The Prague Sonata

Bradford Morrow has written a beautiful symphony of words that crescendo in the final movement of this novel.  An historical novel of life in Czechoslovakia as Hitler brings World War II to their doorstep and modern day Czechoslovakia and the Unites States as the protagonist, Meta Taverner tries to bring together the individual movements of an ancient sonata, that were separated by the war and presumed lost with the people who carried them. 

As one of the subjects who is searching for the parts of the musical manuscript describes it, "A brother and a sister living in Josefov, neither of them particularly compos mentis, survivors from the Nazi occupation days, had made noises about an early sonata manuscript, divvied up into three parts as Caesar divided Gaul."   This novel takes the reader across time periods and oceans as the suspense builds through both the historical stories of the survivors of the two great wars and the travels that Meta and her colleagues take to try and find the owners of the music and hear the stories from the protectors of the music.

The story starts during World War One when as a young girl Otylie's father is leaving her after they have buried her mother.  Otylie is nine years old when her father leaves her with a musical manuscript that he says will bring her a fortune in the future.  He leaves her with the words that, "all wars begin with music".  She grows up wanting to put music behind her and working hard just to live from day to day during WWII. 

Now in current day New York, Meta meets Irena, who at 80 years old is looking to pass on the burden of holding onto a music manuscript that needs to be reunited with its original owner.  Meta a twenty something music student is looking for something that will ignite her passion.  In the course of trying to find out who wrote the original score and find its rightful owner, she has found her own desire to explore Europe and find love.

Morrow has used so many wonderful musical phrases in this novel, one example being his way of describing love as a duet, "A duet that wanted to evolve into a fugue.  One whose harmonic and rhythmic structures moved toward the resolution."

So wonderfully written that even though this is a narrative that I have read before about a lost object music or artwork from the Holocaust that people in current day are searching for, it was gripping and even so lovely at the end that I was brought to a few tears.