By Anne Levin

Michael Pratt

Since becoming the conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra in 1977, Michael Pratt has written countless program notes for the concerts the ensemble performs at Richardson Auditorium and on tours throughout the world. But he had never written fiction — more specifically, historical fiction — until the pandemic put a pause to his regular routine.

That’s when he began to imagine a story that would combine the two most important things in his life: music and love. The Copyists, about a 21st century pianist who travels back in time to 1785, where he works for his idol, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, came out this past fall.

Describing the book as “Outlander meets Amadeus,” Pratt said that the book “kind of wrote itself.” The first version was 110,000 words, and he hired someone to get it down to 95,000.

Being sidelined by the pandemic coincided with some significant health issues. “I came out on the other end of several years of some pretty serious health problems,” Pratt said. “I’m a two-time cancer survivor, and I also lost some conducting time with a ripped-up rotator cuff. I had heart rhythm problems, too. I found myself inventing a scenario, and then at the computer writing this story. And it flowed from there.”

Pratt cites several inspirations for the story. Chief among them is his passion for time travel. “I love Outlander,” he said. “It’s bloody and gory, but it’s also a love story, a romance. And now, many authors have taken that as their inspiration. In Outlander, a woman goes back in time and meets a Scottish hunk. In my book, a musician goes back in time and meets Mozart. His music has always been at my core. As [composer Anton] Dvorak said, ‘Mozart is the sun,’ and I’d agree with that.”

In The Copyists, 20-year-old pianist Stefan Radowitz is pulled back to 18th century Vienna. While working for Mozart, he meets and falls in love with the widowed Countess Elisabetta Grunewald, a composer and pianist who is a rival of Mozart.

Is the book at all autobiographical?

“Stefan is a pianist, but I am not. I am a conductor,” Pratt said. “But it is autobiographical in the sense that Mozart’s greatest music pierces my heart in a way that nobody else does. As for the beautiful widowed countess, I’m not looking for one. I have a lovely wife. But I’ve always been drawn to romance. I think most musicians are. And the music we love the most is from the Romantic era. Mozart wasn’t from that era, technically, but what is romantic is his dramatic writing, his understanding of every little shade and foible of the human heart, and the way he expresses it all in musical ways.”

What makes the countess interesting, aside from being a beautiful and wealthy noblewoman, is her musical talent. “She is almost on the order of Mozart,” Pratt said. “She is a blinding genius, both as a pianist and a composer. Stefan wonders why we haven’t heard of her in his time. He takes it upon himself, as a mission, to see that her music is heard. He is in 1785 to 1791, and doesn’t know if he is altering history or not.”

Mozart wrote some 600 compositions before dying at the age of 35. Pratt has read and researched him extensively. “I included the not-so-appealing parts of his personality as well as the less appealing stuff,” he said, adding that the rivalry with composer Antonio Salieri, which was the basis for the 1979 play Amadeus by Peter Shaffer, was fiction. “Salieri and he were on very good terms, which is in my book,” he said. “They weren’t fighting.”

The book contains a scene in which Stefan and the countess perform the piano concerto that Mozart wrote for two pianos, to be performed by him and his sister, who wasn’t permitted to pursue a musical career.

“But the two protagonists perform this concerto,” Pratt said. “And they have an experience that musicians don’t talk a lot about. It’s rare — becoming at one with your fellow performer, and at one with the music so that the self, the ego, is gone. It’s the most extraordinary thrill. After playing this, they go back and consummate their relationship and realize that the two experiences are almost one and the same.”

The Copyists is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. “I’ve had four really nice five-star reviews,” Pratt said. “People probably have to have some kind of relationship to music in order to enjoy the book, but they don’t have to be experts. There is an appendix in the back that lists and gives the page number of every composition that’s talked about. I worked very hard not to make people feel intimidated. But you do have to be at least kindly disposed to the concert repertoire — particularly Mozart.”