before he married the real Constance; and this has led many people to believe that he took the younger sister out of pique, because he had been rejected by Aloysia.  Whoever believes this has a very superficial acquaintance with Mozart’s biography.  Five years had passed since he had parted from Aloysia at Munich.  The youthful affair had blown over; and when they met again in Vienna she was Frau Lange.  Mozart’s marriage with Constance was a genuine love-match.  It was bitterly opposed by his father, who never became wholly reconciled to the woman of his son’s choice, and met with no favor from her mother.  Fridolin Weber had died.  Altogether the omens were unfavorable, and there were obstacles enough to have discouraged any but the most ardent couple.  So much for the pique story.

Mozart went to Vienna in 1781 with the Archbishop of Salzburg, by whom, however, he was treated with such indignity that he left his service.  Whom should he find in Vienna but his old friends the Webers!  Frau Weber was glad enough of the opportunity to let lodgings to Mozart, for, as in Mannheim and Munich, the family was in straitened circumstances.  As soon as the composer’s father heard of this arrangement, he began to expostulate.  Finally Mozart changed his lodgings; but this step had the very opposite effect hoped for by Leopold Mozart, for separation only increased the love that had sprung up between the young people since they had met again in Vienna, and Mozart had found the little fourteen-year-old girl of his Mannheim visit grown to young womanhood.

There seems little doubt that the Webers, with the exception of Constance, were a shiftless lot.  They had drifted from place to place and had finally come to Vienna, because Aloysia had moved there with her husband.  When Mozart finally decided to marry Constance, come what might, he wrote his father a letter which shows that his eyes were wide open to the faults of the family, and by the calm, almost judicial, manner in which he refers to the virtues of his future wife, that his was no hastily formed attachment, based merely on superficial attractions.

He does not spare the family in his analysis of their traits.  If he seems ungallant in his references to his future Queen of the Night and to the prima donna of his “Elopement from the Seraglio,” to say nothing of his former attachment for her, one must remember that this is a letter from a son to a father, in which frankness is permissible.  He admits the intemperance and shrewishness of the mother; characterizes Josepha as lazy and vulgar; calls Aloysia a malicious person and coquette; dismisses the youngest, Sophie, as too young to be anything but simply a good though thoughtless creature.  Surely not an attractive picture and not a family one would enter lightly.