Mozart for real

After reading two novels about Mozart (see here and here) I decided to switch to biography to see if I could find answers to my questions about what was true and what was fiction created by the authors. The book I chose was Mozart's Women by Jane Glover. I found this while searching on Amazon for books on Mozart; Jane Glover is the music director of Music of the Baroque here in Chicago, so I ordered it. I highly recommend this book. Glover's theme is Mozart's relationships with the women in his life, including opera characters, and his enlightened attitude toward women. She includes a lot of fascinating and in-depth biographical information and thoughtful discussion of Mozart's works and his process of writing music, in particular opera, as it developed over his life.

An interesting aspect of biographies is that they're not "the truth," but are actually a reflection of the time they are written in and the viewpoint of the author. When I first studied Mozart as a college music student, what I picked up about Mozart was that he was an incredible genius who was so removed from the world that he would never be touched by anything -- not by the scenery while traveling, not by the death of his children. The evidence for this was in the music he wrote. His father Leopold was a great man, though a lesser musician than his son, who gave up much to nurture this extraordinary talent. Constanze was a careless ditz, and it was a tragedy that Wolfgang had married her. Then came Amadeus, the play and the movie, and the popular view of Mozart became one of naive  potty-mouthed, immature, musical genius.

Glover agrees with other current biographers and paints Leopold as overbearing and unwilling to let go as Wolfgang grew up. Constanze was playful and a good partner to Wolfgang, and she turned out to be a smart manager, though she took over the finances too late to make a difference to her husband. Glover is clearly outraged by the unfair treatment Wolfgang's sister Nannerl received. A very talented musician, she toured with her brother until she was 19. At that time her father kept her home while Wolfgang continued his extraordinary career. This was in spite of the fact that a number of talented women at the time had successful musical careers as singers, pianists, and teachers.

Wolfgang Mozart himself is depicted as a serious musician, as well as an extraordinary one. He was extremely social and had a wide circle of friends all over Europe. An aspect of his musicianship and personality that surprised me was that he was known for his kindness and patience in working with the singers in his opera productions, including older singers who struggled with the parts he had written.

I was fascinated by the discussions about the writing of the operas and subsequent productions. Mozart was very involved in the libretto, working in partnership with his librettists, and expressed strong opinions about the themes and drama of the stories. The operas that he wrote with Lorenzo Da Ponte -- The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte -- were real partnerships that changed opera forever. Both the themes and the music were unlike other operas of the time, which seemed to have fallen into patterns that everyone expected. For example, composers wrote in a way that encouraged applause at the end of the overture and arias. In Abduction from the Seraglio, Mozart blends the end of the overture into the beginning of act one, removing the opportunity for applause. Likewise, the arias are woven into the dramatic action, focusing the audience's attention on the drama and reducing the chances of applause.

In music school, students study works of the past as fixed entities. While there are new, radical productions of operas and sometimes older works are adapted into new pieces, I always thought of the composer's original work as existing in an original fixed form. As musicians, we often think about honoring the composer's intentions by following what's in the score and learning about convention of the time. It was eye-opening for me, then, to read that Mozart regularly rewrote parts based on his singers' abilities. In some cases he had to make parts easier, for older or less talented singers. In other cases he added new arias to please a singer who wanted a bigger role. So this means that there are multiple versions of how some of his operas can be performed? I'm not that knowledgeable about opera, so I wonder what directors do with these choices today? Is there now a standardized version of each opera?

It appears that Mozart's Women contains so much interesting information and is such fun to read that I forgot my original intention of sorting truth from fiction. I did pick up some ideas that the Weber family was somewhat different that they were portrayed in Marrying Mozart. Mozart's Women paints a happier picture overall of the family than the novel does.

There is more to read -- fiction and nonfiction. That Mozart fascinates us is clear from the amount of other works generated by him and his life.

Mozart in fiction, part 2

After finishing Mozart's Last Aria, I moved backwards in time and read Marrying Mozart by Stephanie Cowell. This novel takes place beginning when Mozart was 21 years old in 1777 until he married Constanze in 1782. The Weber family and especially the four Weber daughters are the core of the story. However, the novel begins in 1842 when an Englishman, Vincent Novello, comes to visit the youngest Weber girl, Sophie, in hopes of learning more about Wolfgang Mozart. Sophie is by this time an old woman. This is similar in structure to Mozart's Last Aria, wherein Mozart's son comes to see his Aunt Nannerl and is given her journal to read. Sophie both talks with Novello and gives him some letters to read. This helps explain how we can see the story from viewpoints of each of the Weber daughters and sometimes Wolfgang. Short conversations between Sophia and Novello set off the sections of the book.

This is a lively story that includes quite a bit of historical fact. Mozart did woo Aloysia Weber, who became a well-known opera singer. She jilted him and he eventually married the next youngest, Constanze. The oldest sister, Josefa, was also a successful opera singer. Mozart wrote the Queen of the Night part in The Magic Flute for her.

Besides the Weber family, including father Fridolin and mother Maria Caecilia, Mozart's friend Joseph Leutgeb is included as an important secondary character. Leutgeb was an outstanding horn player for whom Mozart wrote his four horn concertos. Wolfgang's parents and sister are also characters in the story, both in person and through letters (They were a great letter-writing family.) Other real-life characters include Padre Martini, who Mozart had met in Italy as a boy; Joseph Haydn, and Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, who employed both Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart in Salzburg and with whom Wolfgang had repeated run-ins.

All of the settings -- Vienna, Salzburg, Mannheim -- felt authentic. The musical evenings at the Webers also rang very true. It is known that the Mozart family hosted friends for evenings of music making; probably this was common at the time among both professional and amateur musicians. (Those evenings sound like so much fun that I wish we could revive the idea.) Some parts of the plot did not feel true to me, though I won't disclose them and spoil the story. The author has created clear personalities for each of the characters; some, like Maria Caecilia Weber and the horn player Leutgeb, I felt were probably close to what they had been like in life, based on what I already knew about them. Others I believe are more the authors' creation. In both novels -- Marrying Mozart and Mozart's Last Aria -- Wolfgang Mozart comes across as a serious, thoughtful young man. As I read the book I wished that the author had either identified the pieces she referred to more clearly or included a list of all the pieces with Köchel numbers.

I was not familiar with Stephanie Cowell before coming across this novel, but I learned from her website that she has written a number of historical novels. She was an opera singer for a time and did considerable research on Mozart. She has written quite a few post for Wonders and Marvels, including this one, on Mozart, Salieri, and the movie Amadeus. Marrying Mozart has recently been adapted into an opera and performed in New York.

Mozart in fiction, part 1

Back in January I wrote a post about the Mozart family. Part of the post was about the novels (and one movie) that the various Mozarts inspired, including several titled Mozart's Sister. Wolfgang Mozart and his family seem to attract novelists, more than any other classical musician. Following that post, I decided to look for and read these Mozart novels. In writing about them here I won't be revealing any spoilers. I want to look at how the characters, especially the Mozart family members, are portrayed; who the other historical characters are and their relationship to Wolfgang, and how much of the novel is historical fact.

The first novel that I read was Mozart's Last Aria by Matt Rees. Rees is known as a crime novelist and has used his expertise to write a suspenseful story. The novel takes place after Wolfgang's death and he appears only in his music and others' recollections. His sister Nannerl is the main character. The story is presented as a flashback, with Mozart's younger son Franz Xaver, also known as Wolfgang Amadeus the son, visiting his aged aunt Nannerl. She gives him a mysterious book, which turns out to be a diary of a few weeks in her life right after Wolfgang died. The rest of the novel is the story Nannerl tells of those weeks, with a final scene back in her home with Franz Xaver.

At the time of his death, Wolfgang and Nannerl had been estranged for a number of years. Wolfgang had left Salzburg and his family to live and work in Vienna, where he married Constanze. Nannerl had stayed to care for their father Leopold and eventually married an older man and moved to St. Gilgen, a small, remote town. Their break had to do with the reception Leopold and Nannerl gave Wolfgang's wife and the fact that Leopold left everything to Nanerl in his will. All of this is fact.

In Mozart's Last Aria, Nannerl receives a letter from Constanze informing her of Wolfgang's death and also that he thought he was poisoned. Telling her husband that she needs to pay her last respects to her brother, Nannerl travels to Vienna to try to determine what really happened.

A number of historical people figure into the plot. Wolfgang's widow Constanze Weber Mozart is naturally an important character. Baron van Swieten, who was one of Wolfgang's strongest supporters, plays an integral role. Since The Magic Flute was one of Mozart's last works, the people associated with that production appear regularly. These include the impresario Emanuel Schikaneder who wrote the libretto for The Magic Flute, and the actor and writer Karl Gieseke. Gieseke (or Giesecke) was a cast member in the premiere of The Magic Flute. He also translated several of Mozart's operas into German from Italian. He later left music and Austria to become a minerologist in Greenland and then a professor in Ireland. Other musicians in the story include Anton Stadler, for whom Mozart wrote his clarinet concerto and clarinet quintet, and Maria Theresia von Paradies, a blind concert pianist and singer.

Matt Rees gives background in his Author's Note about which events are historically true and what he changed for the plot. (He also includes a listing of the pieces that are referred to in the novel.) One of these altered facts is that Nannerl never visited Vienna after her brother's death. In order not to reveal too much of the plot, I refer you to the novel and the Author's Note for the rest.

Another afterword discusses how Rees came to write this novel. The plot is structured on Mozart's Piano Sonata in A Minor, K. 310, which he wrote shortly after his mother died.  As I read the book, the beginning drew me into the story, showing Nannerl's quiet life in the country filled with disappointment and unfulfilled hopes. She learns of her brother's death from Constanze's disturbing note and sits down to play the first movement, which mirrors her unease. The second part of the novel, set in Vienna, became confusing for me as Nannerl learned more and more about her brother's life, work, and associates. Many mysterious events and conversations occurred and I felt is was quite dark. For Rees, this is the Andante Cantabile second movement; this movement begins and ends calmly but has a darker, tumultuous section in the middle. When I reached the final part of the novel, the disparate threads began to come together and make sense as many of Nannerl's questions were answered. The third movement of the piano sonata is a Presto that comes to a rousing and satisfying conclusion while staying in the minor key.

I enjoyed this book. I recommend it especially if you like mysteries, classical music and Mozart, historical fiction, and Vienna.