Synopsis
History meets mystery in a novel about a pupil of Mozart's, the young Princess Victoria, whom the composer soon discovers has quite a talent for the keyboard and a knack for being a murder victim
Reviews
It's 1830. Salty William IV has replaced his late unlovable brother George IV on the British throne, but Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, now a vigorous 73, just keeps rolling along. In Bastable's third installment of his posthumous adventures (Dead, Mr. Mozart, 1995, etc.)--this one rather confusingly presented under the byline of Bastable's well-known originator, Robert Barnard--the aging composer has been engaged as music master to 11-year-old Princess Victoria, who precociously asks him (a wish soon seconded by the deceptively shrewd King) to keep an eye on her mother, the widowed Duchess of Kent, and her Comptroller, Sir John Conroy. But an invitation to Victoria and her mother to visit the King at Windsor Castle upstages the Duchess's possible entanglements, first by the myriad intrigues of the FitzClarences, the King's enterprising illegitimate offspring, and then by the death of Mr. Popper, the Queen's Theater manager who's just paraded Mozart's latest theatrical offering, Victor and Victoria, before the King. Convinced that Popper's poisoned cup was meant for the Princess, Mozart finds himself regarding with the deepest suspicion every member of the royal family who looks down a Hanoverian nose at him. The mystery is dullish stuff. But the young Victoria is enchanting, and Mozart himself (``I have just finished a violin concerto for Paganini. Trying to prevent him writing any more himself'') as effervescent as ever. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Combining mystery with alternative history, Bastable, who is really veteran mystery author Robert Barnard, offers us a Wolfgang Mozart who has lived to old age. Still unrecognized, still in debt, a widower after a long and happy marriage, the former child prodigy and performer for kings finds himself giving music lessons to Princess Victoria, heir apparent to the throne of England. But having more on her mind than music, the princess asks her piano teacher to uncover the truth about the ambiguous relationship between her mother and Sir John Conroy. The mature Mozart-a bit cagey, puckish, and fond of his young student-acts as a liaison between the princess's mother and the disarmingly informal newly crowned King William IV, who lives with Queen Adelaide surrounded by his brood of illegitimate children. The King, Victoria's uncle, invites her, the heir apparent, to the Windsor court. Shortly after her arrival, a court visitor is fatally poisoned after sipping from a cup intended for Victoria, and the king calls upon Mozart to make the kind of discreet inquiries at which he has proven so competent. Bastable imagines his characters and their setting so fully and seamlessly and offers such appealing possibilities that readers will wish this slight piece offered Mozart and Victoria more range.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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