Mozart had dragged himself through Christmas, and the cold months which followed, seeing his lost love in every petite woman, feeling that the whole thing must have been a mistake and that any day Aloysia would appear at his door, eyes cast down, modestly dressed. He saw her dressed like his mother, in a gray-flocked gown as plain as a nun’s. He saw how he would take her to his bed, losing at last his wretched and unwanted sexual innocence. He went to sleep in the room he shared with the cellist thinking of it, and woke to find it was not so. Here he was in Vienna, where Haydn had sung as a chorister, where Gluck had the performance of his radiant Orfeo and Euridice, where the Emperor walked daily in the parks, but he made little of the music he wished to make and seldom performed where he wished to perform.

He saw none of the Webers. Sophie had sent him a handkerchief that had been her father’s, with the initials FFW embroidered on it. He looked at it from time to time with distant tenderness, but he had no desire to see her, even to thank her for her kindness. He was too ashamed, and he was in no mood for Carnival.

One day as he was drinking coffee and reading the news journal at a coffee and pastry house, Leutgeb, with his round, youthful face, slipped into the empty chair beside him. “We never see you,” he said. “My wife hardly believes you exist; my baby is sure you do not.”

“I do exist.”

“But not well?”

“Not very well. How are you, my friend?”

“Why, married life suits me! I sell a great deal of cheese, and play my horn wherever I can. Sometimes I wonder where are the concerti my friend Wolfgang promised me. Then when I find I am covered with cobwebs from standing so long contemplating this question, I look him up in a Viennese pastry and coffee house to find out. Where are the concerti, my friend?”

Mozart shrugged and looked down into the coffee grounds.

“Never mind, I’ll wait a bit longer. Look! Some old friends are here, and we’re going to the puppet show at Madame Godl’s krippenspiel. If you can get away, come with us. They’re longing to go. It’s crowded, but the puppets are a marvel. Come on.”

The theater was long, with an intricate puppet stage at one end. The four friends crammed into the narrow, hard benches like schoolboys. Mozart gazed at the three-dimensional backdrop of Jerusalem. The harpsichordist who banged away in a corner was a poor musician Mozart had met as a boy. He heard one of his own divertimento tunes and sat straight up. “That’s yours, you ass,” Leutgeb said. “Don’t you know how much of your music is played? They steal it before you sneeze.”

They spoke loudly above the noise of housewives, a few ladies in masks to conceal their identity at such a low form of entertainment, and many stomping schoolboys waiting for the performance. “What have you been doing here besides playing His Grace’s church music and mourning, Mozart? Are you writing music of any sort, since you are not doing so for me?”

“Yes I am!” he burst out. “But what good does it do? I wanted to perform something of mine at Countess Thun’s the other evening (the Emperor was there), but my Archbishop needed me to play for his convalescing father, so I gave a piano/violin sonata for the dismal old man, and that was that. And I dare not even let him see my anger.”

“And so you shut yourself up.”

Mozart did not reply; he gazed at the marionettes that he could make out from his seat, so large and lifelike, but wooden. How odd the way they jerked and danced when their strings were pulled! Could they feel in their own way? I am one of them, he thought suddenly. Slowly, beginning with the fingertips, I am turning to wood.

Then the play began, and they saw the capture of Jerusalem. The walls fell. Cannons sparked real sparks and smoke filled the theater; in the haze marionette citizens jerked to their deaths, and marionette Romans jerked to their victory. He had seen puppets as a boy, and not particularly liked them, but the banging on the floor and the shouting and everyone choking on the smoke and weeping over the fall of Jerusalem was infectious, and he leapt up, shouting with the rest, suddenly flooded with happiness. To write theater pieces, to write operas, he thought. To write the sort of music he wanted to write, to be free.

The schoolboys trod on his toes going out, and the harpsichordist ran after him, and cried, “Give my regards to your dear sister.” Jerusalem had fallen, and the assistants were cleaning up for the next performance, for which a line was already forming.

The four young men stood in the street. From every direction came the sound of Carnival. “Let’s have a beer and supper,” Leutgeb said.

In the beer cellar a flautist was trying in vain to play above the talking. Now Mozart felt his sadness return, drank a great deal of beer, and was silent. “Idiot,” Leutgeb said to him. “Arsehole. I’ve spoken to you twice, and you don’t reply. We’ve been here for two hours; now it’s time to go, and you’ve never been such tedious company.”

Mozart replied, “Sorry, I’m turning to wood. My heart’s gone already. There you have it. At the next performance of the krippenspiel, look, and you’ll find me hanging with the other marionettes.” He stood up in a sudden fury. “That’s it,” he cried, “that’s it.”

The flautist stopped for a moment to see who was shouting, then resumed. “Sit down,” someone called, “are you going to make a speech? Are you going to drink the Emperor’s health?”

But Mozart continued, “I am turning to wood. I must go and speak to my saintly employer. You’ll excuse me. I’m going now before it’s too late.”

Leutgeb cried, “Tonight, on the eve before Lent? Tonight, past the hour of nine?”

“Nevertheless.” He pulled his friends to their feet, and Leutgeb ran back to pay the bill, then hurried up the steps two at a time to join the others. They stood a street away from Michaelerkirche, with its sandstone fallen angels, and turned toward the palace by the cathedral. The winds from the river and woodlands rose, blowing through the town. “Madman, madman ...” the others cried to Mozart. A guard looked at them carefully, then motioned them on with disgust. The gaslights shone on the stone work of the elegant houses.

Two sentries stood before the palace. “Wait here,” Mozart said unsteadily to his friends. “I’ll be a short while. You wait.” He walked forward, looking over his shoulder at them as they stood with folded arms, shaking their heads.

Inside the palace the chamberlain motioned him on up the great stairway and then down the hall. Count Arco was walking toward him, carrying a lamp and a goblet of wine in blue molded glass. “Where are you going, Mozart?”

“His Princely Grace wishes to see me.”

“He mentioned no such thing to me. Well, go on. He’ll be at his prayers.”

The house was dark, for most of the candles had been extinguished. “No one comes now,” said the chamberlain, opening the bedchamber door and announcing the composer. There was a grunt and a muffled response, and Mozart was waved inside.

The room was papered in red damask, with bed hangings of the same weighty material. The enormous dark wood canopy bed could have slept a workman’s family. The ceiling was high and parqueted with angels, who seemed ready to fall down to the carpet at any moment. His Holiness was already in his dressing gown and nightcap for the evening, drinking wine before a great roaring fire. His face seemed like a withered apple, his eyes even smaller. “Mozart, it’s you,” he said. “What’s so important that you must see me at this late hour?”

“I wish to thank you for your kindness to me, and to say that, with much regret, I have decided to leave your service.”

The Archbishop threw up his hands. “What,” he cried. “You interrupt my preparation for rest with such nonsense when you have eaten my bread this past year? You brat, you idiot! I have borne with you too long. One can see you’re not grateful to serve me. Where is your gratitude? Why did I let your father persuade me to hire you?”

“Well then, Your Grace is not satisfied with me?”

“Idiot, there is the door. Go.”

“For Jesus sake, do not leave his service,” Mozart’s father had written weeks before when Mozart had confided to him his unhappiness. “The Archbishop has borne with your wanderings and mine own and took you back again only at my pleading. If you go once more, it will be the last time; I fear it. Where shall you go away from him? One cannot make a meal and roof of dreams, my son....”

The words spilled from him over the crackling of the fire and into the seeping cold corners of the room. “Very good, my lord, the conditions suit us both, for as much as you want nothing to do with me, I want nothing to do with you either. If I never have to see your face again, it will be too soon.”

At that the Archbishop rose, knocking over the wine by his side, and screamed, “Out, out.” The dark red liquid spilled down his robe and spread across the floor. The veins in the older man’s forehead stood out as he seized the bell and rang it violently. Several footmen came running; another door burst open, and Count Arco, also in his dressing gown, rushed in.

“Remove this brat,” said the churchman.

Count Arco cried, “What have you done now, you impudent puppy, you knave? What disturbance have you made?” He seized Mozart by the arm and shoved him from the ornate bedchamber. Followed by the pale footmen, composer and Count half-dragged each other down the stairs to the great palace doors. Mozart felt the Count’s kick from behind and tumbled into the street. He stumbled to his feet again with a cry of outrage and rushed back toward the footmen who stood between him and the figure of the retreating assailant, the nobleman’s pale satin dressing gown glimmering as he faded into the recesses of the round receiving hall. “What? Will you run off, you coward?” Mozart shouted into the echoing hall.

Someone grabbed his arms from behind. Astonished, he turned to face his musician friends. “Leutgeb, you ass, let me go!” he shouted. “I’m going to kill him.”

“No, you idiot!” Leutgeb cried, shaking his head. “Come away while you have a whole skin. We shouldn’t have let you go there. What did you say to your august employer? What could you have said?”

“I told him to kiss my arse, in so many words.”

“What? Actually said it, came near it? Don’t you know how dangerous that is? Why did you do it?”

“I am Mozart,” he said hoarsely.

“And you’ll be Mozart in a prison getting a good beating, believe me! Didn’t you hear what happened to that fellow who struck a nobleman? Nobility has all the privileges to behave badly; we have none. Disgusting, and this with a reforming Emperor on the throne. ”

Mozart shook them off, his voice gruff and ashamed. “Well then, go home, fool, idiot, ass. I’ll do as I like.” The three wind players had half-dragged him around the corner, where they slapped some cold fountain water at him and then dipped his face in it. “That’s it,” Leutgeb said. “I’ve got a horn lesson to give at dawn, and so do the rest of us. Keep your temper, Wolfgang. Don’t you know now’s not the time to let it out? Go to sleep and think about mending your bridges; you’re meant to walk across them, not burn them down. Will you now?”

“Yes, good night,” he said, for the water had sobered him, and he walked, dripping, back toward the cathedral square by the light of the still-burning lamps. But when he returned to the palace door, he saw that his trunks had been brought down and set on the street. All his clothing and his music lay in a heap, the symphony he had written in Paris folded up into his wind band music. Out of curiosity, a few people from houses nearby had opened their windows, only to see a servant fling down onto the pile a single shoe and two books. Impudent puppy and knave, the Count had called him. He would have liked to go back and beat him. “My God, the bastard, the bastard,” he muttered again and again. “To set me loose like this, as if I were some felon ... my God, my God. So this is what it comes to....”

“Do not leave his service for God’s sake,” his father had concluded the letter. “What security have you? You don’t know how to scrape; you don’t know how to bow. I have never doubted your gifts, but without these other attributes you are lost.”

“Dearest Father,” he thought now, composing his reply. “You’ve made me what I am, and I must be what I am. If I starve, sell what music I’ve written, but I must try, I must try. I can’t believe that God has created me to be a second-rate church composer, only doing what this small-minded clergyman wishes. I’ll write masses, great masses, great symphonies, and I shall write opera.”

But for now, at eleven o’clock at night, Mozart sat on one of his two trunks near Stephansdom, its one exquisite high spire reaching to heaven. He had no place in the city to go.