Q & A with Diane Stanley

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By Sally Lodge -- Publishers Weekly, 1/22/2009

Cleopatra, Leonardo da Vinci, Joan of Arc, Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Peter the Great are among the 11 historic figures Diane Stanley has spotlighted in her earlier picture-book biographies. Her 12th biography, Mozart: The Wonder Child: A Puppet Play in Three Acts, due next month from HarperCollins, profiles this child prodigy from Salzburg who became the toast of Europe at the age of six, performing for kings and princes. Stanley talked to Bookshelf about the book, in which she experiments with both a new narrative format and a new artistic medium.

Diane Stanley.  Photo: Karen Sachar.

He is my favorite composer, and he had such an unusual and colorful childhood that I thought he’d be a wonderful character to write about for kids. As with all my biographies, I see the persona as a window into a period of history, to let me create a sense of the era and what life was like. And in this case, to reveal the role of musicians and what was expected of them.

You depict Mozart and the individuals in his life as marionettes in a play. What inspired this format?

Several things. My editor, Rosemary Brosnan, and I had both been thinking about the fact that, over the years, my biographies have gotten longer and more complex—aimed at older readers. I wanted to go back to a somewhat simpler style, for younger readers, the audience I’d targeted in Peter the Great and Bard of Avon. I also wanted to step back from my entirely realistic portrayals of life, and add some fantasy, while still of course keeping the historical details—architecture, décor and clothing—accurate.

I always travel to research my books, and in this case I traveled to Salzburg, Vienna and Prague. It was a visit to the Salzburg Marionette Theatre that inspired this book’s format. The theatre was established more than 90 years ago and its first production was Mozart’s early opera, Bastien and Bastienne. Since he composed for the stage, a play seemed a natural format for the book, and as it happened his life fell quite naturally into three acts. And I thought that using marionettes as characters would be a fun way to show Mozart’s life. I took digital photos of the museum’s marionettes and e-mailed them to my editor that very day. The idea clicked instantly.

Whimsical visual touches on these pages are marionette cherubs who appear holding scrolls containing footnotes. Why angels?

That idea also came from my travels while researching the book. I was already familiar with putti, the little baby angels you see everywhere on Renaissance and Baroque buildings—painted, gilded, carved in stone. When we were in Austria, we saw them everywhere, even in our hotel lobby. Since I’d already planned to include footnotes in the book, I decided to have the putti come flying in, carrying the footnotes on little scrolls. And in the end, they carry Mozart up to heaven, while serenading him with music.

Music, in more ways than one, plays a key role in the book, as some pages feature music notation. What led you to include these?

They aren’t just for decoration. Each strand of music is particular to that scene or period in Mozart’s life. Scenes showing him as a little boy have music he wrote at that time. The scene from The Magic Flute has music from that opera. His death scene has music from the Requiem he was writing at the time he died. The idea is that children who are taking music lessons can not only read the story and look at the pictures, but also play the music.

You created the art for Mozart using egg tempera on gessoed wooden panels, a new medium for you. What inspired you to explore this technique?

I knew I wanted to paint in something other than oils, but I didn’t know what—or how. This is a technique used by early Renaissance painters and I’ve always wanted to paint like them, but didn’t know how I’d find someone to teach me. I fantasized about going to Florence and working with some master with a long white beard. Then, in 2003, we moved to Santa Fe, and at an art fair there I discovered a half-day workshop on painting in tempera. That was enough for me to think, this is what I want to learn.

And how did you go about learning more about the medium?

I joined the Society of Tempera Painters and met Koo Schadler, who gives workshops around the country. I took three of her workshops and then traveled to Italy with her. We visited churches and studied old master design principles. Mozart was my first chance to use this technique—it felt entirely appropriate for Mozart’s life. I wanted to achieve that kind of glossy, beautifully rendered quality to play up the whole Baroque era—its wonderful costumes and décor.

It seems your family—starting with your mother—has played a significant role in your writing career.

My family has always been very intertwined with my writing career, and family is very important to me. My mother, who died in 1990, was an author. She also loved history and travel, so she turned me on to those things as well as writing. In fact, I collaborated with her on The Last Princess: The Story of Princess Ka’iulani of Hawaii, which she wrote and I illustrated.

It was reading to my own children, who are now grown, that opened my eyes to the idea of writing children’s books. Sharing books with my kids has always been very important. We had family readings until my youngest was in junior high school—I remember reading David Copperfield and Mutiny on the Bounty. Reading together was one of the most wonderful things we did as a family. My mother grew up with that tradition as well.

Speaking of family influences, your husband, Peter Vennema, has also played a hands-on role in the creation of your picture-book biographies. 

Yes, he has helped me with much of my research, and is in fact listed as co-author on some of the biographies. I really trust his judgment, and he gives me early feedback on everything I write. Many of our family summer vacations have been planned around research for books. We’ve been to Egypt for Cleopatra, France for Joan of Arc and Italy twice—for Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. And I have great memories of our son eating wild blackberries at the childhood home of Charles Dickens when I was researching his biography.

The subjects of your biographies are eclectic and far-reaching. What is it that draws you to a personality?

It can be someone I come across while reading, or someone who comes up in a conversation. Suddenly I’ll think, that’s a perfect person to write about. One interesting thing I’ve observed is that it is a very different world today than it was when I started writing biographies in the 1980s—in terms of what children are thought to be interested in. Increasingly, I’ve found more and more people questioning why children would be interested in a person who is not American or not contemporary.

But aren’t today’s kids, as well as adults, allegedly thinking more globally?

I wouldn’t say that we’ve backed away from the world in recent years, but today we really embrace popular culture, and kids are relating to it more and more. If a pirate movie comes out and is popular, kids will want to read books about pirates. Everyone connects to what is familiar. My goal is to make something new familiar to them, which is why I haven’t done a book on Benjamin Franklin, as interesting a person as he is. Kids already know about him, but they’re not going to be introduced to a lot of other historical characters until they’re in high school, and that’s way too late. They need to be introduced to a broader world at a younger age, when they can start a mental file on the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Crusades. This has been my mission over the years and will continue to be.

Do you have any book projects in the works?

At the moment I’m working on a novel—I’ve been writing more of them of late. This one, Saving Sky, will be published by HarperCollins, likely in fall 2010. It is set in New Mexico in the future. It’s about a family who takes in a boy whose parents—naturalized citizens from the Middle East—have been arrested as part of a round-up similar to what happened to Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. It is something I felt compelled to do, since I wanted readers to think about a lot of the issues that we are trying to deal with today.

Any new picture book biographies on your drawing board?

Not now. The biographies take an enormous amount of work, which is why it was such a long time between Mozart and my last biography, Saladin: Noble Prince of Islam, which came out in 2002. I always have to take a deep breath after I finish a biography. So that is what I’m doing.

Mozart: The Wonder Child: A Puppet Play in Three Acts by Diane Stanley. HarperCollins/Collins, $17.99 ISBN 978-0-06-072674-4