Mozart’s Wife

Summary

Giddy sugarplum? Calculating shrew? Mozart's biographers show disdain for his Konstanze, and she aroused strong feelings among her contemporaries. Her in-laws loathed her; his friends, more than forty years after his death, remained eager to gossip about her “failures” as wife to the world’s first superstar. Maturing from child, to wife, to hardheaded widow, Konstanze paid her husband’s debts, provided for their children, and relentlessly marketed and mythologized her brilliant husband. Mozart’s letters attest to his affection for Konstanze as well as to their powerful sexual bond. Yet the question remains: Why did she never mark his grave?