much of the way that legacy was then taken
01:51:34.580up winds up in some cases making her look bad or casting aspersions upon like well why would she do
01:51:42.860this so then the final category on the scale is the sexism bonus how much is what's her life
01:51:50.300affected I mean us and in her case I guess it's also kind of her legacy by by living in this
01:51:56.040patriarchal society and sexism in her life just what I'm thinking based on like having read your
01:52:02.900essay and is talking to you now like I feel you know if she hadn't been in a place where she was
01:52:07.880expected to just constantly have children for nine years maybe her own musical career could have been
01:52:13.560more than it was if she wasn't busy doing that but also at the same point I don't want to take
01:52:18.340away like that was in some ways her choice to do that like she did yeah I don't know so I don't
01:52:24.900know yeah i feel like i put i wrote down five because i don't feel like i feel like the amount
01:52:34.400of sexism she experienced in her life was sort of like baseline like yeah being a married woman
01:52:41.000in vienna in the 1780s exactly yeah but i think the the place of sexism kind of in her posthumous
01:52:51.020legacy is important to unpack and to question. There's a really great, I'm looking at it right
01:53:01.580now, there's a book by H.C. Robbins Landon, who was a biographer of Mozart and Haydn in the 1980s
01:53:13.740and 90s. And he wrote a book called 1791, Mozart's Last Year, where most of it is going like month
01:53:20.940by month through 1791, kind of explaining, you know, what documentary sources do we have
01:53:27.960for different performances and things.
01:53:30.740But there are also chapters, you know, debunking some conspiracy theories about Mozart's death.
01:53:36.780And there's a chapter called Constanza of Vindication, where he basically goes through
01:53:44.800a number, like what sources we have about Constanza from her lifetime, both during
01:53:52.840Mozart's life and after, but also goes through a number of kind of pretty formative 20th century
01:54:00.200Mozart biographies and talks about how they depict Constanza and sort of like, are these
01:54:06.260depictions, like, are there citations for, you know, someone claiming, you know, she had a bunch
01:54:13.260of affairs or someone claiming you know she was faking an illness they're like all of these things
01:54:18.740that people say and what he really wants to draw attention to is like a lot of this stuff is all
01:54:26.980accumulated myth making about what we think as you said what we think a great man should be like
01:54:32.980and what we think you know the person he has relationships with should be like and and a lot
01:54:39.280of it isn't necessarily in, in the sources and, and doesn't necessarily reflect how people would
01:54:48.400have thought about marriage and love and partnership in the 18th century. Like a lot of
01:54:55.560this, a lot of this stuff does seem to come from more kind of 20th century psychological or
01:55:03.780what do you call it? Psychoanalytical kind of approaches to talking about, you know, artists.
01:55:12.080That's, it's, that's really, it's such an interesting, I don't know if I've had anyone
01:55:15.720on the podcast where that was specifically the narrative in terms of sexism. But yeah,
01:55:19.620I think in her life, she was like, I agree with the five, I think just kind of like standard0.88
01:55:24.180issue living under the patriarchy. I don't think it especially negatively affected her in her
01:55:30.080lifetime any more than any other woman but then she has had this sort of weird afterlife of just0.88
01:55:38.460being this kind of like trashed woman where it's just like to put her down to elevate Mozart0.60
01:55:45.720is so weird it's interesting because we've we've both sort of alluded multiple times to kind of0.96
01:55:55.700the impact that the film version of Amadeus has had
01:55:59.180and how we think about sort of all of these people,
01:56:02.820all of these characters in the 1780s and 90s.
01:56:07.620And one of the parts of Amadeus that is fictional,
01:56:17.240is there's a bit early on when Mozart and Constanza
01:56:20.500are arguing about, um, a job that, that Mozart is applying for or wants, um, and, and is asked
01:56:30.820to submit pieces for, for consideration. And he doesn't want to, um, because he just thinks like
01:56:37.420he's, he's great and they should pick him. Um, he shouldn't have to apply. And Constanza says
01:56:44.520something like well i know how i know how music works in this city like like you know and that
01:56:52.580scene and then that situation is is a heavily fictionalized take on what actually happened
01:57:00.760with the finding a music tutor for the princess elizabeth but just that depiction of constanza
01:57:07.840as like someone who herself is not a composer, but is aware of, you know, through her sisters
01:57:15.960and through other musicians she knows, like, like she is aware of how things work.
01:57:24.220Yeah. She's knowledgeable. I think, and I think in general, if you have a partnership where one
01:57:30.180person is like the creative, it's really beneficial. If the other person is like the
01:57:34.580manager if the other person has the like basic skills to like let's pay our bills let's like
01:57:40.120fill out this grant application like i think that's helpful to have that person and money
01:57:46.300does come up a lot in mozart's letters i mean in mozart's letters period but in mozart's letters
01:57:54.140to constanza um and so like i said there's sort of multiple ways of reading this there's there's
01:58:00.300sort of the, the romanticization of, oh, they were always, you know, these sort of impoverished
01:58:07.020artists types, um, which seems to likely be an exaggeration for, for the reasons I mentioned,
01:58:13.780but there's also a like, oh, he, you know, trusts his wife to talk about money with her,
01:58:21.040which was not something all 18th century husbands did.
01:58:24.500yeah no exactly so that's like it's so tricky to parse out who she was and what she was like
01:58:32.200when so much of it is in context of her relationship but yeah exactly like you said
01:58:36.440like he trusts like we know what he wrote to her he's like hey i'm writing this opera i'm applying
01:58:40.620for this job here's some facts about money and that shows that she was interested in that and
01:58:44.260he trusted her and could rely on her to have these conversations so we just sort of like can infer
01:58:49.540from that what she was kind of like because not having her own answers like not having her letters
01:58:56.820to see what she said right exactly so then because this is the Marie Antoinette slash revolutionary
01:59:05.380season I have this new segment called nothing but net where I look to see how do people connect
01:59:13.560with Marie Antoinette because I'm talking about all kinds of people from all kinds of places this
01:59:17.680season, not necessarily, frankly, nobody from France in this portion of the season. So I was
01:59:24.540trying, and I checked with you beforehand, like what is the most direct way to connect Constanza
01:59:28.660to Marie Antoinette? And I think it was that when he was in his child prodigy era, Mozart performed
01:59:34.340for Marie Antoinette, right? He did. So I think just to remind people, Marie Antoinette herself
01:59:42.040was also not French. She was one of Maria Therese's many, many children. And yeah. And so
01:59:51.720when the, when the Mozarts were touring as, as child prodigies, they performed at Schönbrunn
01:59:58.640Palace in Vienna. And yes, so Mozart performed for, you know, the Habsburgs, including Marie
02:00:08.000Antoinette there is this very adorable story that gets told a lot of times although I don't believe
02:00:14.260it's mentioned in any of the the Habsburg family writings so people have sort of cast doubt on it
02:00:22.600but there's this very cute story that like child Mozart trips on a rug or something trips in the
02:00:30.820palace and Marie Antoinette or Antonia as she would have been known kind of pre-marriage helps
02:00:36.620him up and he's you know as a little kid proposes marriage to her um and and then the story appears
02:00:44.780in all sorts of novels and i i believe it's in amadeus as well um it's in the play for sure
02:00:52.080i don't know they mentioned they mentioned it in the movie yep yeah and yeah this is i think a lot
02:01:00.520of people like this story because it's cute and it it it opens up all sorts of like oh well what
02:01:07.960if you know and people love to what if both you know Mozart and Marie Antoinette as you know
02:01:13.940kind of potentially you know doomed historical figures um so there's that there's also the fact
02:01:23.220uh marie antoinette's brother joseph joseph ii became emperor of austria and so uh when
02:01:33.200mozart is writing operas and all of that that's the the emperor in in omadeus yes that mozart
02:01:44.320and salieri are working for that's yeah that's him and then that comes up a bit too when they're
02:01:49.020talking about marriage of figaro and oh my sister antoinette is very concerned about all of this
02:01:53.920you know french thing the theater so there's that well i was just thinking because we also
02:02:00.460talked a bit about and we've talked a lot about rumor and gossip and anecdote and things
02:02:05.500and i think it's it's a more tenuous connection all of these connections with constanza are
02:02:11.920But I think both of these, these women were the subject of anecdotes and gossip, like during their lifetimes, but also especially after in ways that have shaped kind of indelibly how they're talked about.
02:02:34.560And so like, no matter how many times people debunk things like the let them eat cake story, like you still have to bring it up because you mentioned Marie Antoinette and someone will think of it, even if we know it's not true.
02:02:51.300And I think with, with Constanza, you know, we're sort of grappling to some extent with her, her depiction in Amadeus, but I think it has a much longer history as far as, yeah, how we read, like, the anecdotes and the gossip and the stories that she spread during her lifetime.
02:03:11.940And also how like images of her, her character and her relationship with Mozart developed, um, in the decades and century after her death.
02:03:27.320so i think constanza's connection specifically directly to marie antoinette would be mozart
02:03:35.460met marie antoinette and then also he was like that was the emperor so constanza's connected
02:03:41.480to mozart mozart's connection marie antoinette so that's two two two degrees of separation
02:03:45.180effectively degrees yes between these two but as you said like thematically philosophically i do
02:03:51.560think there are some similarities there and actually i was just adding up her score so she
02:03:55.600gets a total score of 28 on the Scandalicious scale. And I was seeing there's so many people
02:04:00.720on the scale now. So I kind of like to see, well, where does that put her and who's similar? And a
02:04:03.960name that I kept thinking when you were talking was Mary Shelley, because she spent, she was
02:04:08.640married to Percy Shelley for relatively a short time and spent the rest of her life trying to
02:04:12.240like publishing his books and helping his legacy. She has a 29. Constanza Mozart has a 28. So I feel
02:04:17.620like they have a similar, that part of like Mary Shelley is now remembered for her work and
02:04:23.220Constanza's not but I think both of them dedicated their post-marriage life to just like establishing
02:04:29.040a legacy for their husband's work yeah and so much speculation like I know with with the Shelleys
02:04:38.920and with Lord Byron about her like what were the relationships yeah yeah um but yeah there's so
02:04:45.380much potential for gossip and yeah that's really interesting that she's sort of right in there
02:04:52.000Exactly. They landed in a similar spot. I feel like where she edged ahead was Mary Shelley had more scandal because she like, yeah, I was going to say there were no, you know, pre-existing spouses or no, there was no like running away in a throuple when you were 16. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Constanza was much more of a traditional narrative, traditional sort of person.
02:05:14.080kristin tell everybody um so first of all the the essay like the thing that you wrote about
02:05:20.640konstanza mozart where where can people find that yeah so um it's in growth music online
02:05:27.640which is a peer-reviewed um music encyclopedia it's individual subscriptions are very expensive
02:05:36.720so i would check and see a lot of academic and public libraries subscribe to this
02:05:41.600And what I wrote, it's the entry on Constanza Mozart, and it's an updated and expanded version of an article that was originally written in the late 90s, early 2000s, by Rudolf Angermüller, who was a scholar of Mozart and Salieri's work.
02:06:05.120And my contribution is the sort of thematic talking about gossip and talking about the role of fiction in Constanza's posthumous legacy.
02:06:18.420And this is part of, so Grove as an encyclopedia has been around for well over a century. It started as a dictionary written by Sir George Grove in Britain in the late 19th century. And it's since gone through many different versions and is now online.
02:06:39.920And historically speaking, it hasn't always had the greatest coverage of women in music history. And so there's this great initiative right now where they're trying to improve their coverage of topics related to gender and sexuality.
02:06:56.220And so I, in my other research project on the history of queer musicology, had proposed a couple of places where either new articles could be written or existing articles could be improved.
02:07:10.980And I was talking, I was meeting online with a couple of the editors and they were asking, oh, are there any other articles that you use in your teaching or your research that you think should be updated?
02:07:24.240And just off the top of my head, I was like, well, I know the one on Constanza Mozart is quite a few years old. It could probably be updated. And at the time, I thought for sure they would go find an established Mozart scholar to write this.
02:07:39.560and they were like oh well you know you're working on this stuff about about rumor and
02:07:46.420gossip and like do you want to do it and so um which was a phenomenal like I really enjoyed
02:07:52.980working on this and getting into making connections between some of the fiction and
02:07:59.000anecdote I'm working with and new developments in musicology and the biographical literature
02:08:07.100And so that was just a great experience. And I'm very glad that they're sort of making the effort to diversify and expand kind of what a music encyclopedia should cover, because traditionally this this encyclopedia, traditionally, a lot of the entries on women connected to important men in music were like, oh, this person was a singer and she sang this important role in this dude's opera.
02:08:36.680and then she retired when she was 30 and we're just not going to talk about like that she lived
02:08:41.180for however many more years yeah and so yeah I think they're really trying to give a better
02:08:48.180sense of how people like Constanza fit into these these bigger narratives of how music happens and
02:08:57.280how music history is talked about that's so interesting and I'm good for them frankly for
02:09:03.580Yeah. No, it's a, it's a, it's a really great initiative.
02:09:07.200Yeah. And do you have any, I don't know, website or social media or anywhere if people want to
02:09:13.780connect with you or see what you're up to? Yeah. So I am, I am currently still on Twitter
02:09:19.420at musicology geek and I'm on, I'm trying to think I'm on blue sky at KM Francine. Um, so if
02:09:29.080We just, if you look up Kristen Francine, or quite frankly, if you look up like Salieri
02:09:34.600operas or things, I mostly post about research I'm currently doing about Salieri and musical
02:09:42.160fiction and also occasional fun maple drinks I try in Montreal.