Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
As the Great War rages, a French pianist sits down to play a breathtakingly original sonata—a piece so strange and inspired that it could change the course of classical music. The moment is captured on wax cylinders, the recording medium of the day. But in the tumult of war the fragile cylinders vanish, and with them the identity of the brilliant composer and the virtuoso pianist.
A century later, five timeworn wax cylinders land on the desk of Ben Weil, a revered classical music producer. From the moment he first plays them in his Chicago studio, Ben knows he’s in the presence of genius. The dazzling piece is years ahead of its time, more Coltrane than Debussy—how could it be?
Brought low by a painful divorce, Ben throws himself into unlocking the sonata’s mysteries. But when a renowned pianist stumbles upon the work and takes credit for unearthing it, he’s swept into a lie that could shatter his reputation and his private life at a stroke. Somehow Ben must find a way to tell the truth—a dangerous quest that will lead him not only to the sonata’s surprising origins, but to his own.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781963101003 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Green City Books |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2024 |
| Pages: | 422 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
edwardhamlin.com
Read an Excerpt
The music is a fold in time. Given just a few piano notes—the quiet opening phrase, say, hovering like smoke—Ben is transported straight back to the moment of discovery, every detail of time and place intact. The muted, undersea lighting of the Studio A control booth where he’s sat beside Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim and so many other brilliant players over the years, listening to breathtaking music recorded only moments before. The companionable glow of his meters and indicator lights. The tang of stale coffee from a mug forgotten atop the microphone safe. The smooth glide of the faders under his expert fingers. And the vague sense of Chicago, somehow, roaring about its business just beyond the soundproof walls, the subsonic rumble of buses and the screech of El trains, the airhorns trumpeting from the ballpark, the snatches of mariachi and hip-hop and rowdy banter along the sidewalks—the city’s soundscape felt rather than heard, a raucous shivaree that never lets up.
All this will snap back in an instant whenever Ben hears even the smallest fragment of the lost sonata, blazing through his heart without losing a single watt of its electricity.
The piece haunts him like the voice of a missing child. Tender and untouchable, it murmurs in the back of his mind as he wanders home from the studio on rainy evenings, sings to him as he dawdles over his solitary dinners. The unknown pianist churns through darker chords as Ben hurries past the hallway mirror, then listens in bemused silence when he sits down at the piano to unwind with a little jazz. On some mornings he’s jolted awake by the breakneck Allegro and springs from bed feeling better than ever, perfectly steady on his feet, almost fully recovered—only to have the music snatch its energy back, and his along with it. But as mercurial as the sonata is, he’s grateful for its company when the house fills with stillness, when all is a little too quiet in his life.
For weeks now Ben’s kept his discovery to himself. He’s played the strange piece for no one. In every spare moment, meanwhile, he’s hammered away at his amateurish research, trying to identify composer and performer, trying to make musical sense of what he’s hearing. He’s listened to the crackly recording countless times, by day and by night, at home and at work, on cheap earbuds and on Studio A’s thirty-thousand-dollar speaker rig. But the deeper he goes, the more he’s aware of his own limitations. It’s a job for a scholar, not an enthusiast. More often than not it feels like a lost cause, a problem with no real solution. Pure folly.
He forges ahead nevertheless, because he has to. He can’t let it go. Night after night, day after day, he scours the literature on early twentieth-century French piano music, listening to Debussy and Ravel and Satie for hours on end until the fierce ringing in his left ear forces him to stop. Like some befuddled philosopher he fills a notebook with stray facts, wild guesses, tenuous theories that only confuse him more, bringing him no closer to the answers he needs. The only thing that’s clear, lately, is that he’s badly out of his depth. While it’s true that there’s an expensive piano in his living room and a piano performance diploma somewhere in a bottom drawer of his life, he’s just never done this kind of detective work. Wrung out, he loses heart and gives up. Then begins again.
At times he’s wished Robin was there to kick around ideas, then reminded himself of all the reasons why it’s better she’s not. Though everything’s changed between them, he certainly hasn’t forgotten her profound musical intuition, the way she can go straight to the heart of a piece on the very first hearing. It’s one of the many things that make her such a fine musician.
Robin would hear things in the sonata he doesn’t. She’d take it apart measure by measure, study its inner workings and reassemble it without missing a beat, quickly grasping the composer’s ambitions. He’s watched her do it a thousand times. Bartók, Górecki, even Bach—he owes his love for each of them largely to her. The memory of listening to music with his brilliant wife, of hearing her revel in its glories late into the night, is precious to him.
There are other moments Ben misses—so many. The way she’d nestle against his neck, jet-lagged and exhausted, when he’d collect her at O’Hare after a grueling tour, horns blaring in the arrivals lane, her body releasing itself into his like a quiet shift of earth. On summer mornings, the scent of sleep she’d leave on the pillow if she rose before he did. On winter evenings, stretched out on the sofa opposite one another with her feet tucked against his chest, the wriggle of her toes inside socks stolen from his drawer. The tiny tattoo of a sixteenth note on the inside of her thigh, so high up that only a lover or a doctor would ever come across it.
In the back of the bedroom closet there’s a grocery bag with a black sweater crumpled inside it, a stray left behind in the chaos of her move-out. A few filaments of fine bronze hair still cling to the cashmere, a fading trace of her Lancôme. At the bottom of the bag is a register slip listing the ingredients for a dinner they must have shared, long ago: lemon risotto with prawns, he’s deduced, an arugula salad, the lazy splurge of a store-bought blueberry pie. An ordinary Saturday evening in their long life together. Robin making the salad, he the risotto. A glass of yesterday’s wine passed back and forth between them while they cook. Ben’s known about the grocery bag and its contents for some time now but leaves it just where it is, wary of its power to harm him. Or perhaps he’s holding it in reserve—for what, exactly, he couldn’t say.
If she were still in his life they’d listen to the sonata according to their old ritual, lying side by side in darkness on the Moroccan tribal rug in the living room, the music spreading over them like a Saharan sky full of stars. But Robin’s not here: in the darkness it’s only him, alone with the starry mystery of a piece of music he may never fully understand.
Genius is the only word for what Ben hears on that first late-summer afternoon in Studio A. Cueing up the digitized recording, the Counterpoint staff already scattering into the stifling city streets on bikes and buses, he has no inkling of the explosion the sonata’s about to set off in his life. He certainly can’t imagine how quickly it will turn him into a liar and a fool. Auditioning the century-old track is a last chore to be knocked off before going home, nothing more.
He clicks the Play button. A percussive pop, then a long stretch of dead air . . . though dead is hardly the word for the chaos that bursts from the monitors. The sound is more like a sky full of locusts. There’s no telling what lies on the other side of it. Ben tilts back in his chair, interrogating the spitting noise with a specialist’s ear, already considering ways to neutralize it. He’s been at this for three decades now and is among the best in the business, but he’s no miracle worker. The hiss and crackle threaten to smother the music the moment it’s born. But the noise may be the least of his worries. At four seconds there’s a sudden dropout: the needle plunges into a divot on the original recording surface, gouging into the wax like a power tool, an excruciating shriek filling the control booth. The digital track replicates the analog disaster with the grim fidelity of a photographer at a hanging. Ben trims his faders quickly, bringing the gain down so it’s bearable. But after a few beats the needle claws its way back out of the rut. Seeing its opening, the static roars back in with a vengeance, loose and feral, back on the warpath. There’s no stopping it now.
At last—a relief—the invisible pianist arrives. Four notes pirouette through the control booth, lighter than air. Despite the hiss and crackle, despite the ten long decades that have passed since the player touched the keys, the final note rings like a chime. To Ben’s practiced ear it sounds like the performer’s in a small, resonant space, maybe a music room or salon, certainly not a hall. Even on the crude recording he can hear the sonic signature of a quality piano—a ballroom grand, if he had to guess, a bit too big for the room. But after the brief arpeggio the music disappears without a trace. The pianist absconds from the scene.
Ben nudges his faders up: nothing but noise. The pianist’s gone off the air.
“That’s it?” he says, puzzled. “Can’t be.”
Only after five seconds, far longer than his musical sense tells him is right, is the opening phrase answered by another. The sonata tumbles headlong into a minor key, landing on a moody, complex chord that utterly delights him. He didn’t see this coming, after the feather-light, optimistic opening notes. Through the roaring locusts, a darker bell tolls. A conversation begins. Ben shifts in his chair, intrigued.
As the sonata unfolds he listens with rising excitement. He’s fascinated by the sly feints and attacks, the daring melodic turns, the thread of dissonance that shuttles through the playing. Jazz chords surface and then vanish without explanation, decades ahead of their time. At a certain point the pianist sprints into double time, then triple time, ripping through a passage so devilishly complex that Ben can’t begin to track it. The music is boundlessly curious, eager to trespass and transgress and build anew. Even today it would be considered avant-garde—how could it possibly be a century old? And the unknown player is a virtuoso by any measure. Every second of the recording beguiles.
Ben scrambles to his feet and begins to pace the room with hands shoved in jeans pockets, galvanized by what he’s hearing, incapable of sitting still. His legs waver under him, weak and fickle; his head spins with a faint sidereal wobble. When he passes the studio door he has to clutch the handle to keep from falling off his feet. But the invisible pianist has shifted him completely outside of himself. For once his body’s failures barely distress him.
The hiss on the old recording no longer matters, either. The ravishing music shakes it off like a dusting of snow. He certainly never expected anything like this. He was expecting—dreading—fifteen or twenty minutes of tedious, homemade parlor music, a bit of shaky Gilbert and Sullivan or Couperin played by some well-meaning amateur a century ago. What’s flowing from the monitors on this Chicago afternoon is on another plane entirely. It’s the direct transmission of a vision. As the recording comes to a close Ben sees the lost sonata for what it is: a dream of modernity, dazzling and feverish and wild as only the truest dreams are.