Beyond Faithfully Yours

Perhaps no one will ever see this, perhaps writing these thoughts and sending them to this void of a four months silence will be useless but I want to put it out there. Faithfully yours Mozart is more than a shallow romance, but touting it as one, given the love story between Constanze and Wolfgang is profound, I want to express my thoughts, even if I am the only person who expresses these things. Faithfully yours Mozart is a one of a kind experience, it is the only Mozart story of its kind where Disability has a voice in an era of intolerance and abuse. I must confess, if you have never seen the play, The Madness of King George, i implore you to. And second, go into this play without your bias as an American, if you are American, but for god's sake, go into this with a willingness to understand that what you are watching is not a comedy, but a take on the very real reality of inhumane acts towards not only the mentally misunderstood, but the disabled. Intolerance. Intolerance, hiding away anyone who was different, treating them as less than human. In Mozart's case, he too was treated as intellectually stupid, his quirks and his whole being, deemed odd by those who knew him. Modern day would give him a myriad of neurological differences, Autism being one they debate but I must say it is an outdated view for which they deny him the possibility of being Autistic. Everyone sees it in his writing, in his music, in the recollections of him (which, I must protest he had a fudging routine he stuck to, its in his LETTERS!) But i digress the point. Mozart himself is a lesson of the intolerence and the constant reality which we, the neurodiverse, deal with and face. We face people who think its alright to shout at us, that we won't feel anything, that it does not shake us to our core when our directness, our honesty, our forwardness, is taken as "rudeness". You will know when we are being rude, believe me. We'll tell you when we don't like you, trust me. At least I will. Directness, being forward, and honesty, a bluntness you don't like, is how it will go. We get to the point of things and you take it as defiant. Mozart experiences this all his life, he is labeled, defiant, insolent, he is labeled many things by those around him who don't understand why he is "rebellious" "self assured" "proud" "odd" and by all accounts of the word "unusual". His peculiarities are often thrown in his face, his lack of skills seen as his fault, his debt assumed by most as gambling, made out to be an alcoholic when he was not. Mozart's truth, the sad truth, is living in an intolerant world that barely understood his genius let alone his visible and invisible disabilities. This part of the story that is overlooked amongst the romance to Constanze, is one of many driving forces of my books. It is not hitting Mozart's highlights, it is Mozart's in-between, it is Mozart as a father, Mozart as a husband, Mozart as a friend, a brother, brother in law, and more importantly, it is Mozart as the complicated disabled and sometimes often chronically ill person he was, facing a myriad of hidden trials with his wife by his side. To bring back the Madness of King George Play, most people miss the deeper meanings. They forget the parts where George is calling out for his wife amidst his insanity. He wants his queen. I cried my eyes out. The bridgerton story while so much I am sure is fictionalized, I believe somewhere between the fiction, there is truth. Men like Mozart and men like King George were caught up in a medical world that had no word for their respective conditions. Some people say Wolfgang had bi-polar, and many articles on his varying disabilities from Adhd to OCD to Tourettes syndrome, and other neurological differences, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Like King George, like Henrich Gottifried Bach, like so many in history who are disabled, have been put away, left behind. Faithfully yours Mozart is a story of intolerance. It is a story of learning to love and to be loved, of having to brave tough storms, of being misunderstood, faithfully yours Mozart is a story about the heart of disability in a world not built for you. And it deserves its chance to shine and to be read.