Ghost Variations: The Strangest Detective Story In The History Of Music - Couverture souple

Duchen, Jessica

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1783529822 ISBN 13 : 9781783529827

Editeur : Unbound Digital, 2016

Synopsis

The strangest detective story in the history of music - inspired by a true incident. A world spiralling towards war. A composer descending into madness. And a devoted woman struggling to keep her faith in art and love against all the odds. 1933. Dabbling in the fashionable "Glass Game" - a Ouija board - the famous Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi, one-time muse to composers such as Bartok, Ravel and Elgar, encounters a startling dilemma. A message arrives ostensibly from the spirit of the composer Robert Schumann, begging her to find and perform his long-suppressed violin concerto. She tries to ignore it, wanting to concentrate instead on charity concerts. But against the background of the 1930s depression in London and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, a struggle ensues as the "spirit messengers" do not want her to forget. The concerto turns out to be real, embargoed by Schumann's family for fear that it betrayed his mental disintegration: it was his last full-scale work, written just before he suffered a nervous breakdown after which he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. It shares a theme with his Geistervariationen (Ghost Variations) for piano, a melody he believed had been dictated to him by the spirits of composers beyond the grave. As rumours of its existence spread from London to Berlin, where the manuscript is held, Jelly embarks on an increasingly complex quest to find the concerto. When the Third Reich's administration decides to unearth the work for reasons of its own, a race to perform it begins. Though aided and abetted by a team of larger-than-life personalities - including her sister Adila Fachiri, the pianist Myra Hess, and a young music publisher who falls in love with her - Jelly finds herself confronting forces that threaten her own state of mind. Saving the concerto comes to mean saving herself. In the ensuing psychodrama, the heroine, the concerto and the pre-war world stand on the brink, reaching together for one more chance of glory.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Jessica is a versatile author with a musical bias. Her output includes novels, biographies, plays, words&music projects, poetry for musical setting, music journalism and more. Born in London, she studied music at Cambridge and piano with Joan Havill. Her novels often focus on the cross-currents between family generations, with music a recurring theme. The latest, GHOST VARIATIONS, is "the strangest detective story in music", based on the true story of the bizarre rediscovery, and Nazi propaganda conscription, of Schumann's long-suppressed violin concerto. Jessica's biographies of the composers Gabriel Faure and Erich Wolfgang Korngold for Phaidon's 20th Century Composers series have met with wide acclaim. Her writing has appeared in in The Independent, The Guardian and The Sunday Times, as well as BBC Music Magazine and Opera News, among other publications. Her music blog "JDCMB", http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com, has attracted more than 2.5m readers. She has recently written an opera libretto, SILVER BIRCH, for the composer Roxanna Panufnik - a commission for Garsington Opera 2017. Her play A WALK THROUGH THE END OF TIME often pops up at music festivals to introduce Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time and has been performed by actor teams including Harriet Walter & Henry Goodman and Janet Suzman & Michael Pennington. Jessica lives in London with her violinist husband and two big fluffy cats. She loves long walks, cooking, ballet, theatre and scouring second-hand bookshops for out-of-print musical gems. Special passions include Russian literature and Nordic Noir.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Unbound Digital
• Date d'édition: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1783529822
• ISBN 13: 9781783529827
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 336
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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