Mozart's Last Aria Part 29

CHAPTER 13.

Piano variations "Willem von Na.s.sau," K 25

CHAPTER 16.

"Laut verkunde unsre Freude," Masonic Cantata, K 623

CHAPTER 22.

"Vorrei spiegarvi" ("I wish to explain to you"), aria for soprano, K 418

CHAPTER 29.

Requiem in D Minor, K 626

CHAPTER 31.

"Un'aura amorosa" ("A loving breath"), aria from Cos fan tutte

CHAPTER 32.

Sonata for Keyboard for Four Hands in D, K 381

CHAPTER 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

Insights, Interviews & More . . .

About the Author.

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 cla.s.sroom 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 a.s.sociation 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 b.u.mped 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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About the Book.

The Story Behind Mozart's Last Aria.

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. 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.sical 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 p.r.o.nounced "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 doc.u.ments 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 ba.s.s. 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 cla.s.sical 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.

Read On

Recommended Reading and Listening.

Books Mozart: A Life.

by Maynard Solomon A thorough historical record that also gives many insights into Mozart's music.

The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context

by Ruth Halliwell Given the intense nature of Wolfgang's relationships with Nannerl and his parents on their long tours of Europe, a focus on the family is revealing.

Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History

by Nicholas T. Parsons History as if told by a knowledgeable raconteur over a meal of Wiener schnitzel and tafelspitz.

Recordings Mozart: Favorite Works for Piano

by Alfred Brendel The greatest interpreter of Mozart performs his most exquisite works.

Mozart: Die Zauberflote

by Otto Klemperer A cla.s.sic recording of The Magic Flute from 1964.