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 

An AWOL Character Returns

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My first novel, one where the main character moved into my head and literally would not be let me alone, not to sleep, not for work, or even to quietly clean my house. Nanina talked and talked and talked for six months straight and I had to stay up half of every night typing like crazy just to get it all down. Miss Gottlieb's story of love, of magic, of music and of madness set me on the full time writer's path some forty (!!) years ago.  

Sometimes, after starting out with a rush and talking away like crazy, a character can decide to take a holiday--sometimes permanently. Actually, this is more like "going AWOL" for the hapless author, who may have a book contract to complete. This is one of the hazard's of being the kind of writer who is working their way through a planned series of linked stories. I once was far more "prolific" --the favorite description of all all agents who are shopping a writer to an editor--but my own little well of inspiration dried up about a year ago.

I believed I was done--written out. Instead of mourning or getting bent out of shape, I've been trying to Zen my way through the absence. After all so many years of story telling, there was certainly a sense of loss, but I was determined not to brood or feel sorry for myself, but simply to take a "wait and see" attitude. 

Recently, however, I've received cage rattling, from not one, but from two characters, the leads in two quite different unfinished novels. One is pure, unadulterated romance (Aphrodite help me!). The other is Zauberkraft Green, which was supposed to be the third story in my "Magic" series. As the name suggests, these are historical novels with a fantasy flare, stories which cross a lot of genres, from Gothic to Adventure to Horror and Romance. 

                           

Zauberkraft Green's main character is Charlize, who is the grandchild of Caterina, who is the heroine of the strongly romance-inflected Zauberkraft Red. Charlize is also the niece of Goran, Caterina's first born son and the shape-shifting hero of Zauberkraft Black. 

Typically--at least, what I'd come to expect from Charlize after we became acquainted--was a lot of ADHD precocious chatter, even a certain bitchiness. Then, just as suddenly as she had begun, her voice vanished from my head. 

I'm beginning to think she didn't want  to talk too much about the things that frightened and threatened her, because, hell, what I do know about those elements of the story frighten me too. However, all of a sudden, right about the dark of the moon a few days ago, Charlize began to speak  again. This blog is a kind of celebration that she's taken it upon herself to reappear and (maybe) finish the darn story.

Or at least, I hope so! I don't want to go on too long about her reappearance or gloat. As everyone who writes, or aspires to, knows, these gifts from the Spring of the Muses must not be taken for granted.  A lot of work and even more concentration will be necessary to turn whatever odds and ends she shares into the spooky journey I hope that Zauberkraft Green will eventually be. 

BTW, all three of these novels are Regencies, even if the first two have a European setting instead of the traditional Lyme Regis or Bath. Young teen Charlize, however, has been adopted by an Englishman, a kindly gentleman who has made an honest woman of her beautiful mother and moved them all to London, so here they are at least, proper Regency people, living where they are supposed to: in the UK. 

Wish me luck! I'm sure I'll need it.


~~Juliet Waldron
(Happily hearing voices in her head again!)

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To P.C. or not P.C.?

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I'm using the term "political correctness" here, although I'm not a big fan of the concept. "P.C." as commonly used calls up an image of a kind of mincing hyper-sensibility. I find that if that's the meaning you prefer, you are probably a fan of simple solutions -- the kind which tweet great, but which are bring on even more troubles.

Human variety is infinite, as are our human cultures, so what is ideally called the "real world" is a deep and complex ball of what one Dr. Who was pleased to call "wibbly wobbly." And this goes for sexuality, too, as our desires and needs and expressions thereof are as unique as a series of dots placed on the slope of a bell curve.

Everyone knows that things in the public arena have changed since #Metoo, but that doesn't alter the history of men and woman and relationship an iota. Much as we disapprove, we can't remake the past, not if we're interested in making an attempt to write good historical fiction.  Books of mine have, however, fallen afoul of some readers. I'm sorry, of course, because the complainants are often young women who are fighting real life battles with sexism in the office, on the streets, and in their own nests, too, as women struggle to be treated justly.

Some parts of our world are rapidly re-framing toward equal rights; others want to put the "ladies" (as they like to say) back in their "breeder/janitorial" place. Remember, we live in a world infused with Old Testament stories, the place where some modern men continue to find justification for their coercive, dismissive male behavior toward "weaker sex."

Fan Girl 

Of my books, My Mozart has the largest P.C. problem, because the affair between a young singer and the composer is the story. Back in the '80's when I wrote about a young artist who gifts her virginity to an admired older man in a mentor position, it didn't occur to me that I was in for serious flack from my Sisters. All I can say in my defense is that at the time I wrote, I was not living an artist's life in a big city or reading gender studies at uni, but was a wife of twenty years with two mostly grown kids and a full time job. I imagined I was hip about gender/sex, but the world where my basic opinions on such matters were formed was the 1950's, a time when, post-war, women were being pushed out of work places and back into the house. Years later, I'm still working toward a better understanding of "woman."

The older man/younger woman love affair is not an unfamiliar one in the world of the arts, or even in corporations, from law firms to universities to oil companies. The fact that such sexual relationships are unequal in power or that such things do happen is not what the readers are worried about,  however.  It's whether these stories should have been told in ecstatic terms when they are, in fact, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, especially so for the less experienced and therefore more vulnerable person in the equation. Abuse of power is rampant in unequal relationships; it's plain old monkey domination with sex thrown in.

What am I actually talking about in My Mozart? What's the book about? Perhaps it is simply Eros, a Being who can be relied upon not to give a damn about P.C. Erotic love is the most mysterious of all emotions--not the least because it is hedged about with so many cultural taboos. It is certainly the least susceptible to the blandishments of reason. Were the Greeks right about Mighty Aphrodite, that She swept all before Her? That desire is wired into us, and so we not only write poems, plays and books about this "crazy little thing called love;" we enact it in our lives. Sometimes it ruins us, sometimes it redeems us, sometimes it takes turns doing first one and then the other or both at the same time. It probably won't last, that obsession, that fire.

But you'll never know until you serve some time in that primal temple.

~~Juliet Waldron

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*I've actually had more readers chastise me for writing Red Magic whose hero and villain both acted like proper 18th Century males toward the teen heroine. Set in 18th Century Germany, RED MAGIC tells the story of a young woman’s transition from rebellious girl to adored--and adoring--wife. A forced marriage brings her to her husband’s mysterious mountain home, where she uncovers a legacy of magic. Prejudices hinder the coming of love between the newlyweds, as well as the weird attraction the young wife feels toward her husband’s magnetic, foreign servant.

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Kitchen Apparition

http://amzn.to/1TDh07s  My Mozart  ISBN:  1927476364

What we’ve had here today has been sun, clouds, and a sort of golden light falling through autumnal trees that I think of as Don Giovanni weather. And what, you ask, makes me call it that? Well, it’s the end of October now and we are approaching Halloween, the time of year, when, in 1787, to thunderous applause and many encores, that opera was first performed. The city was Prague, not Vienna, because by that time the arbiters of taste in the latter place had decided that Mozart was no longer cool. The infamous con man, Casanova, may have sat in with Lorenzo DaPonte and Mozart, while the libretto was written, lending his own unsavory life experiences to the twists and turns of the plot.

When I entered one of those OCD states of mind to which I am prone, in the mid-eighties, it was All Mozart All The Time at our house. I began to write two Mozart novels, “Mozart’s Wife” and “My Mozart.” Wouldn’t want anyone checking out the titles to wonder what the subject was.

http://amzn.to/1Vy47lm  Mozart’s Wife  ISBN:  1461109612

This happened on a late October Saturday. The silver maples were raincoat yellow. The sky had been clear blue all morning until after lunch, but after, the wind rose and a fleet of puffy, gray-bottomed clouds began to put  a lid on things. I was doing housework, still attempting the working woman’s bit where you go double time and do lots of housework and cooking over weekends. Of course, I was blasting Don Giovanni, saturating my cells with every chord—just as I used to do all through the '60's and ‘70’s with rock’n’roll.     

Husband was off somewhere, and the house was empty of teenage sons, too, so the only nerves I was fraying were my own. In those days I had a fabulous pair of pink high top sneakers that looked ever so good with jeans. Jeepers, this was a long time ago--back in the last century...

What happened in my kitchen that afternoon is the only supernatural encounter I’ve had in this house. I think there genuinely are no ghosts here; the house was built in 1948. There has been anger, violence, and grief, but no deaths. So, in this case the "supernatural" experience focused on me.

Looking back, I can see that I'd overdosed on Mozart. And, on this day, too much Don Giovanni, too much dwelling in and on the stories of Herr WAM in which I had been immersed, re-imagining and writing in a Sheldon-Cooper-like spasm of self-indulgence. This led Mozart's dynamic, charismatic spirit, drawn by womanly hero-worship as well as the sound of his music, to pass the gate.

Nanina contemplates the skull of her maestro

The Stromboli dough I'd prepared earlier lay ready to roll out, ready to receive meat, cheese, tomato sauce, and sweet pepper, when my progress was interrupted by a loud creak followed by an unearthly groan. It was that old movie sound effect of the hinges of hell—or heaven—swinging open. It was so loud it overcame the flood of opera, pouring from the kitchen speakers.

I spun around and there he was, standing on my 1948-era brick pattern linoleum. Needless to say, after so much time he looked ghastly—the “great nosed Mozart” as a contemporary called him—shrunken, frail, his face lined with his final suffering—but undeniably present.

.

From "The Mozart Brothers" 

I saw him clear as day. My reaction—I'm not ashamed to admit—was fear. When the door opens at 3 a.m. in a dark bedroom while you are still half asleep, well, that's something you can explain as "dreams intruding upon reality." When, however, the door opens at 3 p.m. on a sun-through- clouds-afternoon, while you construct a mundane kid-pleasing Stromboli it was darn alarming.

I leapt backwards, reaching gazelle-like heights* I've never before achieved, landing all the way across the kitchen. By the time the time those pink shoes hit the vinyl, though, my ghostly idol had gone.  



~~Juliet Waldron

Earworm Mozart

My Mozart at Amazon

I've fictionalized the creation of The Magic Flute in two novels, Mozart's Wife and My Mozart. Nanina Gottlieb, who sang the role of the heroine, Pamina, is the teen narrator of the latter.  Therefore, I thought I'd write about it, with all its "earworm" songs, and produced during the composer's hectic last year.


It has been said that The Magic Flute is a "pipe dream in which the ultimate secret is revealed, only to be forgotten again upon waking.” The opera is full of occult and masonic references, which would suit both the popular taste of the times (1791) for “magic,” and also the taste of Mozart and his friend Emmanuel Schikanader, fellow Masons.

Magical numbers--three Ladies, three Genii--and the multiple, nine--Sarastro’s Priests--appear repeatedly—and, because this is Mozart, in the music too. There are also a host of pairs and opposites among the symbolic characters: male/female, day/night, noble/common, perfect union/dischord. 

 

There are trials to be endured before the lovers may unite. Some believe that because Masonic "secrets” are revealed in the course of the action, the Brotherhood may have been responsible for the composer’s sudden demise. While I don’t subscribe to this notion, there certainly are lots of occult and masonic references scattered throughout the rather muddled story.

It is muddled, too, because Mozart had already begun to set music to a script (or "libretto") when he realized that The Theater am Weiden’s chief competitor, the Leopoldstadt Theater, had already launched a singspiel (those tuneful forerunners of Broadway) based on the exact same story. Their musical was called The Magic Zither.

Upon learning this, the writers and the composer simply changed The Queen of the Night from a good character into a bad one. Similarly, they changed her husband, Sarastro, from an evil tyrant into a benevolent “Philosopher King.”  This late tinkering with the story/music is obvious, for initially the emissaries of the Queen of the Night, the Three Ladies, give the  Prince not only helpful advice, but the magic flute of the title, to help him save the abducted princess.   Here, The Queen of the Night appears to be the injured party. Later, we learn that she and her ladies are now in league to thwart the Prince’s quest for enlightenment and the hand of her daughter.  

No one much cared, in the end, about logic. The music and the spectacle were (and are still) sufficient to create a luminous piece of theater.

Goethe’s mother wrote: “No man will admit he has not seen it. All craftsmen, gardeners…and even the “Sachsenhausers” (a rough rural suburb of Frankfort), whose children play the parts of apes and lions, are going to see it. There has never been such a spectacle before.”

This is high praise, even if the German word for spectacle carries a double meaning: “show” and “uproar.”

To quote Frederic Blume's essay “Mozart’s Style and Influence”: 

“To compose music for all; music which would suit both the prince and his valet…to compose music that had to be both highly refined and highly popular was a new and unprecedented task.”

Two-hundred and twenty-four years since this opera premiered, it's still going strong, a perfect way to introduce young people to this unique western art. Attending a first-rate production is easier and a lot less expensive than it used to be, for the Metropolitan Opera now broadcasts as many as ten operas every year directly into local movie theaters. Here's a cute clip (endure the undie commercial) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s3Vsf9P0hE

 

In December I enjoyed a re-run of Julie (she of Lion King fame) Taymor's  inspired 2006 Met production. My only quibble being that I missed favorite arias, which were cut to make the show last only a tidy 90 minutes.

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang Amadeus!

 

 

~ Juliet Waldron

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