This is a very cool blog! Thoughts on a Train.
The Tale of the Master and of his Belovèd: Beethoven & the Immortal Belovèd (Part 1)
Last Thursday, I completed another novel, The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, which continues the adventures of Dr. T. Richard Kerr against the evil corporation SHMRG that began with The Doomsday Symphony (which you can read here) and The Lost Chord (soon to be posted in its fully revised version).
One aspect of the plot in the last two of these novels involves Ludwig van Beethoven and the woman he referred to in a single letter (found after his death) as The Immortal Belovèd. While the letter is entirely historical, the identity of the woman has never been proven and even today, despite all the theorizing over the last two centuries, no one can say for sure who she was. Josephine von Brunsvick, Antonie Brentano and several others all have their proponents and if you are a devotee of Hollywood films about Beethoven (at least those not involving a Saint Bernard), you might even think she was his sister-in-law, Johanna Reiss van Beethoven which, of all the possible possibilities, is the most absurd.
In the course of The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, Dr. Kerr meets an old friend, Frieda F. Erden, now in her 90s who has found an old manuscript written in the 1880s which she has translated. Its author, Knussbaum, was a friend of Beethoven's and taught at the legendary Schweinwald Academy (recounted in The Lost Chord) where the journal of one of the students, a young English composer named Harrison Harty, describes life there in 1880 along with his fellow students, Gustav Mahler, Hans Rott and Ethel Smyth. But Knussbaum knows a secret and when another student is mysteriously murdered, Harty and his friends find themselves caught up in what Knussbaum knows.
While my novels can be described as "comedy music-appreciation thrillers," much of what is described is based on historical fact - except of course for things like Harmonia-IV, a parallel universe where dead composers go and continue living and composing (the basis for the plot in The Doomsday Symphony which also involves a good bit of time-traveling). And of course a lot of things that may not be true but are considered true because, well... some people have different perceptions of the truth.
In this excerpt from The Labyrinth, there is more historical fact than most Hollywood versions of Beethoven's life, except for the description of the Immortal Belovèd, their relationship and that other aspect of the secret Beethoven kept for the rest of his life: that they had a child.
But in many ways, these secrets go a long way to describe the sudden change in Beethoven's life and creative output - from his suddenly increased deafness to the sudden stop in his creativity late in 1812 shortly after completing the 7th and 8th Symphonies and which only gradually recuperated over the following year before he wrote Wellington's Victory a year later.
In that sense, everything included here is based on fact: the reasons behind it, though plausible, are however purely conjectural.
http://www.dickstrawser.blogspot.co....s-beloved.html
The Doomsday Symphony: On the Installment Plan.
It could mean the end of Classical Music as we know it and, if Mahler's latest symphony makes it back for its world premiere on December 21st, 2012, it could just be the end of the world, period.
What to do...?
Well, my latest complete novel is now ready to be posted on the installment plan here on Thoughts on a Train.
You can read the first installment here.
= = = = = = =
It is set on a hot summer day in July of 2010. The narrator is a middle-aged former composer, recently laid off, named T. Richard Kerr.
(Originally, he was T. Rutherford Cranleigh but I changed the name when I began my next novel and decided I liked this name better. After all, why shouldn’t a classical music detective be named after the old musical form, Ricercar, which means “to seek”?)
Off to visit Victor Crevecoeur, the son of his old friend and mentor, Sebastian Crevecoeur, still living in the old Pocono farmhouse his father had bought as a country retreat from life in New York City, Kerr is to attend a summer concert that afternoon (Victor’s daughter, Zoe, is the concertmaster of the orchestra) and then, after a dinner party at the farmhouse, hear a read-through of a newly discovered piano quintet by Sebastian Crevecoeur, though Victor is being very mysterious about it. Sebastian had committed suicide over twenty-five years before and Kerr had never heard him mention writing something like a piano quintet, before. When he had a chance to see the score, he noticed the completion date on the last page was December 19th, 2009 – only six months ago!
http://dickstrawser.blogspot.co.uk/2...roduction.html
The Tale of the Master and of his Belovèd: Beethoven & the Immortal Belovèd (Part 1)
Last Thursday, I completed another novel, The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, which continues the adventures of Dr. T. Richard Kerr against the evil corporation SHMRG that began with The Doomsday Symphony (which you can read here) and The Lost Chord (soon to be posted in its fully revised version).
One aspect of the plot in the last two of these novels involves Ludwig van Beethoven and the woman he referred to in a single letter (found after his death) as The Immortal Belovèd. While the letter is entirely historical, the identity of the woman has never been proven and even today, despite all the theorizing over the last two centuries, no one can say for sure who she was. Josephine von Brunsvick, Antonie Brentano and several others all have their proponents and if you are a devotee of Hollywood films about Beethoven (at least those not involving a Saint Bernard), you might even think she was his sister-in-law, Johanna Reiss van Beethoven which, of all the possible possibilities, is the most absurd.
In the course of The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, Dr. Kerr meets an old friend, Frieda F. Erden, now in her 90s who has found an old manuscript written in the 1880s which she has translated. Its author, Knussbaum, was a friend of Beethoven's and taught at the legendary Schweinwald Academy (recounted in The Lost Chord) where the journal of one of the students, a young English composer named Harrison Harty, describes life there in 1880 along with his fellow students, Gustav Mahler, Hans Rott and Ethel Smyth. But Knussbaum knows a secret and when another student is mysteriously murdered, Harty and his friends find themselves caught up in what Knussbaum knows.
While my novels can be described as "comedy music-appreciation thrillers," much of what is described is based on historical fact - except of course for things like Harmonia-IV, a parallel universe where dead composers go and continue living and composing (the basis for the plot in The Doomsday Symphony which also involves a good bit of time-traveling). And of course a lot of things that may not be true but are considered true because, well... some people have different perceptions of the truth.
In this excerpt from The Labyrinth, there is more historical fact than most Hollywood versions of Beethoven's life, except for the description of the Immortal Belovèd, their relationship and that other aspect of the secret Beethoven kept for the rest of his life: that they had a child.
But in many ways, these secrets go a long way to describe the sudden change in Beethoven's life and creative output - from his suddenly increased deafness to the sudden stop in his creativity late in 1812 shortly after completing the 7th and 8th Symphonies and which only gradually recuperated over the following year before he wrote Wellington's Victory a year later.
In that sense, everything included here is based on fact: the reasons behind it, though plausible, are however purely conjectural.
http://www.dickstrawser.blogspot.co....s-beloved.html
The Doomsday Symphony: On the Installment Plan.
It could mean the end of Classical Music as we know it and, if Mahler's latest symphony makes it back for its world premiere on December 21st, 2012, it could just be the end of the world, period.
What to do...?
Well, my latest complete novel is now ready to be posted on the installment plan here on Thoughts on a Train.
You can read the first installment here.
= = = = = = =
It is set on a hot summer day in July of 2010. The narrator is a middle-aged former composer, recently laid off, named T. Richard Kerr.
(Originally, he was T. Rutherford Cranleigh but I changed the name when I began my next novel and decided I liked this name better. After all, why shouldn’t a classical music detective be named after the old musical form, Ricercar, which means “to seek”?)
Off to visit Victor Crevecoeur, the son of his old friend and mentor, Sebastian Crevecoeur, still living in the old Pocono farmhouse his father had bought as a country retreat from life in New York City, Kerr is to attend a summer concert that afternoon (Victor’s daughter, Zoe, is the concertmaster of the orchestra) and then, after a dinner party at the farmhouse, hear a read-through of a newly discovered piano quintet by Sebastian Crevecoeur, though Victor is being very mysterious about it. Sebastian had committed suicide over twenty-five years before and Kerr had never heard him mention writing something like a piano quintet, before. When he had a chance to see the score, he noticed the completion date on the last page was December 19th, 2009 – only six months ago!
http://dickstrawser.blogspot.co.uk/2...roduction.html
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