from a person who wished his identity to remain unknown—­he was subsequently discovered to be a nobleman, who wanted to produce the work as his own—­Mozart already felt the hand of death upon him and declared that he was composing the Requiem for his own obsequies.  Even after he was obliged to take to his bed, he worked at it, saying it was to be his Requiem and must be ready in time.  The afternoon before he died, he went over the completed portions with three friends, and at the Lachrymosa burst into tears.  In the evening he lost consciousness, and early the following morning, December 5, 1791, he passed away.  The immediate cause of death was rheumatic fever with typhoid complications, and his distracted widow, hoping to catch the same disease and be carried away by it, threw herself upon his bed.  She was too prostrated to attend his funeral, which, be it said to the shame of his friends, was a shabby affair.  The day was stormy, and after the service indoors they left before the actual burial, which was in one of the “common graves,” holding ten or twelve bodies and intended to be worked over every few years for new interments.  When, as soon as Constance was strong enough, she visited the cemetery there was a new grave-digger, who upon being questioned could not locate her husband’s grave, and to this day Mozart’s last resting-place is unknown.

It must not be reckoned against Constance that, eighteen years after Mozart’s death, she married again.  For she did not forget the man on whom her heart first was set.  Her second husband, Nissen, formerly Danish charge d’affaires in Vienna, is best known by the biography of Mozart which he wrote under her guidance.  They removed to Mozart’s birthplace, Salzburg, where Nissen died in 1826.  Constance’s death was strangely associated with Mozart’s memory.  It was as if in her last moments she must go back to him who was her first love.  For she died in Salzburg, on March 6, 1842, a few hours after the model for the Mozart monument, which adorns one of the spacious squares of the city where the composer was born, was received there.  She had been the life-love of a child of genius and, without being singularly gifted herself, had understood how to humor his whims and adapt herself to his moods in which sunshine often was succeeded by shadow.  It was singularly appropriate that, surviving him many years, she yet died under circumstances which formed a new link between her and his memory.

Beethoven and his “Immortal Beloved”

One day when Baron Spaun, an old Viennese character and a friend of Beethoven’s, entered the composer’s lodgings, he found the man, every line of whose face denoted, above all else, strength of character, bending over a portrait of a woman and weeping, as he muttered, “You were too good, too angelic!” A moment later, he had thrust the portrait into an old chest and, with a toss of his well-set head, was his usual self again.