Marrying Mozart

Very well-written. The dialogue in particular is very believable for the time and place (aside from a few scenes at the beginning where the characters tell each other things they already know). It's obvious that the writer knows a lot about music. The story is both fun and serious. I enjoyed this book a lot, and if you love historical fiction, you will too.

As Mozart turned 250 this January 27th, I was rereading Stephanie Cowell's elegant and humorous novel for the third time. If you're weary of the vulgar and immature Mozart portrayed in the film "Amadeus," this book will warm your heart while correcting the biographical details. In Ms. Cowell's sumptuous version of Mozart's story, the young composer meets the four Weber sisters (Aloysia, Constanze, Josefa, and Sophie), and quickly falls in love with Aloysia, a temperamental diva who became one of his leading interpreters. When the soprano runs off with another man, however, Wolfgang comes to realize that the aptly named Constanze may be his "unsung" true love, an epiphany and plot twist that Ms. Cowell handles with extraordinary grace and charm. The author was an opera singer, and her prose sings with a rhythm all its own. She excels at depicting both the complex family relationships in the Weber household and Mozart's musical struggles as he began to write and produce his first operas. "Marrying Mozart" shows the human side of genius and in that way it is more compelling than many Mozart biographies I've read. I enjoyed this book so much, I may read it for the fourth time before the Mozart year is over.

Stephanie Cowell's superbly evocative, wonderful novel takes the reader from Salzburg in 1842, where an English biographer is interviewing the last surviving Weber sister, back to the Weber home in Mannheim in the 18th century and the era of Mozart, when their relationships with him all began. It tells the riveting, moving stories of all three sisters and the era itself is evoked in a fascinating wealth of detail, so that we are truly back in it. Ms. Cowell's writing is so exquisite, so romantic and so realistic at the same time that we can even feel the weather and the cold winter snow, so perfectly does Ms. Cowell bring it to life with telling detail. Her characters are living, breathing human beings, and we have a highly credible, complicated, real, completely believable Mozart. Here at last is the little man who wrote the great music, and we can feel his genius and his sensitivity in all its complexity. The Weber family, all of them, including the extended family of in-laws, is a powerful, sensitive evocation of the life of the century with all its differences in customs, and the life of Vienna and the court and the world of music are all engrossingly, lovingly, and magnificently depicted. There are startlingly beautiful scenes and a story that is compelling from beginning to end. You must buy and read and reread this magnificent recreation of a long-gone time and of the brilliant people who inhabit it!

I'd thoroughly enjoyed Stephanie Cowell's earlier historical novels set in Shakespeare's London, but I think MARRYING MOZART is her finest writing thus far. Her experience as a singer and writer shows in the fluent descriptions of both the music the Weber sisters sing and Mozart's creative process. You feel you really are living in Mozart's time and place. Patronage and the business of music were vividly rendered. The book was a real page-turner, too, even if you think you know a great deal about Mozart's biography. The family/romantic dynamics are well, not quite Sex in the City, but exciting and charming. The Weber sisters' father is an outstanding character, beautifully developed. I loved this book and just recommended that Bas Bleu offer it in their catalog!

Marrying Mozart is a richly woven poignant love story of a musical genius and four young women and their collective affection in his music and his passion. Set in Mannheim, Munich, Salzburg and Vienna, the novel is a unique insight into the lives of the four Weber sisters and their relationship with the passionate and resolute composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in his early 20s. Intelligent and unpretentious, this is a story of family relationships, longing and belonging, told by Stephanie Cowell in such an excellent manner that's interestingly charming. Alternative in time, after some 60 years, the story is being narrated warm-heartedly by Sophie Weber, the youngest of the sisters. Deliberately and brilliantly told, it starts when Mozart and his mother arrive in Mannheim from Salzburg and meet Fridolin Weber, a music copyist and father of the four sisters. The second eldest daughter captivates the young Mozart, who finds her singing talent only matched by her beauty. But she dreams of fame and fortune as an opera singer, something the struggling composer couldn't provide. She elopes with a portraitist. Mozart is broken-hearted, little does he know that love lies with another Weber sister who eventually becomes his wife. Marrying Mozart is a well thought out novel - distinct, eloquent and a confident ode which can only be captured by a brilliant and sensitive literary novelist who is also a coloratura soprano and a musician herself. The descriptions of each of the Weber sisters trying to make sense as related to each other, and their impact on the young Mozart, are particularly beautiful. Never mind that it happened long time ago in Europe, the author's conventional portrayal of the themes of love and family relationship borders on ordinary people like the Weber family, who we can relate to, a real resonance to typical lives of present day situation. Stephanie Cowell possesses a fountain of historical knowledge. She knows how to bring history to life, making it readable and relevant by creating characters that are all too human in their foibles and desires. Marrying Mozart is as rich as a Mozart music and as demanding as Cowell's task of perfectly blending fact and fiction. She pieces together more than a century's events and experiences, and tells it with impact undiminished through the years. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey back in time. Magnificent.