Mozart Lover Who Hates Classical Music Forums

[Nettl]

Thanks! I really do appreciate that.

[Scott Good]

Originally Posted by Nettl

I love Mozart and I know a lot about Mozart. I know even more about Nancy Storace. I should. I've spent over 10 years in solid research about her. I've also spent numerous years in research over their times and cultures and the 18th century in general. A lot of time, research, and knowledge has gone into this book and I'm proud of it. I want people to read it. I don't give a crap about arguing with someone over some trivial details concerning some Mozart work, or the cause of Mozart's death. So I'll lurk for a little while and if I find some place where I can contribute thoughtfully and intelligently, I will.

Ummm...isn't this "showing off"? That's a big pile of showing off as far as I can see.

Just saying. Maybe we are lost in translation...American to Canadian you know, eh.

But, whatever. My usual first word is "welcome"...so...

"welcome".

S

btw - I also don't care for the little details of Mozart's death or works either...unless we are talking voice leading!

[Nettl]

I honestly fail to see what is "showing off" in what I wrote there, but whatever...

Thanks for the welcome.

Lynette

P.S. I wouldn't exactly term Mozart's voice leading as a "trivial detail". He was kinda noted for that.

[Scott Good]

Originally Posted by Nettl

I honestly fail to see what is "showing off" in what I wrote there, but whatever...

Thanks for the welcome.

Lynette

P.S. I wouldn't exactly term Mozart's voice leading as a "trivial detail". He was kinda noted for that.

Cool.

I think you might like this place. There are piles of interesting people and subjects that float by. It has a different tone than most internet sights - classical loving or not. Not always nicey nice, but then, a bit of passionate discussion is not so bad, n'est pas?

And there are also some people who think W.A. Mozart is a little more than ok.

Best,

Scott

[Nettl]

Scott,

Indeed, there are some very interesting people! I've done some lurking over the weekend and everyone does seem very nice--at least in this particular forum. I read over an interesting thread the other day where one forum member discussed his being banned from other forums and why. He asked others to share their experiences of being banned. It was rather amusing! )

I think I will stick around--perhaps even start a thread about Nancy Storace and see if I can get some discussion going about her. In the meantime, I meant to post this link the other day, but forgot. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roQdfig1eDs"]video trailer[/ame] [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Lynette-Erwin/e/B004LXGWB8/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0"]So Faithful a Heart: The Love Story of Nancy Storace & Wolfgang Mozart[/ame].

[Despina41]

I know at least one person I told about your book is going to pick it up.

[Nettl]

Excellent! Thank you SO much!

[Nettl]

I forgot to mention, too, that the Bright Cecilia forum was very instrumental in some of the research for this book. It yielded a lead to some key evidence to the existence of the letters that were said to have been written by Mozart to Nancy Storace, and to the fact that she destroyed them on the very same day that she had her last, fatal stroke. I'd been searching for the source for which Einstein had gotten his information about the letters and the fact that they had been destroyed and kept running into dead ends. One day, my partner was scanning through some old threads in this forum and came upon one about Mozart's love affairs and Nancy Storace was mentioned. One poster mentioned some BBC transcripts of Jane Glover's interview on her book Mozart's Women in which she mentioned an inquest into Nancy's death and "two German men" who came to her home in Dulwich and asked about "the letters from Vienna". It was Nancy's maid who testified at the inquest and she said that their intentions were to get Nancy to sell the letters to them or they would confiscate them. It was later learned that these men were sent by none other than Georg Nissen, the second husband of Constanze Weber Mozart, who was in the process of writing a biography about Mozart. The maid testified that Nancy "railed" at them and threw them out of her house. That very same day she destroyed the letters and then that evening she suffered her fatal stroke. Very dramatic indeed.

Anyway, I was lead to these transcripts through this forum and they were instrumental in filling in many gaps and in the creation of the solid plot and premise for So Faithful a Heart.

[Nettl]

From the Afterword of So Faithful a Heart:


In this story I have presented two women in Mozart’s life who he loved, each for very different reasons. Each of them fulfilled needs in his life that the other could not fill, and each loved him in a way that only she could. So it is very important for us then, to remove the filters of our modern understanding of marriage and the role of women in modern western society before we can understand the difficult place in which these three people found themselves.

If Nancy Storace was so important to Mozart, then why have we not heard of her? When I began my research on her over ten years ago, I asked myself this question. Several Mozart biographers including Georg Nissen and Joseph Lange mention that Mozart had an “emotional attachment” to Nancy, which, in eighteenth century terms meant an affection of the heart. And the great Mozart historian and biographer, Alfred Einstein, even went as far as to say that Mozart loved Nancy, and that the great concert aria, C’hio mi scordi di te...Non temer amato bene, K. 505, he composed as a farewell gift for her was a declaration in music of his love for her. Einstein makes his disdain for Constanze very clear in his Mozart biography, Mozart: His Character, His Work, and adds that Nancy was much better suited for Mozart in temperament, education, and status. It has only been the more recent biographers who have chosen to minimize the role and influence that Nancy had in Mozart’s life, most often in an effort to accentuate the relationship between Mozart and his wife, and bring Constanze back into a more favorable light. To one, Constanze is the end-all and be-all of love interests to Mozart, and Nancy, nothing more than a minor fling, and to the other, Nancy is the great love of whom fate and circumstances deprived him, and Constanze is little more than an air-headed spend-thrift who didn’t understand her eccentric, genius husband. Through my research I’ve found both views to be extreme and that the truth probably lies somewhere in-between. Again, we have to look within the historical and cultural context of these peoples’ lives and events and look beyond the surface facts and our own cultural biases to what would be most likely true for them.

After years of combing through Mozart biographies, memoirs of Mozart’s and Nancy Storace’s contemporaries, websites, numerous articles, online forums, BBC transcripts, and one fairly recent, complete biography on Nancy Storace, it became clear to me that a piece of the Mozart story was missing, leaving a number of questions about the latter years of Mozart’s life unanswered. Why did Mozart pawn the family silver to buy a coach and four to go on that last German tour for which he had no invitation or commission? Why did Constanze, in the last two years of Mozart’s life, spend so much time in Baden, separated from her husband? Why did Mozart write a letter to her while she was at the spa, telling her that he had heard rumors of her amorous adventures, begging her to be discrete? Why was Constanze not at home when she gave birth to her last child, and why was Mozart not present when the child was born? Why did she, only after her husband’s death, give the child the name Wolfgang, Jr.? Why do none of Constanze’s letters to her husband survive? How did Georg Nissen know of the letters that Mozart wrote to Nancy, and why did he want to confiscate them? And most importantly, why did Nancy save the letters that Mozart wrote to her only to destroy them just before her death, twenty-six years after his?

Two things convinced me that there had been a massive cover-up of the relationship between Mozart and Nancy orchestrated by Mozart, Constanze, Georg Nissen, as well as Nancy, herself. First, when my partner, S. K. Waller, and I began to collaborate on the parts about Mozart and Nancy in her yet to be published novel entitled, Night Music: The Memoirs of Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, we put together a timeline of their lives and found that the opportunities for such a love affair were ample, and that the situations in which they found themselves would easily lend to it. The fact that Nancy was educated in a fashion unlike any other woman performer of her day would have been extremely attractive to Mozart and knowing his character and personality, she would have been irresistible to him. Nothing that I have written in this novel is outside the realms of possibility, and in much of what I have written there is a very strong possibility that it happened in the very fashion in which I described it. I was very careful to stick to the documented events in these two people’s lives, even in my conjecture.

Second, it wasn’t until very recently that I learned that there had been an inquest into Nancy’s death in which her maid testified about the two “German men” who showed up at Nancy’s door inquiring about the “letters from Vienna”. The maid testified that when they demanded she hand over the letters to them that Nancy “railed” at them and threw them out of her house. On the evening of that very same day, she suffered the last in a series of strokes and died a few days later. The letters from Mozart (presumably), were never found, but her son, Spencer Harris Braham, years later wrote to Nancy’s good friend, the English architect, John Soane, that Nancy had destroyed them.

I believe that in an effort to protect their reputations, both living and posthumously, Mozart and Constanze began the cover-up in such a manner as I have described in this novel. Then after Mozart’s death, Constanze continued to try and boost her own reputation, which was directly tied to her husband’s, in order to garner the sympathy of the court so that she could receive the yearly widow’s stipend that would help sustain her and her two children. When Nissen came into the picture, he saw financial opportunity in being the first to write Mozart’s biography.

Knowing that there was much evidence that would sully Mozart’s reputation in the form of letters, Nissen decided to use his diplomatic connections to confiscate any letters that might serve as evidence against the cleaned-up and sanitized Mozart he wished to present, thus the two German men that Nancy’s maid testified about in the inquest into Nancy’s death. In an effort to keep the only thing of Mozart she had left, sacred, Nancy destroyed the letters, leaving history to wonder what had transpired between them.

[periodinstrumentfan]

Hello Nettl !!! ... welcome to Bright Cecilia !!! ^_^

If i see your book on shelves here i'll buy one !!!

i love to read historical fiction

see you around !!!