I studied music as an undergraduate and play the cello or the drums most days. Yet when I set out to write Concert Black, I found that there are surprisingly few novels set in the world of the conservatory and the concert hall. To me, these are ideal settings for drama because they are filled with competition, ego, and high art. Novels that pivot on classical music combine two of my great passions and are among my favorite type of book.
A celebrated composer squares off against a newspaper editor as old friends become enemies.
Ian McEwan has always woven classical music into his novels; his book Saturday features a neurosurgeon listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations while he operates. But the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam features a working musician as a main character.
Some readers view Amsterdam as second-tier McEwan. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I love how vain and prickly Clive Linley can be. McEwan writes wonderful passages about the physical process of composing, often at the piano, for a man who “regarded himself as Vaughan Williams’s heir.”
On a chilly February day two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence, Clive as Britain's most successful modern composer, Vernon as editor of the quality broadsheet, The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had had other lovers too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Molly's funeral Clive and Vernon will make a pact that will have consequences neither…
Patrick O’Brian’s beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels are as much about music as they are about the navy.
Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin meet at a chamber music concert in the opening pages of this first novel in the series. The scene prefigures the way they will one day play duets at sea on their cello and violin.
I love how the opening scene uses music to establish their contrasting personalities. Jack, who is all enthusiasm, can’t help himself but beat time to Locatelli’s String Quartet in C Major. Stephen insults Jack by telling him he is ruining the concert; if he’s going to beat the measure, he should at least not rush. What could have led to a duel ends in a lifetime of friendship.
This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
After a reclusive childhood within the dank walls of Haggard House, Adam Bolton, at the age of eleven, is finally allowed to attend the village school, providing he obeys his mother, Sarai's, injunction. Against all outward influence, he must: “Keep to the straight and…
Julian Barnes dramatizes the tortured inner life of the Soviet Union’s greatest composer.
Dmitri Shostakovich was by all accounts a nervous wreck: a twitching, blinking, sweating mess. He lived in the glare of Stalin himself as the most prominent Russian composer in the 1930s and ‘40s, during the Great Terror.
What I return to is the way Barnes takes us inside Shostakovich’s mind as he tried to balance writing music with life-or-death politics. Some of the compromises he made, like denouncing Igor Stravinsky’s modern compositions, haunted him. "He had betrayed Stravinsky, and in doing so, he had betrayed music. Later, he told Mravinsky that it had been the worst moment of his life."
A Daily Telegraph / Financial Times / Guardian / Sunday Times / The Times / New Statesman / Observer Book of the Year
'BARNES'S MASTERPIECE.' - OBSERVER
In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
This novel explores what it means to leave music behind.
August Blue follows a concert pianist who walks off the stage, mid-performance, then follows her doppelganger across Europe. As she moves further from her artistic career, music becomes a memory.
I admire the dream-like nature of the story, and the way Deborah Levy manages to capture in prose the idea of a sound heard, remembered, and slowly forgotten, as in this passage: "There were weeks when I played fragments of my score through the night, which is when I felt most in communion with [her]. I projected myself into her and she became music."
The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home
At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her thirties - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.
Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar - almost her double - purchases a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.
Like all trauma, healing happens on its own timetable, often in surprising ways.
Paralyzed by grief ten years after witnessing the violent death of her six-year-old daughter, Teresa Calvano turns to Chaucer, Janis Joplin, and a monthly book group to cope.
What did six-year-old Serena Calvano see that caused her…
This novella explores the idea of the musical earworm.
The narrator’s wife is an accomplished pianist; she and a violinist begin performing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata together, which serves as a motif and a proxy for adultery. The protagonist catches them together and commits an unforgivable act of violence.
It is rare in literature to portray the way music can soundtrack our lives—yet that is how many of us experience music, rather than seated in a concert hall on a Saturday evening. Tolstoy’s novella shows how a single piece of music can take on the repetitive, hallucinatory sheen of madness.
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Celebrated biographer Ellen Wroe sets her sights on Cecil Woodbridge, the legendary conductor whose name reverberates through concert halls and conservatories. But Woodbridge, imperious and elusive, rebuffs her approach and conspires to thwart her efforts. Undeterred, Wroe embarks on a relentless pursuit, trailing Woodbridge through the archives of his correspondence and into the long shadow of his past.
Maestro, cellist, conductor-king—Woodbridge is a man enshrined in myth and bristling with contradictions. Beneath his grandeur lies a hidden lattice of ambition, betrayal, and sorrow. From the frostbitten avenues of postwar London to the symphonic stages of Boston and Chicago, biographer and subject circle each other in a dangerous dance—until they collide in a reckoning.
Resting Places follows one woman’s journey after the devastating news of her son’s death. Elizabeth ekes out a lonely and strained relationship with her husband while trying to lose her grief in alcohol. A chance meeting with a man on the side of the road spurs her to travel cross-country…
The Time of Terror: An action-packed maritime adventure of battle and bloodshed during the French Revolution (Nathan Peake Book 1).
The first gripping naval thriller in Seth Hunter's historical adventure series is sure to enthral fans of Julian Stockwin and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.
