Articles
When Music is the Muse
— Susanne Dunlap, author of Emilie’s Voice, Liszt’s Kiss, and The Musician’s Daughter
Historical Novels Review, Issue 44, May 2008
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The magazine the article was published in. |
As biographical subjects, musicians are no different from any other historical characters except perhaps—with a few exceptions—in being less generally familiar to a wide audience. Yet in recreating the world of even the most famous and familiar of musicians or composers, writers face a unique difficulty. Namely, how does music look on the page? I don’t mean in the form of a score, a kind of coded communication that is meant to be interpreted by a proficient into a unique, temporal-aural experience. I mean simply this: how does a historical soundscape translate into material that forms part of a created world in historical fiction? […]
Rita Charbonnier’s work as a pianist and natural affinity for Mozart’s compositions served as a starting point for her work, yet it was discovering that the maestro had a less well-known but extremely talented older sister that got her creative imagination in gear. […] Nannerl Mozart and the frustrations and limitations of her sex are the central themes of Mozart’s Sister, yet the author felt that her primary challenge lay in how to approach the character of Mozart himself. “I had to decide precisely where to draw the line between reality and fiction. I didn’t know whether I should best wear the restorer’s hat, filling in missing parts of the painting and attempting to reproduce it exactly as it was before; or the architect’s, building a new construction on the pillars of the old one. In the end I chose the latter, but only after much emotional deliberation.”
A scene between the distraught and depressed Nannerl, who has just been told she must stay at home and give piano lessons to support the family while her father and brother travel to Italy, and the younger, impetuous Mozart, illustrates both the character of Mozart as Charbonnier imagined him and his relationship with his sister:
“I tried to persuade him,” he murmured after a long sigh, “but you know perfectly well it’s impossible. What was I to do? Refuse to go myself?”
He seemed to perceive in her a sign of assent but it was only his imagination, because Nannerl did not move.
“I thought about it, but then concluded that no one, in my shoes, would have done that. Think about it: Should I give up an opportunity so great for my career, for my very life? Mot even you, in my place, would have—come on, admit it.”
She rolled over, creating an abyss between herself and those words.
The boy then decided to be more honest. “I can’t stay in this provincial place, Nannerl. Truly, I can’t. Life here is nothing but a repetition of tired ballets for a crowd of stupid rich people. There is so much new music inside me—and I know that I’ll only be able to pour it out in the freedom of the wider world.”
Perhaps she had made herself temporarily deaf.
This difficulty with very famous historical figures is universal: how to overcome the entrenched images and strong, emotional attachment readers have to a character they feel they already know. Those who love Mozart might find it distasteful to see him as an ambitious, self-occupied boy who, while sympathetic with his sister, had his eyes fixed firmly ahead on his career. Charbonnier solved this problem—as many do—by focusing not so much on the famous character, but on the less well-known real people around him. Mozart emerges as a convincing, flesh-and-blood personality in Mozart’s Sister, yet our sympathies are really with the repressed Nannerl. […]
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Portrait of Nannerl Mozart at twelve years of age. |
But the question of the music itself remains, of the degree to which it is even possible to convey in words how it threaded through the lives of composers and musicians in previous centuries. Indeed, Charbonnier confessed that although her approach ended up as much a result of instinct as consciousness, she knew that, to write the portrait of Nannerl she had to “…try to express the power of music and its ability to transform the emotions and communicate them in a way that is both universal and subjective at the same time. In short, I absolutely could not skirt around the problem.”
Charbonnier was fortunate to have skills at her disposal that helped her truly enter into Nannerl’s world of music. As she herself describes her process of putting the music into the written words: “I remember writing the page about Fantasia KV 397, a piece from Mozart that I particularly love. I wanted the act of playing it to pacify Nannerl with her illusions of the past and to make her understand things that Wolfgang had said to her, but that she hadn’t wanted to hear at the time. So I programmed my stereo to replay the CD continuously, then I sat on the sofa, which is right next to the piano, with my laptop on the piano stool and the score of the Fantasia propped up on a chair. Listening to the music coming from the speakers and looking at the notes on the score from time to time, I scribbled down visual and emotional images just as they came to me; then I’d stop the CD, get up and play a few passages on the piano, then go back and note down what came to mind, crying my eyes out as I did it… This was essentially the method by which I transferred musical experience to the written page.”
And the result is a verbal fantasia that draws the reader in just as the music draws in a listener:
Suddenly a violent cascade of sound invades the entire space, and the hands speed along the keyboard, from one end to the other, crossing, and then two spaced-out chords, and an unlikely finale, which overturns every premise. It’s a game, barefoot children chasing a ball who stick out their tongue at you, or a carillon that enjoys its own insolence and hammers you with those sharp sounds: and you think, before the piece ends, we’ll have to go back to the beginning. We’ll have to return to sorrow and, so, close the circle…
The greatest potential of music to convey something on the printed page perhaps lies in this power to move a listener. […]
But music itself—does it matter? Is it sufficiently important in history to warrant thinking about for itself, for what it shaped or reflected that can illuminate a period? […] While tales of wars and battles, political upheavals and momentous discoveries have involved women in peripheral ways, there is a special relationship between women and music that acts, in my view, like a microcosm of history. As Charbonnier illustrates so poignantly in her novel, women could have the same talent, the same ineffable feeling about music, the same skill at execution, and yet be prevented from realizing their potential by societal strictures that said, “ladies must not play the violin, or exhibit themselves in public, or compete with men.” […]
I think it is the fact that music has been both empowering to women and illustrative of their limitations that has drawn me to the history of music not just as a scholar but as a writer of fiction. The challenges of putting the experience of music as a listener and a performer on the page are many. […]
Perhaps the most rewarding outcome of writing any book is to discover that someone is affected by it in a positive way. One chance comment by a blogger, who said she was inspired to start playing the piano again after reading Liszt’s Kiss, made the entire difficult, lengthy process of writing, editing and publicizing worthwhile to me. Ultimately, the goal of historical fiction is to bring some aspect of history to living, breathing now on the page. If a reader can not only see the settings, feel the textures of the costumes, smell the food or the ordure, feel the pain of a sword wound or the exhilaration of a sea breeze, but hear the music that underlined the characters’ lives, then that little part of the past has been appreciated in a new way.
I hope many more authors tackle musical subjects in the future. Welcome! There are hundreds and hundreds of stories waiting to be told.
