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A recommendation from ZUBIN MEHTA: “It gives me great pleasure to recommend Boman Desai’s book. He has dramatized the story of the Schumanns and Brahms in the form of a novel, citing their original correspondence of 43 years among his sources. He has researched this most romantic of stories thoroughly, but writes so compellingly that it is like discovering the story anew. The great composers of the age make appearances when their lives intersect those of the trio, and I was glad to see that Desai presents them to us, warts and all, with the deepest sympathy and understanding. It is perhaps his greatest achievement that they appear as fullbloodedly as if they might have been his neighbors."
“I loved and admired this book.”
Diana Athill, British editor of Norman Mailer, John Updike, Jean Rhys, and V. S. Naipaul FROM A RETIRED LIBRARIAN
I had read Trio 1 some time ago and thought it so well-done, articulate, accurate and fascinating that I couldn't wait for Trio 2 to be finished by Mr. Desai. The wait was worth it. He has taken on a difficult task--not merely the lives of composers which can be difficult enough, but through his ability to create sound with words has enabled us to hear the music as well. And no accompanying CD to help us along! There were time I was in the thrall of the book and with irritation I had to put it down to get on with other things but went back to reading it at the first opportunity. It did not disappoint. I think one must bring some revisioning of the principle people in the novel,, Johannes Brahms, in particular as , speaking for myself, there is a penchant for wanting to be presented with a man who was as exquisite in his person and the music he composed, somewhat like Felix Mendelssohn. That was/is not so and in the big picture, I'm not sure it matters. I doubt that one listens to Brahms' music often bearing his personality and overall ambiance is mind when they do. Mr. Desai has written an excellent novel. And to tell the truth I wish there would be a Trio 3. Exceedingly well done!!! 
Clara Schumann
Robert Schumann
Johannes Brahms as a young man
Brahms as he is better known
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TRIO 2
Trio 2 opens with Johannes Brahms at his most salubrious, ensconced in Detmold, a tiny picturesque principality, fifty miles southwest of Hanover, where his best friend Joseph Joachim is court conductor. His duties include conducting the choral society, tutoring the princesses on the piano, and performing for the court. The job occupies him for just three months in the autumn, but pays well enough to suffice for the entire year, allowing him time to compose and travel as he pleases. The long tragedy of Robert Schumann’s death is behind him, the Gordian knot with Clara has been sundered, and he makes friends as easily as in later years he lost them. Best of all he successfully courts Agathe von Siebold, the daughter of a university professor, in nearby Gottingen, for whom he writes songs, likening her voice to the tone of an Amati violin. He is sure enough of himself and his prospects to propose and present her with an engagement ring – but Clara Schumann throws cold water on his plans. She visits the home of Jakob Grimm in Gottingen for a summer with her daughters and one of her sons, during which time she finds herself jealous of her Johannes. She understands that nothing is to come of their beleagured romance and voluminous correspondence despite the words of love that have passed between them, that she would face similar problems with Brahms as she did with Robert, that Brahms is closer in age to her daughters than to herself, that he wishes to have children where she is determined to have no more – but she poisons his mind, however incidentally, against Agathe when she sees them happy together, saying (among other things) that he will never make enough money to support the lifestyle to which Agathe is accustomed, and that there is no shame in composers marrying for money because theirs is a breadless profession. At first, it seems her words have no effect, but after the failure of his first piano concerto in Leipzig, Clara’s cold water gives Brahms cold feet. He writes to Agathe that he wishes to take her in his arms again, but fetters he cannot wear. Agathe is too good a girl to stand for such halfhearted measures and chooses not to reply. He is already a victim of the Freudian conundrum: Where he loves he feels no passion, and where he feels passion he cannot love. The cause of his neurosis has been explicated in Book One of Trio: he first experienced sexuality at the hands of sailors and prostitutes when he played dance music in Hamburg’s seediest dockside bars; and caught later between his love for Clara and his loyalty to Robert during the years of Robert’s incarceration he learned to equate love with renunciation. Yoking the two experiences he learned to separate his sexual urges from his emotions. He is more at ease sexually with prostitutes and servants, even bragging on one occasion that he has never made a respectable woman “unhappy” – making light of the fear that he is not ABLE to make a respectable woman “unhappy.” Salvation comes to him in the form of the highest musical inspirations of his day, and he is recognized as the greatest living composer – but he never entirely overcomes his resentment, and his bitterness loses him many friends. He doesn’t appear to care because his celebrity places him in the highest echelons of society, often the guest of royalty, but he finds himself increasingly alone, losing the friendship of his best friend Joachim – but it is not until he alienates Clara that he begins to recognize his selfishness. He patches up quarrels, but perhaps the last lines of the book say it best: “What remained – the residue, the essence, distillate of his life, gold from straw – remains impervious to fang and claw, at once the heart of the riddle of life and medicine for the heart.” As in Book One, the musical giants of the age stride the pages, among them Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Bruckner – and, as before, the story is told against the background of the growth of Germany from 400+ principalities to one nation under the Kaiser and Bismarck, from the revolutionary wars of 1848 to victories against Denmark, Austria, and France by 1871, and concluding in the year of Brahms’s death with the seed for the settlement of a Jewish state in Palestine, bringing the story into the twentieth century. |
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