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Tag Archives: death

Music, Death, Grief: The Great Passion

23 Monday Jan 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1726, Anna Magdalena Bach, book review, Catharina Bach, coming-of-age story, death, eighteenth century, faith, Georg Philipp Telemann, grief, historical fiction, James Runcie, Johann Sebastian Bach, Leipzig, literary fiction, music

Review: The Great Passion, by James Runcie
Bloomsbury, 2022. 272 pp. $28

Bad enough that thirteen-year-old Stefan Silbermann’s mother has just died. His father, a well-known organ maker, insists that the boy spend a year at music school far from home, in Leipzig, as part of training in the family business.

The year is 1726, and eighteenth-century Leipzig seems a place where people take their Lutheranism neat, forever thinking about death, expecting to suffer, and—among the strictest believers—ready to condemn others for vivacity. Stefan’s school, run by clerics, fits this self-denying mold. But Stefan, though a grieving, serious child, has more to him. The rector seems to want to beat whatever that is out of him—and his classmates, who already pick on the new boy, seize their chance to persecute him even further.

But the saving grace to this school is its choral music director, or cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach. He hears Stefan’s soprano, as yet unbroken, and sweeps him into his house, where the boy must practice music constantly but also has the chance to escape his anxieties and grief a few hours at a time. The cantor, though a hard man to please, understands something of what the boy is going through, since he himself lost his beloved first wife several years before.

Elias Gottlob Haussmann’s portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, 1748 ( courtesy Bach-Archiv, Leipzig via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Also, since the cantor writes a cantata every week, to be performed at Sunday services, Stefan learns to sing music he believes too difficult for him, and to play keyboard better than he’d ever dreamed possible. The downside, of course, is that the school bullies resent him all the more for being the cantor’s favorite, especially since he’s displaced one of his chief tormentors in that role.

Bach’s legendary large family figures here, including his second wife, Anna Magdalena, as sweet and sensitive as her husband is brusque and self-centered. She becomes a kind of surrogate mother for Stefan, though he knows he’s not part of the family. More importantly, there’s seventeen-year-old Catharina, Bach’s daughter by his late wife, with whom Stefan strikes up a close friendship, not least because they each have a lost a mother. As you might expect, he comes to feel something more for her.

The Great Passion has much to say about mourning and faith, life and death, and music as a medium to express feelings about them—as well as the joy that seems so fleeting. Runcie, whose father was Archbishop of Canterbury, knows these themes inside out. I can’t help wonder too whether Stefan’s sadistic, competitive schoolmates derive from models in English public schools.

People have wondered for centuries how Bach managed to write so much music. This book gives a hint. The man never stops thinking about music, and he permits nobody at home to be idle. One child or other is always playing an instrument. They’re used to this constant practice, but Stefan isn’t; if he’s not singing or playing the clavichord, he’s copying scores for the cantor.

I like the characterizations, not just of the principals, but, for instance, of Georg Philipp Telemann, who makes Bach look like a humble wallflower. I also like the kind oboist who takes an interest in Stefan and tries to shield him from the school’s brutalities. The description of this man typifies the narrative style:

The man was as long and as thin as one of his instruments. The buttons and fastenings on his spinach-green coat and jacket were the keys on the barrel of his body, although he seemed to take better care of his oboes than he did of his own health. When he leaned forward to light his pipe, he was so slender he looked like a human candle that was about to set fire to itself.

From time to time, Runcie uses his sharp prose to comment pithily on the human condition. Bach loves to sound off in impromptu sermons, a habit Anna Magdalena warns him about, but which often contain nuggets of wisdom. Stefan laments the human habit of summing up others in a phrase and never seeing past that capsule description, therefore never knowing another person, really. And the oboist urges Stefan to “take the music as quickly as you dare. There’s no point in playing a piece if it only needs to be obeyed.” I think that’s also true of writing; master the words, don’t let them master you.

The dreary, death-obsessed, stiff-necked Leipzigers who make others miserable, probably because they are themselves, are properly off-putting but likely true to time and place. The musicians, who share the same religious beliefs yet strive to create beauty in God’s service, come across vividly. Though I know nothing about choral music and have different ideas about religious faith, I enjoyed The Great Passion very much and highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

The Prince Who Could Not Speak Up: Lampedusa

02 Monday Dec 2019

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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"quiet" narrative, 1950s, aristocracy, book review, death, fascism, Giuseppe di Tomasi, historical fiction, Italy, literary fiction, literature, Mussolini, Palermo, poetic language, Risorgimento, Sicily, Steven Price, The Leopard

Review: Lampedusa, by Steven Price
FSG, 2019. 326 pp. $27

At age fifty-eight in 1955, Giuseppe di Tomasi learns that he has emphysema, and it’s incurable. Give up cigarettes, his doctor tells him. Eat less; exercise more. Follow that regimen, and you’ll have some years left.

But Giuseppe can’t; not because he’s stubborn or addicted to his ways, though he is. (He’s so stuck in his diffidence, he wrestles for months with how to tell his wife he’s dying.) Rather, he’s the prince of Lampedusa, the last of his line, and, like many Sicilians of his generation, he believes that the world in which he grew up has gone forever. So why stay in it? He bears no anger or ill will, only sadness for what has happened to his country since Mussolini took power, the ensuing war, and the striving but damaged Italy that has emerged. Is his acquiescence to his fate passivity or an act of suicide?

No. It’s an existential choice, a key part of which involves writing a book, a testament to leave behind. All his life, Giuseppe has loved literature but written nothing except an article or two. However, in his final months, he pens The Leopard, a novel about an aristocrat who witnesses the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy in the midnineteenth century, and realizes his world is dying.

Years ago, I read and thoroughly enjoyed The Leopard, as clear and penetrating a psychological study of a man, time, and place as you could ask for. Following its posthumous publication, the book became a runaway bestseller, the subject of a film directed by Luchino Visconti, and has earned at least a mention in discussions of great twentieth-century world literature. So when I saw that Price, the author of By Gaslight, a Victorian thriller par excellence, had written a biographical novel about Giuseppe di Tomasi, I had to read it.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a man shattered by the twentieth century (courtesy http://www.fondazionepiccolo.it/Xpiccolo/Area1/ITA/ITA/Static/personaggi/TomasiDiLampedusa.htm via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I’ve come away impressed by Price’s artistic range and the way he’s rendered his subject as acutely as Giuseppe portrayed his Risorgimento prince. I also salute the courage to write about death, that singular event we all think about but dislike talking about or, heaven forfend, reading about in a novel. But as someone who has wondered what our world is coming to — and what, if anything I’ll leave behind when I depart it — I can tell you that Lampedusa speaks to me. It’s not only about literature and its creation; it is literature.

To be sure, the narrative is what publishing folk would call “quiet” (about as far a cry from By Gaslight as you can figure), but that leaves room for contemplation. Price brings across his protagonist’s withdrawn nature, his delicacy in not wishing to offend, the tremendous influence his mother had, especially after family tragedies robbed her of her natural vivaciousness, and the First World War, which left psychic wounds in Giuseppe that never healed.

Price is a gifted poet, and it shows in how he weighs every word, not overwhelming the reader with images but carefully selecting the right ones. For instance: “He was a man who had left middle age the way other men will exit a room, without a thought, as if he might go back any moment.” But, if you prefer descriptions of the Sicilian landscape or city life, there are plenty to choose from, like this one, of Palermo:

The narrow streets there were soft underfoot, the refuse and rotting fruit crushed by the crowds into a slippery grime. High up the stone walls the light would darken and then filter through the interstices of the iron balconies overflowing with potted plants in the criss-cross of laundry lines and Giuseppe would wind his way down to the market, unhurried, the crowds gradually increasing, the flatbed wagon standing with melons in tall stacks or long bolts of red and yellow cloth or gigantic silver fish laid out glistening in rows, their deep flat saucerlike eyes staring at the horrors of the world.

The only thing I dislike about Lampedusa concerns the character of Giuseppe’s wife, Alessandra, known as Licy. (She’s the only female psychoanalyst in Sicily, a fact that Price deploys only occasionally, with great care.) She’s fierce, domineering, slow to forgive, and Giuseppe lives in fear of her. I get that her remoteness offers part of her appeal to him, and how her controlled passion makes her interesting to someone who wishes to provoke it. But I’m not sure I understand how the bond between the two can be so strong and yet so distant.

Still, I admire Lampedusa, the kind of novel that leaves a deep, firm impression.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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