Mozart's Wife (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

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 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!

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.