The candle on the bedside table had long since gone out. The room was cold, the kind of Austrian winter chill that seeps into the bone and settles there, yet Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart was numb to it.
It had been nearly a week since the tragic news had arrived from Vienna. A week since her world had turned gray. “Wolfgang.” Now, his name itself was like a jagged stone in her throat, impossible to swallow, impossible to spit out. She had not slept; she had not eaten. She lay rigid under the heavy quilt, her eyes tracing the familiar cracks in the plaster of the ceiling, waiting for tears that had exhausted themselves days ago. Her mind plucked repetitively at the same discordant string: “He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.”
Exhaustion, heavy and narcotic, finally began to pull at her. It was not a gentle drifting, but a sudden, violent downward spiral. The room elongated, the shadows stretching like taffy, distorting the familiar geometry of her home. The silence of the house was replaced by a low hum, a vibration that buzzed against her teeth.
She closed her eyes against the vertigo, and when she opened them, the ceiling was gone.
Instead of the damp plaster of her bedchamber in St. Gilgen, she was staring at a corrugated darkness, obscured by swirls of blueish smoke that smelled pungent and strangesweeter than tobacco, heavy with a scent she could not name.
Nannerl blinked. She was seated. The wood of the chair was hard against her back, but the design was alienminimalist, curved, devoid of the gilding and velvet she knew. She looked down at her hands; they were hers, pale and trembling, resting on a small, circular table covered in a strange laminate that gleamed artificially.
She looked up. She was in a room that felt subterranean, a cave carved not of rock, but of shadow and noise. It was crowded. People sat huddled together, but they were dressed in the rags of peasantsrough blue trousers, loose shirts, women with hair falling long and unpowdered down their backs. Yet, they did not carry themselves like peasants. They held themselves with an air of intellectual smugness, drinking beer and sipping wine from simple tumblers, talking with animated anticipation.
“Where am I?” she thought, panic fluttering in her chest like a trapped bird. “Is this Purgatory? Have I died of grief?”
Her eyes darted to the wall beside her. A poster was tacked there, the paper glossy and stark. It featured a strange black-and-white image of a man with intense eyes and a velvet cap, looking more like a wizard than a musician. The text was blocky and bold:
FRIEDRICH GULDA
LIVE IN SALZBURG
JAZZ AT THE CELLAR
OCTOBER 1970
“1970.” The number meant nothing to her, a nonsensical arrangement of digits. But the city… Salzburg. She was home, and yet, she was on a different planet.
She struggled to comprehend the light source. There were no candles, no oil lamps. Instead, canisters of metal hung from the ceiling, projecting beams of harsh, white light that cut through the smoke. In the corner stood black monolithscabinets of wood and meshthat emitted a low hiss.
Suddenly, the room erupted in applause. It was not the polite, gloved applause of the Viennese court, but a raucous, rhythmic clapping.
A man walked onto the small, raised platform at the front of the room. It was the man from the poster. He wore no wig, no frock coat. He wore a dark turtleneck that hugged his frame and strange, dark spectacles that hid his eyes, though the room was dim. He walked with a loose, prowling energy, completely devoid of the stiff etiquette Leopold had drilled into her and Wolfgang.
He sat before a massive, magnificent instrument. It was a piano, but a beast of a thing, black as midnight, open-mawed like a dragon.
He leaned into a microphonea silver wand on a standand his voice boomed through the black monoliths, loud enough to make Nannerl jump in her seat.
“Dieses Stück heißt Air from Other Planets” he murmured without even translating. His voice was Viennese, but the cadence was relaxed, slurring with a casual indifference that would have scandalized her father.
He lowered his hands, and the sound that emerged was not a strike, but a sigh.
Nannerl stiffened, her ear straining for a foothold that wasn’t there. It was soft, yes, but it was profoundly wrong to her senses. There was no metronomic heartbeat, no steady pulse to count time by. The music seemed to liquefy the moment it touched the air. He played a chordrich, dense, filled with notes that shouldn’t sit togetherand instead of resolving it to the dominant, he let it hang there, bleeding into the next.
There was no Alberti bass to ground the left hand, no polite introduction, no clear distinction between the melody and the accompaniment. It was a stream of consciousness, a wandering vapor.
“It is formless,” she thought, her brow furrowing as she gripped the table edge. “It is unmoored.”
To her mind, trained in the exquisite architecture of the Galant style where every phrase had a purpose and a counter-balance, this felt like musical heresy. It was meandering, like a man walking in his sleep. It lacked the rigid skeletal structure of the Sonata. It was all color and no line, a painting made of water that refused to dry.
“Where is the beat?” she panicked silently. “Where is the resolution? It is floating away.”
But as she watched, she could not look away. The smoke swirled. The lights pulsed. Nannerl felt the vibration of the notes in the floorboards, traveling up through her shoes. It was physical. It was raw.
In the secret sanctuary of her mind, a door opened. It was the door to the “Kingdom of Back”the imaginary realm she and Wolfgang had built as children during the endless, rattling carriage rides across Europe. A place where everything was reversed, where children were kings, and the impossible was law.
“Oh Wolferl,” she thought, using the silent tongue of their shared soul. “Have I joined thee? Is this the Kingdom of Back? Here, the peasants are kings, the lights are captured stars, and the music… the music has no walls.”
She waited, her heart aching.
And then, seamless as a modulation from minor to major, a voice rang in her mind. It was not the voice of the dying man she had heard reports of, but the vibrant, quicksilver voice of the brother she remembered from their youth.
“Oh, my dearest Nannerl!” Wolfgang’s thought laughed, sounding like champagne bubbles popping. “Look at him! Look at his hands!”
Nannerl gasped softly, looking around, but saw no one. The voice was inside the music.
“He breaks the rules, Nannerl!” Wolfgang continued, his presence wrapping around her like a warm cloak. “Do you hear it? He takes the theme and he massages it, he kisses it, he throws it into the air! He cares not for the Archbishop nor the Emperor!”
“It lacks propriety, Wolfgang,” she replied, her thoughts jumbled and resistant.
“Propriety!” Wolfgang scoffed gently. “Propriety was our cage, Nannerl. Papa’s cage. Look at this man, Gulda. He is of our blood, spiritually. He plays the Classics, yesI have watched him from the ether, he plays my sonatas with a fire that would make Papa weep with rage and joybut here… here he is free.”
Nannerl watched Gulda. The pianist was now in a trance, his fingers floating over the ivory. The music had shifted; it felt like floating in the void between stars. “Air from other Planets.” It was aptly named. It was lonely, but it was a vast, beautiful loneliness.
“Would that we had enjoyed such freedom,” Nannerl thought, a tear finally escaping, hot and quick down her cheek. “To play without the weight of the court. To play only for the joy of the sound.”
“I feel a strange attraction to him,” Wolfgang mused. “He is a bridge, Nannerl. Between the old world and this new, strange time. He understands that music is alive. It must bleed. It must breathe.”
Nannerl closed her eyes, letting the strange, evocative notes soothe her pain. She stopped fighting the foreignness of it. She imagined herself and Wolfgang as children, running through a meadow in the Kingdom of Back, but instead of grass, the ground was made of this musicunpredictable, soothing, infinite.
“It is beautiful,” she admitted, the thought whispering through her. “In a way I cannot describe. It is the sound of… unfettered emotion.”
“Yes,” Wolfgang whispered back. “It is the sound of the soul when it is not forced to wear a wig. I am here, Nannerl. I am in the spaces between the notes. Do not mourn for me. Look at this. The music goes on. It changes, it morphs, but it never dies. We are part of this river.”
The club seemed to spin. The young people with their long hair and strange clothes seemed to glow with an inner light. They were listening with a reverence that the aristocrats in Vienna never possessed. They were not listening to critique; they were listening to feel.
Gulda struck a chord, a massive, towering structure of harmony that seemed to hang in the air, suspended by sheer will.
“I miss you, Brother,” she cried out in the silence of her mind. “The world is too quiet without you.”
“I am never far,” Wolfgang replied, his voice fading into the decay of the piano chord. “Listen to the freedom, Nannerl. Carry it back with you. Sleep now. The Kingdom of Back is always open.”
She felt herself lifting, floating.
There was a tap on her shoulder. She heard a voice, heavy with an accent she struggled to place, though it spoke her tongue.
“Is everything alright?” the waiter asked.
In an instant, the jazz club evaporated. The people dissolved into mist. The 20th century folded in on itself. Nannerl gasped, her lungs filling with the cold air of her bedroom.
She lay back against the pillows, her chest heaving. She closed her eyes, not to escape, but to remember. The silence of the room was no longer empty. It was pregnant with possibility, filled with the air from other planets.
“Goodnight, Wolferl,” she thought.
She drifted off, finally, into a dreamless, healing sleep.
When she opened her eyes again, the darkness of 1970 was gone, replaced by the gray morning light of 1792 filtering through her heavy curtains.
Standing over her was not a waiter, nor a young man in blue trousers, but her husband, Johann. He looked down at her, his face lined with concern, his hand gently resting on her shoulder where the waiter had touched her only a moment before.
“Is everything in order?” he asked softly.
Nannerl looked at him. The room was still. The world was still the 18th century. But her heart was still beating to the experience of the future. She looked at her hands. They were warm. The icy grip of grief that had paralyzed her for a week had loosened, melted by a strange, futuristic fire.
She heard the echo of that strange, beautiful piano in her mind.
To herself, she muttered, “Propriety was our cage.”
“Wie bitte?” Johann asked, leaning closer.
She shook her head slightly, a small, sad smile touching her lips. She took a deep, trembling breath. For the first time in seven days, she felt hunger.
“Just thinking aloud,” she whispered, her voice hoarse but steady. “Ja… es ist alles in Ordnung.”
Johann nodded, relieved, and moved to stoke the fire. As the wood caught and crackled, Nannerl imagined it was the sound of Wolfgang applauding from the Kingdom of Back.