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A Notebook for Nannerl

Coin…button…cake…” Wolfi’s far-off mumbles interrupted Nannerl’s dream.

She opened one heavy eyelid and saw her new diary sitting on the night table. Yesterday she had turned twelve! She was now grown up, because her twelve-year-old candle had burned down. She ran a finger up the bony ridge of her nose and through her hair, which didn’t really feel any more grown up than yesterday. Her doll, Salome Musch, smiled up at her, one eye covered with the pillow. They had named Salome after the old woman who used to come and make the meals when Mama had been sick. Nannerl sighed and kissed the doll’s hard forehead. Maybe now, since she was twelve, she should stop playing with Salome and give her to Wolfi.

She looked across the room at her brother, twisted in his eiderdown quilt. He turned over and Nannerl heard the noise he made in his sleep from grinding his teeth together, then “…want…violin…” His words were hard to catch.

Nannerl gave up straining to hear them and snuggled down under her own warm quilt. For the fifth time in a week, she wished she had a room of her own. Wolfi’s latest habit of sleep-talking kept waking her up, and this had been such a good dream. She closed her eyes and tried to make it continue. She was in a castle and the prince had just placed a golden medallion around her neck, in honor of her great contribution to the musical life of Salzburg. She was feeling its cool smoothness against her skin, and listening to all the courtiers cheering and clapping, and…it was no use. Nannerl couldn’t go back to sleep.

She tiptoed to the hall and checked the time on the grandfather clock. Five o’clock, half an hour before Papa would come around to announce, “Nannerl! Wolfi! Time for my Wunderkindern to wake up and practice for their breakfast!” Wolfi usually groaned and hid under his quilt, letting Nannerl beat him to the clavier. By the time he stumbled into the music room, wiping sleep out of his eyes, she was finished with her scales and ready to help Mama set out the rolls and cheese for breakfast.

She looked at the clock again. What if she practiced extra long and hard today, beating Wolfi by an hour at least? Papa would be sure to praise her and say how hard-working she was, perhaps right in front of Wolfi! She went back to her room and looked at her little brother lying in his nightshirt, his quilt now kicked to the floor. Well, Papa’s extra praise would help Wolfi remember he was still four and a half years younger than her. Maybe some people thought Wolfi was like God, but really he was just a little boy who liked to tickle people and sleep in.

She pulled the stiff corset over her nightshirt, feeling its achy tightness around her chest. There was no one to help her pull it tighter, but she could get Mama to do that later. She chose her new yellow dress that puffed out over her big crinoline, the one with the green bows at the sleeves and a matching bow around the cap. Papa and Mama and Wolfi sometimes teased that she was dressing up for a boy, but that was nonsense. Why couldn’t she wear something nice on an ordinary day? And actually, it wasn’t very ordinary. It was the day after her twelfth birthday.

Nannerl carefully closed the door of the music room so that she wouldn’t wake anyone up. Her fingers felt cold and stiff as they went up and down the keys, playing scales and arpeggios over and over until the sky turned pink and the birds woke up and joined her with scales of their own. Nannerl stopped suddenly. Had she heard Mama and Papa’s door click open? She wanted to play something for Papa, something that would be a secret just between the two of them.

She noticed a thin notebook sitting on top of a messy stack of papers. The inscription on the worn front cover, in Papa’s clear hand, read: For the clavier, this Notebook belongs to Miss Maria Anna, 1759. She had forgotten about the notebook, thought it was sitting somewhere at the back of the old music cupboard. How had it got here? It was the one Papa had given to her at her first clavier lesson, when she was seven.

Nannerl flipped through the book. Most of the early pieces were minuets composed especially for her by Papa. She found her favorite, Minuet No. 11, and began to play. Maybe Papa would hear it and remember the lesson when she had played it for him. That time she had played it without any mistakes, but also with something else. She had put everything into the music: Mama’s hugs and the way Wolfi made her laugh, chocolates, their dog Bimberl’s fur, and the shadows that flicked over the walls during supper. She had stirred all of it into the little minuet so that it steamed rich like the stew Mama made on winter afternoons.

“You are an amazing talent, my daughter Maria Anna,” Papa had whispered, and Nannerl could tell he was serious because he used her formal name. Two tears had slipped silently from his eye to the clavier keys. After that she’d played the minuet over and over for two weeks, until one evening Mama had stormed into the room and told her to please play something else because she was going crazy.

A small click interrupted Nannerl’s thoughts. She stiffened. Papa had opened the door and was standing there listening to her play! Her heart beat harder but she kept on until the final note, trying to play the way she had on the day Papa had cried. When she was finished, she felt his hand on her shoulder and turned around quickly to see if he was pleased. He was smiling.

“You’re up early, Nannerl! What a diligent, hard-working daughter I have, playing so beautifully at six o’clock in the morning,” he said, sitting down on the bench beside her.

Nannerl’s fingers tingled with the praise. Being with Papa alone was even better than being praised in front of Wolfi. She loved Papa’s soapy smell and the way his coat brushed against her dress.

“You played this piece superbly when you were only seven,” Papa reminisced. He had remembered! “Do you recall when you used to play this again and again and drove your poor mama crazy?” he asked, and they both laughed. “Let’s play it together, just for fun.” Nannerl nodded and quickly turned the page back before Papa could change his mind. He hardly ever did things just for fun.

“Wait, Nannerl!” Papa turned to the last page of the piece again. “Can you read what I wrote here, at the end of the piece?”

Nannerl peered closer to read Papa’s tiny script.

This minuet and trio little Wolfgang learned in half an hour on 26th January, 1761, one day before his fifth birthday, at half past nine at night.

She had forgotten that, although this notebook had first been hers, Wolfi had later learned all of the pieces perfectly. Papa had carefully recorded Wolfi’s progress after each piece.

She looked up. Wolfi stood in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. He came over, looked at the notebook, and suddenly wasn’t sleepy anymore. He snatched it from the piano ledge and started skipping around the room.

“I found this in the old cupboard,” he sang, panting and returning to the clavier, “and I’m using the empty pages at the back to write music. See, Papa,” he turned the pages and held up a fresh composition, “I composed this sonata movement last week!”

“Well, well, we must hear it,” said Papa with a smile. He stood up. “Here, Wolfi, play it for us.”

Nannerl thought she would explode. She stood up.

“It’s my book!” she cried. “Papa gave it to me and it’s mine! You’re always taking my things!” She glared at Wolfi.

“But, Nannerl,” Papa said, “you must be reasonable. You haven’t used this book for years. It was just sitting in the cupboard. I see no harm in Wolfi using it for his compositions.”

“You just don’t understand,” Nannerl cried, running from the room. “It’s not fair!”

Papa called after her but Nannerl didn’t really hear and she didn’t care either. She slammed the door and sank down onto the bed and began to sob, then remembered that she had cried here last night too.

I’m supposed to be twelve and grown up and all I can do is cry, she thought, as Wolfi’s sonata drifted out from the music room. She dug her fingers into the quilt, smelling coffee and fresh rolls that made her stomach growl. She would stay here all day. That would show them. Not that they’d really care if she starved.

Mama knocked at the door. Nannerl could tell it was her, because Papa or Wolfi would have just barged right in.

“Come in,” Nannerl said into her quilt.

“It’s time for breakfast,” Mama said in her no-nonsense voice. “You’re not going to stay up here and starve over a notebook, so you might as well blow your nose and get something to eat. Let me tighten your corset first.” Nannerl knew there was no sense in arguing with Mama. She slowly stood up and allowed herself to be fixed. She hated how the corset squeezed, even when she was playing the clavier or running up the hill to the market for eggs.

At breakfast and during the arithmetic lesson that followed, Wolfi tried to make Nannerl laugh by making faces at her behind Papa’s back. His crabby-neighbor-Frau-Spiegel face almost succeeded, but she managed to hide behind a book so he wouldn’t see her smile.

After dinner, Nannerl found the notebook on her chair. Wolfi looked straight at her, his eyes begging for a truce. She lifted the notebook, nodded, and gave him a queenly smile, sort of lofty and far off. Wolfi drummed a riddle with his knuckles in their secret code language; two quarter note taps, a triplet, two half notes and four sixteenths, meaning “What looks like a noodle?” She shrugged. He made his Frau Spiegel face again and this time Nannerl burst into a loud giggle.

Papa turned around and glared at them. He often looked that way, now that the Grand Tour was so close. “Come here, both of you,” he ordered. Nannerl braced herself for a lecture. Wolfi came around and sat on Papa’s lap and she leaned against the table.

“In less than a week we depart for Munich,” he said in a brisk voice. “You two will be in the spotlight, and the eyes of many distinguished people will view you. You will be earning money, just like adult musicians. This is serious business, and you must act like professionals. Wolfi, what’s a professional?”

“Um…it’s like an adult, I guess,” he said, “an adult who has a job and receives money.”

“Good,” said Papa, “except that you don’t have to be an adult to be a professional. Now, Wolfi, why the long face? Remember the rewards! Remember the way people clapped? Remember when you sat on the lap of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria? Think of the opportunity! Perhaps on this tour the great Johann Christian Bach will hear your compositions!”

Johann Christian Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach! One of the greatest composers alive! Nannerl imagined sitting at the clavier with the great composer while he played her latest composition. He would pat her on the back and say in a gruff voice, “Well done, my girl. I must see about getting this published immediately!”

A loud knock echoed through the apartment.

“There’s my first student,” said Papa. “Now finish your work quietly, and remember that you are both professionals.”

That evening after supper, Wolfi begged Nannerl to play “March Around and Play the Violin” with him but she said no, partly because she couldn’t really play the violin and partly because she had important work to do. She shut the door to their room, got out her diary, and lay on the bed. Bimberl panted and jumped up beside her and Nannerl stroked the dog’s fur while she wrote.

June 3, 1763

Dear Diary,

I’m so excited about the Grand Tour! Papa says we might play for the great Johann Christian Bach! And I have a plan! My plan is to have a new piece of music finished perfectly so that I can play it for him and he’ll help me become famous, maybe even help me to get it published! But what should I compose? It will have to be something brand new, something no one has ever heard. I’ll make it as big as the sky but quiet sometimes too, like the candlelight shadows dancing across this page…

Nannerl felt her eyelids grow heavy and she jerked suddenly, catching herself dozing. Bimberl slept soundly beside her. She could hear Wolfi march around the house, still playing his violin. She fell asleep with his music ringing in her ears.