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: #1013057 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 354 pages

Review

This is a multi-faceted novel which brilliantly joins the nomenclature of romantic and historical fiction. I would recommend this novel to lovers of music, lovers of history, and just plain lovers. --Knowbetter.com

Juliet Waldron brings Konstanze and her wayward genius of a spouse to vivid life. She avoids the pitfall of the biographical novelist by refusing to make either of them the villain, and her insights into character are extraordinary. --Liz Burton, The Blue Iris Journal

Mozart's Wife is a story of love, jealousy, grief and most importantly--forgiveness. ...Fastpaced; Ms. Waldron has exquisite, flowing prose. .. a must read... --Kim Murphy, Sime-Gen

Waldron's writing is humorous, erotic, and fluid. Her beautiful use of words reveals the delicate, volatile intimacy inherent in marriage. In the antagonist, Waldron characterizes a woman's quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) struggle to remain the dutiful wife while also protecting her children and herself from her husband's self-destructive behavior. Mozart's Wife is a consuming piece that reminds us that all humans, regardless of talent or skill, are within the boundaries of fault and outside the lines of perfection. I highly recommend this wonderful book. --Melissa Levine,

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

Customer Reviews

Historical anti-romance
The tortures of the Inquisition wouldn't induce me to confess to reading historical romances, so Mozart's Wife is perforce a historical love story. It's the first-person narrative of Konstanze Marie, nee Weber and in later life Nissen, who has been almost exclusively vilified or ignored through seven generations of her husband's biographers. They see a great genius dead at thirty-five, an unmarked grave and a widow minting cash from his manuscripts. Konstanze's story redresses the balance with an engaging and thoroughly engrossing picture of life as a woman in the late eighteenth century - the complexities of love and marriage, the practicalities of running a household, the horror of "dishonour" and the agony and danger of childbirth - and, in Konstanze's case, the additional complication of her brilliant, charming, vulgar, gentle, generous, philandering, feckless, irresistible and totally incorrigible husband. Though nearly immune to his musical gifts (her favourite of his operas, not unjustifiably in the circumstances, is the one that made the most money), Konstanze clearly contributes more to the survival of his work than the great man himself ever thought of doing. But although Konstanze touchingly recounts her life after Wolfgang's death, it's the Mozarts' life together that takes up most of the book, and it's the details of that life that compel the attention - the characterisation of Mozart's cold, stern and uppity family; the moving from place to place, buoyed up by an adoring Prague only to be dragged down by an indifferent Vienna; the endless, unwinnable battle to try and clear up the disaster area that is Mozart's finances; the exhausting and perilous ordeals of pregnancy, childbirth and what is nowadays blandly called "infant mortality". If, towards the end of the book, Konstanze starts to behave very much like the hard-nosed money-grubber her detractors have accused her of being, it's more a cause for sadness than surprise. Her story doesn't end there, however, and in an exquisitely moving scene at Mozart's grave she finally makes her peace with his memory. Written with a light touch behind which lies a huge wealth of research, Mozart's Wife is definitely historical, decidedly unromantic, and quite captivating.

THIS is life with Mozart!!
THIS is life with Mozart from his wife's point of view...
The story will transport you back to the 18th century, reads easily and is entirely engrossing. It was one of the few books that has kept me up reading until the sun rose! The writing is so stark and raw, no flowery romanticism, just honest, straightforward realism. Although I personally found neither Mozart nor Konstanze likable, they were completely, charmingly, and utterly human, flaws and all.
Mozart's Wife is one of the best books I have read in many years. I highly recommend that you don't waste another day without reading this incredible book!

Life and the Artist
Mozart's Wife by Juliet Waldron is a richly textured and painstakingly researched trip into the eighteenth century. Waldron's prose is clean, infinitely readable. She develops her characters brilliantly and without sentimentality. The overriding sense is that of *the real*: Stanzi Mozart is voluptuous, spirited, and wretched by turns. What is life lived in the shadow of a genius? Exaltation, poverty, at times madness. Mozart's Wife lays before the reader the picture of a man overcome by the Muse, and the woman who struggles to live with him, keep their meager household, and rear their children. Mozart in essence, remains a puzzle: it has been posited that the heightened sensitivity of artistic genius may render life too painful to bear, and that this is why so many truly brilliant musicians, poets, or writers enter a cycle of inevitable self-destruction. They burn with a blinding light and extinguish themselves. Mozart's Wife takes up this theme in the relationship of Wolfgang and Stanzi; the opiate for Mozart's pain is the female form. Waldron doesn't lapse into romanticism, however. Her characters seize the reader from the outset because they are genuine-their hopes, fears, joy, and pain become our own. The author has the uncanny ability to place us in the conjugal bed, in the midst of a pain-riddled childbirth, a dying man's vision, or at the Opera with equal dexterity. Most telling, when Stanzi must face the reality of her feelings after many years by Mozart's side, we have been there with her; we've mourned and adored and torn our hair.