Allegro
A Novel
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
A Best Book of the Year by Christian Science Monitor
This thrilling historical mystery starring Mozart tells of friendship and betrayal, and how music allows us to defy death—from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum.
In 1789 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, looking for a sign, a signal, an answer to an enigma that has haunted him since childhood: Was Bach murdered by a famous oculist? And years later, was Handel a victim of the same doctor?
Allegro follows his investigation, from the salons of London to the streets of Paris, recreating an enthralling and turbulent time, full of rogues and brilliant composers, charlatans and presumptuous nobles. Running parallel to this search is the rise of Mozart, his knowledge and fame, his trials and losses.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is conscripted into the intrigue surrounding Johann Sebastian Bach's dying days in the underwhelming latest from Dorfman (after The Suicide Museum). In 1765, when Mozart is nine, he visits London with Johann Christian Bach, son of the famed composer. After giving a performance, he's cornered by John Taylor, a disgraced oculist blamed for the death of the elder Bach in the wake of a surgery to cure the composer's blindness. Taylor pleads with Mozart to arrange a meeting between him and the younger Bach so that Taylor might clear his name, emphasizing that to secure the meeting Mozart need only mention the name of another composer, Handel. Bach refuses, and 13 years later, Mozart is accosted by Taylor's son, Jack, in Paris. Now poor and a compulsive gambler, no longer able to trade on his childhood as a musical prodigy, Mozart is more easily persuaded by Jack, also a doctor, who offers medical attention for Mozart's dying mother in exchange for arranging an audience with Bach. Dorfman breathes considerable life into these historical figures, but the tale itself feels at once inflated and underdeveloped, with minor episodes devoted to Mozart stretched into dozens of pages at the expense of the more intriguing Jack and his quest for vindication. The result is closer to a penny-theater melodrama than a grand symphony.
