The Maestro and Her Protégé
When Hannah Schaeffer meets Nadia Boulanger, a real-life composer, in Paris in 1959, she is just ten years old. But she is about to begin a demanding musical education and a lifelong career. Later in life, when she feels she is about to lose her contract as the conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she travels to Paris and visits Boulanger’s grave daily, lost in her memories.
The novel moves back and forth from Hannah as a young girl, a prodigy sent to study music, to other points in her life and career, and to an older, accomplished Hannah who feels that change is coming for her. Her reflections on her life as a music prodigy and on the career roadblocks placed in front of her because she is a woman, paint an accurate picture of the struggles of women in the 20th and even 21st centuries. Moving between 1959 and the present day, Hannah recalls her strict tutelage from Boulanger, her “musical mother,” and we see her interactions with her actual mother, who is a self-interested woman, her loving grandparents, and real-life musical geniuses like Boulanger and Leonard Bernstein.
This novel is as musical, itself, as a book can be. The past and present appear together, flowing in and out of each other as a composition of thoughts. The sections of the novel are named Overture, Reverie, Rhapsody, and Coda, and the book is like a complete concert with a beginning and an ending. Everything to Hannah can be written in music: “It was not a peck, but a soft graze of his lips. As if he thought I were a fragile object. As if he believed a more determined kiss might break me. Before I could hear the notes of that kiss, he was stepping away….” A masterful symphony of words. Highly recommended.
