Alison Bauld

Mozart's Sister Alison Bauld

This wonderful debut novel follows Nannerl Mozart's life through marriage, children, widowhood and death in conversations with her nephew, Franz Xaver, Mozart's younger son. Intervoven is a fictional account of what may have happened to Mozart's body. It is a story with subplots ingeniously constructed from the few known facts. The heroine is Nannerl Mozart, the forgotten sister of a genius. As a child she had played for the royal courts of Europe with her brother, yet in adolescence she was left at home in Salzburg with her mother, while her father and Mozart lived in Italy. The father is not portrayed as an ogre, more a parent dedicated to enshrining and marketing his son's talent. The consequences are explored with perception and sympathy for each member and for Nannerl in particular as an eighteenth century female of considerable musical gifts. In 1770, Mozart wrote to his sister from Rome to praise her composition, urging her to send him more. None of her music survives and A. M. Bauld has included one of her own songs in homage. Merdith Oakes, playwright and librettist said "I loved reading Mozart's Sister because it carried me far. It's a living history: it's history appropriated by an informed, engaged, adoring, perceptive and wildly creative mind that responds to the Mozarts' life and music with a life and music of its own."