Giddy sugarplum or calculating bitch? Mozart's many biographers (from Schenk to Hildesheimer to Solomon) show little love for his Constanze.

Mozart's wife aroused strong feelings among her contemporaries, too. Her in-laws despised her. Mozart's Viennese friends, as much as forty years after his death, remained eager to gossip about her. Nonetheless, Mozart's personal letters attest both to his affection for Constanze and to their powerful sexual bond.

She bore six children (four died in infancy), while presiding over the unsteady domestic establishment of the world's first superstar. She shared his slide into the fast, loose fringes of the Viennese musical world. Maturing from child, to wife, to hard-headed widow, Constanze paid her husband's debts, provided for their children, and relentlessly marketed and mythologized her brilliant husband.