MOZART'S LAST SCORE
Mozart's Last Score
Philip Becker
UK rights: Working Partners Ltd
US rights: Working Partners Ltd
Portuguese rights for Brazil: Geração
All other rights available
Mozart’s first opera – which he finished when he was twelve – was performed in the garden of the infamous Dr Franz Mesmer. Mesmer was great friends with the Mozart family and a keen musician, specialising in playing the glass harmonica. He used to play it while treating his patients according to his recently evolved theory of ‘animal magnetism’ – a theory that led to his expulsion from Vienna in 1777.
His association with Mozart came to haunt Mesmer as he desperately tried to recover his reputation as a serious medical mind. In 1791, which would turn out to be the year Mozart died, he was allowed to return to Vienna and set about proving his theories right. Who better than Mozart, now a famous composer, to help him with his task? All he needed was for Mozart to admit that Mesmer’s treatments had helped his musical talent develop into the genius that had become so evident.
But Mozart had by this time read his deceased father’s journals and knew the devastation that Mesmer has wrought in many lives – especially of fellow musicians. As he fatally confronted the murderous doctor Mozart wrote a Tarantella that contained the truth about Mesmer, decipherable to only a few people.
This score – the last ever penned by Mozart – came into the possession of Anton Stadler, Mozart’s old friend and a well-known clarinetist, twenty years after Mozart’s death. If he can find the answer to the riddle of the score then Mesmer, still alive and enjoying the adulation of the medical establishment again, may yet be brought to justice. The search for clues brings Stadler into contact with many of their old acquaintances before he makes a shocking revelation in a lunatic asylum near Strasbourg.
This is the first time that the first time that the relationship between Mozart and Mesmer has been explored. It's a rich historical novel and a conspiracy thriller in one, painstakingly researched and giving a wealth of factual detail and tapping into the ongoing fascination with the cause of Mozart's premature death.
Mozart's Last Score is one of the first adult titles from Working Partners Ltd. Since 1995, Working Partners has created some of the most recognised series in children's fiction including Animal Ark, Heartland and, more recently, Rainbow Magic and Warriors. Rainbow Magic now has sales of five million copies in the UK and Commonwealth and translation rights have been licensed in seventeen territories. Animal Ark, now with its own Classics list in the UK, has sold over fifteen million copies worldwide.
In 2006 Working Partners Two was formed to develop book ideas and to establish a network of writers to emulate the children’s success in the arena of adult fiction. Philip Becker is a pen name.
