The Mozart Conspiracy — Scott Mariani

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I have to stop picking up books with the names of composers in the titles. At least I have to stop adding them to my reading stack before I scope them out. The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani was a fast-paced read but it really exhausted me. In true thriller fashion, the book opened with some gruesome and perverted incidents that were creepy enough to alert a sane reader to the havoc to follow. No claims for sanity here—reading a book a day in medias res is a less than rational challenge. So I read on, knowing full well things would get more horrible as the pages turned. They did.

Ben Hope is a former SAS officer, member of a British special services unit of highly trained operatives who carry out the most critical and dangerous missions. These days he’s a hero-for-hire, rescuing children from pedophile rings and solving complex and deadly crimes. Ben’s friend Oliver Llewellyn dies a suspicious death and Ben is contacted by an old flame, Oliver’s younger sister Leigh, a world famous opera star who happens to be the girl Ben left behind.

The twist is the Mozart letter, a document discovered in the hollow leg of an antique piano by the Llewellyns’ father. The letter contains a secret that reveals something important about Mozart’s puzzling death and may prove that he was murdered. Some people will stop at nothing to get the rolled parchment in Mozart’s handwriting. Ben has to piece together what Oliver stumbled across as he researched the letter, and how that may have killed him. Leigh is in the same danger after she reveals on television that she will carry on her beloved brother’s research, using the materials he sent to her.

A conspiracy encompassing an ancient order that may still exist, a mysterious estate with a ritual assassination room in the cellar, a rising young politician with a green agenda and sadistic enemies, the terrified opera diva, a dogged Viennese gumshoe who is working in a compromised police department, a young kid who gets kidnapped a lot but remains resilient, a renegade nun on the lam from the law in a totalitarian regime, a scarred and deformed very very bad guy in a large cast of unsavory characters, all this captures and nearly kills Ben who wants to save his former lover and avenge his friend.

The torture is ugly, the weapons are plentiful and powerful, a shocking thing happens and then an even worse thing happens and then it gets nasty. Ben Hope has an astonishing ability to withstand injury and pain and escape imprisonment, imminent death and sophisticated traps. Many things become weapons and many weapons are lovingly described and demonstrated. Mariani would seem to know his knives and guns. He doesn’t quite know his opera, which undercuts the credibility of the tale at a few points.

Leigh Lllewellyn is about 34, still early in an operatic career. As a big star she would sing the major roles. As a trained singer she would choose roles carefully to mature and preserve her voice. But Mariani has her singing Verdi’s Macbeth, Puccini’s Tosca and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte—the Queen of the Night role. The Verdi and the Puccini call for darker, full-bodied voices with the heavier timbres that a singer develops over time. Singing those roles too soon will imperil a soprano’s top notes and the topmost belongs to the Queen of the Night, a high F above high C. No way does one singer tackle all those parts at the same point in her career. So, being an opera nerd, the discrepancy made me wonder what else might have been lightly researched.

The violence is convincing, though, if sickening. And Ben loves Leigh, the two of them dash all over Europe in every type of conveyance, evil triumphs again and again and many bodies pile up—one has an iron skillet half-buried in his brain, courtesy of our clever hero. It’s a very bloody book and most of the characters die and the conspirators trace their lineage to a sect of the Masons, the organization Mozart belonged to and glorified with The Magic Flute.

Clues do fit together neatly; villains are beyond redemption; Leigh is beautiful and as good an actress as she is a singer; Ben finds it increasingly hard to protect her. Every beat is a fresh disaster. The Mozart Conspiracy earns its thriller stripes in an action movie explosion of nonstop brutality. Mozart isn’t very essential; he serves mainly as an excuse  for absolute carnage that continues senselessly after the book’s logical end. It seemed like too much to me. I would have preferred more Mozart and fewer maniacs and several dozen fewer murders in the mix.

 The Mozart Conspiracy: A Novel    Scott Mariani | Touchstone  2011

Mozart’s Sister — Rita Charbonnier

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Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart — Nannerl — was a child prodigy who played the harpsichord and eventually the pianoforte, improvised and composed music and sang with astonishing virtuosity. Her brief career as the miraculous young Mozart child ended the moment her brother arrived. Leopold Mozart coldly replaced the daughter with the son, forbidding his eldest child to compose, to play in public, to do much more with her life than support the brother she adored and grew to resent.

Mozart’s Sister is Rita Charbonnier’s fictional recreation of Nannerl’s life, based on the scant details that can be recaptured. Little is known about her aside from the early performances that amazed concert crowds, the great childhood affection that bound the Mozart siblings, the relentless rejection of her talent by a father obsessed with promoting his son, and the fact that she devoted a great deal of her life after Wolfgang Mozart’s death to collecting and publishing his compositions.

In lively epistolary passages, Nannerl recounts her early years to her fiancé, an absent military officer. Her letters disclose a charming young Wolfgang, as personable as he is talented, and two children who create a magical world only they can inhabit. But Leopold Mozart is an ogre, denying his daughter access to the music that pours out of her and relegating her to the role of piano teacher to support her brother’s concert tours by giving lessons. Once she renounces her own life as a musician, any mention of her playing and composing enrages her. Nannerl’s bitterness is tangible and the destruction of her soul and talent is a horror.

Mozart manages to carelessly wreck the shreds of happiness his sister gathers around her; the engagement ends as calamitously as her career due to Wolfgang’s seduction of her favorite pupil, her fiancé’s daughter. Then their mother succumbs to illness in Paris while touring with her son and Nannerl is so badly shattered that she is sent away to recover in the mountains at the country home of the household servant. As she slowly regains her strength and sanity, she is wooed and won by a baron who worships her. Her congenial marriage and household of children and cheerful confusion is abruptly altered by the news of Wolfgang’s untimely and impoverished death. How she reconciles the loss of her brother and the decision to dedicate herself to his legacy is the denouement to a tumultuous existence, touched and wounded by genius at every turn.   

The novel is very readable and presents a world that is easy to understand and enter. Charbonnier is skilled at pacing and creating characters and her Nannerl is sharp-tongued and witty, an acerbic foil to Wolfgang’s sunny appeal. The fact that she finds happiness and purpose in the end is comforting although not entirely believable. The waste of her talent and the dismissal of her music and her self in favor of her brother is infuriating. The story of Nannerl is the story of all women who are wildly gifted and buried alive. I thought, through most of the book, ‘this is why there are men and men and men in the canon.’ What is lost to the world by the suppression of women and the discounting of their work seems an irreparable tragedy, starkly delineated in the dynamic of the Mozart family.

Nannerl may have been as great as her little brother, or surpassed him handily, or fallen behind as his genius emerged. We will never know. If she did ultimately find a measure of peace and a sense of purpose, she deserved it. If her loss haunted her and twisted her life, we have no clear record of that either. Mozart’s Sister has just enough history to be credible and just enough tension at the repression of Nannerl to make you want to scream. Or pound on the keyboard, or burn a few manuscripts. We are fortunate beyond measure for every composition she helped to conserve and catalog. Her kid brother’s music is still divine. Her music no longer exists—and that is a dark coda to the colorful tale of her life.  

Mozart’s Sister: A Novel     Rita Charbonnier    Crown Publishers   2007