Mozart's Sister: A Novel

by Rita Charbonnier

  “So, Monsieur Mozart, what might be your next move in promoting your son?”

  “I intend to publish his compositions.”

  The queen looked with lively surprise at Wolfgang, who was at last contentedly chewing something that he liked: a filet de bœuf that the sympathetic waiter had already cut up for him.

  “And this child writes music? I don’t know much about it, sir, but I imagine that that is exceptional.”

  “Indeed, Your Highness. I intend to begin immediately to publish his works systematically, in such a way that a larger number of persons may become acquainted with his gifts. And naturally I have preserved his manuscripts in order, since there is no doubt, my queen, that one day they will be in great demand. I am preparing a splendid future for him.”

  “I know, I know, but now enough of this subject,” she said, looking at the child with a maternal smile. “Let me hold this dear little fellow. May I?”

  “Of course!” Leopold rose quickly, picked up Wolfgang, and placed him in the queen’s arms. Torn away from that delicious meat, shifted from a comfortable chair to a slippery old lady covered with jewels, the child threw a glance of desperation at his sister, who was too far away and, in her turn, chained by etiquette, so that there would have been no way to intervene.

  Marie Leszczynska had not only a keen mind but keen eyes as well. She immediately noticed the violet bruise on Wolfgang’s temple, which someone had tried to camouflage with a layer of powder and hide beneath the elegant wig that he was wearing for the occasion.

  “Oh, poor child. Did you fall?”

  Leopold started. “How did that happen, Wolfgang?”

  Nannerl, taking in the scene from the other end of the table, felt the food stick in her throat.

  “Don’t be shy; answer your father,” Marie urged him graciously. “I give you permission to speak. And if the queen tells you to do something, you have to do it.”

  “Well, I—I hit the portable harpsichord with my head.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” the father said suspiciously.

  “Because—because I made a scratch on the harpsichord and I was afraid you would get angry.”

  Leopold was justly incredulous. “You made a scratch on the instrument—with your head?”

  “No, no. It’s that when I fell I was holding the violin.”

  Leopold raised his voice. “And so you also ruined the violin?”

  The queen laughed heartily, shaking and making Wolfgang shake with her. “Let it go, Monsieur Mozart. I assure you, you won’t get to the end of it. I have had more children than you, and I am much older. You’ll never know what really happened. And if you find that one of your instruments is damaged, what is the problem? You have it repaired. Now, little one, what would you say about tasting this suprême de profiteroles à l’écossaise?”

  What that pyramid of sweetness had to do with Scotland is not known, but certainly it had something to do with gluttony. Sitting in the arms of the queen and eating from her plate while she cuddled him and caressed him, Wolfgang filled his stomach with chocolate, cream puffs, and custard, and then with strawberries and cream, and then almond-stuffed apricots, and finally the most delicious flavors of ice cream. And when the dinner ended and it was time to leave, his pockets were overflowing with candies of all kinds, hidden there by the loving and tremulous hands of the queen of France.

  XIV.

  Who had seen the sea? It had a strong odor, of salt; kitchen salt has no smell, yet the sea does. And it was so big it was frightening, and it moved on its own, pushed by an invisible power. It seemed possessed by a dark rage, eager to avenge some insult, in harmony with the leaden sky, which, at its signal, would descend to meet and mingle with it.

  Wolfgang raced from stern to prow, looked out to observe the fish, lay down on the bridge to better feel the pitch of the small boat. Anna Maria pursued him uselessly, with the constantly sharper sensation that her stomach had gone somewhere else, not the right place but higher up, in the direction of her throat, and that it was tying itself in knots. She took her husband by the arm and begged him to sit in the stern beside her, and not to leave her alone, at least for a few minutes.

  “It’s nothing, seasickness,” Leopold declared. “Seasickness doesn’t exist. You have only to concentrate on something else, and right away it passes. Pray. There’s always a need for that: ask the Lord to grant us all good health.”

  Dragging a rope, Wolfgang darted past them and disappeared through a trapdoor. Frau Mozart sighed wearily.

  “Let him go; don’t worry. He certainly can’t escape from here. Come, my dear, please.”

  Nannerl was alone at the prow, crouching on the bridge like a little Siren, letting herself be slapped by the wind. The English coast was already visible through the fog, and she wondered what that island was like, inhabited by such adventurous people, people who went boldly forth to seek glory and wealth in the farthest corners of the world. Their language was made up of words more familiar to her than Italian or French; but if it was true that the sun never shone, then what source of joy did they have?

  She was joined by her brother, who knelt quietly beside her and in turn gazed at the distant strip of land. In harmonious silence, the two remained squatting beside each other, like two statues carved in the same rocky group, elaborating on their expectations for the London stay.

  “What will Christian Bach be like?” Wolfgang asked.

  Nannerl seemed to see him: he was a true maestro, a man who would be able to understand and help her as her father never would. “He must have…white hair, and big hands that are nimble and quick on the keyboard, and ink-stained. Also the keys of the harpsichord are stained, and he wipes them off himself, with a white cloth, and then…and then the pen that he uses to compose is one of those long silver ones. And he keeps the ink in a dark blue inkwell.”

  “I think he is better than Papa.”

  “That’s obvious, Wolfgang! Is there any need to mention it?”

  As for Leopold, sitting in the stern, his ears didn’t burn, but something must have happened in his body, because he was paler than before. His wife serenely prayed: “Sancta Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae…”

  “Amen,” he said, choking, and vomited into the sea.

  It was another world! It wasn’t Europe! All the customs, the objects, the behavior were different. The houses were low, of dark colors, gray, brown, even black, or the dirty red of unstuccoed bricks. In front of every building was an iron gate, to protect passersby from falling into the basements; every doorway led directly to a house. Buildings of apartments didn’t exist: only many single houses next to each other, with rooms stacked three or four stories high. As a result, there were no internal courtyards: if Wolfgang and I had been born in London, where would we have placed the king’s throne?

  The rooms were small, which gave them the advantage of being very warm. The stoves used coal, not wood; wood was used, rather, for furnishing. Walls covered with wood, wood-beamed ceilings, even the floors that squeaked under your feet were of wood; the smell of pine was strong enough to make you faint. The windows were not wide, except those on the ground floor, which is called the first floor; and they had a strange system of sliding the windows open upward, so that they could never be opened completely; looking out, you were amazed by the view of streets swarming with an incredible mass of humanity.

  Both men and women were tall, strong, and good-looking; blacks, Chinese, people of the lower classes mingled with the wealthy, and the latter did not consider this an insult or claim gestures of deference. They all seemed to be wearing costumes. The men’s coats were long, reaching to mid-calf, and had tight sleeves that restricted their arm movements. The women never went hatless: they wore broad hats, round, with wide soft brims, tied behind, of shiny material or of straw, or of taffeta, and richly decorated with ribbons and trimmed with lace, bows, flowers, and sometimes even precious stones. The skirts were of
linen, silk, cotton, fabrics from Persia and the East Indies, printed with little flowers or embroidered with delicate floral designs. Victoria, I assure you, would have been mad for those fabrics! The boys had short hair and felt caps perched on their heads, which they held on to with one hand when a sudden breeze threatened to carry them off. Then, one moment it was warm, and the next, cold air from the north lowered the temperature until your teeth chattered, and you’d want to go to bed immediately.

  You might find yourself witnessing a quarrel right in the middle of a square: two men savagely beating each other—breaking teeth, cracking bones—while passersby ignored them, or stopped to watch as if at a stadium, or maybe they even joined in the fray. It could also happen that you would be accosted roughly by a stranger, because of your continental dress: we endured what to the English is the worst possible insult, to be taken for French! So my father brought us in a hurry to a tailor shop and had us dressed anew from head to toe. And so, proudly, in all things now similar to an ordinary local family, we mixed with the dust and smoke and were lost in the crowd…

  XV.

  “Herr Tschudi, I am honored by your welcome, and I must acknowledge, of course, that you are a skilled craftsman. And yet I confess to you that this new instrument—how can I put it? It doesn’t convince me. An Italian invented it, right? It’s time for that riffraff from the south to stop illegally trying to take over the music business.”

  “I understand your point of view, Herr Mozart. But may I be permitted to remind you that while the pianoforte was indeed invented by the Cristofori, it was perfected by Gottfried Silbermann, that is, a German—”

  “Of course! And I am aware, besides, that Johann Christian Bach has already composed for the pianoforte. Make no mistake; I am, in all modesty, quite well informed. In spite of that, I don’t think this instrument will have a wide circulation. One of those passing fashions that are gone as soon as they have arrived—surely you know what I’m saying?”

  They were having tea in the workshop of the best-known maker of pianos. There was no habitation in London where the teakettle was not ready from morning to evening, and on every visit one was unfailingly welcomed with tea and buttered scones. And it seemed that the custom extended to craftsmen’s workshops, or at least those that were doing well; and to judge from the fine Chinese porcelain cups and the heavy silver teapot, Mr. Burkhardt Tschudi was managing very well. He also had an assistant, a man in a white coat who was sitting calmly in a corner working with glue and file.

  Nannerl couldn’t wait to try the modern instrument, which had replaced the metallic and essentially tedious sound of the harpsichord with a completely new, much more expressive timbre, thanks to an ingenious system of levers and hammers. She was excited by the idea of investigating a broad spectrum of acoustic effects, depending on the intensity with which she touched the keys, from the delicacy of a light rain to the tremendous power of thunder, passing through a thousand intermediate shadings.

  While the adults were conversing, she silently approached the magnificent instrument. Close up, it did not seem different from a harpsichord. It was of cedar, without decoration, and massive; it had a single keyboard, not the two, one above the other, that many harpsichords did. The moment she pressed her fingers to the keys, Nannerl felt the same emotion as when she had seen her newborn brother, and she realized that her life would no longer make sense without the pianoforte. Wolfgang joined her, mouth open in amazement, while she ran her hands up and down the keyboard, and crossed them, and then, still playing, stood up to see what the hammers were doing to the strings. She experimented freely, following only her own whim, instinct, passion.

  “What are you doing—are you by chance improvising?”

  It was the voice of Leopold. Mr. Tschudi looked at him with some disappointment, while Nannerl put her hands back in her lap.

  “Girls should not give in to the wish for fantasy,” Herr Mozart continued. “Eh! What would the world be if men did not take on the task of reining in feminine vanities?”

  Anna Maria, who was adjusting a hairpin, stopped abruptly and tried to assume the air of a serious person.

  With studied calm, Leopold put down his cup and wiped his hands and mouth with the napkin. “Very good! We have seen the instruments, and now I would say that we can go. Thank you, Herr Tschudi.”

  “Oh, so soon?” he said, unhappily. “We have some others upstairs. Don’t tell me you don’t want to see them! They are my best pieces.”

  “It would be very interesting, but you must understand that my son is wasting precious time that he should be devoting to practice.”

  “There is also a harpsichord upstairs. Wouldn’t he like to try it out? It might, after all, be useful, in an educational sense.”

  Wolfgang’s cry echoed amid the opened sound boxes. “Yes! I want to try playing both together.”

  “But of course, little one. My assistant will go with you.”

  Wolfgang darted away with the man in the white coat, followed by his mother and a resigned Leopold. Nannerl prepared to go with them, but Tschudi rapidly, furtively, closed the door to the stairs: “Come, play for me as you were doing before.”

  She glanced nervously at the door.

  “Don’t worry. They can’t hear anything from upstairs.”

  “No, it’s better if I go. My father will notice that I’m not there and come down.”

  “No one has ever played an instrument of mine as you did. Please, go back to it. Do this old man a favor.”

  Timidly, Nannerl sat down on the stool. She sounded some light chords, played a short scale, then a trill. Finally she let herself be possessed by a feeling of pleasure and at the upper end of the keyboard she spun a melody that contained echoes of treetops tossed by the wind on a beloved hillside near Salzburg, of the cool dampness of a cut bough, of the beating wings of a woodcock. She kept the volume low, fearing her father’s ire, but there was no need; he was too much in the spell of Wolfgang’s abilities, upstairs, and had forgotten her. And at the end, the old craftsman, with his faintly greasy complexion, gave her brief, emotional applause, the most gratifying she had ever received, and whispered a phrase that she never forgot: “Have the courage to fight for your dreams, little Miss Mozart.”

  XVI.

  They had arrived. The Maestro lived in a four-story mansion with a green lacquered door. From above a long and oddly mobile nose, a butler as elegant as a lord gazed over the heads of the Mozarts and said only, “Follow me.”

  Pressing her scores to her breast, Nannerl felt her heart beating violently; a vise gripped her from the pit of her stomach to her throat, and she was afraid of stumbling on the steps.

  “Welcome! It’s a pleasure to meet you. How are you?”

  “I am deeply honored to make the important acquaintance of the most esteemed and illustrious Herr Johann Christian Bach!” Leopold exclaimed, touching the Maestro’s fingertips.

  “Come now, there’s no need to be so formal among colleagues. Frau Mozart, enchanté. Please, let me show you the way.”

  Above the majestic grand piano hung a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, with his severe, troubled expression and an enormous wig of white curls that hung down to his chest. The son, so different and so young, turned in a friendly manner to Wolfgang and Nannerl: “And here are the little Mozarts! The two prodigies I’ve heard so much about.”

  “And I’ve heard so much about you!”

  “Silence, Wolfgang. Children should speak only if spoken to.”

  “No, no, Herr Mozart, let the little one express himself. So, what do you know about me?”

  “That you are better than Papa! Nannerl said so.”

  A heavy silence fell. Bach, amused, said, “My dear girl, in art there is no established hierarchy, and it’s certainly not a contest, that one can win or lose. But you, little boy, you must try to preserve this lovely impudence. If you can put it into your music, no one will be able to stop you.”

  “Impudence? I think that mus
ic is a matter of discipline,” Leopold muttered.

  “No doubt, discipline is indispensable. But it is only the means that allows us to express passion.”

  “As in the works of your father!” Nannerl interrupted headlong. “He was the first composer who—”

  “Shall we get to the point?” And abruptly, and almost discourteously, Leopold offered Bach a bundle of scores. “These are Wolfgang’s most recent compositions. I would hope that you might examine them as soon as possible, to assess the possibility of taking him as a student.”

  “Of course! I can even do it right away, if you have the patience to wait a little while.”

  “Pardon me…I have some things to show you, too, if you wouldn’t mind: a lied with basso continuo, a duet, and even a cantata.” With trembling hands, Nannerl offered her music to the Maestro.

  “I’m impressed. So you, too, compose!”

  “Let’s not talk nonsense!” Leopold grew more and more nervous. “No woman composes.”

  “But I do—my scores prove it.”

  “Careful, Nannerl: this is the sin of pride! And as Saint Augustine says, superbia parit discissionem, caritas unitatem.”