Music and Silence by Rose Tremain

A bold new novel from the author of Restoration and The Way I Found Her In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish court to join King Christian IV's royal orchestra. From the moment when he realizes that the musicians have to perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, he understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states of light and dark, good and evil, are waging war to the death. Designated the king's Angel because of his good looks, he finds himself falling in love with the young woman who is the companion of the king's adulterous and estranged wife, Kirsten. With his loyalties fatally divided, how will Peter Claire find the path that will realize his hopes and save his soul? With a sure, alchemical touch and the narrative finesse that always turns her histories into a kind of magic, Rose Tremain has fashioned a rich, provocative historical romance as pungent as Denmark's salty air. This is a tale of opposites: light and darkness, tenderness and violence, music and silence. Editorial Reviews From AudioFile English lutenist Peter Claire performs in the royal orchestra of King Christian IV's seventeenth-century Danish court, stirring the hearts of the principal women in this novel. Royal family dynamics are interwoven with love and lust as Claire catches the eye of the king and achieves a far-flung influence on a number of fronts--his political clout reaches from a widowed Irish countess of Spanish origins to the workers in the Scandinavian silver mines. Chapters are interspersed with delicate lute chords, and the alternating voices of the readers animate the narrative of each of the main characters. Feminine and breathy, Alison Dowling and Clare Wille give velvety, expressive voices to the female characters' tales. Michael Praed's strong, unaffected speech depicts the intensity and desperation of the characters he portrays. Mortal danger and the prospect of tragedy build as the narrators deliver their spirited array of voices. A.W. ? AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the audio_download edition. From Booklist Fans of Tremain's historical fiction Restoration will delight in her new novel, Music & Silence. The year is 1629, and King Christian IV of Denmark fears that his life is spinning out of control as he watches his royal consort, Kirsten, openly flaunt her adulterous affairs and his country fall into ruins. To assuage his misery, he appoints the Royal Orchestra to play in the freezing cellar of his palace while he listens in the cozy Vinterstue above. Music, the king hopes, will bring the sublime order he craves. His consort, in contrast, detests all music and is forever devising Beautiful Plans to rid herself of the king. Caught in the struggle between the forces of music and silence, light and darkness, are Peter Claire, the king's lutenist, and Emily Tilsen, the royal consort's waiting woman, who try to nurture their love within the treacherous confines of the Danish court. Music & Silence plays both the high and low notes of humanity: it descends darkly with lust and betrayal and crescendos with the magic of love and romance. Veronica Scrol --This text refers to the audio_download edition. From Kirkus Reviews Versatile British author Tremain's eighth novel (after The Way I Found Her, 1998) is the stuff of which fairy-tales are spun, though it also exhibits a compelling psychological and moral density. The tale begins in 1629 as Peter Claire, a young English lutenist'' whos been summoned to the court of King Christian IV, arrives in Denmark to become the newest member of the royal orchestra. Then, in a skillfully presented array of increasingly interlocking narratives (each keyed to a different character's consciousness), Tremain explores a considerable range of human responses to, and involvements with, the overt expressiveness of music'' and the silence'' that pervades hearts and minds given to introversion and secrecy. The tale of Christian's embattled boyhood and sudden ascension to the thronea sort of Hans Christian Andersen fable of a mind eagerly expanding, then possessively contracting brilliantly dramatizes a hungry spirit's resolute perfectionism. The confessions'' of Christian's adulterous consort Kirsten (petulantly recorded in her private papers'') vividly portrays an antic superego that thrives on self-indulgence and subterfuge. And the parallel tale of the love between Peter Claire and Kirsten's favorite handmaiden, Emilia, whos also been traumatized by a complex legacy of intrigue and lustironically echoes the royal drama to which it is gradually, ingeniously linked. Not all the connections here work quite so effectively (the story of Danish-born Countess O'Fingal, for example, whose Irish husband is destroyed by his obsession with a heavenly melody heard only in his dreams feels redundant and contrived). But Tremain's deepening characterization of King Christianboth as an incarnation of acquisitiveness who believes in his own divine right, and a sensitive seeker of higher thingsis masterly and, ultimately, very moving. Tremain studied with the late Angus Wilson, and the influence of his fertile imagination has clearly helped shape, and energize, her own. Music & Silence may be her best yet. -- Copyright ?2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the audio_download edition. About the Author Music & Silence is Rose Tremain's eighth novel. Her previous work has been short-listed for the Booker Prize and has won the Prix Femina Etranger and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. --This text refers to the audio_download edition. Amazon.com Review Rose Tremain deserves a hallelujah chorus dedicated to her alone. A decade after the appearance of Restoration, with its superb evocation of the British baroque, comes her glorious and enthralling Music and Silence. Like the earlier novel, this one is a treasure house of delights--as haunting as it is pleasurable and teeming with real and imagined characters, intrigues, searches, and betrayals. The vivid scenes loop in and out, back and forth, like overlapping and repeated chords in a single, delicious composition. The year is 1629, and King Christian IV of Denmark is living in a limbo of fear for his life and rage over his country's ruin, not to mention his wife's not-so-secret adultery. He consoles himself with impossible dreams and with music, the latter performed by his royal orchestra in a freezing cellar while he listens in his cozy chamber directly above. Music, he hopes, will create the sublime order he craves. The queen, meanwhile, detests nothing more. The duty of assuaging the king's miseries falls to his absurdly handsome English lutenist, Peter Claire, who resigns himself to his (so to speak) underground success: They begin. It seems to Peter Claire as if they are playing only for themselves, as if this is a rehearsal for some future performance in a grand, lighted room. He has to keep reminding himself that the music is being carried, as breath is carried through the body of a wind instrument, through the twisted pipes, and emerging clear and sharp in the Vinterstue, where King Christian is eating his breakfast.... He strives, as always, for perfection and, because he is playing and listening with such fierce concentration, doesn't notice the cold in the cellar as he thought he would, and his fingers feel nimble and supple. Other stories, each of them full of fabulous invention, intertwine with these musical machinations. There is the tale of the king's mother, who hoards her gold in secret; the tormenting memory of his boyhood friend, Bror; and the romance between Peter Claire and the queen's downtrodden maid, Emilia. And while the author paid meticulous mind to her period settings, her take on desire and longing has a very modern intensity to it, as if an ancient score were being performed on a contemporary (and surpassingly elegant) instrument. --Ruth Petrie --This text refers to the audio_download edition. Review A magical novel . . . which offers great beauty, great ugliness, great wisdom.--The Spectator Lyrical, voluptuous and pictorially splendid.--The Sunday Times (London) --This text refers to the audio_download edition. From Publishers Weekly As she proved in Restoration, Tremain can write literary historical novels whose period details encompass the social and intellectual currents of their time and place. This dazzlingly imaginative, powerfully atmospheric work is set mainly in 17th-century Denmark. One of the protagonists is English, however, and Tremain captures the sensibilities of natives of both countries. British lutenist Peter Claire arrives in Copenhagen in 1629 to join the orchestra of King Christian IV. Depressed after a doomed love affair with a soulful Irish countess, Peter finds his melancholy mood mirrored by that of the king, who is beset by both financial and marital crises. That fruitless wars and profligate spending by the Danish nobility have depleted the country's coffers is the king's public woe; privately, his heart is anguished by the behavior of his consort, Kristen Munk, who despises her own children, keeps her spouse from her bed and is carrying on with a German mercenary. Recognizing in Peter's handsome countenance a resemblance to a lost childhood friend, Christian declares that Peter is the angel who will help solve his personal and national problems. Tremain's complex plot is built in small increments. Excerpts from the brazenly selfish Kirsten's diary alternate with the points of view of dozens of others, including Kirsten's lady-in-waiting Emilia Tilsen. Kirsten deems Emilia irreplaceable and prevents her from openly acknowledging her feelings for Peter. Love--requited and thwarted, healthy and perverted, damaging and healing--is one theme of the novel, represented by six pairs of lovers. Love is inextricably tied to the power to enslave; perhaps it's a form of enchantment, of which another manifestation is music. Tremain builds her narrative via alternating voices blending like the solos of musical instruments. Threading irony among its many leitmotifs (Christian IV, for example, who understands that music can lead to the divine, subjects his musicians to brutal living conditions), the narrative sweeps to a dramatic crescendo, with several characters in mortal danger and the prospect of tragedy everywhere. Yet it ends in felicitous harmony, a triumph of storytelling by a master of the art. 9-city author tour. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the audio_download edition.