section_path: Life and career/Vienna/Marriage and children
section_name: Marriage and children
paragraph_text: Marriage and children
  
  After failing to win the hand of Aloysia Weber, who was now married to the actor and artist Joseph Lange, Mozart's interest shifted to the third daughter of the family, Constanze.
  
  The courtship did not go entirely smoothly; surviving correspondence indicates that Mozart and Constanze briefly broke up in April 1782, over an episode involving jealousy (Constanze had permitted another young man to measure her calves in a parlor game). Mozart also faced a very difficult task getting permission for the marriage from his father, Leopold.
  
  The marriage took place in an atmosphere of crisis. Daniel Heartz suggests that eventually Constanze moved in with Mozart, which would have placed her in disgrace by the mores of the time. Mozart wrote to Leopold on 31 July 1782, "All the good and well-intentioned advice you have sent fails to address the case of a man who has already gone so far with a maiden. Further postponement is out of the question." Heartz relates, "Constanze's sister Sophie had tearfully declared that her mother would send the police after Constanze if she did not return home." On 4 August, Mozart wrote to Baroness von Waldstätten, asking: "Can the police here enter anyone's house in this way? Perhaps it is only a ruse of Madame Weber to get her daughter back. If not, I know no better remedy than to marry Constanze tomorrow morning or if possible today."
  
  The couple were finally married on 4 August 1782 in St. Stephen's Cathedral, the day before his father's consenting letter arrived in the mail. In the marriage contract, Constanze "assigns to her bridegroom five hundred gulden which... the latter has promised to augment with one thousand gulden", with the total "to pass to the survivor". Further, all joint acquisitions during the marriage were to remain the common property of both.
  
  The couple had six children, of whom only two survived infancy: