Kindle Edition Amazon Juliet Waldron Amazon Category:  Historical Fiction Publisher: Books We Love Type: Fiction Pages: 277 Copyright: June, 2012 Mozart was her teacher, her mentor, her friend and her rescuerMozart was her teacher, her mentor, her rescuer--and, finally, fatally, her lover... At dawn, in the marble palace of a Prince, a nine-year-old sings for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then at the peak of his career. Always delighted by musical children, he accepts Nanina as a pupil. Gifted, intense and imaginative, she sees the great "Kapellmeister Mozart” as an avatar of Orpheus and her own, personal divinity. His lessons are irregular and playful, but the teacher/pupil bond grows strong. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro premieres, and Nanina, now twelve, is given a solo part. For her, this is the beginning of a long stage career. For Mozart, it marks the start of his ruin. His greatest works will be composed in poverty and obscurity. During the composer’s last summer, his wife has left him. Chronically in debt and suffering the emotional isolation of genius, he takes refuge with his disreputable Volksoper friends, who want him to write a “peasant opera” for their audience. Nanina, now grown, and still in love with Mozart, is among their number. As he seeks solace among the women of the Volksoper, the charms of his young fan become increasingly alluring. No one, least of all the composer, understands the depth of her obsession or how a brief affair will permanently alter her life. http://www.amazon.com/My-Mozart-ebook/dp/B0089F5X3C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1350481769&sr=1-1&keywords=My+Mozart Show More Show Less          Excerpt * * * "Most painfully affected of all by Mozart's fatal illness was Fraulein Nanina Gottlieb..." From Joseph Deiner's Memoirs, related at Vienna, 1856 Chapter One "Mozart, Ich liebe dich. I love you. Love you." "Come here, Nanina Nightingale. Come and give your poor old Maestro some of your ‘specially sugary sugar." My mouth on his the friction produced warmth and sweetness, with a decided undertone of the expensive brandy he liked, flowing from his tongue to mine. I slid my arms across the brocade of his jacket, none too clean these days, and swayed a slender dancer's body against him. Let me assure you that my sophistication was assumed. It really doesn't matter - then, or now. I was young, foolish, and drowning in love. I was seventeen. He was thirty five. He had once been boyishly agile, doing handsprings over chairs, turning cartwheels of joy at a prima donna’s kiss or a perfect performance of his own celestial music. He was never tall, and was, like most men of his age, working on a bit of a belly. Still, he kept more or less in shape by a daily regimen which included running from bailiffs, dashing out the back doors of taverns to avoid payment, and climbing in and out of the bedroom windows of adventurous (and talented) musical gentlewomen. I believed he knew everything--that he could see right through me with those bright blue eyes. He probably could. He'd been my music master--and, more--my deity, ever since I'd met him, in my ninth year. His jacket, now spotted and stained, must have been fine enough to wear in the presence of the Emperor. Bright blue, it perfectly matched his eyes. I can still feel the fabric sliding under my fingers as my arms passed over his shoulders and around his neck. I can still see him a woolly frizz of blonde hair, long, aquiline nose--a ram that had once been an angel. Sometimes, when he was loving me in some exquisitely naughty way and joyfully smiling as he did it, I could almost see horns. So you will understand exactly how I loved him, so that you will know that it was a real passion, I'll tell you that I adored the feel of him, the smell of him, the taste of him. They've tried to turn him into a tinkling porcelain angel, but I'm here to tell you, here and now--he was not. Mozart's eyes were big, slightly protuberant, and as I’ve said, so blue. Alarming, those eyes! Once they'd shone with the pure light of genius, radiant and blissful as a summer noonday. Lately, they were simply wasted. My adored Maestro was mostly either drunk or hung over. He'd fallen from grace. Everyone knew it. Creditors hounded him. There were too many wild parties, not enough money. His wife had given up coping, had gone back to the Baden spa where she had an on-going romance with a big, handsome Major. And who could blame her? Pretty Constance, in the last ungainly stages of yet another pregnancy, fleeing Vienna after a winter of freezing and begging for handouts... Even a seventeen year old idolater could recognize her defection for simple self preservation. I didn't judge her. I didn't judge myself. I was simply glad to have her out of the way. When she was gone, he was restless, at loose ends, spending most of his time hanging around our theater. Of course, nothing could have suited me better. Oh, I can still hear my painted Mama lecturing, telling me all about Wolfgang's debts, his drinking, and his wife. If I must go whoring, why couldn't I be sensible, make it pay? Naturally, I knew that the lady who filled his mind was one of his damned piano pupils. She was struggling with a very real fear of her husband and with her own natural chastity. Dear Mozart always imagined that if a lady played his music with "taste and feeling", she belonged to him in a deeper and more complete sense than she could ever belong to a mere husband. The notion proved in every case disappointing, and, in the final exercise, fatal. He often held forth upon "acting like a Kapellmeister/ dressing like a Kapellmeister", long after he'd been ejected both from the court and the wider world of gentlemanly convention. When sufficiently drunk, he used to amuse everyone at The Serpent, clowning with a violin like some impoverished, itinerant musiker. One night, a pair of Englishmen who'd been dining there dropped a handful of kreutzers and asked in broken German if he knew the way to "the house of Kapellmeister Mozart." As the regulars roared, Mozart answered with the filthiest English curse he knew and haughtily stalked away, leaving the money on the floor. The waiter, Joseph Deiner, God bless him, scooped it up and applied it to Mozart's perennial bill. * * * It's hard to tell how you will like a true story, but to my mind, all the best tales grow. Have patience. This, I assure you, is a love story.

The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same
The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same June 11, 2012
By Patricia A. Martin
Format:Kindle EditionThose of you who are familiar with Mozart's Wife, the companion novel to My Mozart, will be swept up again in the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but this time from the perspective of his child mistress, Fraulein Nanina Gottlieb. The prodigious amount of research that obviously went into this flight of fantasy shows itself in every paragraph. Ms. Waldron has again captured the very essence of the period, and places the reader as observer in a fascinating era of human history. And as we soon see, love's labors are as lost in the 18th Century as they are in our current lives, some three hundred-plus years later.

The brilliance of the plot is that it is timeless ... Teenage fan falls in love, has a brief love affair with her idol, and is dropped (inevitably) by older man who didn't really mean for things to go this far, but who is now alarmed that they have. But he's Mozart, so creating music is all he really cares about. His human relationships are a means to an end. As she is a singer/dancer and a genuine musician, the music--his music--does magical things to her--even, in the end, keeping her (apparently) sane and relatively happy with her memories and his ghostly presence. The characters are as real as today, once again underscoring the fact that people, after all, never change in motives or behavior ... only in time.

Carried along by the story, told beautifully as always, the reader certainly feels the emotions that boil at every turn, stirred my Mozart himself and flavored with the spices of adultery, jealousy and even fear. Fear for the future, fear of the past, fear of what may become of those who love in such precarious times.

As the author herself says, "There are chickens in the street, sparrows in the ivy, and men and women still break each other's hearts." Lacking only the chickens in the street, it is the human condition now, and will always be. And that is the beauty of the story, in that it is timeless, and if the reader can identify with any character, it would be Nanina, the nightingale, singing the sweet songs of love and life.

Bravo, Ms. Waldron. Your talent and knowledge shine on every page.


Suspension of Disbelief
Did this really happen? I was so convinced of this reality that I stopped reading several times to check out these people on the net. A more astute fan of Mozart or opera would have recognized the characters without looking them up; I had to know if the story was true. That's the most flattering suspension of disbelief a reader can offer the author.

Concerning the last year of Mozart's life, the love story might have happened just this way. Passionate-forbidden- a vienese version of "A Star is Born."- but much, much more. Songs translated from "The Magic Flute" are woven into the book as naturally as the descriptions of people and place. This really knocked my socks off, and so you don't have to know the opera or Mozart's music to love this book. Juliet Waldron takes you by the hand into this other world so completely that you will never forget it.

In the wicopedia description of Anna Gottleib, I read that as an old woman she lived in poverty and was ridiculed when she claimed to be the first Pamina. I wish I hadn't read that. The narrator of My Mozart seems more real.