“Fashion wasn’t anything I wanted to be involved with,” she says. Yet the visually arresting images in “Wonderland,” her new book and collection, may be her strongest work.

Annie Leibovitz would like to make one thing clear upfront: She is not a fashion photographer. Given that her new book, “Wonderland” (Phaidon) is an anthology of fashion images shot mainly for Vogue, that’s curious.

But since the book, which arrives on Nov. 17, was built on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” perhaps it’s not so curious after all. As Alice confronts a cast of bewildering characters, she asks, “Who in the world am I?” Leibovitz, through fashion, poses the same question.

“I’ve grown doing work in this genre,” she said, “but it didn’t go along with my perception about myself and my work. I come from a place where I want things to really matter.”

“Ambivalence and irony are in the book,” she told me later.

As a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Leibovitz was inspired by the gritty, spontaneous photography of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Though she admired the fashion work of Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn, she had no desire to emulate them. “I thought fashion was silly,” she said.

We met at Studio 525 in Chelsea, where Hauser & Wirth was holding a five-day “Wonderland” pop-up show during Fashion Week in September. (The Southampton outpost of the gallery will be showing some of the same photographs from Nov. 6 through Dec. 23.)

Four gigantic screens projected a selection of Leibovitz’s work, from a pregnant Melania Trump in a gold lamé bikini, to Lady Gaga in Valentino haute couture. Leibovitz, who is 72, was moving gingerly on an aching hip that badly needs replacement surgery, pushing herself the way she did two months earlier when she shot puffers, parkas and jackets near an active volcano in Iceland.

She was dressed in her typical uniform of black pants and matching shirt. That morning she’d asked one of her teenage daughters if she should wear a 20-year-old tattered blue shirt but was promptly told, “Wear the black one.”

“I’m just a creature of comfort,” she said. “I don’t imagine anyone is looking at me.”

Leibovitz is one of the top portrait photographers in the world, but I’ve long been a fan of her fashion photography — in many ways, I think it’s her strongest work. For most people, “Wonderland” will be their first exposure to Leibovitz’s talent in this area.

The 341 images in the book bear the hallmarks of the Leibovitz style — masterly use of color, theatrical staging, artful interplay between artificial and natural light — but the best of them live up to the book’s title. They are enchanting, wrapped in a visual narrative that showcases her gifts as a powerful storyteller.

“When one typically does a fashion shoot the goal is to illustrate the clothes,” explained Phyllis Posnick, Vogue’s contributing editor and a frequent Leibovitz collaborator. “Annie ‘dresses’ the picture.”

When I complimented Leibovitz on the book, she replied, “I’ll believe that as far as I can throw you. I’ve been around the block too long.”

Fifty years, in fact, starting as a photojournalist at Rolling Stone. She captured some of the most defining moments of the era, from President Nixon’s ignoble exit from the White House, to a naked John Lennon curled up in a fetal position around Yoko Ono. At Vanity Fair, she became known for her quirky, conceptual portraits of boldface names, including a nude, seven-months pregnant Demi Moore.

Then, in 1993, the writer Susan Sontag, Leibovitz’s companion, encouraged her to deepen her work by documenting the conflict in Sarajevo. But in 1998, Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, now Condé Nast’s global editorial director, approached her about working for the magazine. A year later, she was sent to Paris during the couture shows to shoot a photo essay with its fashion editor, Grace Coddington. The story featured Kate Moss and Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy.

Leibovitz, who had never attended a fashion show before, was “in awe,” she said of the artistry on display. “It was like performance art.” The experience gave her a greater appreciation of fashion. “But I could never be a bona fide fashion photographer,” she added, explaining that she thinks of herself as a “conceptual artist using photography.”

James Danziger, whose gallery represented Leibovitz for over a decade, was the first to show her fashion images in 2006. “It’s likely that historically these images, which are great fashion photographs, will best stand the test of time,” he said. “This is the way it is in photography. Most celebrities are forgotten but fashion lasts.”

Leibovitz continued at Vogue for the next 23 years, creating a substantial body of work but thought it was “too soft” for a book. Then Covid-19 happened, and she found herself quarantined with her three daughters at her 200-acre farm in Rhinebeck, N. Y. She’s owned the property for 25 years; it’s where her large family gathers — she’s one of six children — and where Sontag often used to write.

In lockdown with her daughters for nearly a year, she was grateful for the time together. Two of her most fanciful photo essays in the book, “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz,” were shot when her daughters were young — the oldest is now 20, the twins 16. “At the time I was reading fairy tales to them, so I was really living in that world,” she said.

The book also reawakened memories of Sontag. Leibovitz reminisced about the time Sontag read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to her. “We had blankets under a tree,” she said. “It was such a beautiful day, and Susan had such a wonderful voice.”

Leibovitz shot the “Alice” pictures with Coddington in 2003, during Condé Nast’s free-spending days, when no one blinked an eye about sending a crew of 30 to 40 people to a chateau in northern France. “When you look at each picture and how much time it took, it’s really mind-boggling,” Coddington said.

The photographs were based on John Tenniel’s original illustrations in the Carroll book, including one of Alice squeezed inside the White Rabbit’s house. The set designer produced a replica, scaling it to the model Natalia Vodianova’s proportions. “The house was really incredible, with a little table and chairs,” Coddington said. “But Annie thought the windows were wrong, so the designer had to rebuild the whole thing.”

Fashion designers were cast as characters in the book, among them John Galliano as the Queen of Hearts, Tom Ford as the White Rabbit and Marc Jacobs as the Caterpillar. Karl Lagerfeld, who had wanted to be the White Rabbit, appeared as himself.

“I’ve always loved the way Annie brings a sense of narrative or storytelling to her fashion images,” Wintour wrote in an email. “She has an eye for character, conflict, romance, drama — you always feel something interesting is happening, or about to happen, or has just happened.”

In another fashion essay Leibovitz offers a hilarious parody of famous couture shoots of the past. In 1963, decades before Photoshop, Melvin Sokolsky took models out of the studio and shot them in a plexiglass bubble over different parts of Paris. Leibovitz placed Ben Stiller, reprising his “Zoolander” role, inside a duplicate bubble and dangled it from a crane over the Seine. Karen Mulligan, Leibovitz’s longtime studio manager, recalled having to reassure Stiller’s worried publicist that if he fell in the river, scuba divers were on standby.

A passionate researcher who loves history, Leibovitz is drawn to the narrative essays because they give her something to focus on besides clothes. In 2007, she traveled to Spain for a story based loosely on Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” Leibovitz had planned to shoot Penélope Cruz and Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, the great-grandson of the famous matador who’d inspired the character of the bullfighter in the Hemingway novel.

“The day before the shoot we heard that Cayetano had been gored by a bull and was heading to the hospital,” Mulligan recalled. “Then he suddenly showed up. He’d bandaged his own leg. We had to get him into those tight matador pants and blood kept seeping through.”

Like Ordóñez, Leibovitz seems to thrive on stress. “She tortures herself and everybody else,” Coddington said. “But she’s unique, and I admire the effort she puts into each picture.” Others who’ve worked with her say that her relentless perfectionism can lead to angry outbursts, but agree that she’s less reactive now.

“I was ruthless in getting the photograph,” Leibovitz admitted. “I haven’t had the best behavior.”

“Working with Annie isn’t for the faint of heart,” said Mary Howard, her set designer of 30 years, adding, “Annie never wants to have regrets.”

She also doesn’t want to lose control over an interview. We sat opposite each other at a long table that was piled with research material — for me and on me. The latter was encased in see-through plastic and, according to Leibovitz, contained an email in which an unnamed person had written “some not very nice things.” I was tempted to ask, “Like what?” and then found myself glancing over to see if I could read it.

Leibovitz kept her notes on her left. I kept my notes on my right. We were like two lawyers squaring off before a jury composed of giant digital celebrities surrounding us in the gallery. “I don’t know if I have the ability to talk about the work while it’s flashing like this,” she said.

But talk she did — right through many of my questions. It was the first interview she’d done about the book and admitted she was nervous.

Instead she discussed all the great work being done in photojournalism, and how she doesn’t understand why every form of photography isn’t embraced. “Isn’t it?” I asked. She replied, “Well, if something’s not real enough….” Earlier when I’d asked her to define the meaning of the word “wonderland,” she said, “It’s the opposite of real — unreal.” As in fashion.

“Maybe it’s the friction that makes the work so good,” I suggested.

She paused. “Possibly.”

Leibovitz was more comfortable discussing the book’s portraits. In 2007, she received the first of three commissions from the royal household to photograph Queen Elizabeth II, who was annoyed that she’d had to wear the full regalia of the ancient Order of the Garter.

Leibovitz thought the queen’s tiara didn’t look right with the ornate robe, and in a BBC documentary, she’s heard saying, “Could we try without the crown? It will look better, less dressy.” The queen says, “Less dressy? What do you think this is?” But she ultimately removed the tiara.

The pictures of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair represent fashion at its most transformative. The former Olympic decathlon gold medalist sported a number of outfits, including a gold corset and a black Zac Posen dress. “We weren’t trying to do journalism,” she explained. “It was a construction, an acquired look. We were there to support her as she became a woman.”

When working for Vogue Leibovitz has to remind herself that even portraits need a fashion element. “I try to downplay it as much as I can,” she explained. “I’m totally on the subject’s side. Sometimes Vogue will help with the clothing, but Michelle Obama was adamant about wearing her own. ”

When Leibovitz went to photograph Senator Tammy Duckworth, the senator had already selected her outfit: a St. John Knits suit that she’d purchased on eBay. “She explained that she got all her suits off eBay,” Leibovitz said. “I told her, “C’mon, let’s do it. I love that I get to have those little moments.”

Leibovitz had trouble finding the perfect ending for the book, finally selecting a photograph from Alexander McQueen’s last collection in 2010. The brilliant 40-year-old designer committed suicide that year on the first day of New York Fashion Week. “McQueen’s collection had been shipped to New York for Grace and me to shoot,” she recalled. “We took it into a large building in Brooklyn, and as we lifted the pieces out, we thought, Let’s leave them in the shipping boxes.”

Throughout the day, as Coddington and Leibovitz worked in silence, the light moved slowly across the room. Finally, it cast a beatific glow on the model standing in the wooden crate. Dressed in a coat tailored from lacquered gold feathers, she’s like a Renaissance archangel fearsome in her gilded glory.

Leibovitz, the un-fashion photographer, captured the perfect fashion moment.

Patricia Morrisroe is the author of “Mapplethorpe: A Biography” and “The Woman in the Moonlight,” a novel.

The post Annie Leibovitz, the Un-Fashion Photographer appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

By the time Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony, he hadn’t presented any major new work in a decade. He was by that point almost completely deaf, and many thought him crazy. The Viennese had become obsessed with Italian opera, and the 53-year-old composer feared that he had gone decisively out of fashion. Still, he wanted to show the world that Beethoven was still Beethoven.

He planned a concert that would take place at the prestigious Theater am Kärntnertor, but first had to get the approval of its temperamental manager, Louis Antoine Duport. The violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh warned Beethoven that Duport needed to be handled “very gently and courteously” or he could “make things hellacious.”

But it was Duport who ultimately made the event happen. Without his behind-the-scenes assistance, Beethoven’s final symphony might never have entered history on May 7, 1824.

Duport is usually identified merely as a former dancer, but he was the Nureyev of his day — famous for soaring leaps, dazzling footwork and the ability to pirouette 50 times on one leg. He specialized in the role of Zephyr, the west wind, for which he flew across the stage suspended on wires.

Born in Paris in 1781, he was the son of Joseph Robert Duport, a sculptor, and Maria Desseule. He had a sister, also a celebrated dancer, and at least two brothers. Little else is known about his early life, until his sudden appearance as a soloist at the Paris Opera on March 14, 1797.

But researching early ballet in America, the historian Lillian Moore discovered a child prodigy named Louis Duport who arrived in Philadelphia in 1790. This 9-year-old was accompanied by Pierre Landrin, who was dancing master at the Opera and may have taught music and dance to Marie Antoinette’s children.

Eventually based in Charleston, S.C., Louis gained prominence as one of the best young dancers in America. But after a performance in Savannah, Ga., on Aug. 19, 1796, he vanished without a trace. Was this the same Louis Antoine Duport who made his debut at the Paris Opera seven months later? It’s unclear, though they shared the same name, birth year and tour-de-force performance style.

What is certain is that, in 1804, Duport challenged Auguste Vestris, then the most famous dancer in Europe, to a contest of pirouettes and jetés-battus. (Vestris was 20 years Duport’s elder, and critics generously called it a draw.) Duport then began choreographing ballets with the intention of deposing the esteemed ballet master Pierre Gardel at the Opera.

Napoleon admired Duport but was increasingly outraged by his imperious behavior and salary demands. (Just 26, Duport had enticed the Opera’s management into paying him the same amount as the eminent Vestris.) In 1808, facing possible arrest, Duport, disguised as a woman, slipped out of Paris with a star of the Comédie Française, who was also Napoleon’s former mistress. He ended up in St. Petersburg, where he was so popular that Tolstoy would later mention him in “War and Peace.”

In 1812, he became the ballet master at the Kärntnertor in Vienna, choreographing the first dance adaptation of Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella.” After marrying his favorite ballerina, he went on to dance in Munich, London and Italy, performing in several ballets that allowed him to dance Zephyr, his signature role.

While at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Duport met its flamboyant manager, Domenico Barbaja, who was eager to bring his composer discovery Gioachino Rossini to Vienna. Taking over the Kärntnertor’s lease, Barbaja asked Duport to help run it, and when Rossini and his new bride, the diva Isabella Colbran, arrived in 1822, the city greeted them with enthusiasm bordering on idolatry.

By February 1824, Beethoven was ready with both the Ninth Symphony and his “Missa Solemnis.” He had long wanted to set Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to music and had incorporated its call for peace and unity into the symphony’s rousing choral finale. Given the sweeping popularity of Italian opera in Vienna, however, he toyed with the idea of presenting the work elsewhere. It was only after 30 friends and music lovers signed a petition of support that he began to look for a theater in the city.

The Theater am Kärntnertor was his first choice. One of two imperial theaters in Vienna, it was named for its location next to the Kärntnertor, or Carinthian Gate. (The Sacher Hotel now occupies the site.) In March, Beethoven’s brother Johann met with Duport, who was receptive but warned that the concert would need the permission of the Hofmusikgraf, the official in charge of music for the court theaters.

Beethoven’s secretary, Anton Schindler, also began secretly negotiating with the suburban Theater an der Wien. There was talk of the Burgtheater, which was the other imperial house, and the small Landständischer Saal as alternatives.

At the end of March, Schindler visited Duport to request the Great Hall at the Hofburg, or Imperial Palace, for a repeat Beethoven concert. (This hall was also under Barbaja’s administration.) Since plans hadn’t yet been finalized for the first concert, Duport may have been confused, but he agreed. It was an unsettling time for him. Barbaja was in Naples under house arrest, charged with attempting to burn down the Teatro di San Carlo to conceal accounting irregularities. He was eventually exonerated, but Duport, who had spent the previous year in Karlsbad taking the waters for an unknown ailment, was undoubtedly distracted.

For that planned repeat performance, Duport could only offer Beethoven the Hofburg’s smaller hall, prompting the composer to threaten to call off the concerts. As for the initial event, Schindler was still pushing for the Theater an der Wien, but Beethoven wanted Schuppanzigh as concertmaster. When the musicians balked at using outside workers, the An der Wien was out. The Kärntnertor was back in.

On April 24, Duport received a letter from Schindler with a lengthy list of demands. Beethoven wanted the date of the concert to be either May 3 or 4, and expected an immediate response; the situation was “urgent.” One can only imagine what must have gone through Duport’s mind; he had faced down Napoleon and now had to deal with the self-important Schindler. But Duport had deep respect for Beethoven and agreed to hold the first concert at the Kärntnertor and the second in the Hofburg’s Great Hall.

The Ninth required an 82-member orchestra and 80 singers, stunning for that time and more than twice what Duport could offer. As a result, Beethoven had to supplement with amateurs from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. And since Beethoven wanted the full forces onstage, Duport also had to approve the building of scaffolding and risers. The solo singers complained that the high notes were beyond their reach. Government censors interfered with the planned excerpts from the “Missa Solemnis.” Beethoven wanted to open the concert with his “Consecration of the House” Overture, but couldn’t find the score.

With the concert only a week away, Duport had yet to give Beethoven a formal contract; one of the composer’s friends suggested reporting the manager to the police commissioner. But on the evening of May 7, a large crowd began filing into the thousand-seat theater. Though Beethoven had hand-delivered invitations to members of the court, the imperial box was empty; the nobility had already left town for the summer. With only two full rehearsals and little time to study the score, the conductor, Michael Umlauf — with Beethoven at his side — made the sign of the cross before he gave the downbeat.

The concert was far from perfect and received mixed reviews, but the audience realized it had heard something unique. The response was at times rapturous; people applauded and shouted so loudly that a police agent called for quiet. The box office figures, though, were lower than expected. According to Schindler, when Beethoven saw them, he collapsed to the floor and accused Duport of swindling him.

True to his word, though, Duport went ahead with the second concert on May 23, insisting only that a Rossini aria be substituted for one of the “Missa Solemnis” sections. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and the hall was only half full. Duport lost money, but made sure that Beethoven received his full fee.

Duport eventually assumed the lease of the Kärntnertor, managing it until 1836, when he retired to Paris. He died in 1853 and was buried at Père Lachaise, where his tombstone is decorated with two female nudes, one appearing to sprout wings. Few who pass the monument probably realize that he was among the greatest dancers of his generation. Or that he played a major role in bringing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to the world. But whenever voices rise up to sing “Ode to Joy,” we have Zephyr to thank.

Patricia Morrisroe is the author of the novel “The Woman in the Moonlight.”

The post The Behind-the-Scenes Assist That Made Beethoven’s Ninth Happen appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

In the past, we’ve asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, the violin, Baroque music and sopranos.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the stormy, tender music of Beethoven, who was born 250 years ago this month. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your choices in the comments.

Click here listen to the best of the stormy, tender work of the composer who changed music.

The post 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Beethoven appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

With his nasty temper and squalid lifestyle, Beethoven was not an easy genius. Writing from the perspective of his lover, an author explores the appeal

I swore off difficult men after writing Robert Mapplethorpe’s biography. When my book was published 25 years ago, it elicited violent criticism from some of his friends. They felt I’d been too hard on the controversial photographer whose S&M pictures had created a firestorm in the early 90s. One bombarded me with profanities. Another threatened to kill me. My publisher wondered if I should hire an armed guard.

When an editor floated the idea of a novel about Beethoven, my first thought was, “Another difficult man.” My second thought: “At least all his friends are dead.”

Beethoven was petty, paranoid, and had a volcanic temper. His various lodgings were filthy and chaotic. Pieces of Verona salami and red herring vied for space with the scribbled sketches of great symphonies. He hired and fired a succession of housekeepers and cooks, claiming they were trying to steal or poison him. His colorful vocabulary consisted of such putdowns as “arch-swine,” “arch-villain,” and “troglodyte.” In one of his ugliest episodes, he engaged in a protracted court battle to wrest his nephew Karl away from his “immoral” sister-in-law. Karl, buckling under the pressure, attempted suicide.

It’s Complicated

My book is narrated by Countess Julie Guicciardi, the dedicatee of the “Moonlight” Sonata and the “dear, enchanting girl” he fell in love with in 1801. In a letter to a friend, he confessed that she loved him too and that for the first time his thoughts had turned to marriage. When I first began writing I worried that I wouldn’t be able to access Julie’s emotions. There were times when he was so impossible that I wanted to slap her across the face and shout, “Snap out of it!”

But then I began to fall in love with him. My heart broke for the small boy whose alcoholic father would pull him out of bed at night to practice piano. I agonized when he confronted the reality of his hearing loss, knowing that it would end his dazzling performing career. I cheered him on through various re-writes of Fidelio, because he had the audacity to create such a valiant female heroine. I laughed at his stupid puns, ignored his awkward attempts at dancing, and suffered through his numerous love affairs with women he could never have. They were usually married or, like Julie, above him in station. He claimed that all he wanted was a pretty face to sigh at his compositions, but I knew that wasn’t true.

Beethoven was petty, paranoid, and had a volcanic temper. But I began to fall in love with him.

He lived completely in his music, and, for a time, so did I. I admired the powerful Eroica and the Ninth Symphony, but the Beethoven I loved was to be found in quieter moments—the “Moonlight’s” plaintive first movement, the sublime Cavatina and Heiliger Dankgesang from his late string quartets.

The Cavatina was included on the Voyager Golden Record that was sent into outer space. So, aliens, if you’re reading this, listen to the Cavatina. If you have a heart, you will lose it.

The post Music Man appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

Nannette Streicher has been marginalized by history, but she was one of Europe’s finest keyboard manufacturers.

The Morgan Library & Museum owns part of an original sketch of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata. In the margin, the British publisher Vincent Novello writes that the document was given to him by “Mrs. Streiker” — “one of Beethoven’s oldest and most sincere friends.”

Nannette Streicher’s marginalized place in history is encapsulated in these scribbled lines. While she was indeed one of the closest friends of Beethoven, whose 250th birthday will be celebrated this December, she was also one of the finest piano builders in Europe. She owned her own company — employing her husband, Andreas Streicher, a pianist and teacher, to handle sales, bookkeeping and business correspondence. But many Beethoven scholars, perhaps finding it inconceivable that an 18th-century woman could build a piano, have turned Andreas into the manufacturer and Nannette into his shadowy helpmate.

Born in Augsburg, Germany, in 1769, Nannette was the sixth child of Johann Andreas Stein, a renowned manufacturer who developed an innovative piano action, improving on the mechanism that causes the hammers to strike the strings. It became known as the “Viennese action.”
At 8, Nannette played in front of Mozart, who criticized her posture and grimacing, but admitted that she had “genius.” Two years later, she had mastered many of her father’s building techniques, earning a reputation as a mechanical wunderkind.

After her father’s death in 1792, Nannette, then 23 and recently married, transported the pianos by raft and set up the business in Vienna. She partnered with her 16-year-old brother, Matthäus, changing the company’s name from J.A. Stein to Geschwister (siblings) Stein. It was a time of rapid developments in piano design. With concerts moving beyond aristocratic salons into larger halls, manufacturers were under pressure to produce heavier, more resonant instruments.

Beethoven, who had met Nannette in Augsburg years earlier, asked to borrow one of her pianos for a 1796 concert in Pressburg (now Bratislava). Writing to Andreas, Beethoven joked that it was too “good” for him, because he wanted the “freedom to create his own tone.” In a follow-up letter, he complained that the piano was still the least developed of all the instruments and that it sounded too much like a harp.

The elegant Stein piano, with its light touch and silvery tone, wasn’t ideally suited to Beethoven’s wild and forceful performance style. Taking an obvious swipe at the composer, Andreas wrote an essay describing an unnamed pianist as a brutal murderer at the keyboard, “bent on revenge.”
“Already the first chords will have been played with such violence that you wonder whether the player is deaf,” he wrote.

The comment was sadly prescient. Beethoven had just begun to notice a decline in his hearing, but had told no one. Though he would later need a louder instrument to compensate for his deafness, he was at this point mainly concerned with finding a piano that accommodated his dynamic extremes.

Nannette had already expanded her keyboards’ range from five octaves to six and a half, but she was slow to make other major alterations to her father’s original design. It was a stressful time. By 1802, she was the mother of two small children, and a 6-year-old son had recently died. She was also engaged in a dispute with her brother; the siblings eventually decided to dissolve the company and strike out separately.

Matthäus took an ad in a local newspaper positioning himself as the rightful heir to the Stein name. Nannette, unwilling to relinquish her own claim, established Streicher née Stein. She faced stiff competition from local builders, such as Anton Walter, as well as French and English manufacturers. Beethoven had purchased a French Erard in 1803, but he never stopped pressuring the Streichers to keep pace with his increasingly ambitious compositions.

By 1809, Nannette had considerably reworked her father’s design, turning out some of the largest, loudest and sturdiest pianos in Vienna. With a warehouse that produced 50 to 65 grand pianos a year, the Streicher firm was considered by many to be the finest in the city.

In 1812, the Streichers built a 300-seat concert hall adjacent to their showroom; it was decorated with busts of well-known pianists, including a life mask of Beethoven by the sculptor Franz Klein. Concerts there, which attracted the likes of Archduke Rudolf, Beethoven and Andreas’s piano students, became a hub of Vienna’s musical life.

Nannette added another job when, in August 1817, she agreed to manage Beethoven’s chaotic household. The composer was going through one of the many crises that marked his life. His hearing had worsened and he was in a creative slump. Having wrested control of his young nephew from his sister-in-law, he needed to give the appearance that he was providing the boy a good home.

Over the next 18 months, Beethoven wrote Nannette over 60 letters, ordering her to take care of his laundry, mend his socks and buy groceries, dusters and shoe polish. Increasingly paranoid, he was convinced that the “beastly” servants were out to rob and poison him, and that they were colluding with his “immoral” sister-in-law.

Beethoven’s relationships with women had always been fraught. He fell in love with pretty aristocrats who would never marry a commoner, or else he developed filial attachments to married women. Nannette, with her plain, angular face and hawklike eyes, wasn’t beautiful or highborn. But she was kind and generous; he called her his “good Samaritan.”

Beethoven’s relationship with her may have been his most successful with a woman. She wasn’t oblivious to his shortcomings, telling Vincent Novello, the publisher, that he was “avaricious and always mistrustful.” But by that point, the pianist and piano builder had known each other for over two decades; they had a connection, and were united in their devotion to the piano.

By assuming his household duties, Nannette cleared the way for Beethoven to write his most ambitious piano sonata, the colossal “Hammerklavier.” It was longer and more difficult than any of his other piano works, ending with a wild fugue. It ushered in some of his greatest works: the “Missa Solemnis,” “Diabelli” Variations and Ninth Symphony. Though he was now using an English Broadwood piano, he confided to Nannette in a letter that the post-1809 Streicher had always been his favorite.

Nannette outlived Beethoven by five years, dying in 1833, at 64. The Streicher firm continued to thrive under her son, Johann Baptiste, and then her grandson, Emil, who built pianos for Brahms. When Emil retired, in 1896, the company closed.

That would seem to have been the end of Nannette’s legacy. But her instruments live on, in museums around the world and in the strong, nimble hands of women she inspired. In the mid-1960s, as Margaret Hood, an artist and calligrapher, raised two young children, she started making harpsichords. After doing research in Europe, she began specializing in reproductions of Streicher pianos, producing them in her Platteville, Wis., workshop. She was building an 1816 Streicher six-and-a-half-octave grand when she died, in 2008.

Anne Acker, who trained as a concert pianist before studying mathematics and computer science, met Ms. Hood in Wisconsin. They bonded over their love of music, and Ms. Hood became Ms. Acker’s mentor. While caring for her children, Ms. Acker began building and repairing harpsichords and antique pianos, and after her friend’s death, she purchased the reproduction Streicher from Ms. Hood’s husband.

“I explained to him that a piano researched and begun by a woman, that is a replica of a piano designed and built by a woman, needs to be finished by a woman,” Ms. Acker said in an interview.

The piano — the work of three women over two centuries — had its debut at the Boston Early Music Festival in 2019. It was the year of Nannette’s 250th birthday.

The post The Woman Who Built Beethoven’s Pianos appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

In Celebration of Beethoven’s 250th Birthday

We asked two friends of ACO—pianist Petra Somlai and author Patricia Morrisroe —to collaborate on a video performance-and-writing project around Beethoven’s Sonata No. 14 in C# minor, better known as The “Moonlight” Sonata.

Here is Ms. Somlai’s nuanced and powerful performance, with text excerpts from The Woman in the Moonlight,Ms. Morrisroe’s new best-selling novel about The “Moonlight” Sonata’s dedicatee, the young Countess Julie Guicciardi. Below the video you’ll find Ms. Morrisroe’s engaging essay about their doomed love affair, the Sonata, and her reaction to hearing it, for the very first time, on fortepiano.

Reflections on The “Moonlight” Sonata by Patricia Morrisroe

When Beethoven wrote the “Moonlight” Sonata in 1801, he was confronting the reality of his hearing loss. The words “I am deaf” terrified him.  He was then Vienna’s foremost piano virtuoso and knew that it would end his performing career.  He also knew that deafness carried a social stigma.  Up until then, he’d been an outgoing personality who enjoyed political discourse.  He now began to avoid people so they wouldn’t guess his secret.

Reflections on The “Moonlight” Sonata by Patricia Morrisroe

When Beethoven wrote the “Moonlight” Sonata in 1801, he was confronting the reality of his hearing loss. The words “I am deaf” terrified him.  He was then Vienna’s foremost piano virtuoso and knew that it would end his performing career.  He also knew that deafness carried a social stigma.  Up until then, he’d been an outgoing personality who enjoyed political discourse.  He now began to avoid people so they wouldn’t guess his secret.

During this traumatic time, he met 19-year old Countess Julie Guicciardi who became his piano student and later the dedicatee of the “Moonlight” Sonata.  Julie is the “dear, enchanting girl” he referenced in a letter to his childhood friend, Franz Wegeler.  Beethoven confessed to Wegeler that they were in love and that his thoughts had turned to marriage, but that she wasn’t of his “station.”

The romance, like many of Beethoven’s love affairs, was short-lived and unfulfilled.  Yet over the years the sonata has taken on an amorous subtext.  Ludwig Rellstab, in his 1823 novel, Theodor, compared the first movement to a lake reposing in the shimmer of the moon, an Aeolian harp “sounds laments of yearning lonely love.”

A Russian writer embellished on the description by placing a boat on the lake.   People then began populating the boat with lovers, and by 1862, the sonata had become universally known as the “Moonlight” Sonata.

Rellstab’s use of the word “lament” is closer to Beethoven’s intentions.  The composer was grieving his diminished hearing, so it’s not surprising that the first movement follows in the tradition of mourning music.  It lulls the listener into a meditative state that obviates time.  Like the moonlight’s shadowy palette, it is otherworldly and disquieting.  It is also ineffably sad.   Liszt described the Allegretto as “the flower between two chasms,” a necessary transition, because in the third movement, Beethoven rips the flower from its roots.  It’s a tour de force of near maniacal intensity.

During the four years it took to research and write The Woman in the Moonlight, I listened to the sonata at least 100 times.  I had never heard anyone play it on a fortepiano, though, and wasn’t sure I’d like it.  Beethoven was always seeking more range and power in his pianos in order to accommodate his dynamic extremes and legato style.  I feared it would sound anemic.

After listening to Petra Somlai on a reproduction 1795 Walter fortepiano, I didn’t have to worry. I’d looked for Beethoven in countless biographies; I’d read all his correspondence and contemporary accounts, but suddenly he came to life for me.

The fortepiano produces a warm sound that is intimately, almost eerily human.  In the first movement, Petra’s exquisite playing makes Beethoven’s heartache palpable. The third movement has always required virtuosic piano skills, but when Petra unleashes Beethoven’s rage, it becomes a life-and-death battle between the performer and her instrument.  We hear Beethoven fighting the furies to rise about his pain.  We hear him fighting against the limitations of his hearing, of the fortepiano, of life itself.

Petra takes our breath away because we’re fighting too.  Beethoven shows us the way.  He begins with a funeral march and ends with a fiery resurrection.   Hope – that’s the message in the “Moonlight.”

The post Special Project: Rediscovering the “Moonlight” Sonata appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

Six months after Beethoven contemplated suicide, confessing his despair over his increasing deafness in the 1802 document known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, he was carousing in taverns with a charismatic new comrade, George Polgreen Bridgetower. This biracial violinist had recently arrived in Vienna, and inspired one of Beethoven’s most famous and passionate pieces, the “Kreutzer” Sonata.

Beethoven even dedicated the sonata to Bridgetower. But the irritable composer — who would later remove the dedication to Napoleon from his Third Symphony — eventually took it back.

While Napoleon didn’t need Beethoven to secure his place in history, this snub reduced Bridgetower to near obscurity. Though his name was included in Anton Schindler’s 1840 biography of Beethoven, he was described inaccurately as “an American sea captain.” Like so many Black artists prominent in their lifetimes, he has been largely forgotten by a history that belongs to those who control the narrative.

Bridgetower was born on Aug. 13, 1778, in eastern Poland, and christened Hieronymus Hyppolitus de Augustus. His father, Joanis Fredericus de Augustus, was of African descent; his mother, Maria Schmid, was German-Polish, making Bridgetower what was then known as a mulatto, a person of mixed race. (The poet Rita Dove’s 2008 book “Sonata Mulattica,” an imagined chronicle of Bridgetower’s life, has helped raise his profile a bit in recent years.)

Bridgetower’s father — who took the name Frederick, and sometimes went by others — was the driving force behind his son’s career. Handsome, charming and fluent in multiple languages, Frederick was a natural storyteller with a flair for promotion; he claimed that his father had been an African prince unofficially adopted by a Dutch sea captain, was promised diamonds and gold dust, and then sold into slavery, surviving a shipwreck in the process. The father married an African woman and wound up in Barbados, where Frederick was born; the name Bridgetower was likely derived from the island’s capital, Bridgetown.

It’s unclear how Frederick wound up in Poland, but the historian William Hart wrote in a 2017 article in The Musical Times that young Bridgetowers’s godparents were members of the noble Radziwill family; Frederick, and possibly his wife, may have been in their service. The couple and their son soon moved to Austria, where Frederick, known as “the Moor,” worked as a page to Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy. The music-loving prince maintained his own orchestra at his palace in Eisenstadt, where Haydn was court composer. (George Bridgetower was later touted as a pupil of Haydn’s, but it’s unclear if he ever studied with the master.)

Bridgetower’s public debut was long thought to have taken place in Paris in 1789. But Mr. Hart discovered an advertisement in a Frankfurt newspaper promoting a concert by “Hieronymus August Bridgetown,” the “son of a Moor,” in April 1786, when the boy would have been just seven. It noted that he had already played for Emperor Joseph II.

The Bridgetowns, as they were then known, lived for a time in Mainz, an important musical center, where Maria gave birth to another son, who would later become a cellist. Frederick, leaving his wife and younger child behind, took on tour his elder son, who, billed as a “young Negro of the Colonies,” performed a violin concerto by Giornovichi in the prominent Concert Spirituel series in Paris in 1789.

“His talent, as genuine as it is precocious, is one of the best replies one can give to the philosophers who wish to deprive those of his nation and his color the faculty of distinguishing themselves in the arts,” said a review in Le Mercure de France.

After several more concerts in Paris, including one attended by Thomas Jefferson, the Bridgetowers — as they then called themselves — left for England, where the family created a sensation.

With Oriental-inspired clothing in vogue, Frederick played up his presumed exoticism by wearing flowing Turkish robes. Everyone wanted to meet this “African prince” and his prodigy — whose name had now become George. By the fall of 1789, Frederick had arranged for his son to play before King George III and Queen Charlotte, as well as the Prince of Wales, later George IV.

George induced “general astonishment” playing in Bath, according to the Bath Morning Post. At 11, he made his London debut with a Giornovichi concerto between the first two parts of Handel’s “Messiah.” He and his father were often at Carlton House, the town residence of the Prince of Wales, who organized regular chamber concerts. On June 2, 1790, the prince sponsored a benefit concert for Bridgetower and another young artist at the Hanover Square Rooms, the premier concert venue for fashionable society.

Until then, Frederick had skillfully managed his son’s career. But his behavior turned increasingly self-destructive. At a masquerade attended by the prince, Frederick dressed as a caricature of a Black slave, advocating for abolition; this was certainly a worthy cause, but the stunt served to alienate the elites whose favor he had taken pains to cultivate. During a performance of “Messiah,” he shouted for a repeat of the “Hallelujah” chorus, and, after a struggle, was thrown out of the theater. There were reports of excessive drinking and womanizing.

Charlotte Papendiek, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte and a prolific journal keeper, wrote that Frederick gambled away his son’s money and treated him so brutally that George sought refuge with the Prince of Wales at Carlton House. Frederick was committed to an asylum before being sent back to Germany by the prince, who took 12-year old George under his protection.

The prince gave him the opportunity to learn from the finest musicians in London. He studied composition, theory and piano with Thomas Attwood and violin with both François-Hippolyte Barthélémon and Giornovichi. He formed a close relationship with Giovanni Battista Viotti, a violinist and composer whose confident, daring style would influence his own.

Over the next decade, Bridgetower would play in nearly 50 public concerts with leading orchestras and musicians, including Haydn and the double-bass virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti. He was the first violinist of the Prince of Wales’s band; the organist and composer Samuel Wesley wrote that Bridgetower was “justly ranked with the very first masters of the violin.”

After visiting his ailing mother in Dresden, Bridgetower arrived in Vienna in early April 1803. He had been invited by Prince Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven’s patrons, to play that composer’s quartets.

Beethoven and Bridgetower formed an instant bond. The composer, then 32, may have recognized himself in the 24-year-old violinist. Beethoven had been nicknamed the Spaniard for his swarthy complexion, and engravings of the two men show a marked resemblance. They also had in common abusive fathers with vested interests in their careers, as well as the ability to thrill audiences with their astonishing talents.

After hearing Bridgetower play, Beethoven not only agreed to participate in a concert for him at the Augarten, but also decided to write something for them to perform together. He had already started sketching out the first two movements of a violin sonata, to accompany a previously discarded finale. He now began to compose with Bridgetower in mind, as the two men stayed up nights drinking and acting like teenagers. Though Bridgetower was described as melancholic, he could also be high-spirited and ribald. He brought out Beethoven’s freewheeling, bawdy side.

The concert had been planned for May 22, 1803, but since the sonata wasn’t ready, it was postponed until the 24th. At 4:30 that morning, Beethoven instructed his pupil, Ferdinand Ries, to copy out the first two movements for the violinist. Ries managed only the first, and the piano part was still in sketch form. Beethoven and Bridgetower took the stage for the morning concert, having never rehearsed the piece. Bridgetower was sight-reading.

Beethoven had given Bridgetower an opening solo that began with an explosive declaration, moving into a fiery, sensual dialogue. At one point, Bridgetower surprised Beethoven by imitating and then expanding on a short piano cadenza in the first movement. Beethoven, jumping up, hugged him, crying, “My dear boy! Once more!”

After the performance, Beethoven presented Bridgetower his tuning fork and wrote a dedication on the score: “Sonata mulattica composta per il mulatto Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico” (“Mulatto sonata composed for the mulatto Bridgetower, great lunatic and mulatto composer”).

Tolstoy wrote about the unsettling first movement in his novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” whose protagonist, after hearing his wife play the piece with her violin teacher, stabs her to death in a jealous rage. Beethoven didn’t do anything that extreme, but after Bridgetower made a rude comment about a woman Beethoven admired, the two men quarreled and Beethoven took back the dedication.

When the sonata was published, it instead bore the name of the French violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer. Beethoven had been thinking of moving to Paris, and dedicating the piece to Kreutzer was a calculated political move. What Beethoven didn’t know was that Kreutzer disliked his music; Kreutzer described the sonata as “outrageously unintelligible” and never played it.

Bridgetower returned to London and continued to perform, enjoying the patronage of the Prince of Wales. On May 23, 1805, he participated in a concert in the Hanover Rooms, along with his brother, who played a Romberg cello concerto. Their father had also come back to England, where he was arrested and thrown in jail for vagrancy.

In 1811, Bridgetower received a master’s degree in music from Cambridge University and became a member of the Royal Philharmonic Society. Five years later, he married Mary Leake, the daughter of a prosperous cotton manufacturer; they had two daughters. One died in infancy, and he grew estranged from the other. He and his wife separated in 1824.

Little is known about Bridgetower’s later years; at some point, he seems to have stopped performing, making his living as a piano teacher in Rome and Paris. In an 1847 letter to Madame de Fauché, a fellow musician, he makes a joking but telling reference to his biracial identity: “If the bearer of this letter is fortunate to find you, favor me by having your message conveyed to him who is not fair enough to be ‘my tiger,’ nor ‘dark enough’ to be ‘my Friday,’ but is my long-tried honest Caliban.” The allusion to the half-human, half-beast character in Shakespeare’s “Tempest” is a poignant one: When his island is suddenly occupied, Caliban is enslaved.

Bridgetower died on Feb. 29, 1860, in a house on a small back street in south London; he was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. The death certificate identifies him as a “gentleman.” By then, Beethoven had been gone for 32 years.

It’s unknown if Bridgetower ever played the “Kreutzer” Sonata again, or if he was in contact with Beethoven after their rift. All we know is that on May 24, 1803, two brilliant performers dazzled a crowd with their high-wire virtuosity. One of them entered history.

The post The Black Violinist Who Inspired Beethoven appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

I met Beethoven at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was looking for patrons for his orchestra. I needed a muse. I was working on my first novel, The Woman in the Moonlight, about the deaf composer’s volatile love affair with Countess Julie Guicciardi. As a longtime journalist, I was accustomed to quoting living people, not inventing dialogue for dead ones. When a friend offered to introduce me to a conductor who specialized in instruments from Beethoven’s time, I thought, How perfect! Perhaps I could interview him and gain insight into a musician’s life.

When the maestro walked into the restaurant, I noted that he had Beethoven’s wild gray hair and commanding presence. It was too soon to tell if he had the composer’s irascible personality, but after he launched into a diatribe about his “incompetent” staff, I was hopeful. Like Beethoven, he could also be charming; he was smart, funny, and single-minded in his devotion to music. During our three-hour lunch, he explained that he’d been divorced for many years. When I asked what he missed most about married life, he replied, “My Steinway.”

The next day, he invited me to a patron concert at a private club. The ornate room evoked the Viennese salons where Beethoven had once thrilled the nobility with his fiery improvisations. I imagined the women in diaphanous Empire-waisted gowns, the men in morning coats and white cravats. In the middle of the program, a harpist performed the Moonlight Sonata.

The maestro later confessed that a tear had dripped down his cheek; he explained that it spoke to his “permanent connection to the power of musical vibrations,” adding that we were the “sum of vibrations through the ages.” This was good news. If we vibrated long enough, soon I’d be vibrating with Beethoven himself.

Every morning before I started to write, I went on the maestro’s website. It functioned as a portal to the 19th century, with Vienna just a click away. Now that I had a Beethoven surrogate, I no longer felt tethered to the facts. I could indulge my imagination. My writing was going so well that I was ready to take a break.

My husband and I were in Tuscany when my muse returned unbidden. He complained in an email that his new staff was sending out information filled with grammatical errors. I worried that he was confusing our roles. I was the writer. He was the muse. Why fret over grammar? I told him that I didn’t think it wise to let anything distract from his upcoming concerts.

That night, I had a dream that I wrote a musical composition. It was a blend of Keith Jarrett’s “Bridge of Light”—the maestro had conducted it—and parts of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major. It felt like a real breakthrough. I’d finally built a bridge to the past.

I thought my muse might be interested, but he never replied to my email. He did, however, get back to me once I returned to New York. He was angry that I wasn’t more sympathetic to his staff problems. When I accused him of getting overly dramatic, he reminded me that “music is the most dramatic of all the arts!” Julie, my narrator, was suffering from Beethoven’s difficult temperament, and now I was suffering from the maestro’s.

We hadn’t spent any time discussing Beethoven, so I wanted to set up an official interview to get his thoughts. He was impossible to pin down but finally squeezed me in. While I knew Beethoven’s biography, the maestro knew his music so intimately that his knowledge almost transcended words. I had a hard time following his arcane references. When I reviewed my notes, among the few things I’d written down was “Beethoven = angel hair filigree.” I had no idea what it meant.

During the interview, I’d asked him to speculate on Julie’s reaction upon hearing Beethoven play for the first time. He was then the most exciting piano virtuoso in Vienna, with a style that veered from ferocity to tenderness. His playing was considered too agitating for ladies with a delicate constitution. In my book, Julie fainted. Was this realistic? He never really answered, but in a follow-up email, he offered an example from his own life, telling me that women were attracted to him because of “the music thing.” He went on: “You know, the road ladies.”

Was he comparing my narrator to a groupie? Did he think I was a groupie too? We got into a heated text spat. He later wrote that given the pressure he faced, he wanted only supportive people around him. I knew what that meant. The maestro, my muse, was banning me from Lincoln Center.

I quickly apologized. He was planning to conduct Beethoven’s 8th Symphony and I couldn’t miss it. The maestro was charismatic on the podium. Puffing out his chest and extending his long arms, he seemed to enfold the entire orchestra in his embrace. Listening to the symphony on period instruments allowed me to hear what Julie heard, giving me a deeper understanding of the sound world of the 19th century.

Feeling more positive, I invited the maestro to attend an arts gala. I’d arranged the table so he could sit next to a potential patron. He ignored me the entire night. Beethoven would have done the same thing, so I was trying to work it into the novel, but life was now overtaking art. When I told the maestro that I found his behavior rude, he promised to talk to me at the party after his next concert. We had a lovely conversation, and I became a patron. In my book, Beethoven had just had a fight with his largest benefactor and needed money. I felt that I was helping both men out.

Afterward, the maestro said he needed a break—from me. Dealing with him was like having whiplash. But wasn’t that the essence of Beethoven’s music—the sudden rhythmic changes, the thunderous climaxes, the sheer outsize drama? A month later, after another spat, the maestro refused to reply to several of my texts and I let it rest. Muses can’t be summoned. They emerge when you least expect it.

One day, he suddenly emailed to say that he’d caught me in an HBO documentary and it was as if my ghost had invaded his bedroom. In my book, Julie had just returned from Vienna after a long separation from Beethoven. “I thought you were Eine geist,” I had him say.

After the maestro conducted a thrilling rendition of Beethoven’s Eroica, he invited me to attend a musical event—“Epilogues & Epitaphs”—at Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. I had no desire to spend a hot summer evening in a crypt, but as I was preparing to bury Beethoven, I chalked it up to more research. After drinking a plastic thimble of bourbon in a mausoleum, we trekked up the hill to the catacomb. The concert was pleasant, but I couldn’t help noticing the names of the people entombed around me. It felt like an ending.

But there was an epilogue. I attended the maestro’s gala at the same time I was reworking a critical ballroom scene. The maestro had promised to dance with me, but when Julie waltzed with Beethoven it ended in tragedy. I was nervous, but I didn’t have to worry. During the cocktail hour, the maestro was so engaged with prospective patrons that he waltzed right past me without saying hello.

During the past year, we’d talked about collaborating on something for Beethoven’s 250th anniversary. This spring we met to discuss plans. His upcoming schedule was packed with Beethoven events. Over the years, I’d grown fond of his orchestra and was excited about the concerts. Unlike our first lunch, however, there was an elegiac tone to the conversation. When we said goodbye, he held out his arms and drew me in the way he did his musicians. The following week, he conducted the very last concert at Lincoln Center before COVID-19 shut it down.

Today, I no longer live in the 19th century. The Woman in the Moonlight is finished and about to be published. Did the maestro influence my creative process? He certainly helped to bring Beethoven, with all his Sturm und Drang, alive. But ultimately, the effect was more ineffable than that.

Muse = angel hair filigree.

The post Meeting Beethoven at an Italian Restaurant on the Upper West Side appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

By Norman Vanamee

The author and journalist Patricia Morrisroe decided on the subject of her new novel, The Woman in the Moonlight, while having lunch with an editor. “He mentioned that Beethoven had been in love with one of his piano students. I had no idea!” Morrisroe, a former contributing editor at New York magazine and frequent writer for numerous other publications, did what she has done her entire career when she learned something new: “I went home and started researching.”

The student was Countess Julie Guicciardi. She and Beethoven were introduced in 1801 when she was 19 years old and she took lessons with him for several years before marrying and moving to Naples. Beethoven dedicated his “Moonlight Sonata” to her in 1802 and kept a miniature portrait of her, which was found in his desk after he died. Aside from that, however, there isn’t much about her in the historical record. Morrisroe expanded her research to include relatives and contemporaries. “I just kept on digging and digging—half writer, half detective—after a while I couldn’t stop.”

The result of all this research is Morrisroe’s first work of historical fiction, a novel full illuminating details about the countess and the composer, but also finely rendered details about society life in 1800s Vienna. The book comes out today, T&C asked her to describe some of the more surprising things she discovered.

Was it unusual for a young woman to take piano lessons from a composer?

Not at all. Women in those days had to become proficient in musical instruments so they could appear accomplished, and thus, marriageable. But it had to be the right instrument. It could not be the violin, for example, because you had to do these violent flashing movements which were considered unattractive. It couldn’t be the cello because you had to squeeze it in between your legs. So women were pretty much limited to the piano, which showed off your dainty wrists and posture.

You describe marriage in the book as transactional. Was this true even for someone like Guicciardi?

We’ve all read Jane Austen, but even so it really hit home for me when doing research on Guicciardi and her contemporaries how women were treated like chattel in those days. Marriage was a sort of property and money exchange and women had little say in the matter. Everything was stable [with this process] if all ran smoothly in terms of money. But if it didn’t, it could fall disastrously apart.

Julie’s cousin [Josephine von Brunswick, who may have been the subject of an unsent letter Beethoven wrote addressed to his “immortal beloved”], for example, was brought to Vienna to find a husband and was married within nine days. She was incredibly beautiful and talented, but she was married off to a disgraced aristocrat, the owner of a cabinet of curiosities and wax museum. He died and left her with no money and four children. She had to open her house up to borders and was later declared “immoral” by Vienna’s secret police.

You describe exceptions.

There were these incredible women who somehow worked around the system. One I particularly admired was Nanette Streicher, who was the mother of six children but also made pianos—first with her brother and then with her husband. She was a musician and constructed incredible instruments, some for Beethoven himself.

What else did you learn that surprised you?

I’ve always been fascinated by fashion and I was struck by the freedom of the clothing at the time. It wasn’t really buttoned up and corseted. It was very loose, diaphanous and Greek-inspired. Julie chopped off her hair into this fantastic à la Titus bob, which was also how Beethoven wore his hair.

What about liaisons, dangerous or other?

You had these women who really had no lives except that they went to musical events and salons. Many were married to men they didn’t love and ended up having affairs. People have said to me, “My God, there’s so much sex in the book.” I didn’t anticipate this at all but it was so persuasive in the research. These aristocrats were a pretty decadent and debauched bunch. You could not not put it in.

Julie and Ludwig?

Beethoven had been suffering from hearing loss and when they met he was at a point when he really had to confront the reality that he might go completely deaf. He was Vienna’s foremost piano virtuoso, and so it was just a truly devastating time. And then this beautiful woman walks into his life. She was a famous beauty known as “La Bella Guicciardi.” He described her as “the dear, enchanting girl” in a letter to a close friend.

But she married someone else?

Beethoven tended to get involved in tortured relationships with women he could not have. I think he may have done this on purpose. I imagine Julie was in love with his music but it would have been impossible for them to marry because they came from different social stations. And anyway, I’m not sure who would be able to put up with him. He was famously a very, very difficult man. He moved constantly and couldn’t keep housekeepers or cooks. Descriptions of his apartment were ‘there’s a mess everywhere, old salami next to the herring next to the manuscript pages of the Seventh Symphony.’ It was absolutely utter chaos.

Guicciardi had a second act, didn’t she?

She married Count Robert von Gallonburg in 1803. He was definitely part of her social station, but below Beethoven’s in musical abilities [Gallonburg was also a composer]. They moved to Naples and that could have been the end of my book until I learned that she became a spy and returned to Vienna….

The post Author Patricia Morrisroe on Beethoven and the Bored Housewives of 1800s Vienna appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.

Four years ago, I was having lunch with an editor who mentioned that Beethoven had fallen in love with one of his piano students. She was the woman to whom the great master had dedicated the “Moonlight” Sonata. The editor thought it would make a good novel. Was I interested?

I was intrigued, but intimidated. Wagner once described Beethoven as a “titan, wrestling with the gods.” Did I want to wrestle with a titan? I’d never written historical fiction, didn’t read German and knew nothing about early-19th-century Vienna. Though I’d studied piano for 12 years, my teacher thought Beethoven’s music was too “agitating” for someone with my “high-strung” temperament.

When I got home from lunch, I listened to Maurizio Pollini play the “Moonlight.” I’d heard the sorrowful first movement before, but it suddenly touched me differently. Both my parents had recently died, but with a heavy workload and my childhood home to sell, I hadn’t given myself time to grieve. Now Beethoven was encouraging me to mourn, hypnotizing me with doleful, dronelike melody.

But just as I was settling in for a good cry, he yanked me into the second movement’s lively Allegretto, before pushing me headfirst into the explosive Presto. In 16 minutes, I’d gone from sorrow to happiness to defiance.

Over the next two weeks, I listened to nothing but Beethoven. Soon, the titan had taken over my life. I wrestled with his music. I wrestled with his dozens of biographies. I didn’t have to wrestle with the decision to write the novel that became “The Woman in the Moonlight”; it felt like Beethoven had decided for me.

Her name was Countess Julie Guicciardi. When the “Moonlight” Sonata was first published, the dedication page was in Italian, so she’s been known as Giulietta ever since.

She left no diaries and few letters. I could find only three suspected likenesses: a bust, a lithograph and a portrait miniature showing a young woman with large eyes, lush lips and hair “à la Titus,” the daringly short style then popular among Vienna’s fashionable set. Some once thought she was the “Immortal Beloved,” the anonymous woman to whom Beethoven wrote a passionate letter that was discovered after he died. (Today, far likelier candidates are the composer’s friend, Antonie Brentano, and Julie’s cousin, Josephine von Brunswick.)

Beethoven began giving Julie lessons in 1801, when she was 18 and so beautiful that people called her “La Bella Guicciardi.” He was 30, with intense brown eyes and a volatile temperament.

They probably met through the Brunswicks, who had made Beethoven’s acquaintance two years earlier. Julie’s aunt had come to Vienna from Hungary to marry off one of her daughters. In order to attract suitable husbands, aristocratic women were encouraged to play an instrument. The cello sat between the legs, and the violin required rigorous slicing movements; the piano was considered far more ladylike.

Josephine von Brunswick and her sister, Therese, got Beethoven to teach them. He admired the lovely Josephine, but she quickly found a husband, and Beethoven turned his attention to Julie.

It was an agonizing period in his life. For the previous four years, he’d been suffering from tinnitus, a ringing and buzzing in his ears, and was having trouble discerning high notes. He feared the situation was irreversible and tried to keep it secret. He became reclusive, afraid of what people would say when they learned that Vienna’s foremost piano virtuoso was going deaf. Apart from the social stigma, he knew that it would probably end his brilliant performing career.

Julie helped lift his despair. It’s generally agreed that she is the “dear, enchanting girl” he refers to in a letter to his friend Franz Wegeler. He confided to Wegeler that he was thinking of marriage, but that the aristocratic young woman wasn’t of his station.

At some point in 1801, he completed the “Moonlight” Sonata. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact date; he recorded his compositional process in sketchbooks, and many pages related to the “Moonlight” have been lost. When it was published in March 1802, it had only a generic name; its romantic title emerged after Beethoven’s death. In 1823, the writer Ludwig Rellstab described the first movement as a lake reposing in the faint shimmer of the moon, and that association eventually caught on.

Even before it became the “Moonlight,” however, the sonata was a hit; the dreamy first movement was played so often that Beethoven grew tired of it. He complained to his student, the composer Carl Czerny, that it seemed to be all anyone wanted to hear.

One imagines that Julie would have been thrilled to be its dedicatee, but in 1852, when Otto Jahn interviewed her for his biography of Beethoven, she painted a different picture. She told Jahn that Beethoven had originally given her his Rondo in G, but when he suddenly needed to dedicate that work to the sister of his foremost patron, he offered Julie the “Moonlight” instead. (The story doesn’t quite add up. The Rondo had been written several years earlier and was published after the “Moonlight.” Perhaps Jahn didn’t gain Julie’s trust — the rest of the interview is relatively uninformative — or perhaps, having already been suggested as the “Immortal Beloved,” she didn’t want any more scrutiny.)

In November 1803, Julie wed Count Wenzel Robert von Gallenberg, a composer of modest talents and limited means, with whom she moved to Naples. There her life, never dull, became even more dramatic. She met Joachim Murat, the King of Naples, and his wife, Caroline, Napoleon’s youngest sister. In October 1814, Julie appeared at the Congress of Vienna, the assembly that reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. According to local police records, she was an “emissary” for the Murats, who wanted to make sure they’d keep their kingdom.

In a city teeming with spies, Julie was one of many, but she had certain advantages. Her sister-in-law, Countess Eleonora von Fuchs, was married to an imperial chamberlain, and, according to the Viennese police, Julie was the mistress of a prominent Saxon diplomat. Did she see Beethoven during the trip? There’s no record of it, but he was the musical star of the Congress, conducting his bombastic “Wellington’s Victory” and Seventh Symphony before a crowd of luminaries. It’s hard to believe that Julie wouldn’t have encountered him.

Their lives intersected again in 1822, when Julie and Gallenberg moved back to Vienna, where he’d been hired at the Theater am Kärntnertor. The Kärntnertor will always be remembered for one event in particular: the 1824 premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Was Julie sitting in a box that night to listen to the soaring “Ode to Joy”? Again, there’s no evidence.

But Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s secretary and early biographer, met Gallenberg at the Kärntnertor. This prompted Beethoven to reminisce about Julie: he claimed that Julie loved him more than her husband, and that after her wedding, she’d come to him crying but he had spurned her. Knowing of her financial hardships, though, he’d arranged through a friend to give Gallenberg money.

It would seem that he hadn’t entirely forgotten his “dear, enchanting girl.” After Beethoven’s death in 1827, friends discovered several items tucked away in a secret compartment of a desk drawer. Among them was the “Immortal Beloved” letter and two portrait miniatures. One was that “à la Titus” image believed to be Julie Guicciardi.

Patricia Morrisroe is the author of “Mapplethorpe: A Biography” and the novel “The Woman in the Moonlight,” coming in September.

The post The Woman at the Heart of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata appeared first on Patricia Morrisroe.