Mozart's Last Aria

by Matt Rees

  Finale from Don Giovanni.

  BEHIND THE BOOK: MOZART’S LAST ARIA BY MATT REES

  In 2003 I was covering the violence of the Palestinian intifada as a foreign correspondent. I had seen terrible things and lived through dangerous moments in the previous three years, working every day in the West Bank or Gaza. I was fairly sure the trouble wasn’t over. I needed a break – to get out of the desert for some calm in the mountains of Europe, to see some beautiful cities where the people weren’t killing each other, to be transported by music. I traveled to Austria and the Czech Republic with my wife, Devorah, and I found all those things. But the main pleasure of relaxation for me is that it brings me to life creatively. So the journey also gave me an idea that bubbled in my head for years, until it became Mozart’s Last Aria.

  Despite all the other attractions of Vienna, Salzburg and Prague, our trip drew us again and again into contact with the Mozart family. On a sunny spring day, Devorah and I visited the Salzburg apartment where Wolfgang was born. There we found a small exhibit about Nannerl. Her portrait made her look almost identical to Wolfgang. On our way to the village we had chosen as a mountain retreat, we happened to pass through the lakeside village in the Salzkammergut range where Nannerl lived as the wife of a boring local functionary (and where coincidentally her mother had been born). I became curious about the largely unacknowledged talent of this child prodigy.

  We took a train to Prague. In the eighteenth-century Estates Theater, where Wolfgang premiered Don Giovanni, we saw a production of that great opera. Somewhat neglected under Communism, the opera house had been left untouched by the architecturally philistine Sixties and Seventies. It’s just as it was in Mozart’s day. Sitting in my box on an old bentwood chair, watching this great opera, I was transported back over two hundred years, imagining the man behind this great artistic creation and those who had known him. The figure who reached out to me from that time most insistently was Nannerl. She was the one whose life posed the most unanswered questions.

  A couple of years later, I was having dinner with Maestro Zubin Mehta, formerly the musical director of the New York Philharmonic and now holder of many top positions in the world of classical music. I asked him which of all the great composers he valued most highly. ‘I’d find it hard to live without Mozart,’ he said. That gave me a new kind of focus for my thinking about those people who had lived with Mozart, and Nannerl in particular. After his death at only 35, what had it been like to live without him? To have lost one of the greatest geniuses in the history of the world. Maria Anna Mozart (Nannerl means ‘Little Nanna’ in German; it’s pronounced ‘NAN-erl’) had been almost as talented as Wolfgang, yet she was cooped up in the mountains while her little brother became famous in Vienna. Close as children, their relationship was strained by separation. I started to think about her response to his death. Did she imagine all the music he might have written that she’d never have a chance to play? Were there things she might have wanted to say to him, after he was gone?

  I came up with the idea of posing Maestro Mehta’s question through Nannerl. A musical prodigy who’s forgotten to history except as a footnote in stories about her famous brother, she knew him better and longer than anyone. What was her response to losing him?

  Well, that’s how I decided to write the novel. Then came the research. In some ways, it may not be exactly what you might expect.

  Of course, I read many books and documents about Mozart and also by Mozart – Wolfgang, Nannerl, their father Leopold, were all big correspondents and many of their letters survive, so it’s possible to have a sense of how they might have spoken to each other and expressed their thoughts. Music historians have also researched the tiniest elements of Wolfgang’s life and work. For example, I was able to draw on lengthy studies of the layout and contents of Wolfgang’s final apartment on Rauhenstein Lane. Despite all this minutiae, many questions remain about Wolfgang, and about his death in particular. Constant new discoveries about Wolfgang’s music and life gave me a great deal of material to weave into a cohesive (fictional) theory of how he might have died.

  But beyond traveling to Vienna, reading up on my subject and listening to Mozart’s music wherever and whenever I could, I also tried to enter into the life of Nannerl and Wolfgang. I did this with meditation and concentration techniques. The essence of these techniques, as I’ve adapted them, is to still my judgement and to open up my heart, so that I find myself in the presence of the energy of, say, Nannerl Mozart. Our world being a fairly cynical place, I don’t tell many people about this technique because some people think it sounds like I believe in ghosts – yet, here I am, writing about it for you. But you’ve read the book so I hope you’ll understand why it’s important. I’ve discussed these techniques with many creative artists, and they all use them to some extent. The emotion you’re trying to portray is ‘out there,’ and you have to find it, focus on it, and open up to it. How else does a dancer identify the emotion her body needs to portray? How can an actor inhabit the feelings his character is supposed to experience? It won’t just come to you; you have to go out and find it. Well, I found Nannerl. Or perhaps she found me…

  This technique helped greatly in my portrayal of Nannerl. But it didn’t help my piano playing. I learned piano as a kid, but I gave it up out of laziness and a healthy spirit of rebellion. I kept on playing music, featuring in several bar-bands on guitar and bass. But for this book I decided to re-learn piano. It certainly taught me that I’m no Mozart. Still, it was important: to revive my understanding of written music, to see inside the structure of Wolfgang’s pieces, to be able to communicate with talented musicians who helped me understand how they perform the great sonatas and symphonies.

  Often I found myself talking to musicians about the structure of Wolfgang’s music, not just the surface details of melody and rhythm. The organization of his work, which of course lies beneath the surface, was one of the things I found most attractive. In the classical period, music was almost rigidly precise. Mozart took this sense of order and undermined it, creating musical tension almost without our hearing it. He resolves the tension at the end of each section or of each piece, so that listeners are left deeply satisfied by the restoration of order. Sounds a bit like a crime novel, I thought: a murder disturbs the protagonist’s life; at the end, some kind of order is restored. This made me think about using Wolfgang’s music to structure my novel.

  I laid out the novel in terms of one of Wolfgang’s piano sonatas. Intimate and rhapsodic, these are my favorite pieces by the maestro. I chose one of his most disturbing sonatas, the A minor (known by its number designation K 310). Many people think of Mozart as a purveyor of happy little tunes compared to the sweeping emotionalism of Beethoven. But this sonata demonstrates the ardent depth of Wolfgang’s music. He wrote it in Paris, alone and distraught, after his mother died there (she became sick while accompanying him on a concert tour when he was 22).

  How does this sonata fit the form of a crime novel? It begins with an Allegro maestoso that is disturbing and almost discordant. Listen and you’ll see what I mean. In Mozart’s Last Aria I have Nannerl play this movement after she hears of Wolfgang’s death. I thought of this as the introductory theme of Act I of my novel, in which the calm world around Nannerl collapses with news of her brother’s death and she resolves to find out what happened to him.

  The thoughtful second movement (Andante cantabile con espressione) is Act II of the book, the central section in which Nannerl explores the Vienna Wolfgang left behind. She finds out about the delicate relationship with his wife, the fears of his friends, and the dangers that may have hounded her brother.

  Act III is the final Presto movement, in which the disturbing themes of the first movement are resolved in a series of climactic scenes, just as Nannerl uncovers the truth over the last couple of chapters of the book.

  This idea gave me an emotional framework for the plot. Given that the A minor sonata was written in response to a death – that of
Wolfgang’s mother – and that I wanted to explore Nannerl’s feelings about her dead brother, it seemed natural to use this sonata.

  So here you have it, my crime novel in A minor.