Mozart's Birthday, 2021

~~Juliet Waldron

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When I began Mozart's Wife, I was madly in love with the composer's music--which conflated to being in love with the man himself. His youthful music is so sensual, so bright and shiny, so full of optimism--it probably sounds like what the flowers must sing to lure the bees. it is green leaf and blue sky music--just the kind to accompany springtime and young love.

Mozart's Wife began like that, full of the romance that bloomed between Mozart and his Stanzi Marie. Pop songs from my own teen years filled my head while I wrote--songs which were likewise full of longing and desire, ones like "I think we're alone now" as the lovers seek a hiding place in which to express their body longings.  

"Little sister don't you do what your big sister done" was the song in Mozart's head, I'm sure, for he'd first loved Stanzi Marie's big sister, Aloysia. This pretty, talented young woman instead  had given herself to an aristocrat who obtained for her the prima donna's roles she craved.

Mozart's height of popularity is on the horizon. He and Stanzi marry, overcoming his father's objections. He composes operas for the court theater and is welcome at the soirees of the rich and famous. Stanzi, hitherto her family's Cinderella, shares in this--she has clothes, maids, lovely apartments, parties--all the perks of having a successful husband. 

Babies come, as they do. A "Blessed event" used to be the euphemism. In the 18th Century, however, childbirth was "travail," a danger through which women passed with trepidation. If she was both lucky and healthy, she might escape unscathed, but death in childbirth was a real hazard. (In my own experience, a gentle, kind family friend disappeared from my childhood when she died in hospital (1953) three days after an apparently uneventful childbirth.) Back in the 18th Century, which had no knowledge of hygiene or germ theory, midwives and doctors alike transmitted puerperal fever and other forms of sepsis from one new mother to another. 

Mozart concealed his acute, feminine sensitivity within his music, only expressing these culturally forbidden aspects of his personality through the female characters in his operas. Although the plots toe the patriarchal line-- i.e., his opera, Cosi fan Tutte--So do they all--these weak women--he certainly endows his female characters with engaging, memorable personalities. There are heroic women, conventional women, mad women, love-sick women, as well as power-hungry, manipulative women, women of wit, of humor and admirable gumption. 

Like his wickedest creation, the rake, Don Giovanni, Mozart knows and loves them all. Once I understood that about him, even the episodes where I conjecture infidelity on his part, have a certain inevitability about them. 

While writing Mozart's Wife, I discovered I did not want to take sides. I understood and loved both my leading characters. 

So Mozart does what men of his century were permitted, stabbing Stanzi to the heart. Being a woman of spirit, and comforted and advised by her cynical sister Aloysia, she hardens her heart and pursues an amour her own.  

In this section of the novel, I moved onto fictional ground, although plenty of rumors from which I drew my inspiration are recorded in letters and diaries of the contemporaries. Meanwhile, there are operas and orchestral pieces being written, some with no buyer in sight, created simply because Mozart's evolving genius compels him. At the same time, there was less recognition and they were falling headlong into debt; there was no stability for the little family. Despair over his faltering fortunes sends Mozart to the bottle.

Babies are born and die, famous and infamous real life characters pass through their lives--Lorenzo DaPonte, the renegade Italian priest and lyricist for Mozart's big three--Cosi fan Tutte, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro--as well as the real life Casanova. There is also a large cast of musicians, male and female, who sing or play his music. Some were friends, some were false. Some were lovers--of both his music and of the man. And all through these years immortal music was being written.  

While writing Mozart's Wife, I discovered I could not take sides. I understood and loved both my leading characters, despite their failures and flaws. I hope, if you read Mozart's Wife, you will too.

Here is a group of Mozart fans from twenty years ago, at the yearly birthday party I used to have for my hero. We drank syllabub and champagne and consumed all manner of party goodies. We swapped stories that we'd read about Mozart all while listening to his blissful music. Dear friends!

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang Amadeus!

~~Juliet Waldron

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Why Write Historical Romance? by Victoria Chatham

 

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Authors are often asked questions by their readers or followers. I find the usual one asked of me is: why do you write historical fiction and romance? Let’s face it – with all of the details that need to be exact, writing historical fiction can be challenging. So why do it?

I freely admit to not having started off as a history buff, having found it to be the most boring subject when I was at school. Dates wars or invasions and the succession of kings didn’t matter to me at all as the subject had no relevance to my life at the time.

Jane Austen was a must-read at school and, at that age – ho hum. Sorry, Austen fans, but that is the truth. I have since returned many times to Austen, reading her books from a totally different aspect and discovering the treasure trove of minutiae they contain. The same applies to Georgette Heyer. The first of her books I ever read was Frederica (which I consider her best) but then I collected and read all her Regency romances without ever considering that they were, in fact, history books. A stylized history, maybe, but history nonetheless. Second readings of many of her titles gave me a whole new appreciation of the Regency era (1811 – 1820) beyond ladies’ dresses and gentlemen’s sporting preferences.

I started digging around in non-fiction history books, checking for myself anything I queried whether it was a style of dress or manner of speech and found I loved the research. At that time in my life I had no more thought of writing a book, historical or otherwise. But, in those odd and forgotten facts I came across snippets of past lives that really fascinated me. How other people lived, loved, how a table was laid and what cutlery they used and all the events that surrounded them came to life in an amazing way. More latterly YouTube has provided a visual and sometimes harsh view of life as it was lived in several eras.

Books We Love is fortunate to have a wealth of historical authors. Do you want to know more about Mozart? Check out Juliet Waldron’s book Mozart’s Wife. How about a taste of ancient Sumer? You couldn’t ask for more in Katherine Pym’s Begotten. A.M. Westerling’s Bakerville Beginnings takes us back to the gold rush days in British Columbia, and Diane Scott Lewis offers a background of the French Revolution in Escape the Revolution. There are many more historical titles, all offering  fascinating glimpses of past lives.

There is no doubt that history offers a rich and varied tapestry from which to draw inspiration for plots, characters and yes – happy-ever-afters.

Victoria Chatham

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My Burford Ghost Story

 

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As a kid, I was traveling with Mom in UK, and staying in one of her favorite places, Burford, Oxfordshire. This is, BTW, 1961. She always stayed in black and white Tudor hotels if at all possible. We hadn't been in England for many days when we entered the interior courtyard of just such a place, driving in our green Morris wagon through the narrow made-for-carriages entryway. 

There was no double room available. After a bit of discussion, they put me upstairs on the 3rd floor which was right under the eaves of this venerable building. A steep stairway went up, and on the way the porter said they only put the young and spry up here.  

Then as now, I was history mad, so I scouted around, really enjoying the feel of the place, the dark beams, the crooked walls, the off-kilter floors, the heavy dark antiques which filled the hallways and public rooms. All this carved, blackened antiquity was new and delightful, the stuff of travel books, and now--I was actually here! After supper, I went up to bed to read, leaving Mom in the salon bar downstairs talking to other guests. 

 The toilet (a.k.a. “loo”) was down the hall, so I'd made a final trip before settling in for the night. There wasn't much light up there, just enough to see the stairwell opening. I knew there were only two other guests staying up on the floor besides me.  

The roof, with beams bare, slanted down over the bed, which was a formidable four poster with carved posts and broad box feet. It, my mother had said was "probably Jacobean." Even if it wasn't, it was making a credible effort to look even older. I remember the smell, too, of polish, of damp and of the ages since the house had been built. Clearly, this room wasn't used often. I finally fell asleep listening to footsteps below coming and going and a blurry mumbling sometimes interrupted by laughter seeping up from the floor below.

 I awoke in the night—and to my distress, I had to go to the toilet, which meant a walk across the hall. I groped around for the light and found my door key. With the key clutched tight, I descended from the high bed. It was very quiet now, just after midnight by the watch I'd set on the nightstand. 

I didn't have the suitcase which contained my bathrobe with me. Dressed only in a flannel nightgown, I didn't want anyone to see me, but when I opened the door, it was now entirely dark in the hallway. That pitiful dim light, I thought, must have gone out.

 Then, just as I finished locking the door behind me, I turned and saw the ghost. I knew enough English History to know this was a cavalier, a fine one, too, with long locks and a trimmed beard which came to a nice Charles I point.  He had high leather gloves and a hat with a red plume. His collar was of lace, and he had on a long waist coat, but no outer jacket. 

 Now, FYI, the English Civil War was not my preferred time period. No, at fifteen, I was an obsessive Ricardian, devouring Paul Murray Kendall's Richard III, and Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and historical novels set in the appropriate time period. The doings of the members of the House of York were as familiar to me as were those of my schoolmates. 

Since we'd begun to travel in the UK, if a thing wasn't medieval, well, it was barely worth looking at. In fact, I had been anticipating the next day, when Mom and I were to drive to see what remained of the home of Lord Lovell, who'd been King Richard’s dearest friend. His home was now a ruin beside the nearby River Windrush.

 

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The ghost put one hand on his hip. His lips moved and I understood what he said, although there was no actual auditory sensation involved. He said he was an ancestor of mine, who had come here to raise a company to fight for the King, and that he had been waiting for me for a very long time. The oddest thing about him was that he appeared to be almost up to his knees in the floor, no boots were visible.

 At this point, I got scared. Suddenly, I was cold, freezing! I wanted to run but I couldn't move, to shout, but the sound stuck in my throat. 

Then, it changed again. Although I was still standing in the hallway, standing in my nightgown, with that low-wattage electric light illuminating drab yellowish walls, not a single creature, living or dead, was there with me.

 The next morning over breakfast, I told the entire story to Mom, including the fact that the ghost had “stopped at the knees.” My mother got very excited, for she never sees things like that, and has always wanted to. She was terribly interested in what the ghost had said, because she said she had always had such a longing to have a cavalier in the family. I remember saying something annoyingly teenage like "if only he had been a medieval ghost."

 At this point, people at the next table were giving us looks. Then, the host, who’d been  saying good morning to other breakfasters, came by. He moved a chair over to our table and said, sotto voce, "Ah--don't-please--talk about that in the dining room. I'm terribly sorry your daughter was disturbed, but that—fellow--is quite a nuisance, you know. When he’s active we can barely use the third floor--especially that back guest room."

 We leaned heads together over the table and continued the conversation quietly. Our host went on to explain that he’d had a parapsychologist visit, an investigator who’d also, after staying upstairs for a few days, had had an encounter with the third floor ghost, though it hadn't spoken to him. Our host said that the investigator had explained that we only saw the ghost down to the knees because “he is standing on the old floor—the way it was before remodeling,” an event which had apparently taken place just after the last war.

 So that's one of my ghost stories, a thing which happened a long time ago. I have come to doubt this man truly was an ancestor, however. A branch of my mother's family had originally come from the Burford area, but they were probably weavers or something similar, not sword carrying gentlemen. Retelling this tonight, I wonder if this “ancestor” bit was the line the ghost used on all the history-struck teens he met.

 

Juliet Waldron

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Seat of the Pants + Writing Fiction

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That's what it is these days, pretty much, seat of the pants. Fortunately, I'm no longer an office worker, where this tendency is job-ender! Retired, however, I've become increasingly this way--culminating in tonight, wherein I crown myself Princess of Procrastination. 

My husband seems to believe that I have a record with put-off-till-tomorrow syndrome. He says he remembers college, and me sitting up half the night, bent over a textbook, performing a last minute stuffing on facts. But---shhhhh--I remember him breaking open his Statistics book the night before the final...

What happens when you yourself, a writer of books and proud, self-declared "Seat of Your Pants Plotter" find that inspiration has failed you? The seat of those pants has worn through, or something. 

I'm accustomed to being led (grabbed by the throat) by my characters, who are usually chatty and full of stories about themselves and their friends and relations, but what if they wander off and fall down a rabbit hole?

Far too many have been doing this to me lately. They start off with a conversation which really seems to be going somewhere, but suddenly, as if someone filled their 18th Century teacups with many, many drops of Laudanum, they fall back senseless upon the appliqued cushions of the settee, or, more likely, just vanish down a dark hallway of the rambling manor which belongs to their uncle, the sixteenth Earl of Whatever, and never return.

Afterward, no matter how often I attempt to recontact them--offering them dinner parties, glorious, thundering steeplechases, or handsome sweethearts, late night trysts in the Earl's topiary gardens or witty dialogue in Regency Ballrooms, they refuse to come out and share their stories with me.

This has been happening for the last year or so. It's annoying, really, when all the chatter just stops, because up till now I've been able to rely on my characters supplying entire story lines. Or to put it another way, the thread I've been following in the labyrinth breaks and there I am, left alone in the dark. 

I can't lay this at the paws of the two cats who vie for which one can jump the most frequently on my forearms while I am attempting to create. 

(Lizzie, who really knew how to cuddle on my forearms in such a way that I could still type.) 

Tony & Willeford show no interest in mastering Lizzie's talent. Willeford assumes the meatloaf position directly in front of the keyboard. Tony faces the monitor and refuses to be turned, so his legs keep straying onto the keyboard resulting in stuff like ,,,,hkkkjhkhgkkkkkkkkgkhhh;;;;;;;;;;

Schuyler in full meatloaf

But this cat-blaming is a deflection, a writer's cop-out. 

Facts are: I've gotta get this heroine I've been imagining back to work.  Perhaps a long absent relative from the East India Company--or maybe from the equally exotic, violent world of plantation Jamaica--needs to show up, in order stir the pot, and pique my young character's interest. I'll even go back to the drawing board of a re-write if that's what it takes to get the seat sewn on my plotting pants again.

Fellow fiction writers: Please be so good as to let me know if you have any tricks up your sleeves. (Pretty please?)

~Juliet Waldron


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Harlots & Nightingales

Nightingale, her Lovers & Mozart

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 Buried in the depths of Hulu is a series based on Harris's Guide to the Ladies of Covent Garden, an erotic guide book to the prostitutes who worked the area. This little magazine was issued every year, at a cost 2 shillings + in London during the period 1757-1795. As the charms and specialities of each woman were described in sometimes graphic detail, it was titillating reading in and of itself. 

Having spent a lot of time imagining exactly that time period in the course of working on various novels, I was instantly drawn in. As befits a British production, the costuming and the opening street scenes on the poor side of town were thrillingly authentic, full of piss, drunks, poverty and danger. I confess, I'm completely addicted to Harlots, which has more engaging characters and more twists, turns and heart-breaks in one episode than some series contain in an entire season. 

Way beyond the soft core flash, Harlots is genuine women's history, served straight up. (!) It's written by women and a stern female gaze informs every scene and every line of dialogue. It made me realize, so much more than the tepid statement: "women had no property rights," that these women were property/chattel, just like their client's carriage horses. 

A woman belonged to her father until she belonged to her husband. If she was married off to a gross rich old man or to a violent young one, she might still be lucky enough to become a widow. Only then would she have a chance to control her own life. In a terrific scene at the end of the first series, an aristocratic woman confides that she doesn't care who killed her husband, but if his whore knows who did, she only wants to say "thank-you."

The best a harlot could hope for was a rich and congenial "keeper," a man who would protect what belonged (often by contract) to him. During Georgian times, in London, one in five women was engaged in the sex trade. There were many sociological factors bringing this heart-breaking statistic about, but whatever was the cause, young women flooded into town from impoverished rural families looking for work as domestics. Even if they were fortunate enough to avoid being recruited or even kidnapped for sex work, they were utterly dependent and could easily be forced into sex with their masters. The practice survives today, in the form of workplace sexual harassment.  

If you think those bad old days are over, take a look at the headlines in the past few years about the trials of women working in the entertainment (and the infotainment) businesses. This also happens in the course of ordinary employment, in offices, in restaurants, where tipped workers are paid (in my state $2.83/hr.) and in factories where women, in ever increasing numbers, have gone to work.  One reason for the vulnerability of working women is because even college educated women are not paid what men are paid for producing exactly the same work. Moreover, the color of your skin decides exactly how much less than a man you will earn. Poor women discover that they can make a great deal more "on the game" than working at a minimum wage job, so, if they are young or need to make their own hours because their children are young and daycare impossible because of cost, sex work might still seem to be the only option. 

My Mozart

The Viennese novels I've written are about the morally sketchy entertainment business, true then as now. Singers, actresses, and dancers enjoy fame and a bit of fortune while their looks and physical abilities last, but in the 18th Century they were never considered "respectable." Glamour and charisma brought wealthy men routinely into a talented woman's orbit. In a time when rich men routinely took mistresses, (and I'm sure it's not any different today) these talented women were collected by gentlemen as objects that proved status and virility--a virility often lodged only in their bank accounts.

My heroines, born poor and talented, Maria Klara and Nanina Gottlieb, live in a world where they always walk a cliff path way, the kind with a crumbling edge and an abyss beneath. Men take them for harlots simply because of their profession. Maria Klara is, quite literally, the property of a dissolute music-loving aristocrat. Her career as well as her comfort depend upon her powerful Count's good will and her ability to please him--both on stage and in his bed. Escape from her gilded cage seems utterly impossible.

Nanina, her family impoverished by the death of her father, barely escapes being turned out by her own mother. Lost virginity was the end of respectability, and, with that went the only other option for a woman in the 18th Century--marriage. Wife or Prostitute were woman's choices, unless she had money of her own sufficient to survive upon.  Artists like Mozart lived on the edge of this fast and loose theatrical world; Papa Leopold Mozart's letters are full of exhortations and warnings to his precious, susceptible son on the subject of whores, who might also be talented prima donnas, the kind of women who have passed through the hands of many men.

Mozart's Wife

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~~Juliet 

Day after Turkey

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Day after Thanksgiving here. We've reached the life stage where family lives far away and there are no youngsters nearby. Down to bare minimum family now. A brother-in-law who visits from Maryland. We cook less every year, but it's still too much. Husband & his brother have gone down to Lancaster County to go knife shopping on Black Friday, so here I am--tardy--but here.


Anyone who writes about Mozart has to have a love for opera, and if you've been reading me for even a small time, you know I truly adore this old, peculiar western art form. I'm beginning to break free of the tried and true repertory. (How many Madame Butterflys can you absorb?) The wonderful innovation of Met performances showing at the Movies allows me to go with a fellow devotee to see a performance from NYC of Philip Glass's opera, Akenaten.

Usually, you "hear" an opera more than "see" it. In the case of this production, however, the visual was a partner to the music.  As a result of the one-two punch, the performance stunned us.  Juggling has been added to the staging, and it provided another way to enter into entrancement. This composer is sometimes accused of creating what  has been called "Philip Glass Time," in which the audience is left spellbound. The popular genre this music is most clearly related to is Trance. 

And that's where I'll leave this, because words fail me. I can't do justice to this performance which combines choreography, music of orchestra and voice, and spectacle filled with color and symbolism.

Karen Almond / Metropolitan Opera) as seen in Opera Wire

Nefertiti & Akenaten

Karen Kamensek was the conductor; good to see a woman take the podium and do exactly what the work needed. No outsize stars here, just an astonishing piece of teamwork, craft, professionalism and ART. 

My friend and I were hypnotized. It took us a few minutes to collect our wits and walk with great care out of the theater with all those multi-plex (disorienting!) carpet patterns. Hours had passed; when we finally saw a clock, we were surprised by how late it was.     

Here's a link--barely a minute of your time, if you are curious.
  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSn_UAquOfw

~~Juliet Waldron

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The Intimate Mozart

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Sadly, the book with the perfect title, Mozart's Wife, has had to be issued with a new name, owing to shenanigans on the part of a monstrously large retailer whose name I shall not speak. I wrote this book quite some years ago, now in the last century.  

What began for me as a Mozart obsession soon became entangled with the story of the women who lived with a genius for nine short years, and who took his Viennese rocket ride to fame and fortune and crashed into poverty beside him. This little woman, who was even more diminutive than her vertically challenged husband, saw our hero at his best and at his worst. Her name was Constanze, or, using the German spelling: Konstanze. In his letters, Mozart often called her "Stanzi" or "Stanzerl" when he wasn't teasing her about her "Needle Nose."

It began with a romance, as this least favored of the Weber daughters married her big sister's erstwhile boyfriend, a young fellow who'd been a wunderkind and who was now attempting to be taken seriously as an adult musician. It appears that Mozart suffered from all the familiar problems of a child star attempting to bridge the gap. Accustomed as he had been to fame and adulation from his earliest years, this was made supremely difficult, not only because of Mozart’s own high opinion of himself, but because of the understandable resentment of older musicians who believed they had achieved official appointments “the hard way.”

I found that many of Mozart’s biographers had no love for Constanze. They either belittled her as someone who abandoned her man when the going got rough—as things certainly did in the later years in Vienna—or they dismissed her as a silly young woman from an insignificant family who’d married a genius she was ill-prepared to handle. I immediately doubted the “insignificant” part, at least in terms of the Weber family’s musicianship. Constanze’s two older sisters became famous singers, performing the most demanding vocal music of the day—some of it written specifically for them by their brilliant brother-in-law.

Mozart’s largest problem in finding financial security was that upon voluntarily leaving the Archbishop of Salzburg’s service, he became the first freelance musician (of any stature) in Europe. With an almost impenetrable class system in 18th Century Europe, he paid a high price for his daring. No nobleman could allow such an insult to pass, because in those days, "inferior"  was what musicians, no matter how brilliant, were. (Every great musician who came after him, even the fiercely proud and independent Beethoven, would carry the image of Mozart’s rebellion like a banner.)

It is a modern axiom that “anonymous was a woman,” and so it proved to be as I searched for facts about Constanze among a host of biographies. In the second volume of The Mozart Family Letters,* I found many written by Mozart himself, most sent from Vienna to his father in Salzburg. They make good reading, for Wolfgang was a witty observer. These letters may be the horse’s mouth in one sense, however, we must also bear in mind that they were also carefully tailored to soothe the recipient, the stern and possessive Leopold.

Leopold Mozart had not spent his life schooling and grooming Wolfgang for the pure pleasure of the exercise. He always hoped that his son would receive a good appointment at an important Court and would then be able to support his parents in high style. An early marriage—to anyone, much less to a penniless girl with no useful social connections—was not his plan.

When Mozart began to lodge with the Weber’s, tongues began to wag. Despite the expense, slowness, and difficulty of communication in the late 18^th Century, Leopold Mozart seems to have had a network of informants who were only too happy to supply him with information that the proud old man would find disagreeable.  And by simply looking the other way, it was easy enough for the recently widowed Mama, Cecelia Weber, to allow Mozart to compromise Constanze. What amounts to a shotgun wedding was eventually forced with connivance between the widow and a court-appointed guardian.  

 “But who is the object of my love? Again, do not be horrified, I beg of you! Not one of the Webers? Yes, eine Weberische—Constanze, the middle one...my dear good Constanze, she ….is the best of them all. She makes herself responsible for the whole household, and yet she can never do right! …One thing more I must tell you, which is that I was not in love at the time of my resignation. It was born of her tender care and service when I lodged in their house…” 

Stanzi wanted to escape her domineering and critical mother; Mozart hoped to take a wife and have a safe and comfortable home to return to after his battles with the world. He looked forward to having his supper fixed, his clothes cleaned, pressed and mended. He seems to have not thought much about the expenses of a family, nor about the inevitability of children nor any of the difficulties of marriage.

The Mozart’s union took a classic form—young people wanting to escape from restrictions and injustices at home. Wolfgang and his Constanze jumped out of the frying pan of parental domination into the fire.

 Another feature of Constanze’s life is rarely mentioned by Wolfgang’s biographers, one I came to believe that this was the key to her story. Frau Mozart was pregnant or convalescent from childbirth for six years out of the nine she was married to Wolfgang. The longest interval between pregnancies was seventeen months, the shortest (on two occasions) six months. In 1789 she was bedridden. Her legs swelled, she had intermittent fevers and a terrible pain in her legs and abdomen throughout the entire pregnancy. The daughter she bore that year died at birth and very nearly took her mother with her.

From the letters, and from what I’ve read to research the symptoms, it would appear that Constanze nearly died of puerperal fever on two separate occasions. Childbirth and the resulting illnesses brought doctors, midwives, wet-nurses, and prescriptions--and expense. It would be difficult, even today, to keep a woman with such an obstetrical record “in good general health.” 

All large European cities were dirty. There were backhouses behind crowded apartment buildings. What this meant for the summer water supply is not hard to guess. The brief life of four of Mozart’s children and the illnesses of the parents were not unusual. However, it can only be imagined how difficult the birth and death of four infants in such a short space of time was for a young mother.

“My dear wife….will make a full recovery from her confinement. From the condition of her breasts I am rather afraid of milk-fever. And now the child has been given to a foster-nurse against my will, or rather, at my wish! For I was quite determined that whether she should be able to do so or not, my wife was never to feed her child. Yet I was equally determined that my child was never to take the milk of a stranger! I wanted the child to be brought up on water, like my sister and myself. However, the midwife, my mother-in-law ... have begged and implored me not to allow it, if only for the reason that most children here who are brought up on water do not survive as the people here don’t know how to give it properly. That induced me to give in, for I should not like to have anything to reproach myself with.”

It was a good thing that Mama Cecelia, tactful for once, managed to persuade Mozart that babies cannot live on sugar water, whatever wicked nonsense Leopold had retailed! The wet nurse system being what it was, women took on more babies than they could feed in return for the pittance they were paid. The more I learned, the less surprised I was that only two of the six Mozart babies Stanzi bore in the nine years of their marriage survived to adulthood. 

This letter changed my focus once and for all. All I could see was Stanzi, no doubt ill-prepared and injured by the rigors of childbirth, now ordered not to nurse her child--and being sickened with milk fever as a result--by a man who apparently lived in a dream world. Genius or not, my musical hero had feet of clay. Sisterhood is Powerful!

The emotional toll of so many births and deaths had to be great.  I cannot imagine that Constanze ever felt very well—or was able to function efficiently on any level—while her husband’s moods swung from despair to elation and back again. Their sixth child, Franz Wolfgang, was born at the very nadir of Mozart’s fortune. He survived—perhaps, as I wrote, because the family was now so destitute that his mother was forced to feed him herself. 

After Leopold Mozart, a demanding correspondent, died, the picture of the Mozart’s family life becomes less clear. The other reason we know less is because Constanze, like other wives of famous men,* destroyed many letters written by her to Mozart and most of the letters he wrote to her when she was at the spa or times when he was touring. Those that survive are filled with names that she carefully blacked out during the long years that remained to her after Mozart’s death.

Was she protecting her own reputation? Or was she protecting the reputations of people who were then still alive—and still powerful? Was she covering up something? A few bits of gossip remain.

 “Mozart,” it was said, loved his wife tenderly, although he was sometimes unfaithful to her. His fancies had such a hold over him that he could not resist them.”*

While Mozart was probably no Don Giovanni, he was a profoundly talented man working in a profession full of beautiful, talented women. These artists shone the glory of his creation back upon him—a most seductive mirror. Or, perhaps, as has been suggested: “Mozart disguised his own hyper sensitivity by expressing himself through women.”*

The end of the story, culminating in the mystery of Mozart’s death, was created from hints in a multitude of diaries and letters. In the end, I was forced to trust the characters to tell me what had taken place. Whether it is fact or fiction, I allowed the last few chapters of The Intimate Mozart to unfold exactly as my characters explained. 

We women know how much we bring to the table and yet how little we are still regarded. I began by wanting to write a novel which would center on a great man. I ended by depicting an 18th Century wife's world, complete with all the challenges, the successes and failures, the light and joy as well as the sorrows and shadows.

~~Juliet Waldron

*Mozart, by Marcia Davenport, 
*The Mozart Family Letters, translated by Emily Anderson
*Jean-Baptiste-Antione Suard in his Anecdotes of Mozart, 1804
*Martha Washington and Elizabeth Hamilton are known to have destroyed letters "too personal"
* The Mozart Brothers, Swedish film, 1986