On Thursdays, Mother prepared chicken soup using fresh ingredients gathered from the market behind our house. The soup was hearty and delicious, though the presence of a chicken beak floating near the surface never failed to unsettle me. It stared back with an expression that can only be interpreted as judgment.
While Mother cooked in the kitchen, our canary, bright yellow and entirely convinced of his own importance, repeated fragments from today’s harpsichord lesson. He sang loudly and without hesitation, and judging from Mother’s expression, I wondered whether she had briefly considered adding him to the soup.
To improve her mood, I decided music might help. I crawled toward the harpsichord, where Nannerl had just finished practicing a minuet[i]. As soon as she lifted her hands from the keys, I climbed onto the stool and played back what I had heard. The room froze. For a moment, I assumed I was in trouble. I smiled. That usually helped.
Father was the first to understand what had happened. With the excitement of a man discovering fire, he exclaimed that I had memorized the piece after hearing it only once. My sister muttered something about me being annoying. In fairness, she was not mistaken. I was indeed an adorable little menace.
[i] A minuet in music is a graceful, moderate-tempo dance in triple meter (usually 3/4 time) popular in 17th and 18th-century courts.