AS IF MUSIC WEREN'T ENOUGH

posted by James Reel

    Burt Schneider, who used to announce from time to time on KUAT-FM but now serves as the local All Things Considered host on KUAZ, has pointed me toward an interesting reader’s list at Amazon.com. Someone has recommended 19 novels revolving around classical music. Most seem to be murder mysteries; my taste runs more to literary fiction, so I’ve read only two items on the list: John Hersey’s Antonietta and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto; Patchett’s is by far the better novel of the two. Burt would add a 20th title: A Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, a novelist I admire although I haven’t read this book, either.
    I haven’t perused any music-related novels (other than Bel Canto) in several years, and I’ve come to avoid them because novelists apparently can’t avoid making some huge musical blunder that spoils it all for me. In Sándor Márai’s excellent Embers, for example, which is about the decline of the Austrian empire rather than music, characters play a Chopin two-piano piece that doesn’t exist. There was no reason for Márai to invent one. He just got sloppy.
    On a more positive note, off the top of my head I would recommend (tepidly) Frank Conroy’s Body and Soul, following the development of a young pianist, and (far more strongly) Mark Salzman’s The Soloist. The latter, about a concert cellist facing performer’s block, jury duty and a young prodigy for a student, is that rare work of fiction that gets the music right. It probably helped that Mark himself plays the cello and is the son of the late Martha Salzman, who was an excellent harpsichordist you may remember from her performances around Tucson.