‘Vienna Nocturne’ by Vivien Shotwell

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn

An appreciation for historical fiction can be rather a divisive thing to admit to one’s friends and colleagues. I for one enjoy it, with the obvious proviso of enjoying it when it is done well. Have no fear, we’ll get to what done well actually means. However, I have friends who are history buffs who are as repelled by the idea of slathering fictional elements on the purity of historical research, just as I am by the sight of ketchup on a hot dog. As far as that goes, a very good friend of mine – a prominent American novelist – doesn’t like the idea of actual historic personages barging their way into narratives and disrupting the story; it makes the whole thing like Woody Allen’s famous and quite brilliant short story “The Kugelmass Episode”.

“The Kugelmass Episode” is the story of a professor at New York’s City College who develops the magical ability to appear in famous works of fiction; not just in his own copy of the book, but all copies in the world. This leads to the delightful lines, “What he didn’t realize was that at this very moment students in various classrooms across the country were saying to their teachers, “Who is this character on page 100? A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?”

As I think of it just now, it seems time to introduce a new verb to the lexicon of book reviewing: kugelmassing. Given that I’ve introduced the word, I also feel free to define it. Kugelmassing is the introduction of a fictional element (kugelmass, n.) into an historical event for the purpose of reader amusement and entertainment.

Kugelmassing can be either broad or subtle. Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning one could term as a Greater Kugelmass. Barging into the story of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is Uncle Sam himself, loquacious, folksy and rather foul-mouthed, enlisting Richard M. Nixon in his cause. And this Greater Kugelmass works quite brilliantly.

There is also the Lesser Kugelmass, such as in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975). What is imposed here on the murder of architect Stanford White, the early Civil Rights activism of Booker T. Washington, and other notable events and personages of the early twentieth century are generic, observational characters. They are so generic they have names like Father, Mother, and Mother’s Younger Brother. There is also the Greater Kugelmass figure of Coalhouse Walker, the black musician who turns to violence in the face of racism. Here again, this kugelmassing works just fine.

Ultimately, the worth or otherwise of kugelmassing is dependent on what it does for the reader. Does the introduction of fictional events or characters increase one’s understanding of the actual history, much as an elegant frame enhances a Renaissance painting? Or, is the kugelmass just a trick, a sort of con game that draws in readers who think they are learning when they are really being fed something like a Chicken McNugget – there may be chicken in there, but it’s disguised in batter and salt.

So, what then of Vivien Shotwell’s debut novel Vienna Nocturne, set in the milieu of Mozart in the mid-1780s? Besides the great man himself, with the novel concentrating on his career as an opera composer, most of the other characters actually did walk, talk and sing two hundred and thirty years ago. Shotwell’s main character is the English-born soprano Anna Storace, who indeed did star in the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro and went on to enjoy a long and lucrative career in the great opera houses of Europe. Of course Antonio Salieri shows up, as anyone who has seen Amadeus on stage or in the movies would be crushed if he didn’t have a lengthy cameo. This Salieri is not as murderous as Peter Shaffer’s creation, but it’s pretty easy to hear F. Murray Abraham’s voice in exchanges such as:

“I know what you meant,” said Salieri, smiling easily. “You can have it, my man, with pleasure. I wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.”

Mozart gave him a blank slate and then laughed. “That’s right. You wouldn’t. Forgive me, Salieri. Sometimes I forget you’re not as clever as I am.’

“Do you really?” asked Salieri dryly. “That’s the most flattering thing I’ve heard all day, Mozart, my boy. I’m sure I never forget it for a moment.”

All one needs is a pinch of snuff and a twisting of a mustache tip and we’re off to the melodrama races here. But why not? People do say incredibly bitchy things from time to time, especially if they’re walking around inside novels.

Other people from the history books take a bow in these pages. Emperor Joseph Hapsburg is so helplessly chocolate-addicted that one wonders how anyone ever comprehended a word he said, what with his shovelling the truffles into his mouth two or three at a time. As well, there is the curious mystic medicine man, Doctor Franz Mesmer, who cures Anna’s depression after a miscarriage by quite literally jolting her out of it with an electric shock.

As for the Lesser Kugelmasses, the principal one is Anna’s devoted lady servant Lidia, who Shotwell admits is an invented character. So why is she there? Well, besides being the necessary confidante so that pages of what would otherwise be dreary internal monologue can otherwise be expressed as regular dialogue, Lidia also has a strong lesbian lust for the nubile Anna. Oh it goes unsatisfied and sorry to disappoint, but Lidia and Anna’s non-sex scenes are definitely an attention getter. As to, are Anna and Mozart having it off while he is playing the piano and she is singing an aria he wrote her? Yes, simultaneously. Well I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly impressed. I find the television a distraction, let alone performing a brand new piece in the key of F.

This means that we have now run across the Greater Kugelmass. As Shotwell says in the novel’s historical note, there is not a shred of evidence that Wolfgang Mozart and Anna Storace ever had an affair. Well, the author chooses to take as evidence the moving aria that Mozart wrote for Anna’s farewell concert in Vienna, but if the writing of a love song means that the composer is in love with the singer, the entire life and career of Cole Porter requires re-examination.

Does an invented romance work? I’ve actually just spent a good minute or so staring up at the ceiling light with my lips pursed while trying to decide. I’m not going to dodge the question, for after all I’m the idiot who brought it up in the first place, so I have to say that having an attraction between Mozart and Anna actually being consummated really is a step too far. It definitely puts Mozart in a lesser light, cheating on Constanze, presented here as absolutely angelic. It’s an unnecessary blob of pigeon poop on the statue of a great and tragic man.

The worth of Vienna Nocturne is all in the rehearsal and performance of those late eighteenth-century operas. Author Vivien Shotwell herself is a classically trained mezzo soprano, and it definitely shows that what she wants to do with this novel is to share her passion for the music of the period with the reader; the daughter of booksellers, she studied music at Yale and writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she’s a dual citizen of Canada and the US. One definitely gets a strong sense of the mise-en-scène of music, the opera houses, the sniping prejudices of the Austrians – who at the time ruled Italy and took Italian as the proper language of music – against the Germans.

If there is a recurring flaw, it is that the dialogue sometimes becomes stilted. Just because someone lived a couple of centuries ago doesn’t mean he or she spoke like an Oxford Don, or a romantic poet trying out a few lines on the family over dinner:

Anna touched the base of her throat. “Please don’t pity me. In truth I am fortunate. When I think of my life, of all I’ve done, all I’ve loved, it amazes me. Look, it makes me cry. I’ve always been so weak and softhearted.”

“Openhearted, my dear one,” Lidia exclaimed.

If Lidia had instead replied, “You left out softheaded,” I’d have done a kugelmass, leapt into the novel and hugged her. At some point, all dialogue in a novel has to pass the Who Talks Like This? test.

In sum, I did like Vienna Nocturne. Reading about the music scene of the baroque period was equal parts informative and entertaining. The love story between Mozart and Anna truly is as exquisite as anything Fabergé ever created. I just wish that Shotwell’s exuberance had been a bit tempered. But this is a first novel. She has time on her side.

Bond Street Books | 304 pages |  $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0385678032