Mozart's Last Aria (22 page)
I
read throughout the night. By the morning I was feverish with excitement. I rushed down the mountainside to Aunt Nannerl’s home. I carried the journal she had given me, recording the events of that week in 1791. Its secrets, revealed for the first time after almost forty years, were so strange that I needed to feel their weight in my hand. Otherwise I might have believed that I had dreamed them.
I headed through the narrow streets at the foot of the mountain. I crossed the cathedral square and hurried up the steps to Aunt Nannerl’s apartment.
Her maid opened the door. She held a handkerchief to her eyes. “Master Wolfgang, I’m so glad you’re here. Dear God has sent you.” Franziska wiped at her tears and only then noticed my own agitation. She hesitated.
“What is it, girl?”
“She’s had a terrible night, sir. She’s very weak.” She sobbed. “I don’t think she has long. She won’t let me call for a doctor. But she’s been asking for you.”
I went through to the bedroom. Aunt Nannerl lay as I had left her. Under her bonnet, her face was so pale it seemed to have been dusted in flour. A thin hand lay across her shawl.
I sat beside her, and touched her shoulder gently.
She snapped her head toward me. “Wolfgang,” she whispered.
“I’m here, Auntie.”
Her blind eyes were milkier than ever. “You read it? You know now?”
“I can’t believe it, Auntie.”
She snorted. “Do you think such things could be made up?”
“Why did you never tell?”
She pursed her lips—the pause of one who must concentrate hard to accomplish the mere act of breathing. Her maid might be right, I thought: Aunt Nannerl seemed close to the end.
I touched her wrist. The flesh was cold. “Did you want to protect my mother? Was that why you told no one?” I said. “You didn’t want Mamma to suffer, to know the truth of how her husband was taken from her?”
Her pale eyebrows descended, a grimace.
“Don’t tax your strength, Auntie. I understand. Mamma will never know.”
She nodded toward the piano.
“You wish for me to play for you?” I raised my voice as though I spoke to a child or a foreigner.
She beckoned with a slight motion of her hand. I leaned close. Her breath was bitter and metallic, like a coffeepot that has lain unwashed for a day.
“I wish to explain to you,” she murmured.
“That’s why you gave me the diary?”
Her head shook. “Sing it for me.”
The aria was for a soprano, but it was hardly the time to quibble with my aunt about musical technicalities.
I laid the journal on the edge of her bed and sat at the old Stein. In my head, I formulated the letter I must send that day to Innsbruck, to her sole surviving child, Leopold, urging him to come bid her farewell. Under my breath I found the right pitch for my voice. I played through the introduction, transposing the orchestral part directly for the piano, and sang:
I wish to explain to you, O God,
what my grief is.
But fate condemns me
To weep and remain silent.
My aunt’s head lay to the side. She stared toward the window. I wondered if, in her blindness, she detected traces of the strong morning sun off the cathedral towers, perhaps as an undefined glow before her eyes. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t tell if she was singing with me or struggling for breath.
My heart may not crave
for the one I wish to love.
At the dramatic conclusion of the aria I confess the music took hold of me. I no longer was aware of Aunt Nannerl, small in her bed. I brought out the highest C-sharp I could manage and, as often happened when I played my father’s music, I felt his hand guiding mine across the keyboard.
Part from me, run from me.
Of love, do not speak.
With the aria at an end, I closed my eyes and listened to the final chord resonate in the body of the piano. Something brushed the back of my wrist and I started in fright.
I turned to ask Aunt Nannerl if she had enjoyed the aria. She lay so still I decided, instead, to tuck her hand beneath the blanket for warmth and tiptoe to the sitting room.
I lifted her arm. It was heavy, like a sleeping child. I bent close to her and whispered her name. Her head remained on its side, facing the window, eyes closed. I raised my hand before her lips and nose, but felt no breath. Her chest was still.
While I had been singing, she had gone.
I took her hand between both of mine, as though my warmth might revive her. She held something there. I turned her wrist to see what it was.
A thin gold chain looped around her middle finger. In the center of her palm, at the end of the necklace, lay a cross embedded with ambers.
F
RANZ
X
AVER
W
OLFGANG
M
OZART
Salzburg, October 10, 1829
This novel is based on real historical events. Mozart’s anticipation of his own death, his risky plan for a new Masonic lodge of some kind, and his mission to Berlin are matters of historical research. Pergen’s secret police persecution of the Masons, Hofdemel’s suicide, and his mutilation of Magdalena are also well documented, as are many of the other details of the characters, their relationships, and their membership of secret Masonic Brotherhoods. That women would have been members of Wolfgang’s new lodge is drawn from the text of
The Magic Flute
, which I interpret as a forceful argument for women’s inclusion in the Masons.
I altered the histories of several characters, allowing myself fictional license of varying degrees. In fact, Nannerl never visited Vienna after Wolfgang’s death. Gieseke fled the imperial capital, only to turn up in Greenland and later Dublin, where he died in 1833, a respected professor of mineralogy. Count Pergen really was fired by Leopold II. But he was reinstated soon after the emperor’s sudden death, which came only three months after Wolfgang’s passing. It was suspected Leopold had been poisoned by Freemasons.
Before he died, Leopold dismissed Swieten, whose membership of the Masonic Illuminati had become known. The baron never returned to public life. He died in 1803.
Magdalena Hofdemel went back to her family’s home in Moravia. The capacity of Wolfgang’s music to soothe various disorders is the subject of many recent scientific studies. A paper published in the
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
in 2001 found Mozart’s piano sonatas reduced epileptic activity in sufferers like Magdalena.
As for Wolfgang, no one can be sure exactly how he came to his end. But he might really have died this way.
W
ith thanks to: Dr. Orit Wolf, for showing how great musicians work; Louise and Dieter Hecht, for taking me high above the Karlskirche and demonstrating how scary old Vienna can be; and Maestro Zubin Mehta, who told me that he, too, would find it hard to live without Mozart.
Mozart’s work was catalogued for the first time by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, an Austrian music historian, in 1862. The music is identified these days by his so-called Köchel, or “K,” numbers. Mozart’s contemporaries, of course, wouldn’t have used K numbers, so I didn’t refer to the music that way in this novel. But if you want to look up and listen to the music featured in this book, here’s a list of the K numbers:
P
ROLOGUE
“Vedrai carino” (“You will see, my dear”), aria from the opera
Don Giovanni
, K 527
Sonata for Piano in A, K 331
C
HAPTER
1
Piano variations “Ah, vous dirai-je,” K 265
“Per pietà, ben mio, perdona” (“For pity’s sake, my darling, forgive”), aria from the opera
Così fan tutte
(
Thus Do All Women
), K 588
Sonata for Piano in A Minor, K 310
C
HAPTER
5
Adagio for Piano in B Minor, K 540
C
HAPTER
6
Clarinet Concerto in A, K 622
C
HAPTER
8
“Ach, ich liebte” (“Ah, I was in love”), aria from the opera
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
(
The Abduction from the Seraglio
), K 384
Symphony 41 “Jupiter” in C, K 551
“Der Hölle Rache” (“Hell’s revenge”), aria from the opera
Die Zauberflöte
(
The Magic Flute
), K 620
Sonata for Piano in B-flat, K 333
Piano Concerto in C, K 467
C
HAPTER
13
Piano variations “Willem von Nassau,” K 25
C
HAPTER
16
“Laut verkünde unsre Freude,” Masonic Cantata, K 623
C
HAPTER
22
“Vorrei spiegarvi” (“I wish to explain to you”), aria for soprano, K 418
C
HAPTER
29
Requiem in D Minor, K 626
C
HAPTER
31
“Un’aura amorosa” (“A loving breath”), aria from
Così fan tutte
C
HAPTER
32
Sonata for Keyboard for Four Hands in D, K 381
C
HAPTER
34
“Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino” (“If you want to dance, Little Count”), aria from
Le nozze di Figaro
(
The Marriage of Figaro
), K 492
Sonata for Piano in F, K 332
Finale from
Don Giovanni
Meet Matt Rees
I’
VE ALWAYS BEEN A WRITER
. It’s the only thing about myself of which I’ve never been the least uncertain. I’ve known it since I was seven (a poem about a tree, on the classroom wall with the teacher’s gold star beside it). The years between that poem and my first novel (which also won a kind of gold star in the form of a Dagger Award from the Crime Writers Association in London) were taken up with refining my writing skills and finding the wisdom within myself about which I might write.
I was born in 1967 in Newport, which was a steel town in Wales until Margaret Thatcher closed the steelworks. My family there was big and close. My maternal grandmother had three of her many sisters living on the same street. My cousins used to invade the park across the road each weekend. My father’s from Maesteg, which was a Llynfi valley mining town until Thatcher had a look at the mines and . . . well, never mind. I loved the landscape of the valley, the treeless hills carpeted in ferns of russet and green, and the rain, always the rain. At eighteen,
I took my bleached blond hair to Wadham College, Oxford University. I received a degree in English language and literature, focusing on post-structuralism, deconstruction, and Marxist literary criticism. For a would-be writer, it was like becoming a mechanical engineer when I really just wanted to drive the car. I did an MA at the University of Maryland and partied my way around New York for five years before I made the move that changed my life.
I found the sense of inner tranquility that, I think, is a worthy version of wisdom in an unlikely spot: Jerusalem. I came here in 1996. For love. Then we divorced. But the place took hold. Not for the violence and the excitement that sometimes surrounds it, but because I saw people in extreme situations. Through the emotions they experienced, I came to understand myself. Writing for
Newsweek
and
Time
magazine, I built up a stock of knowledge about these deep emotions that I knew I’d never fit into my journalism. So I wrote my Palestinian crime novels, which have been translated into twenty-one languages.
I’m still in Jerusalem, where you may be surprised at how convivial the lifestyle is. I’m blessed to have traveled far enough through the world to have a met a wife I’d never have bumped into had I stayed in Wales (she’s a New Yorker). I go to bed very happy, knowing that, unlike during my days as a journalist, no one will shoot at me when I go to work in the morning and no distant boss will pretend to be worried for my safety. I’m at my desk by 8 a.m., though I usually don’t bother getting dressed until the afternoon. I write standing up, doing yoga stretches, and listening to Mozart. My three-year-old son bursts through the front door at about 1:30 p.m., yelling “Daaaaaddyyyy.” At which point, my writing day is most definitely over.
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The Story Behind
Mozart’s Last Aria
I
N
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. In her portrait she looked 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 thirty-five, 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’ve written that she’d never have a chance to play? Were there things she might’ve 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 been forgotten by 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, and 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 one another and expressed their thoughts. Music historians have also researched even 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 judgment 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 relearn 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 twenty-two.)
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 that Wolfgang left behind. She finds out about his delicate relationship with his wife, the fears of his friends, and the dangers that may have hounded him.
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.