Press Coverage
Her so-called life
— Wynne Delacoma in Chicago Sun-Times, 04 November 2007
What to make of the sudden interest in Nannerl Mozart, the immortal Wolfgang’s hitherto relatively obscure older sister? Over the past three years, no fewer than three historical novels, each titled Mozart’s Sister, have been issued.
Two, by Alison Bauld and Nancy Moser, are paperbacks; the most recent, by Italian film and TV screenwriter Rita Charbonnier, is a hardcover issued this month by Crown.
The story of Nannerl – christened Maria Anna and born in 1751, four and a half years before her brother – has always had a certain drama. A hugely gifted keyboard player and incipient composer, she was trotted around Europe along with Wolfgang by their ambitious father, Leopold, playing for nobility including the Austrian Emperor Joseph and Empress Maria Theresa. But as Nannerl moved into her teens, Leopold decided Wolfgang was more likely to bring his family the fame and fortune Leopold craved. Nannerl was left behind, and soon fell out of contact with the brother, who had once been her closest friend and confidant.
Nannerl settled into a life as a music teacher in provincial Salzburg and, at age 32, married a wealthy civil servant. They lived in a mountain hamlet near Salzburg; where she,raised his five children by a previous marriage as well as three of their own. After Wolfgang’s death in 1791, Nannerl worked on collecting and preserving her brother’s manuscripts. Her thoughts about her own life are barely revealed in a handful of surviving letters and a diary mainly given over to the bare facts of the day.
You don’t have to be a feminist to infer that Nannerl was a victim of sexism. Young women with her kind of musical talent did have a shot at professional careers in 18th century Europe. Acclaimed female singers and keyboard players could be found on the stages of Nannerl’s native Austria and Europe’s’. musical capitals. But when the tyrannical Leopold decreed that Nannerl’s performing career was over, for whatever reasons, she acquiesced.
If you want to learn more about the real Nannerl, her mother and the female friends, lovers and musicians who enriched the life and art of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, pick up a copy of Mozart’s Women, published in 2005 by HarperCollins. This engagingly written, thoroughly researched nonfiction book by conductor Jane Glover takes us inside the hearts and minds of not only the real women who passed through Mozart’s life, but also the unforgettable female characters who populate his operas.
If, however, you would rather not let the facts get in the way of a rip-snortin’ good story, you might prefer Charbonnier’s Mozart’s Sister. She takes the basic outline of Nannerl’s life – including a brief involvement with a potential suitor, an Austrian military man named Franz d’Ippold in 1777 – and fills it out with a zesty combination of modern feminist consciousness and the sights and sounds of the traditional romance novel.
Some of it is irritatingly formulaic. Like any Victorian heroine worth her smelling salts, Charbonnier’s Nannerl takes to her bed for days in times of crisis. Wrestling with her own unhappiness, she finds release in taming an unruly horse. She flees into the forest to brood.
But Charbonnier is a pianist as well as a writer, and she has a real understanding of a true musician’s burning need to make music. She plots the arc of Nannerl’s life with flair, building it around an exchange of imagined letters between the handsome, sympathetic d’Ippold and a passionate, open-hearted Nannerl.
It was a pleasure to read Charbonnier’s concoction of a network of support for Nannerl — a sympathetic Salzburg priest who advises Leopold to nurture his young daughter’s gifts as a composer, a suitor who values Nannerl’s sharp tongue, even when it cuts his own thick hide. And a happy ending — who wouldn’t wish that for the little girl who once performed in glittering royal courts only to be shunted aside for a favored younger brother?
Life can be unfair, but Charbonnier’s novel is a satisfying attempt to smooth out Nannerl Mozart’s playing field.
Wynne Delacoma in Chicago Sun-Times, November 4th, 2007
