Mozart tale is a perfect harmony of fact, fiction

Much can be, and has been, said about the current vogue for historical novels, and when a novelist purports to give us an impossibly detailed portrait of a real-life historical personage -- what Shakespeare was wearing and thinking on Dec. 12, 1599, for instance -- we may well have our doubts. Indeed, we might also register an unease about the entire enterprise of mingling fact with fiction. That being said, a historical novel at least presents itself as a novel, so the reader is forewarned.

Apart from entertainment, what can this fictionalizing approach to history provide? A good historical novel can, as it were, connect the dots. It can start with the known facts of history and offer a plausible, convincingly imagined picture of how these people might have felt, thought, spoken and acted. It should also give us a sense of what it was like to live in that particular place and time.

After Peter Shaffer’s skewed portrait of him as a clumsy buffoon in “Amadeus,” poor Mozart can probably use some help. Fortunately, there are excellent studies of him, including Maynard Solomon’s fine biography. And for those who enjoy the charms of the fictional mode, Stephanie Cowell’s “Marrying Mozart” offers an engaging portrait of the composer as a young man falling in love and of the four Weber sisters, one of whom became his wife.

Josefa, Aloysia, Constanze and Sophie live with their parents in a tiny, cramped, fifth-floor apartment in Mannheim. Fridolin, their father, is a poor, kindly, hospitable man who earns his meager living as a music copyist. Not only has he taught his daughters all he knows about music, but he also loves inviting his musical colleagues and friends round on Thursday nights for jolly sessions of food, wine and music-making, somewhat to the annoyance of his wife, Maria Caecilia, who resents the expense, not to mention the trouble of preparing the food.

To one of these gatherings comes Mozart, who’s arrived in town looking for work. No longer the bankable child prodigy, he is trying hard to make his own way as a composer. Cowell’s portrait of Mozart is subtly done: understated, balanced and believable, conveying his youthful high spirits and occasional silliness as well as his essential seriousness, kindliness and decency. (She’s even able to place the scatological aspect of his character in the context of the culture in which he lived.) But it’s the four sisters and their difficult mother who are this novel’s most remarkable achievements.

We first meet them, as Mozart did, in 1777, when the youngest girl, Sophie, is going on 12. The two oldest sisters have lovely singing voices and sometimes perform in public: 17-year-old Josefa is her father’s daughter, passionate, warm-hearted, intellectually curious, with a rich, complex voice, while the slightly younger Aloysia, with her lighter, crystalline tones, is the family beauty, the one on whom their desperate but ever-hopeful mother has placed the greatest hope of marrying a wealthy aristocrat. She is the one Mozart first falls for, not quite recognizing how self-centered she is. Then there’s little Sophie: a great reader, clever, lively, hard-working and altruistic (at this point, she’s thinking she might want to become a nun).

The third sister, Constanze, the one whom Mozart eventually does marry, remains a shadowy presence throughout the earlier parts of the book, only in the later parts emerging as a fully fledged character. This is not an oversight but a well-planned and successful authorial strategy, Cowell’s way of portraying the sister hidden in her sisters’ shadows, the one too long overlooked, even by herself.

The author of “Nicholas Cooke,” “The Physician of London” and “The Players: A Novel of the Young Shakespeare,” Cowell paints a wonderfully vivid and evocative picture of late 18th century Salzburg, Mannheim, Munich and Vienna: the drafty rooms, the narrow, creaking stairways, the flickering candles, the cold mornings, the cost of firewood, the fraying clothing, the mud-spattered skirts and hosiery, the shared narrow beds, and the endless appetite for coffee, cake and other sweet confections. (Only when one of the girls enjoys a marzipan flavored with boysenberry, a fruit not created until the 20th century in California, did that feeling of authenticity waver.)

Cowell, who trained as a lyric coloratura soprano, also writes feelingly and knowledgeably of music and its role in her characters’ lives. But perhaps her most impressive achievement is her portrait of the emotional dynamics of the Weber family, the mixture of love, anger and irritation the girls feel for their mother. Cowell understands Maria Caecilia, who was once, as her daughters are now, a beautiful young girl with all the world before her. Equally remarkable is her depiction of her heroines’ temperaments -- mixtures of naivete and sophistication, sentiment and common sense, sensuality and piety and, above all, a wonderful, passionate kind of romantic innocence and sincerity. The complexities of the Weber sisters, Cowell suggests, found their way into the characters of the heroines of Mozart’s operas.

“Marrying Mozart” is a charming novel, so much so that one would enjoy it even if the gentleman involved in these girls’ lives were not one of the greatest geniuses in the history of music. As it is, however, it also has the virtue of offering a believable and appealing portrait of Mozart himself.