The Mozart Forum
— Rita Charbonnier. Unfinished portrait of Mozart by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange
If you are a lover of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music then you will probably be familiar with the Mozart Forum, a wonderful site dealing with the life and works of the great master. You can exchange information and make contact with experts in the field and ask them questions. I recommend any Mozart fan to go and have a look.
Some time ago there was a debate about which is the best Mozart biography available on the market. A Spanish user sparked off the topic and then at a certain point she switched the debate to historical novels with this posting:
I have lately seen in internet this book, but I am always afraid and I usually get upset of the novels based on real history, because sometimes one doesn’t know what is invented and what is not. Do you know it? It’s Rita Charbonnier’s “Nannerl, Mozart’s sister”.
This is the curt response from Anne-Louise Luccarini (note the Italian surname).
Rita Charbonnier’s book is an extremely highly-coloured romantic novel, with very little historical or biographical accuracy, I’d be tempted to say none.
(The bold was present in the original text).
Real history. Historical or biographical accuracy. What does this mean? I’ve already discussed the issue but, to summarise, I believe that it’s impossible to create an image of a historical character that will please everybody, fans and experts alike. And that applies not only to fiction but even to essays which claim to tell “the truth”. The views of expert historians are quite often very different and even on the Mozart Forum there has been some heated debate about what Mozart’s father, Leopold, and Mozart’s wife, Constanze Weber, were like. As far as I know it was impossible to reach any kind of consensus.
When I was researching my second novel La strana giornata di Alexandre Dumas (published in Italian) I came across the French-Canadian journalist and writer Maurice Constantin-Weyer. He was born in 1881 and died in 1964. He won the Prix Goncourt in 1928 and wrote 54 books including the novel L’aventure vécue de Dumas père. This is what he wrote in the preface:
Many eminent critics despise biographical novels as a genre – and what biography does not have something of the novel in it – saying that they are “false”. I have to confess that I do not understand the term “false”. […] For someone who has lived through two world wars and communications relating to them and for someone who spent many years in a newspaper office, the idea of a factual report loses all credibility. It becomes suspect. Any communication can serve opposing objectives. Any one piece of information can be true in twenty different ways. […] And can we be sure that an absolute truth really exists anyway? The older I get the harder it becomes to accept the idea.
It goes without saying that I agree with him.
