“I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave.  And who can comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?”

Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the door, begging her, for God’s sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter’s and ask one of them to call, as if by chance.  But the priests hesitated for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of “these unchristian Fathers” to do as she wished.

After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold applications to Mozart’s feverish head, which shocked him into unconsciousness.  He died at one o’clock in the morning of November 5, 1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem.  The ruling passion!

Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his windows.  As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease, thought to be malignant typhus.  She wished to die with him.  Her grief was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely.  She was taken to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable to leave the house.  On that day so furious a tempest raged that the friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and sleet.  So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a pauper’s grave, three corpses deep.

It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house.  She then went to the cemetery to find the grave.  It could not be identified, and never since has it been found.  No one had tipped the old sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.

There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr. Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure, speaks of Constanze as “indifferent to the disposition of the mortal remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated.”

For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence.  But for the highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician, there is a superfluity of proof.

After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he granted.  Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of her husband’s works, which she arranged, and with such success that she paid all Mozart’s debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500).  Thus she took the last stain from his memory.  She also interested herself, like Mrs. Purcell, in the publication