A delight, at once fanciful and erudite: should be richly satisfying to Mozart buffs and fascinating to those in the outer...
A fourth outing by New York soprano and novelist Cowell (The Players, 1997, etc.) re-creates the situation that led up to Mozart’s marriage.
Based on true events, this is the story of the prodigy who, at 21, is just beginning to make a name for himself as a serious composer. Unhappily engaged as a court composer for the Archbishop-Prince of Salzburg, Mozart leaves the bishop’s employ in 1777 and begins to travel throughout Europe with his beloved, ambitious mother. In Mannheim, the two visit the home of Fridolin Weber, an impoverished musician whose four daughters (Josefa, Aloysia, Constanze, and Sophie) are as renowned for their musical talents as for their beauty. Mozart eventually becomes a lodger in the Weber home and a fixture in that family’s life. Fridolin’s wife Maria, a shabby-genteel sort who nurses memories of her fine upbringing and dreams of recovering her lost position in society, wastes no time in sizing up the young Mozart as a good prospect for a son-in-law—although not in the same league with the Swedish count they’re also trying to reel in. Before long, Mozart is engaged to Aloysia, but this ends unhappily when it turns out the young lady is pregnant by another boarder (a painter). The brokenhearted Mozart leaves Mannheim and throws himself into his work, but he has a change of heart in the end and returns to the Weber house to marry Constanze and live out the rest of his life with her—fairly happily, too. Cowell frames the story by relating much of it as a memoir, recalled by Sophie in 1842 at the behest of Mozart’s English biographer Vincent Novello. With its frequent changes in locale and abrupt switches in the objects of affection, the tale is reminiscent of nothing so much as an opera—appropriately enough.
A delight, at once fanciful and erudite: should be richly satisfying to Mozart buffs and fascinating to those in the outer circle as well.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03268-9
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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