The Book

For fans of Hilary Mantel or GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, the novel ESCAPEMENT is historical fiction with a pedigree: a coming-of-age story about a young girl who will grow up to build pianos for Beethoven.  

When 8-year-old Nannette Stein steps onto a raft to travel down the Danube with her father to Vienna, it launches her on a trajectory of ambition and achievement, constantly tempered by the limitations placed on a girl in a society that was only starting to embrace female emancipation. Nannette’s father is a brilliant instrument-maker and inventor, and Nannette plays on his keyboards and dazzles the Imperial Court; but after she returns home to the family workshop in Augsburg, and moves into adolescence, she struggles to figure out what kind of life and career she can realistically hope to have in a world dominated by men. 

She watches her best friend, the virtuoso player Anna von Schaden, make her way as a court musician in the nearby principality of Wallerstein, but Anna, too, is constantly thwarted as she deals with the vagaries of her marriage, the politics of the court, and the whims of the mercurial  Prince. Meanwhile, Nannette’s father is training Nannette as an instrument-maker in her own right; and Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn are visitors to the family workshop. But how will Nannette be able to forge a life for herself using her hard-won skills, rather than simply becoming  a wife and helpmeet to someone else? 

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

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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. 

ESCAPEMENT,  which is a logical extension of my years spotlighting women throughout my career as a classical music journalist, 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.