Vienna Nocturne (35 page)

In June 1801, the promising young English tenor John Braham arrived in Vienna with his lover and collaborator, the soprano Anna Storace, at the end of their four-year musical tour of the Continent. He had met her when her brother, now deceased, had hired him as principal tenor at the Drury Lane theater, where Anna sang. He and Anna had studied with the same teacher. She had an estranged husband who was also named John. They laughed about that sometimes. Although Braham was just beginning his career and Anna was ten years older, it didn’t seem to matter.

They had embarked on the tour shortly after the sudden death of her brother, in 1796. She had wanted to visit all of the places where she had sung in her brilliant youth, when she was younger even than Braham. It would feed her memories, she said, and advance his career. They went to Paris and sang for Hamilton and Napoleon. They spent months in Naples and Venice, and every great city under the sun. Then they came to Vienna.

It was just the same
, she said. That was what she’d said of nearly every place they’d visited. Her hand on his arm was rigid. Braham
patted it and looked affectionately into her face. Now when she talked of the past he would know where it had happened, be able to journey there with her. He could almost see the past crossing her features now, in this park in Vienna, the past revealing itself to him with more candor and detail than it ever had in her stories. The pretty movement of her dear brown eyes, the furrow in her brow, told all. And there, finally, came a crystal tear.

“You’re crying,” he said. He loved the vividness of her emotions, her passions, rages, and ecstasies. He often thought someone should paint her in one of her passions.

Anna wiped her cheeks and looked away. She was going to sit on the bench by the lilacs, she said. She wouldn’t be half an hour. He might walk in the garden until she was ready. Then they would go see the Thun und Hohensteins and he would sing for them.

“And you, as well, my love?”

Her face was pale. No, she said. She had something in her throat. She could not sing today. The countess would understand.

He left her, as she wished, and paced the orderly gravel paths of the park. The Prater, it was called. They were in a secluded square ringed with trees. She sat by the lilacs. The flowers waved about her. The ribbons on her hat rippled in the air. A blustery day, with gray light. Braham watched her carefully as he strolled the garden paths, but for all the warmth of his attention she did not move or call to him. Drawing out his watch, he saw that it had not been ten minutes. Half an hour, she’d said. Twenty-two minutes to go. He resolved not to disturb her before she was ready. After all, he loved her. He could spare her half an hour.

He turned on his heel to examine a rosebush. Then he looked back again at Anna. She had taken off her slippers. He had not noticed that before. Her feet, perhaps, were tired. Sixteen minutes remained. Under his breath he hummed an aria he would sing later for these famous Thun von Hohensteins. The aria was by Wolfgang Mozart. Anna’s friend. Braham had a golden voice. He looked forward to seeing their pleasure when they heard it.

To all those who traveled with me and my Mozart story over the past decade, I offer my deepest thanks.

For inspiring the writing of this book, I am grateful to my exceptional mentors, Keith Kibler, Jim Shepard, Margot Livesey, and Ethan Canin. For their patience, enthusiasm, and wisdom in bringing it to fruition, I am grateful to my extraordinary editors, Susanna Porter and Dana Isaacson, and my superlative agent, Ayesha Pande. I warmly thank Libby McGuire, Dana Leigh Blanchette, Priyanka Krishnan, Zoë Maslow, Nita Pronovost, and all those at Ballantine Books and Doubleday Canada who have supported and worked on this project.

For their cheers, advice, aid, and correspondence, my heartfelt gratitude to: Els Andersen, Peter Aronow, Isaiah Bell, Connie Brothers, Anthony Bucci, Deb Bucci, Robert Buckland, Austin Bunn, Soman Chainani, Chris Dixon, Rossen Djagalov, David Durham, Anthony Eleftherion, Jeremy Friedman, Ann Foster, Richard Giarusso, Kevin A. González, Julia Green, Chad Harbach, Andy Howard,
Deborah Copaken Kogan, Kecia Lynn, Paul La Rosa, Mark Leidner, Samuel Levine, Tod Lippy, William T. J. de la Mare, Marvin Moore, Tyler Putnam, Shannon Rabong, Dan Rosenberg, John Sell, Roman Skaskiw, Isaac Sullivan, Anna Weinstein, Julia Whicker, and Matt Williamson.

Thank you to the many teachers who influenced this novel: Maria Acda, Robert Bell, Deborah Birnbaum, Michael Chance, Lan Samantha Chang, Doris and Richard Cross, Yvonne DeRoller, Tony Eprile, Jill Feldman, Stephen Fix, Jane Hester, Carolyn Kanjuro, Maurice Lammerts van Bueren, Linda Lewis, James Alan MacPherson, Carol MacVey, Randolph Mickelson, Wendy Nielsen, Rachel Joselson, Shari Rhoads, Marilynne Robinson, Alec Tilley, Robin Graeme Thomas, and Jennette White.

My love and gratitude to Amy Blyth, Carol Halpern, Cathy Hubiak, Robin Kibler, Beth Sutton, and Laura Wiebe; to my dear grandparents, Robert and Peggy Moe; and to the Fletchers, Humphreys, Islams, Moes, Ostlings, Riches, and Thorntons.

I am sincerely grateful to the Iowa Arts Fellowship, the Hubbard Hutchinson Memorial Fellowship, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

Thank you to all those who care for the arts.

Thank you to the cradle of loving kindness of the Shambhala community.

Thank you to the precious natural world: to the gardens, parks, woodlands, large trees, lakes, oceans, mountains, and songbirds in the company of which much of
Vienna Nocturne
was composed.

Finally, my deepest love and gratitude, beyond expression, to my sister, Alexis Shotwell, my brother, Gordon Shotwell, my mother, Janet Moe Shotwell, and my father, Hudson Burr Shotwell.

When Anna Storace bade farewell to Vienna, in 1787, she was twenty-one, the same age I was when I first began writing this story. In the space of years, I have grown so close to these characters that I sometimes believe that everything I’ve written about them is true. The bare facts
are
true, at least as far as we know. I stayed as close as I could to an accurate timeline. With the exception of Lidia, Herr Gosta, and the rest of the servants, all of the named characters are based on actual people. Many of the scenes, such as the concert in the orangery and the execution of Franz Zahlheim, are based on real events. The titles of the operas are paraphrased translations of Italian titles. Martín y Soler’s
A Rare Thing
, for instance, is called
Una cosa rara
in Italian, and was at the time of its premiere indeed more popular than
The Marriage of Figaro
.

Anna did study singing with a castrato named Rauzzini, and she did marry a man named John Fisher who was said to have abused her. She sang Mozart’s music and was his friend. There is no record of whether Anna and Mozart loved each other, but in the music he
wrote for her, especially the farewell aria
Non temer, amato bene
, for which he played the piano solo, I believe there lies an undeniable and unspoken affection.

The thoughts, speech, motivations, and written correspondence of the characters are all my own.

The cantata
For the Recovery of Ophelia
was called in Italian
Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia
, and was jointly composed by Mozart, Salieri, and someone named Cornetti, who may have been Stephen Storace writing under a pseudonym. This cantata has been lost, and so my description of its music and structure is invention.

When I consider my presumption in writing fiction about Mozart, I am embarrassed. I do not know whether it would have amused or affronted him. I hope, at least, that by writing in such a way I might encourage others to seek out live performances of classical music and opera, to play instruments and sing, and to support musical education and the arts.

It was not within the scope of the novel to encompass all of Mozart’s greatest works, and they are the best way to get to know the real man. Another, more direct way to get to know him is to read the Mozart family letters. For this novel I was particularly indebted to
Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life
, edited and translated by Robert Spaethling.

Less is known about Anna Storace than about Mozart. In historical accounts she is usually called by her nickname, Nancy. She, perhaps most of all, is my own creation. I had to make her mine, someone I loved.

In my research for this novel I drew gratefully upon the following resources:
The World of the Castrati
, by Patrick Barbier;
The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s Poet, Casanova’s Friend, and Italian Opera’s Impresario in America
, by Rodney Bolt;
Anna … Susanna: A Biography of Mozart’s First Susanna
, by Geoffrey Brace;
Mozart in Vienna, 1781–1791
, by Volkmar Braunbehrens;
Daily Life in the Vienna of Mozart and Schubert
, by Marcel Brion;
Mozart and His Operas
, by David Cairns;
Mozart in
Person: His Character and Health
, by Peter J. Davies;
English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, by
Jane Girdham;
Mozart’s Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music
, by Jane Glover;
Mozart: A Cultural Biography
, by Robert W. Gutman;
Mozart’s Operas
, by Daniel Heartz;
Reminiscences of Michael Kelly of the King’s Theatre, and Theatre Royal Drury Lane
, edited by T. E. Hook;
The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna
, by Mary Hunter;
The Cambridge Companion to Mozart
, edited by Simon P. Keefe;
Mozart and Vienna, Including Selections from Johann Pezzl’s ‘Sketch of Vienna’ 1786–90
by H. C. Robbins Landon;
The Mozart Compendium: A Guide to Mozart’s Life and Music
, edited by H. C. Robbins Landon;
Arias for Francesco Benucci: Mozart’s First Figaro
and
Arias for Nancy Storace: Mozart’s First Susanna
, both by Dorothea Link;
Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London
, by Curtis Price, Judith Milhous, and Robert D. Hume;
The Eighteenth-Century Pleasure Gardens of Marylebone
, by Mollie Sands;
Angels and Monsters: Male and Female Sopranos in the Story of Opera
, by Richard Somerset-Ward; and, last but not least, “Pots, Privies and WCs; Crapping at the Opera in London before 1830,” by Michael Burden.

V
IVIEN
S
HOTWELL
was born in Colorado and raised in Nova Scotia. A daughter of independent booksellers, and a classically trained singer, she has received degrees in music and writing from Williams College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Yale School of Music.