It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears.  Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with her punishment, and suggesting that the man’s wife would probably assist her if informed.

It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a domestic tragedy.  Frau Hofdaemmel was a pupil of Mozart’s whose husband grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her almost to death, and then committed suicide.  The story gradually grew up that Mozart was the cause of the man’s jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he later discarded after Koechel, another biographer, had succeeded in proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart’s death.  Hofdaemmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan.  There was, however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin, who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in 1789—­90.  She sang in his “Entfuehrung,” and it was said that his friends had to help him out of his entanglement with her.  But Jahn scouts the idea.

Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of Mozart’s life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he received to write a Requiem Mass.  We are sure now that it was Count Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own.  To Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was writing was an omen of his own end.  Shortly before his father had died, Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death when it should come, and speaking of death as “this good and faithful friend of man,” and adding:  “I never lie down at night without thinking, young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns.”

Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him suddenly declining in health.  To divert him, she took him for a drive, but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he had been poisoned.  Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family physician, Doctor Closset.  He blamed Mozart’s state to overwork and overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.

After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not leave his bed.  Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister, Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very solicitous and attentive.  It is Sophie who described in a letter the last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five.  Mozart, even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die.  When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer: