I wrote like my brother. Iwrote. It was an acknowledgment of my volume of sonatas. Papa was telling me, without saying it directly, that he knew that music was mine. The quiver of candlelight trembled against my folded hands, disguising the shudder that coursed through my body.
“How do you know this?” I asked him quietly.
“Nannerl,” he replied. His eyes fixed on mine. “You know how.”
You know how.I looked around the music room, its shadows stretched and shaking from the candles. Any doubt I might have felt over what had happened now fell away. Here, at last, was his admission that he had indeed taken my music with intention, had put my brother’s name on my work and published it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“Would it have made any difference?” he mumbled. “Except to make you miserable sooner? Would you have fought me? It is the way it is.”
He did not like coming to me like this, vulnerable in admitting to me the truth. I found myself thrilled by his discomfort. For once, I was not the one apologizing to my father, seeking his approval, trying to find a way to appease him. Now it was his turn.I let him shift, his eyes first meeting mine and then darting away in frustration, trying to settle on anything else but my unspoken accusation.
“Why do you do all of this, Papa?” I asked. “Our lessons. Our tour. Sacrificing your own standing with the archbishop. What is the reason for it? I know it is about the money. But that cannot be the whole of it.”
His posture was stiff and hunched, his fingers woven against each other. I waited patiently until he finally found his response.
“Do you know what I thought I would become, Nannerl?” When I shook my head, he said, “A missionary. My parents thought me a future priest, that my calling was a divine one.” He was silent a moment. “For a long time, I thought that my entire purpose in life had been to become a missionary, and that I had failed it. Music and composition? I am good at it, but I am no lasting figure.” He looked down at the creases in his hands. “Then I heard you and your brother at the clavier. I knew what God had put me on this earth to do. In a way, I have become a missionary. There is no greater purpose for me than to ensure that you are heard by as many as possible.”
I studied his bowed head and realized how old he looked. In that moment, I felt sorry for him. I believed my father, but I did not think he understood himself as well as he thought. He wanted me to be heard, but not by name. He wanted me to be seen, but not for what I could create. And he thought himself a missionary, an ambassador of God, when what he really wanted was to validate himself.
The satisfaction I’d felt earlier at his admission and his vulnerability began to fade. I’d gotten what I wanted from him. Now, as I stared at his aging face in the candlelight, all I wanted todo was shake my head. Underneath his harsh exterior was just a pitiful man, mired in insecurity. I sighed. The thought of dragging this on suddenly brought me no joy.
“I’ll help him,” I said.
My father glanced up at me, surprised.
“I’ll help him,” I repeated. “It will be hard, but we can do it.”
Papa opened his mouth, closed it, and searched my gaze. He did not smile. I waited, wondering if I might catch a glimpse of guilt, some semblance of an apology on his face.
But he had already admitted too much for one night. In the next instance, he leaned back and furrowed his brows. “Of course you will,” he said. The authority had returned to his voice just as I had retreated to my meek position, the daughter at his command. “I want you and Woferl to do nothing else in these eight days, to go nowhere, until you have finished the oratorio. I will check on you both twice a day, at morning and at night, and your mother will bring you food. If Woferl tires, you will take his place.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“I cannot have the archbishop thinking that Woferl does not deserve the reputation he has earned across Europe. You understand this, of course, Nannerl.”
I nodded. My father tightened his lips in approval, and then he rose from his chair with a single motion. I rose with him, watching him move out of the candlelight and back into the shadows of his bedchamber. When he disappeared, I turned away.
I had not bothered to ask if my name would appear next to Woferl’s on the oratorio’s title.
My father locked Woferl and I together in the music room the following morning, with nothing but fresh sheets of paper and quills and ink, and our clavier. We were not to leave until nighttime.
In a way, I was relieved. Hyacinth had always been able to find his way to us, but somehow, trapped in this room, I felt like even he might be unable to unlock a door that my father had secured himself. And even though Woferl and I still hung in an uneasy place, at least here we could speak only with music.
It was the original secret we shared between us, the ability to hear a world that others could not.
Woferl said little about why we were working together, but he seemed relieved too by my presence. He sat beside me at the clavier stand, his body turned unconsciously toward mine as he settled on a tune, the key, and the tempo. He sang part of the harmony to me, so that I would know what he wanted, and then he started to write out the first violin lines. Woferl had become faster at composing, if not for his growing experience then for the stress that Papa placed on him. He wrote in a nonstop fury, until he had completed three lines of continuous music, and then he paused. He looked at me and pointed out the phrases as he hummed.
I watched his thin hands at work. He was very pale this morning, and his dark lashes stood out against the white skin. “We’ll start with arpeggios,” he said to me. His hands floated across the paper. “Slow, and then grand, with other strings below it.” He paused to scribble more notes below the ones he’d already written. “With an undercurrent of notes, to fill out the harmony.”
“A flute,” I said, after I watched him write out the second violins. “To carry your melody above the strings.”
He nodded without looking at me. The music had already taken away his focus on anything else.
I went on, writing the lines for the flute and the horns. As I did, I noticed a shift in our styles, where his flowing melody met the abrupt sounds of my harmony. It was a subtle difference, so small that those unfamiliar with our work might never know.
Woferl would, though. He could distinguish what we wrote even when others could not.
