Autumn captured in music
Sit back, close your eyes and let music infuse you with the beauty of the season…
Sit back, close your eyes and let music infuse you with the beauty of the season…
The heroine of my novel Song of the Nile is named Aida for the opera – a passionate, dramatic story of love and tragedy.
When the nights are long and the days short, when sadness beckons and hope is hard to grasp, when spring seems a long time away… there’s always solace to be found in music.
Music has such power to express romantic feelings: as the French novelist Victor Hugo wrote, ‘Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.’ Here are my top five romantic pieces of classical music – inspiration for my latest novel, Concerto, the love story of a pianist composer and a music therapist.
‘I have lived for art, I have lived for love.’ So sings Floria in Puccini’s opera Tosca. But what is an opera exactly, and how did this art form develop?
Music is at the heart of my latest novel, Concerto. The hero, Umberto, is a pianist composer who has lost his sight, and consequently his will to compose and play. Enter music therapist Catriona, who will have her work cut out trying to guide this stubborn and depressed man back to the piano, where he belongs.
‘”Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours.” This is the kind of intense, enflamed passion that I dreamt of for my novel Concerto…’
‘An author’s job is to tell a story through writing, but in Concerto I was able to also use music to tell that story.’
In my novel Concerto, the heroine, Catriona, is a music therapist who is hired to work with a client who is depressed. Umberto was once
‘This is a setting to inspire the artistic soul. Here, at the Villa Melzi d’Eril in Bellagio, Liszt would walk for hours in the surrounding parkland, breathing in the atmosphere, letting his muse take in the stunning views and hear the music in the air…’
For me, editing an upcoming novel means spending many hours in my office: door closed, lamps lit, music playing. The latter is always carefully selected to match the mood of the book I am editing, and while editing Concerto one composer in particular featured prominently in my playlist, Frédéric Chopin.
When I am staying at my home in France, I love to take long walks by the sea and hear the rhythmic sound of the water lapping, or sometimes crashing, on the sand. I sit in my garden and listen to the chorus of the cicadas and the drone of the bees attracted to my lavender. In Ireland, I go for walks in the woodland near my home, to the sound of the leaves stirred by the breeze and the birds singing high up in the trees and the merry tinkling of a little stream.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was, without doubt, one of the greatest composers to have ever lived. In his short life he composed more than 600 works, many of which continue to be performed by musicians today. His music is popular the world over, and in the most recent poll for Classic FM’s Hall of Fame (2019), three of his pieces featured in the top-twenty list. Here is his most popular work on the list, the Clarinet Concerto in A Major.
At the heart of my new novel Concerto is music – beautiful, poignant and cathartic.
Opera is a key theme in my novel Concerto. The heroine, Catriona, is a young woman who dreams of becoming an opera singer. She has the passion, and the talent: she attends the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Nice, and has made the final in a competition to earn a place at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris, which would launch her career in the world of opera. Then she meets composer Umberto Rolando Monteverdi, and her life takes an entirely unexpected twist.
‘Opera is complex for those who perform it, but also for those who listen to it. It takes more time, more patience and more spirit
I listened to a lot of classical music while writing my new novel Concerto, set on Lake Como, but one modern track featured regularly in
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Music is a great source of inspiration to me, whether classical or modern, and in any language. I have a huge repertoire of songs from
Back when my debut novel, Burning Embers, was newly released, I found on the internet a song with the same title, and was quite taken
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