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 woman figuring out how to make a career in the male-dominated world of 18th-century classical music. You meet Mozart; you meet Beethoven; and you meet a half-dozen female musicians you may not have heard of. 

What are the markers of a woman’s successful life? ESCAPEMENT begins 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 — the start of an ambitious trajectory that will lead to her becoming one of the leading instrument-makers of her age. But while posterity remembers Nannette for carrying on her father’s legacy and for her encounters with Mozart and Beethoven and Haydn and various other luminaries, Nannette’s own image of her life is shaped by her family, her female friends — including other brilliant woman like the virtuoso Anna von Schaden — and her life as a mother in an age when women could expect to lose several of their children, and faced the constant threat of dying in childbirth themselves. 

The product of extensive original research, ESCAPEMENT will bring classical music to life in a new way for readers as it shows Nannette’s trailblazing 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. 

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.