The Mozart Girl

by Barbara Nickel

  “You are an amazing talent, my daughter Maria Anna,” Papa had whispered, and Nannerl could tell he was serious because he used her formal name. Two tears had slipped silently from his eye to the clavier keys. After that she’d played the minuet over and over for two weeks, until one evening Mama had stormed into the room and told her to please play something else because she was going crazy.

  A small click interrupted Nannerl’s thoughts. She stiffened. Papa had opened the door and was standing there listening to her play! Her heart beat harder but she kept on until the final note, trying to play the way she had on the day Papa had cried. When she was finished, she felt his hand on her shoulder and turned around quickly to see if he was pleased. He was smiling.

  “You’re up early, Nannerl! What a diligent, hard-working daughter I have, playing so beautifully at six o’clock in the morning,” he said, sitting down on the bench beside her.

  Nannerl’s fingers tingled with the praise. Being with Papa alone was even better than being praised in front of Wolfi. She loved Papa’s soapy smell and the way his coat brushed against her dress.

  “You played this piece superbly when you were only seven,” Papa reminisced. He had remembered! “Do you recall when you used to play this again and again and drove your poor mama crazy?” he asked, and they both laughed. “Let’s play it together, just for fun.” Nannerl nodded and quickly turned the page back before Papa could change his mind. He hardly ever did things just for fun.

  “Wait, Nannerl!” Papa turned to the last page of the piece again. “Can you read what I wrote here, at the end of the piece?”

  Nannerl peered closer to read Papa’s tiny script.

  This minuet and trio little Wolfgang learned in half an hour on 26th January, 1761, one day before his fifth birthday, at half past nine at night.

  She had forgotten that, although this notebook had first been hers, Wolfi had later learned all of the pieces perfectly. Papa had carefully recorded Wolfi’s progress after each piece.

  She looked up. Wolfi stood in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. He came over, looked at the notebook, and suddenly wasn’t sleepy anymore. He snatched it from the piano ledge and started skipping around the room.

  “I found this in the old cupboard,” he sang, panting and returning to the clavier, “and I’m using the empty pages at the back to write music. See, Papa,” he turned the pages and held up a fresh composition, “I composed this sonata movement last week!”

  “Well, well, we must hear it,” said Papa with a smile. He stood up. “Here, Wolfi, play it for us.”

  Nannerl thought she would explode. She stood up.

  “It’s my book!” she cried. “Papa gave it to me and it’s mine! You’re always taking my things!” She glared at Wolfi.

  “But, Nannerl,” Papa said, “you must be reasonable. You haven’t used this book for years. It was just sitting in the cupboard. I see no harm in Wolfi using it for his compositions.”

  “You just don’t understand,” Nannerl cried, running from the room. “It’s not fair!”

  Papa called after her but Nannerl didn’t really hear and she didn’t care either. She slammed the door and sank down onto the bed and began to sob, then remembered that she had cried here last night too.

  I’m supposed to be twelve and grown up and all I can do is cry, she thought, as Wolfi’s sonata drifted out from the music room. She dug her fingers into the quilt, smelling coffee and fresh rolls that made her stomach growl. She would stay here all day. That would show them. Not that they’d really care if she starved.

  Mama knocked at the door. Nannerl could tell it was her, because Papa or Wolfi would have just barged right in.

  “Come in,” Nannerl said into her quilt.

  “It’s time for breakfast,” Mama said in her no-nonsense voice. “You’re not going to stay up here and starve over a notebook, so you might as well blow your nose and get something to eat. Let me tighten your corset first.” Nannerl knew there was no sense in arguing with Mama. She slowly stood up and allowed herself to be fixed. She hated how the corset squeezed, even when she was playing the clavier or running up the hill to the market for eggs.

  At breakfast and during the arithmetic lesson that followed, Wolfi tried to make Nannerl laugh by making faces at her behind Papa’s back. His crabby-neighbor-Frau-Spiegel face almost succeeded, but she managed to hide behind a book so he wouldn’t see her smile.

  After dinner, Nannerl found the notebook on her chair. Wolfi looked straight at her, his eyes begging for a truce. She lifted the notebook, nodded, and gave him a queenly smile, sort of lofty and far off. Wolfi drummed a riddle with his knuckles in their secret code language; two quarter note taps, a triplet, two half notes and four sixteenths, meaning “What looks like a noodle?” She shrugged. He made his Frau Spiegel face again and this time Nannerl burst into a loud giggle.

  Papa turned around and glared at them. He often looked that way, now that the Grand Tour was so close. “Come here, both of you,” he ordered. Nannerl braced herself for a lecture. Wolfi came around and sat on Papa’s lap and she leaned against the table.

  “In less than a week we depart for Munich,” he said in a brisk voice. “You two will be in the spotlight, and the eyes of many distinguished people will view you. You will be earning money, just like adult musicians. This is serious business, and you must act like professionals. Wolfi, what’s a professional?”

  “Um…it’s like an adult, I guess,” he said, “an adult who has a job and receives money.”

  “Good,” said Papa, “except that you don’t have to be an adult to be a professional. Now, Wolfi, why the long face? Remember the rewards! Remember the way people clapped? Remember when you sat on the lap of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria? Think of the opportunity! Perhaps on this tour the great Johann Christian Bach will hear your compositions!”

  Johann Christian Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach! One of the greatest composers alive! Nannerl imagined sitting at the clavier with the great composer while he played her latest composition. He would pat her on the back and say in a gruff voice, “Well done, my girl. I must see about getting this published immediately!”

  A loud knock echoed through the apartment.

  “There’s my first student,” said Papa. “Now finish your work quietly, and remember that you are both professionals.”

  That evening after supper, Wolfi begged Nannerl to play “March Around and Play the Violin” with him but she said no, partly because she couldn’t really play the violin and partly because she had important work to do. She shut the door to their room, got out her diary, and lay on the bed. Bimberl panted and jumped up beside her and Nannerl stroked the dog’s fur while she wrote.

  June 3, 1763

  Dear Diary,

  I’m so excited about the Grand Tour! Papa says we might play for the great Johann Christian Bach! And I have a plan! My plan is to have a new piece of music finished perfectly so that I can play it for him and he’ll help me become famous, maybe even help me to get it published! But what should I compose? It will have to be something brand new, something no one has ever heard. I’ll make it as big as the sky but quiet sometimes too, like the candlelight shadows dancing across this page…

  Nannerl felt her eyelids grow heavy and she jerked suddenly, catching herself dozing. Bimberl slept soundly beside her. She could hear Wolfi march around the house, still playing his violin. She fell asleep with his music ringing in her ears.

  3

  The Secret Symphony

  In, out, pull. In, out…Nannerl sewed in rhythm to the tune that she hummed—softly, so Mama wouldn’t hear. She glanced across the big kitchen to the fireplace where Mama stood pouring the wax to make candles. Nannerl hummed the tune again, but in her head this time. This wasn’t any old tune. It was the tune of a symphony! Her symphony! The one she was going to have finished by the time she met Johann Christ
ian Bach!

  Nannerl had spent every extra minute of the past four days composing. It wasn’t easy. When she wasn’t practicing the clavier, she was helping Mama wash the clothes, bake the bread, make the soap, and pack the trunks for the trip. When she did manage to slip away to her room, someone would always barge in with a question or an errand. So far, no one had discovered her secret. She had become an expert at slipping her papers under the bed and pretending to knit as soon as she heard the door click.

  Nannerl knew what would happen if Papa discovered that she was composing a symphony. She remembered when she had tried to show him her sonata for violin and piano. First, he would laugh. Then he would shake his head and say, “A symphony, Nannerl! Where did you ever get such an idea? To compose a symphony, one must have years and years of strict training and besides, you musn’t waste your time with such things. There is so much music already written for you to practice. And there are so many household tasks that you must learn from your mama!” Then, to make her feel better, he would give her a few little composition exercises. Baby things, like filling in chords to a bass and melody line already given! As if she hadn’t already done that when she was eight!

  Now if her symphony were published…what would Papa say then? Inside her head, Nannerl could hear the sound of forty, maybe fifty violins, rising above the deep voices of the cellos. It would have more instruments than any symphony anyone had ever written. She could hear them swirling together, surrounded by flutes and an oboe and—

  “Nannerl!” Mama’s scolding voice interrupted the entrance of the clarinets. “Stop your dreaming and get on with the sewing! There are trunks to pack and clothes to iron and bread to bake. We’re leaving tomorrow, not next year!”

  “Sorry, Mama,” said Nannerl, stabbing the rose-colored satin with her needle. Her best performance dress, with all its gold embroidery and silk lace, lay in a heap on the kitchen table. Nannerl sighed and checked how much lace was left to attach to the sleeve.

  It seemed that the lace had always been her monthly job. First, she had to take it all off, or it would be ruined in the wash. Then, after the washerwoman had scrubbed the clothes, and after the drying, the lace all had to be stitched on again. Nannerl had been sewing lace on hers and Mama’s clothes for the last two weeks!

  Now there was just one row of stitching left. In, out, pull. In, out, pull…Nannerl’s sewing needle moved back and forth, conducting the music in her head like a baton. Suddenly, moist, warm fingers covered her face, and satin brushed the back of her neck.

  “Guess!” said a familiar voice behind her.

  “Katherl, of course, you silly goose!” said Nannerl, standing up and hugging her best friend. Katherl’s father was the Salzburg court surgeon. Since Papa was assistant court composer, Nannerl and Katherl had always been friends.

  Nannerl looked at Katherl’s dress. It completely covered her feet. Nannerl had begged Papa to buy her a “grown-up” dress that was really long like thirteen-year-old Katherl’s. But Papa wouldn’t hear of it. He disapproved of very long dresses. “She’s always trailing dirt,” he would say. Today, as usual, the bottom of Katherl’s dress was splotched with mud.

  “Good afternoon,” said Katherl, curtsying and turning to Mama. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t knock. Your servant, who was outside preparing the carriage, let me in, so I thought I’d surprise Nannerl.”

  “Good afternoon, Maria Anna,” said Mama, smiling at Katherl over the candle wicks. Katherl’s real name was Maria Anna Katharina, almost the same as Nannerl’s.

  Nannerl lifted her needle. “Isn’t it exciting about Sebastian?” she said. “He’s our very own servant, and we have our own carriage too! Even if we are hiring the driver and horses in stages. On the last tour we had to ride in a public carriage and it was horribly squished.”

  “Sebastian is handsome. How old is he?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Probably about nineteen. How was your trip to Munich? Did you get a new bonnet?”

  “Two. You should see them. The new fashion is to have a few flowers above the rim, sweeping down like…so…just above the eyes. I will be the first in Salzburg to show it off,” said Katherl, fingering the lace on Nannerl’s performance dress. “What I wouldn’t give for a dress like this! Was it really a present from the Empress Maria Theresa?”

  “Of course,” said Nannerl, remembering that performance when she and Wolfi had astonished the court in Vienna. The next day, the paymaster had come to the inn where they were staying and delivered two costumes; one for Wolfgang, the other for her. Whenever she put it on for a performance, Nannerl would finger the edges of the lace, feeling lucky and grown up.

  She pulled the last stitch with a tug. “Finished!” she announced, glancing over at Mama. “Could I please say good-bye to Katherl, just for a few minutes?”

  Mama looked up from the candles with her lips pressed together, but Nannerl detected the trace of a smile. “Well, just for a few minutes. But watch the time carefully…there are clothes to iron and trunks to pack and—”

  “—bread to bake,” Nannerl finished as she grabbed Katherl’s hand and raced out to the hall.

  Outside the music room, Nannerl pressed her ear against the closed door, motioning for Katherl to do the same.

  “Wolfi, here is the score of a symphony by Joseph Haydn. Notice the instruments he chooses,” Papa’s voice drifted out with a few notes played on the violin.

  “C’mon Nannerl, let’s—” whispered Katherl, but Nannerl just shook her head and listened harder. So Papa was teaching Wolfgang how to write a symphony! “You must know the sound of each instrument very well,” Papa continued, “so that you know which ones will sound right together. You choose a theme, a melody as a basis, then expand upon it.” Some clavier notes drifted out to the hall.

  Nannerl pressed her ear hard against the door until it almost hurt, as if that could somehow help her to be in there with Wolfi and Papa. She didn’t want to miss anything. But it seemed as if Papa wanted to keep leaving her out.

  Well, she would just have to work harder. Maybe tonight, after the packing. Who needed lessons from Papa anyway? She had studied that score a hundred times at least, in the mornings before she practiced the clavier.

  She and Katherl tiptoed to her room, trying not to step on the creaky parts of the floor. Nannerl closed the door and Katherl sat down on the bed. She sighed. “Do you realize that you are the luckiest girl in Salzburg? What I wouldn’t give to visit Paris and London and Amsterdam!”

  “With only your mama and papa and little brother for company?”

  “But just think who you might meet! Your new servant Sebastian seems nice. When did your papa hire him?”

  “Just the day before yesterday, for the trip.” Nannerl paused. “Katherl…if I show you something very secret, will you promise not to tell anyone?”

  Katherl kneeled on the floor. She lay her head on the bed and closed her eyes. “Never, ever,” she said in solemn tones. “I promise, and if I do, death shall be my punishment.”

  “Get up, you silly goose,” said Nannerl, giggling. “All right, here it is.” She quickly thrust the stack of papers at Katherl, then looked at the floor with her hands behind her back.

  “Is it a sonata?” asked Katherl.

  “No.”

  “A trio?”

  “No.”

  “A quartet?”

  “No, silly, look at the number of instruments!” Nannerl looked up from the floor. Her friend’s mouth dropped open.

  “A…a symphony? You’re writing a symphony?” asked Katherl in her loudest voice, the one that always seemed to fill a room to the very top.

  “Sh!” said Nannerl. “No one can find out, until I can get Johann Christian Bach to help me get it published. It’s going to be gigantic. It’ll have way more instruments than any symphonies now, perhaps hundreds of them! I think it’ll even h
ave a boys’ choir and an adult choir and…oh, Katherl, what do you think?”

  Katherl studied the music and Nannerl waited, twisting a loose bit of thread around her finger. Katherl took clavier lessons sometimes. It wasn’t as if she knew as much about music as Papa or anything, but Nannerl still felt nervous.

  “Well?” asked Nannerl, still twisting the bit of thread.

  Katherl quickly looked up. “It looks fine, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Well…um…all those instruments…”

  “You don’t like it? You think it’s a stupid idea?” Nannerl pulled the thread against her fingertip, indenting the skin.

  “No, no, I like it. But what I mean to say is…well…nobody’s ever written anything with so many instruments. Maybe it’s kind of…well…kind of big?”

  “Maybe…” said Nannerl. She swallowed the lump in her throat.

  “Anyway, I think you’re a genius!” said Katherl in a loud voice, so that Nannerl had to shush her again. “Sorry,” Katherl whispered. “People will probably think it sounds strange. But who cares what they think, as long as you know it’s the best thing you ever wrote!”

  “I don’t know,” said Nannerl. “I think I’d like it to be published and be famous.”

  “Well, I hope you do get to be famous. You deserve it, because you work so hard and you’re so talented. Papa says you and Wolfi are the greatest performers in all of Europe!”

  “Always performer…I wish they would say composer,” said Nannerl, looking down at her symphony. She lifted her head and looked at Katherl. “Do you think someday they will?”

  “I know they will!” said Katherl. She noticed the thin book lying on Nannerl’s night table and picked it up. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a travel diary, to write in every day. Will you write to me? Maybe you could even send ideas for the symphony with Herr Hagenauer’s letters.”

  “Who’s Herr Hagenauer?”

  “Our landlord, silly. Remember—he owns the grocery shop next door? And he has a daughter, the stuck-up one who thinks she’s so great just because she’s fifteen? Herr Hagenauer and Papa always write letters when we’re away, so you could send your letters and ideas with his! And I’ll send letters with Papa’s!”