Score is reunited 170 years after Mozart’s wife sliced it in two
Published: January 12, 2006
SOME 170 years ago Mozart’s widow stood in her Salzburg residence with a knife poised over one of her late husband’s manuscripts. Slowly, and with a slight wobble, Constanze sliced through a sheet containing music for a string quartet and parts of a piano concerto.
The two pieces, given to men from whom Constanze wanted favours, drifted their separate ways for the better part of two centuries before they were reunited yesterday for an exhibition at the British Library.
Constanze von Nissen, as she became when she remarried, realised that she could double the value of Mozart’s sheet music by cutting it in half. Her knife separated two cadenzas, or decorative harmonic progressions, written by Mozart for a pastiche piano concerto, No 3 in D.
But the cut also severed a second piece of music on the other side of the paper. The violin sections of a variation on the minuet from the String Quartet in F were separated from the cello and viola sections. She gave the lower portion, containing the parts for cello and viola, to Herr Sattler, a local government official in Bavaria, to persuade him to help her to recover a debt.
The portion containing the violin parts was presented to Julius Leidke, a court musician from Darmstadt, either as a present or to oil the wheels for an unknown transaction. Sattler’s portion passed from one private owner to another and travelled to America and back before it was acquired by the British Library in 1953 as part of a bequest from Edward Meyerstein, a British writer. The upper portion resurfaced more than 50 years later, when the owner put it up for sale.
The British Library acquired it and will display the two portions together for the first time in its Mozart’s Musical Diary exhibition, which will run from Saturday to April 10 to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
Chris Banks, the head of music collections at the library, said that the minuet was part of Moazart’s attempt to be taken seriously as a composer and shake off his reputation as a child prodigy. “This was at a time, in 1773, when Mozart was 16 or 17 and had gone on a third trip to Vienna with his father,” she said.
Mozart died in poverty in 1791, leaving Constanze with many debts. She outlived him by 52 years, remarrying and selling off her first husband’s works to make ends meet.
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