Marrying Mozart

Marrying Mozart is a historical novel by the American writer Stephanie Cowell, published in 2004.

The book is set in Mannheim in 1777, in a family of four sisters who live in a crowded house and earn what they can from music: their father copies scores and the girls sing and play. A young composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, comes to know the family, and the novel follows the years in which his career and their circumstances keep bringing him back to the Weber household. Cowell tells the story from the sisters' side, so the household and its economics are as much the subject as the music, and the courtships and quarrels of the family are set against the wider business of getting a living from an art.

Cowell has written other novels about artists and composers, and this one takes the facts of Mozart's marriage as the end point of a family story. Its real subject is the household and the choices open to women with a talent, a family name and very little money.