Product Description

Giddy sugarplum or calculating bitch? Mozart's biographers show disdain for his Konstanze. Mozart's wife aroused strong feelings among her contemporaries: for example, her inlaws despised her. Her husband's Viennese friends eagerly gossiped about her as well. Nonetheless, Mozart's letters attest both to his affection for Konstanze and to their powerful sexual bond. She bore six children while presiding over the unstable household of the world's first superstar. As a widow, Konstanze paid off his debts, provided for their children, and relentlessly mythologized the life of her brilliant husband. Why, then, did she never bother to mark her illustrious husband's grave?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #555939 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 354 pages

From AudioFile
Celeste Lawson's narration bridges this novel, which crosses historical fiction and romance. The story of Mozart's adult life is told from the perspective of his long-suffering (or hard-hearted, depending on your perspective) wife. It's the story of her passion for her husband and her struggle to survive being a married to a musical genius who gave little care to the money required to support a lifestyle of parties, hard drinking, and chasing after women and the fickle patronage of aristocrats, upon whom they depended. Lawson presents distinct and nuanced characters who avoid playing to the soap opera quality of the events in Mozart's life. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Download Description
Giddy sugarplum or calculating bitch? Pretty Konstanze aroused strong feelings among her contemporaries. Her in-law's loathed her. Mozart's friends, more than forty years after his death, remained eager to gossip about her "failures" as wife to the world's first superstar. Maturing from child, to wife, to hard-headed widow, Konstanze would pay Mozart's debts, provide for their children, and relentlessly market and mythologize her brilliant husband.

Mozart's letters attest to his affection for Konstanze as well as to their powerful sexual bond. Nevertheless, prominent among the many mysteries surrounding the composer's untimely death: why did his much beloved Konstanze never mark his grave?

Customer Reviews

My Father Loved Opera and Classical Music
I grew up listening to Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. Not until Mozart's Wife did I put a face on one of the men that wrote that music, and he turned out to be bigger than life.

I started writing the review in my head for Mozart's Wife by Juliet Waldron before I was halfway through reading the novel. In my opinion, it's that good--a strong six stars out of five. This is no Hollywood stereotype with a happy prince charming ending although that also happens--sort of.

This is a get-in-the-gutter with the rats kind of story that hides nothing. There are no devils here. There are no angels either. There are only real, flesh and blood people. If you want an entertaining trip to discover Mozart, the man behind the music, your journey ends here. This novel delivers. Mozart's Wife is a story that had me laughing, shuddering and exhausted but satisfied by the end.

Mozart's Wife paints a convincing picture of Mozart as the first superstar with all of the dangers that title entails. Today, the tabloids would have had a field day with Mozart. The paparazzi would have chased him everywhere. Cameras, action, lights and freeway car chases would have been daily fare for this man and his family.

Then, in the beautiful white-and-gold Tyl Theater, I witnessed something I'll never forget. The delirious passion of Prague for the `Marriage of Figaro' had been but a prelude.
By the time the old commendatore lay dead at the feet of the wicked Don Giovanni, the audience had gone completely mad. The applause, the shouts of "Bravo!" were ear-splitting.
In the box where Josefa and I sat, we could feel the building tremble. Clouds of hats and handkerchiefs flew into the air after each `aria'. Confetti rained into the orchestra and onto the stage. There was encore after encore.

Mozart was a wild man. He drank. He partied. He seduced endless women that threw themselves in front of him like doorstops. He didn't have brakes, and it was his wife that suffered and was corrupted. She was the one that starts out as an innocent beauty with visions of prince charming and ends up wounded like so many that have followed in her footsteps since with other superstars. Pretty Konstanze is the flower that opens, changes color and almost wilts in the process

Then I'd remember Elise, or worse, Magdalena.
"You liar!" I'd scream and push him away. "You broke my heart!"

Mozart doesn't have much of a character arc in the novel, but that does not detract because the novel opens up Mozart and dissects him as the story goes along. Mozart is the same man from beginning to end. Nothing changes him, but you will have to read Mozart's Wife to find out what that means. Slowly, we discover his moral corruption step by shadowy step as it is revealed inches at a time. The cost of his fame eats him like a malignant cancer from the inside out and like his wife, we are in the room standing beside her experiencing Mozart's decline in all its tragedy. Mozart's superstar status across Europe makes him the bell of the ball until he ruins his reputation and loses his welcome in cultured society. Even that is not enough to stop him.

"How could you! How could you! In our own house! Pig! Taking advantage of your own poor, wretched servant!"

He has his followers, both parasites and sycophants, along with a handful of real friends that support him and his wife until the end.

When we meet Konstance, his wife, as a young girl, Mozart is busy seducing her older sister. After the older sister, Aloysia, gets tired of waiting for Mozart and marries another man, Konstance becomes the consolation prize for Herr Kapellmeister. Her innocence captures his heart and there is no doubt that he loves her through the entire novel to his bitter end.

After the Romance Comes Marriage
Many a romance novel ends with marriage. The courtship, the chase, will they or won't they - these things provide the backbone of the novel, and in the end there is marriage and, presumably, a happy-ever-after.

In Juliet Waldron's historical novel, however, the courtship and marriage of Konstanze Weber and Wolfgang Mozart is only the beginning. The true story is of the marriage that follows, which every wife knows is when romance and love is truly tested. Konstanze begins as a self-conscious young maiden, overlooked in favor of her more talented sisters. She falls in love with Mozart and can hardly believe that the astonishing young composer has chosen her for his one true love. But marriage to the musical genius turns out to be a tumultuous existence for Konstanze, who quickly matures into a wife, a mother, and the household accountant. Konstanze, who grew up in a musical family, is not unappreciative of Mozart's genius, but reality dictates that music is primarily the thing which brings money into the house; it is their livelihood; it serves a purpose. While Wolfgang Mozart follows his muse, creating the music he loves - whether there is a market for it or not - Konstanze tries to prevent them from falling into poverty.

Mozart is flighty, unpredictable, and easily swayed by his friends. When flush with cash, he spends it like water, gambles it, and lends it to his friends. Konstanze has to bully him to take charge of the household accounts and keep them from ruin. She finds herself constantly pregnant, every childbirth a life-endangering horror and the precious infants too easily carried off by disease. Besieged by scandalous rumors, Konstanze does not want to believe her husband is unfaithful to her, but soon the unpleasant truth cannot be ignored and her husband scarcely bothers to hide it.

Juliet Waldron has created a believable, multi-faceted portrait of a woman loved but betrayed, adoring and yet resentful, capricious and sometimes spiteful. Her characterization of Konstanze Weber Mozart far outshines that of the genius composer himself, who becomes rather a minor character by the end of the novel. Mozart's Wife is a memorable historical novel about a woman who was long overshadowed and forgotten in the shadow of her husband, but without whose intervention his music might have been consigned to obscurity.

A Lively Look at Mozart's Spouse
I found Mozart's Wife to be absorbing and well-written. It follows Konstanze's life as she grows from a naive young girl to a capable, shrewd woman, her marriage as it disintegrates under the pressures of too many bills, infant mortality, and infidelity.

Konstanze is the narrator here, and her voice is a refreshing one: informal, earthy without becoming coarse, candid, un-self-pitying, and wry. She and Mozart are highly flawed but likable people, who never forfeit our sympathies even as they act appallingly toward each other and toward others. That's very difficult for an author to pull off, and Waldron does it admirably.

Waldron has a nice eye for detail. As a mistress of Mozart's departs the cramped household, she is accompanied by her cats: "Her calico Mutzie and tiger Murr followed, tails up, for all the world like a couple of well-behaved dogs out for a walk."

The book does feel a little disjointed in spots. For instance, Konstanze spends much of Chapter 20 fussing over an impending visit from Leopold, Mozart's difficult father, but the visit is never depicted; when we next hear of Leopold two chapters later, the matter seems to have been forgotten. Did something get cut? I also felt that too little emphasis was placed on Mozart's Masonic ties, considering the crucial role they later assumed in Waldron's explanation of his death and obscure burial.

All in all, though, I enjoyed this book thoroughly.