Inspiration for Mozart

I’m interviewed on the CBS columnist Jeff Glor’s blog about my new novel Mozart’s Last Aria.

Here’s how it starts:

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Matt Rees: I’ve always loved Mozart, but his music became more important to me when I was working as a foreign correspondent for Time magazine during the Palestinian intifada. The violence I witnessed and experienced disturbed me. I was in some ways traumatized. My reaction to trauma was to lose my temper to a crazy extent. When I listened to Mozart, I felt calmer. So I used to drive around the West Bank and Gaza listening to this beautiful music, not thinking about the killing and the threat that lay around the corner. I took a break from covering the intifada to visit Austria with my wife – we were looking for a place that was the anti-intifada, organized, peaceful and beautiful. We happened to pass through a small mountain village where, I learned, Mozart’s sister, Nannerl had spent her married life. I visited her house and saw that she looked exactly like her brother. Naturally that got me thinking about plot opportunities. But I also felt called by her, as I stood at the edge of the lake at the bottom of her garden. Called by a talented woman who had been consigned to this backwater while her brother achieved fame in the Imperial capital. I wrote the book for her.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

MR: I learned to play the piano so I could connect with the inner workings of Mozart’s music, the structure, and the way in which great players prepare to perform his work. I had hoped this would take me deeper into his work, but even so I was surprised how well that technique worked. I spent a lot of time discussing performance with friends of mine who’re classical musicians. It was invaluable to play Mozart’s music, to hear it from within, as it were. Even with my pitiful technique, I was surprised at how clear Mozart’s structure and aims were made by a little musical knowledge. So if anything surprised me in writing the book, I suppose it was that Mozart was an even greater genius than I had thought him to be before I started to work on “Mozart’s Last Aria.”

Read more on Jeff’s blog.