From the main link:

Though Leopold Mozart, that appalling but oddly endearing martinet of a father, makes a vivid appearance in the book (never more so than when he moves Wolfgang and himself out of a smallpox-infected house in Vienna, leaving their "evidently dispensable" womenfolk behind), it is Mozart's mother Maria Anna, his sister Nannerl and his wife Constanze who at last take centre-stage. Constanze quietly emerges as the book's real heroine, but it is his mother and sister whose lives, as revealed by Glover, stop one in one's tracks. How unexpected, for example, to find the constantly nagged, frequently ignored, endlessly house-keeping Maria Anna displaying, in one of her last letters, a sharp grasp of current affairs in Europe and a lively appreciation of recent scientific inventions. (It is equally arresting to find her signing off a letter to her husband with the cheerfully scatological envoi characteristic of all Mozarts: "Keep well, my love. Shove your arse in your mouth. I wish you good-night, my dear, but first shit in your bed and break it." Her incipient alcoholism is teasingly inferred from her own letters and those of her son, the price of a life lived at the beck and call of the two equally demanding men in her life. And yet "her life, as she would surely have agreed, was in its way glorious . . . she had borne and raised not one but two children of prodigious talent, and through them gained an experience of life which very few women of her time, of whatever social background, could ever enjoy." Earlier, Glover has described the scene when the children played the piano for Joseph II while their father looked on, and Maria Anna sat with the Empress Maria Theresa, sharing their experiences as mothers. "It must have been the highlight of her life."

Constanze: Mozart’s Beloved

Maria Anna "Nannerl" Mozart

Mozart Family Graves

Last month the Guardian did a preview piece for the book focusing on Constanze that I thought was fascinating. This is one of those books that I would not have believed you a year ago if you told me that the book at the top my "must read" list would be a book about the women of Mozart.

Wow, I'm fascinated. I've always loved Mozart, and a book about the women in his life is most intruiguing.