Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music

by Jane Glover

Overview

Throughout his life, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was enchanted, amused, aroused, and betrayed by women—his mother, sister, wife, sisters-in-law, female patrons, friends, lovers, and fellow artists—and he was equally complex to them. But ultimately the great composer loved and respected the women he knew intimately and those whom he admired from afar. In this fascinating, evocative, and compellingly readable biography, Jane Glover, acclaimed conductor and acknowledged expert on Mozart's life and work, brings these remarkable ladies vividly to life—the real women who shared the composer's tumultuous world and inspired some of his greatest musical achievements, as well as those he dramatized in his magnificent operas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060563516
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/26/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	403,089
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Jane Glover is one of our preeminent conductors and an expert on Mozart. She studied music at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, and subsequently completed her doctorate on seventeenth-century Venetian opera. She is Music Director of Chicago's Music of the Baroque and conducts regularly with the Chicago Opera Theater. In addition to the New York City Opera, she has conducted at all the major symphony and chamber orchestras in Britain — at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the English National Opera and Glyndebourne — and appears regularly at the BBC Proms. She works extensively in the United States, Europe and Australia. She is also a regular broadcaster, with highlights that include a television series on Mozart and the radio series Opera House. She received the honor of Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2003.

Read an Excerpt

Mozart's Women

His Family, His Friends, His Music

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By Jane Glover

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Jane Glover
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060563508

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Chpater One

Mozart never knew either of his grandmothers. His mother's mother, Eva Rosina Pertl, died in the care of her pregnant daughter a few months before he was born. His father's mother, Anna Maria Mozart, could have heard her seven-year-old grandson perform in Augsburg in 1763 but had long since fallen out irreparably with her own son Leopold, and kept her obstinate distance. But both these women, the one a victim and the other a culprit of historical absenteeism, had a strong influence on the lives and natures of their own children, Mozart's parents; and thus they left their mark on the early awareness of their grandchildren.

There was music on both sides of Mozart's family, but more perhaps in the maternal genes. His grandmother Eva Rosina's father and her first husband were both Salzburg church musicians. Her second husband, Nikolaus Pertl, was also musical, with a career path initially not dissimilar to that of his future son-in-law. Pertl attended the Benedictine University in Salzburg, sang bass in the choir of St Peter's Abbey and taught at the monastery school. But his main study was law, which after graduation brought him jobs in Salzburg, Vienna and Graz. He was forty-five when he married Mozart's grandmother in 1712. He then held the fairly senior post of District Superintendent (or Pflege) in St Andrae, but in 1715 suffered a near-fatal illness, which left him greatly debilitated. The Pertls moved to the quieter waters of the Abersee, and the small village of St Gilgen, where Nikolaus he held a similar but lesser-paid position. As his health continued to decline, he increasingly found himself having to borrow money, especially after the birth of his two daughters, Maria Rosina Gertrud in 1719, and Maria Anna in 1720. When he died in March 1724, his debts amounted to more than four times his annual salary. His effects were confiscated, and Eva Rosina, with her two little girls, returned to Salzburg to live on a meagre charity pension. Four years later, in 1728, her elder daughter died. Eva Rosina and Maria Anna, survivors of this all-too-common cycle of family tragedy, were thrown ever closer together.

The future mother of Mozart thus had a somewhat difficult start in life. Torn from the peaceful lakeside beauty of St Gilgen at the age of four, bereft of her father and soon also to lose her sister, she was bewilderingly transplanted into the city-state of Salzburg -- prosperous, independent of its neighbours Bavaria and Austria, and gleamingly modern. Ruled since the thirteenth century by a series of Prince-Archbishops, Salzburg reaped great revenue from its far-flung territories with their salt mines, livestock farming and forestry. Over the centuries it had also grown as a cultural and intellectual centre. The Benedictine University was founded in 1623, and, also in the seventeenth century, under a series of rulers whose imaginations were fired by the Italian Baroque, the city's architecture was transformed. The first major works of Fischer von Erlach, who later brought similar innovation to Imperial Vienna, were four of Salzburg's finest churches. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the city had nearly 16,000 inhabitants. Its ecclesiastical royal Court was the centre of important social and cultural events. Its merchants had distant trading connections, which gave them immense wealth individually. There was a wide range of public institutions and social services: schools, museums, libraries, hospitals and almshouses. Salzburg looked after its poor as well as its wealthy. In the 1720s it was just this supportive security that the widow Eva Rosina and her small child needed.

Little is known of Maria Anna's upbringing, except that she was not especially healthy. She probably had no formal education. Perhaps she and her mother supplemented their charity pension by making lace -- an industry which thrived along the shores of the Abersee. In the one adult portrait of Maria Anna, she is depicted holding a piece of lace in a rather proprietorial manner, which suggests that she had made it herself. But she was clearly a bright, observant and intelligent child. Through caring for her mother, which she continued to do until Eva Rosina's death in 1755, she developed a strong sense of resourcefulness, compassion and duty. These qualities were to sustain her through her eventual marriage to a charismatic but difficult man.

Sometime in her early twenties, Maria Anna met a young Court violinist. Leopold Mozart had been born and raised in Augsburg. His father, Johann Georg Mozart, was a well-to-do bookbinder; his mother, Anna Maria Sulzer (Johann Georg's second wife, married within a few weeks of the death of his first), the daughter of a weaver. Leopold was the eldest of nine children. He had received an excellent education in Augsburg's Jesuit schools, and after the death of his father in 1736, when Leopold was seventeen, it was the Jesuits who had effectively taken care of him. His mother had seemed almost to relinquish responsibility for her eldest son, concentrating instead on her younger children, and this was probably the origin of an ever-widening rift between them. As the years progressed, mutual mistrust festered and grew. Anna Maria may have disapproved of Leopold's erratic choices of career. First he forsook the family firm (her younger sons would continue the bookbinding business); next he abandoned the Jesuit path, for he left Augsburg in 1737 and entered the Benedictine University in Salzburg, where he studied law; and then, after only a year there, he was dismissed, with the chilling indictment of having been 'unworthy of the name of student',¹ and began to pursue his abiding passion, music (he was a talented violinist, organist and composer). This was too much for his mother. Finally dismissing him as some sort of family black sheep, she effectively cut him off, never allowing him to receive his family inheritance. Both Leopold and his mother were cunning, blinkered, stubborn, and ultimately unforgiving -- maybe this was what lay at the heart of their antagonism: they were simply too alike.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Mozart's Women by Jane Glover Copyright © 2006 by Jane Glover. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This

Dame Felicity Lott

“Beautifully written and scholarly without seeming so.”

Judith Flanders

“It is Jane Glover’s great gift to show how the women surrounding Mozart...all influenced him.”

John Allison

“Jane Glover has pulled off a coup des livres with her fresh take on Mozart’s life and work.”

Editorial Reviews

Beautifully written and scholarly without seeming so.” — Dame Felicity Lott

“It is Jane Glover’s great gift to show how the women surrounding Mozart...all influenced him.” — Judith Flanders

“Jane Glover has pulled off a coup des livres with her fresh take on Mozart’s life and work.” — John Allison, Sunday Telegraph

“Impossible to read Mozart’s Women without being deeply touched by what it reveals of the people closest to the composer.” — The Independent

“a heartfelt and original portrait...[from] one of the world’s finest musical interpreters of Mozart.” — The Observer

“Rich, evocative, compellingly readable, Mozart’s Women illuminates the music and the man, but above all, the women who inspired him.” — ClassicFM Newsnight

From the Publisher

Impossible to read Mozart’s Women without being deeply touched by what it reveals of the people closest to the composer.

The Independent

Rich, evocative, compellingly readable, Mozart’s Women illuminates the music and the man, but above all, the women who inspired him.

ClassicFM Newsnight

Jane Glover has pulled off a coup des livres with her fresh take on Mozart’s life and work.

John Allison

It is Jane Glover’s great gift to show how the women surrounding Mozart...all influenced him.

Judith Flanders

a heartfelt and original portrait...[from] one of the world’s finest musical interpreters of Mozart.

The Observer

Beautifully written and scholarly without seeming so.

Dame Felicity Lott

Glover tells the story of Mozart with special emphasis on the women in his life. There are long and rich accounts of Wolfgang's mother, who coddled him; and Nannerl, his musical sidekick; and his vivacious wife, Constanze. But Glover also looks at the lives of his indomitable mother-in-law, his sisters-in-law (two of whom became renowned sopranos and interpreters of his music), as well as other women vocalists who inspired him. She even considers the female characters in his operas. Glover makes no claims for her book as a work of original scholarship, but by examining Mozart's life through the perspectives of the women in it she offers some striking insights into his character, achievement and times.
— The New York Times

Anthony Tommasini

Glover, a respected British conductor, views Mozart through the women in his life: his mother; his sister and sometime duet partner, Nannerl; his wife, Constanze Weber; and the female singers for whom he wrote roles that are “some of the most vividly drawn and brilliantly understood women on the operatic stage.” Mozart seems to have had more in common with the happily domestic Figaro than with the brilliant seducer Don Giovanni, and knew how to appreciate a talented, vivacious, and resourceful woman, as Glover illustrates with many touching excerpts from his correspondence. However, after Mozart’s death, in 1791, her book begins to drag as she follows the lives of his survivors; Constanze remarried, completing her second husband’s biography of her first, and lived until 1842. The book’s title notwithstanding, much of the first half is dominated by Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s authoritarian and manipulative father, who emerges as probably the most significant person in Mozart’s life.

The New Yorker

Despite this book's title, Mozart was no ladies' man. The loves in his life add up to his mother, Maria Anna; his talented sister, Nannerl; a cousin known as "the Basle"; the four Weber sisters, all singers, and one of them, Constanze, his wife; and, naturally, the women in his operas and the divas who sang the roles (these included the Webers). In this latest of many Mozart biographies, Glover, a leading conductor of 18th-century music, views Mozart's life through the women who surrounded him, though no biographer could avoid Mozart's micromanaging father, Leopold. Mozart's first crush may have been on his cousin, and the second was certainly on Aloysia Weber, who firmly rejected him (and later regretted it). But Mozart's marriage to Aloysia's younger sister seems to have been entirely happy. The book's best and most original part of this work offers a close analysis of the operas, especially of the female roles and the women who inspired them; the discussion of Cose fan tutte is especially good. Though Glover is not an inspiring writer, the analyses of operas will interest some people, and the work will find an audience among loyalists. Photos. Agent, Margaret Hanbury. (On sale Jan. 4) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In this distinctive and engaging view of Mozart, Glover, a noted conductor who specializes in 18th-century music, discusses the composer's life and music in the context of the women in his life. His mother, sister, wife and her sisters, the female characters in his operas, and the divas who sang his works are all illuminated here, often via Mozart's own letters, with Glover brilliantly analyzing statements and then filling in the details. The discussions of his music, especially the operas, are lucid and insightful. Glover writes with the authority derived from her intimate knowledge of the repertory, and the product is so well crafted that it flows like a good novel. Mozart and the women in his life come to life in a way not achieved by any other biography. Highly recommended.-Timothy J. McGee, Hastings, Ont. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A thoughtful portrait of the famed composer and the less famous women who inspired his work and served as its greatest vehicles. Tom Hulce played it right in Amadeus: Wolfie Mozart was a bit silly, devoted to puns, bad jokes and bathroom humor. He also had little-appreciated depths of emotion and intellect, and Glover, a noted conductor of 18th-century music, does a fine job of bringing these out as she drops in to examine his process here and there, as with his deployment of timpani in the Requiem alongside the "Lacrimosa dies illa" dirge, a moment both brilliant and sorrowful. For some reason, Glover reveals, the timpani had frightened Mozart as a child, "together with their constant partners the trumpets . . . and his life ended, on an unresolved dominant chord." At least one woman was profoundly affected by his all too premature death (of overwork and lack of sleep, it was said): his young wife Constanze, who tried to catch his illness so that she might die, too. Constanze, who lived to be 80, was perhaps not the most important woman in Mozart's life; that honor goes to his sister Maria Anna, "Nannerl," pretty and musically accomplished, who shared with him the "family's customary lexicon of lavatorial catchphrase." Other women of importance, to each of whom Glover gives voice, were the talented performers who brought his depiction of ideal womanhood to life: His Susanna (of Figaro), the most ideal of them all, was smart, loyal, funny, "a little vain" and above all strong, dominating every scene she was in. To be sure, Glover suggests, Mozart was fond of strong women, but some of those to whom he gave his heart crumbled before others. Glover writes fluently and well of Amadeus's manybeloveds, as well as of his tangled life in general.

Kirkus Reviews