Giddy sugarplum? Calculating shrew? Mozart's biographers show disdain for his Konstanze, and she aroused strong feelings among her contemporaries. Her in-laws loathed her; his friends, more than forty years after his death, remained eager to gossip about her “failures” as wife to the world’s first superstar. Maturing from child, to wife, to hardheaded widow, Konstanze paid her husband’s debts, provided for their children, and relentlessly marketed and mythologized her brilliant husband. Mozart’s letters attest to his affection for Konstanze as well as to their powerful sexual bond. Yet the question remains: Why did she never mark his grave?
Juliet Waldron nourished a fascination with the past from earliest childhood, perhaps from growing up in a haunted 1790’s house. Mozart’s Wife won the independent Ebook award for best fiction.
C. M. Hébert is an Earphones Award winner and Audie Award nominee. She is the recording studio director for the Talking Books Program at the Library of Congress’ National Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband, daughter, cat, and assorted fish.