ESCAPEMENT: A NOVEL (IN PROGRESS)

Based on the life of Nannette Stein Streicher, the woman who built pianos for Beethoven

The novel ESCAPEMENT is Hilary Mantel meets “Amadeus:” the true story of a musical prodigy trying to figure out how to make a career, as a woman, in the male-dominated world of 18th-century classical music — with a side helping of Mozart.

When 8-year-old Nannette Stein steps onto a raft in 1777 with her father to travel down the Danube to Vienna and dazzle the Emperor with the claviers built in their workshop, it’s the start of an ambitious trajectory that will lead to her becoming one of the leading instrument-makers of her age. But success is not a foregone conclusion, either for her or for her best friend, the virtuoso aristocrat Anna von Schaden, one of the first women to hold a position on the music staff of a German court. 

ESCAPEMENT is a coming-of-age novel and a study in contrasts. Nannette is trained in her father’s workshop in Augsburg, a city that prizes artisans but will not allow a woman legally to be a guild master; in nearby Oettingen-Wallerstein, Anna struggles to compose her own music while dealing with court life, the ups and downs of her marriage, and her treatment at the hands of the Prince. Nannette entertains visitors like Mozart and Beethoven, as well as now-forgotten luminaries like Maria Theresia Paradis, but is unsure how she can use her hard-won skills to forge the life she wants — until her love for a struggling young composer becomes the key that will unlock the door to her future. 

The product of extensive original research, ESCAPEMENT will bring classical music to life in a new way for readers as it shows Nannette’s progress through a historical epoch that first emancipates and then represses her - just as the piano escapement she helps to invent makes sound by first freeing a hammer to strike a string and then restraining it.

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Nannette Streicher (1769-1833) played a significant role in music in Classical-era Vienna. Her father built keyboard instruments that Mozart loved; she built pianos for Beethoven, a personal friend; and her son took over her workshop and became one of Brahms’s favorite piano-builders. 

In this family dynasty, it’s the woman who remains the least known; plenty of Beethoven biographies have averred that it was Nannette’s husband, rather than Nannette, who was the piano-builder. Nannette, in fact, had it all: a supportive and encouraging father; a husband who adored her and put his own dreams aside for her; children who loved her and followed in her footsteps; and a wildly successful business. But much of the story of a fulfilled woman’s life can slip through the mesh of the usual biographical filters. All too often, in the various Lives of Classical-era composers, the texture and color of the past is winnowed away -- along with a lot of the influential women who populated it. 

ESCAPEMENT, which is a logical extension of my years spotlighting women through my journalistic career, is an attempt to reanimate not just a young woman’s life, but an entire world: repopulating the Classical landscape with the women who contributed so much to the vitality of the period and the dissemination and endurance of its music.