The Book

    “The job of the escapement is to liberate the hammer, and then catch it again. Our whole world 

     of clavier music is born from that one moment of freedom.” - Johann Andreas Stein, path-

     breaking piano-builder, to his young daughter Nannette. 

Augsburg, 1777: When 8-year-old Nannette Stein steps onto a raft with her father to travel to Vienna and demonstrate their instruments to the Emperor, it is the start of a lifelong journey to bring music into the hands of the people. Nannette’s brilliant father has thrown himself into the race to develop the new devices that make music available to everyone, which will eventually become known as “pianos,” though he invents all kinds of combination harpsichord-pianos and piano-organs, since it is not yet clear what will emerge as the instrument of the future. Nannette has an additional challenge: as a woman in Augsburg, she is not legally able to become master of a workshop herself. 

The novel ESCAPEMENT, a cross between “Wolf Hall” and “Amadeus,” follows Nannette through her youth as a keyboard prodigy, workshop assistant, and participant in a music world whose dimensions have been largely forgotten. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven visit the Stein workshop, but so too do now-neglected luminaries like Sterkel and Rosetti, Anna von Schaden and Maria Theresia Paradis. Music, in Nannette’s early years during the Enlightenment, was not an established canon of masterpieces by “geniuses,” but a burgeoning activity in which everyone could take part — even women. 

That didn’t mean it was easy. Nannette, as she masters her craft and dazzles audiences with her playing, struggles to imagine what her future might look like. In nearby Oettingen-Wallerstein, her best friend Anna von Schaden becomes a pioneer as a woman with a salaried position on a court music staff; but she struggles to compose her own music while dealing with her marriage and advances of the mercurial Prince. ESCAPEMENT follows both women’s quests to forge careers in music, until Nannette’s father dies and she can no longer avoid the question that has always awaited her: whether she will follow the path of true love and marriage, or find a way to keep running the Stein workshop herself. 

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Nannette Stein 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 (wrongly) that it was Nannette’s  husband 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. 

The product of years of original research, and a logical extension of my years spotlighting women throughout my career as a classical music journalist, ESCAPEMENT reanimates 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.