Dear friends and supporters,


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/00CBC003-86E9-463D-B611-67C832E766B1.jpg?v=1690914103" width="500" height="375">


I hope you are keeping well and looking forward to being able to hug people once again. With just two weeks to go until the long-postponed first performances of the 'Immortal' Concert of the Novel, it is looking as if it really will happen this time (she said, crossing fingers madly). Viv McLean and I can't wait to be reunited for the first time in over a year. Pictured above: a snap from a gig we had at the Wigmore Hall a few years back.

Tickets for the two Barnes Festival performances on 26 May are going fast and can be booked here: <a href="https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/barnesmusicfestival">https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/barnesmusicfestival</a>

I'd like, nevertheless, to highlight a very special evening on 24 May, which will actually be the world premiere. It takes place at Music at 22 Mansfield Street, the wonderful salon of Bob and Elisabeth Boas in their beautiful Georgian house close to Oxford Circus. Viv, David le Page and I have enjoyed many fabulous evenings here thanks to the truly remarkable kindness and generosity of Bob and Elisabeth, and all proceeds benefit the Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust. Bob has been able to stage events with social distancing involving 'bubbles' and sensibly spaced chairs, so the evening begins with drinks and canapes at tables, at 7pm, and the music begins about 7.45pm.

Our performance - in which I will read 'in character' as Therese - lasts about 70-75 mins. Text and music alternate. Viv will play the following pieces of Beethoven:

Bagatelle Op. 126 No. 3; Sonata Op. 81a 'Das Lebewohl, first movement; part of the Andante Favori; Sonata Op. 57 'Appassionata' first movement; Sonata Op. 78 'A Therese', first movement; Sonata Op. 110, arioso and fugue.

Tickets are £30 and can be booked by emailing Bob Boas at boasb1@outlook.com. Space is strictly limited, and as this is our first time back performing in absolutely ages, please do come along to help us celebrate. Hope to see you there.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

A very special evening on 24 May

Dear friends, supporters and IMMORTALs,

Whatever the rest of 2021 may hold, the parrots on the apple tree, the woodpeckers in the park and the cats moulting inside the house assure me that it really is springtime. In addition, I'm thrilled to say that some of my "concerts of the novel" of IMMORTAL, along with a few other stage pieces, are once again in the diary. Let's take this slowly, because it feels like tempting fate to plan too far ahead, so for now I will simply offer you the dates in May.

Viv McLean, my dear friend and fabulous pianist performance partner over the past 8-9 years, will be joining me to present the concert version of IMMORTAL. We hope you will relish this mix of words &amp; music, bringing the story of Beethoven and Josephine to life. It will be absolutely wonderful to see you and to share the magic of live music and theatre again, at long last. Please note, booking is ESSENTIAL because seating is socially distanced and therefore limited.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Emslie_A_Sonata_of_Beethoven.jpg?v=1690914141" width="368" height="500">


(Above: A Sonata of Beethoven by Emslie, with a demonstration of socially distanced seating...)

 

The repertoire, alternating with episodes of narration, is all Beethoven:

• Bagatelle Op. 126 No. 3

• Piano Sonata Op. 81a, ‘Das Lebewohl’, first movement

• Andante favori, extract (written for Josephine Brunsvik )

• Piano Sonata Op. 57, ‘Appassionata’, first movement (dedicated to Franz Brunsvik)

• Piano Sonata Op. 78, first movement (dedicated to Therese Brunsvik)

• ‘Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder’ from An die Ferne Geliebte, transcribed by Franz Liszt

• Piano Sonata Op. 110, Arioso and fugue 

The concert is about 70-75 mins without a break.

24 May: IMMORTAL Concert of the Novel - the World Premiere. This is at Bob Boas's beautiful salon concert series close to Oxford Circus: Music at 22 Mansfield Street, London W1. Bookings can be made via boasb1@outlook.com. 

We are extremely grateful to Bob for including us in his programme, which is habitually the crème-de-la-crème of London's chamber music and recitalists.

Bob Boas says: "From May 17 to June 20 the format will be the same as that we adopted last autumn namely as the distanced audience will be seated in “bubbles”  limited to 6 with 1 metre plus distancing. Face masks should be worn during the concert. Drinks plus canapés will be served at seated tables from 7.00 onwards, the music will start about 7.45 and to emphasise that these are concerts and not social events we will not have supper or drinks and canapés after. The price is £30."

26 May: IMMORTAL Concert of the Novel, Barnes Music Festival. Two performances, at 6pm and 8pm, to allow for socially distanced seating. I'm overjoyed to be featured in our "local" top-of-the-range annual musical treat. The concerts take place in St Mary's Church, Church Road, Barnes, London SW13. You can book online here <a href="http://www.barnesmusicfestival.com/tickets">http://www.barnesmusicfestival.com/tickets</a> 
You can also buy tickets in person at Chesterton's Estate Agents in Barnes (Castelnau or Barnes High Street branches) and East Sheen (Upper Richmond Road West). 

Hope to see as many of you there as possible!

Love and best wishes, 
Jessica x

IMMORTAL Concerts, Rescheduled!

It's today - probably. It may actually be tomorrow. Either way, Happy Beethoven's Birthday! 


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/beethoven-in-1803-painted-by-christian-horneman-561x640_4e742876-f5df-4df7-bfee-2bd114f21a0f.jpg?v=1690914122" width="438">


How will you celebrate? Personally, I will be busy transcribing an interview about Beethoven with a total genius of a pianist whose CD booklet note I am writing.

It's Krystian Zimerman. You can see his performances with Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO of the five Beethoven concertos in three chunks on DG Stage, the record company's new streaming platform, tomorrow, Saturday and Monday (17, 19 and 21 Dec). To everyone's despair, plunging London into Tier 3 today means that the marathon concert of all the concertos at the Barbican tomorrow has been cancelled, along with everything else. I'd been looking forward to it all year.

Nevertheless, I'm lucky enough to be quite involved in the recording project as interviewer and writer, so I listened to two out of the three 'dress rehearsals' at LSO St Luke's. We were fortunate to hear some utterly extraordinary music-making under the most challenging of conditions with 'socially distanced' orchestra. Yet rarely have I heard a live performance of Beethoven that makes me think I might have been listening to the composer himself performing - elemental fire and passion, wit and humour, indomitable spirit, thunderous free-flying power, and a spiritual ode to joy. The audio recording will be released in the spring.

Back in Immortal land, Classic FM had a nice surprise for us. They invited me to offer exactly 250 words, no more and no less, on what Beethoven means to me. Today the result is on their website and I find I am in some seriously stellar company. What's most interesting, though, is that everyone - from politicians to Lang Lang - seems to home in on that sheer joy that bounds out of Beethoven's music. It is not the struggle that we love the most in his work: it is the lust for life. You can read it here: <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/in-250-words/">https://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/in-250-words/</a>

News comes meanwhile from Germany that the celebrations for Beethoven's anniversary are to be extended well into next year. Probably just as well.

So, back to work. And by the way, don't ignore the struggle in Beethoven's music. It could be that in 2021 we'll need it too.

Thank you again a thousand times for all your support for Immortal and its hero 'Luigi', who is still...immortal.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

HAPPY BEETHOVEN'S BIRTHDAY!

<img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" src="/images/15077/preview/medium" width="500" height="375">


Dear friends and supporters,

It's been a hectic few weeks and a bout of tonsillitis didn't help. So from the tranquility of a plane-less Monday morning, in company with a snoring cat and a violinist practising Paganini downstairs, here's a quick update and some links for a catch-up.

First of all, because of a sudden, belated and unexpected lockdown (thanks, Boris...) everyone's carefully laid plans for distancing audiences at concerts went up in smoke and everything for November got cancelled. There's been a scramble to rethink, reimagine and reschedule. The Up Close and Musical festival at the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe has been moved to May, my Immortal concert with Piers Lane for the <a href="https://www.barnesmusicsociety.org/copy-of-rachel-roberts-tim-horton">Barnes Music Society </a>has been rescheduled for 16 January, and the Nordern Farm performance has unfortunately had to bite the dust. There are a few other dates in the diary for June, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it.

One of the events that I was most sorry to lose this year was the staging of the youth opera The Selfish Giant by the composer John Barber, for which I did the libretto. It was meant to happen in July. Now we are hoping that it will be able to enjoy a staging in some way, shape or form next summer instead. Like The Happy Princess with composer Paul Fincham in 2019, it's a commission from Garsington for their youth companies, and this time also a co-commission from Opera North. The story is a transformation of an Oscar Wilde fairytale. It is all about the beauty of nature, how much we need it, how much we need to be at one with it, and how completely stupid it is to build walls between different peoples and different generations. We need to work with nature and with each other to build a better world - because one day we will leave it, and then what is our legacy?

"Here in the garden, our haven, here in the garden, our heaven; here we can be who we're meant to be, where we find ourselves and are free..." When we wrote the piece we had no idea that this year the beauty of nature would become what would sustain our young performers who were indeed cut off from their friends, their schools, their rehearsals and their joy in singing together. They made a short film about it, using some songs from the opera. It's called Our Haven and Garsington released it on Friday for National Children's Day. Here it is: <a href="https://youtu.be/jJK1Rc1DdFU">https://youtu.be/jJK1Rc1DdFU</a> 
(Pictured above: my haven, aka Richmond Park.)

Meanwhile, the Zoom launch for Immortal went off with much more zing than I'd thought possible. We had more than 50 attendees from all over the world, which was astounding, and the support of Joanna Pieters, who presented and interviewed, Simon Hewitt Jones, who produced, and Mishka Rushdie Momen, who played, was absolutely incredible. Although I was alone in the study, and Ricki slept in a chair behind me all the way through, I felt as if we'd had a real party. If you didn't see if and you'd like to, <a href="https://youtu.be/acmvkCaAvXI">the whole thing is now on Youtube, here</a>.

Soon afterwards, I found myself roped into a reimagining of an event for the wonderful Wimbledon International Music Festival, a favourite calendar highlight of mine here in south-west London. Normally the inimitable Anthony Wilkinson brings world-class music to live stages on his own doorstep, but of course this time everything had to be moved online and replanned for the format. You can see the lot for a small fee at their website - and yes, one should have to pay to watch music online, because making these things costs and otherwise there soon won't be any. The festival includes some amazing concerts such as a cello and piano recital of Beethoven by Raphael Wallfisch and John York, a typically thoughtful and eclectic programme from pianist Clare Hammond and a star highlight filmed at the Wigmore Hall, with Paul Lewis performing the Beethoven Diabelli Variations. If you think there's a Beethoven theme, you're right, and the event into which I was parachuted was a discussion with pianist Piers Lane, actor/director/writer Tama Matheson and festival director Anthony Wilkinson exploring the magic of Beethoven and, beyond that, what the arts really mean to us, why we need them and where we go from here. <a href="https://www.wimbledonmusicfestival.co.uk">All details here.</a>

Next, a call from The Sunday Times. There's a new biography of Mozart just out, by the splendid Jan Swafford, the musicologist and composer who seemed to capture the nation's hearts when he appeared in the BBC series Being Beethoven. This latest book is 800 pages long, which I didn't completely realise until after I'd agreed to review it, but it is such a lovely read that I felt a bit bereft when I'd finished. The review was in yesterday's paper <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mozart-the-reign-of-love-by-jan-swafford-review-gd2mm53pm">and is online (£) here</a>.

Yesterday, too, I was on Talk Radio rabbiting about Beethoven and Immortal. There's been an enthusiastic blog tour of book site reviews, and we're waiting with slightly nibbled nails for further reviews to appear in print. In general, though, I would advise any budding novelists to check in advance that their release date does not coincide with a very important American presidential election, because firstly nobody will have eyes for much else, and secondly nothing that you write will ever be able to match up to the bizarre reality unfolding in front of us there.

As the divine Joni Mitchell sings, "something's lost and something's won, in living every day... I really don't know life at all."

Let's keep on keeping on, and remember the beauty in the garden. 

To which end, I've just ordered 80 daffodil bulbs.

Here in our haven...

Dear friends and supporters,

Tremendous thanks to everyone who joined us on Zoom a week ago for the Immortal virtual launch party. It was quite a revelation on several counts.

First, it is every bit as much a launch do as a "real" party would be: you have to prepare properly and have the right support. I could not have been more fortunate in my amazing team, all dear friends with special kinds of expertise: Simon Hewitt Jones, who knows how to work the technical side of such things; and Joanna Pieters, editor and podcaster, who I knew would bring a fantastic positive energy to the hosting and interviewing. (Do check out her podcasts, The Creative Life Show.) She did. The whole thing ran like a perfectly oiled clock, and I hope I didn't sound too cuckoo.

Next, we might not have been together, and the audience chat was all typed rather than spoken, but we had friends signing in from all over. Los Angeles, New York, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and even good old East Sheen. How would that even have been dreamed of a year ago? (Clue: it wasn't.) 

Third, it was enormous fun and at the end I felt like we'd had a genuine party, even though I was safely on the sofa in my slippers with a cat and a glass of wine by 8.30pm.

And finally, but by no means least, if you missed it you can now watch it on Youtube, right here. Enjoy!

I'm starting to get ideas as a result, which is really dangerous.........

Meanwhile there's lovely feedback arriving about the book: several top-notch reviews on Goodreads et al, and lots of spin-off interest in the vein of "are you free next Monday?", which is how the music world has to plan things at present. On balance, and with hindsight, I must admit I'd advise people to check the date of the American election before planning a release date for a new book...but nevertheless perhaps there is some advantage to the fact that more people are feeling vaguely positive now than were previously.

Thank you as ever for all your support. You've made all of this possible. I look forward to raising an actual glass with you when we're allowed to do so.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

That was the night that was

Dear friends and supporters,


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="206" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Bubbly.png?v=1690914220" width="500">


I’d love to invite you to a digital launch party for Immortal. Even though we can’t meet in person, we’re going to do the best we can online: please join us for some reading, pictures, an interview and Q&amp;A with me, and even some music. Do bring a glass of bubbly, a nice cup of tea or anything you fancy.

I'm delighted that my interviewer will be Joanna Pieters, formerly editor of The Strad magazine, whose podcast series The Creative Life is highly recommended. 
 
Simply register here to join and receive the Zoom link. 


 <a href="https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pcumsrTkjHtwIRPQaTf0oMPbVmmvc4Wn5">https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pcumsrTkjHtwIRPQaTf0oMPbVmmvc4Wn5</a> 


Date: Tuesday 10 November 2020 
Time: 6pm UK time  
 
If you need any further copies of Immortal itself, I’m happy to recommend the newly launched Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops: <a href="https://uk.bookshop.org/books/immortal-9781789651157/9781789651157">https://uk.bookshop.org/books/immortal-9781789651157/9781789651157</a>

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Love and best wishes, 
Jessica

YOU ARE INVITED TO A DIGITAL LAUNCH PARTY FOR 'IMMORTAL'

Dear all,

Yesterday was rather amazing: publication day included lots of wonderful messages, the first reviews (nice ones - phew!) and the release of Wigmore Hall's video in which I introduce the book and do some readings and the wonderful pianist <a href="https://www.mishkarushdiemomen.com">Mishka Rushdie Momen</a> (pictured) plays Beethoven's Sonata in F major, Op. 10 No. 2. This was made possible by the extremely kind invitation of the Hall's director, John Gilhooly.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Mishka_photo.jpg?v=1690914212" width="333">


The presentation was specially devised for this occasion. It is entirely different from the concerts that are [hopefully] coming up next month - and it worked out extremely well. Mishka was eager to play this particular sonata, which she's been programming in recitals this autumn, and I found that a selection of readings from the early part of the book would match it to perfection, not least because the Op. 10s are mentioned in the crucial pages soon after Pepi and Tesi have got to know Beethoven.

The Wigmore's clever technician has made the two of us appear and vanish as if by magic. And if I do look a little bit sombre - well, it was my first visit to my beloved Wigmore Hall since lockdown and it was both strange and slightly disconcerting to be addressing that marvellous auditorium that was sitting empty in front of me. I'm now investing in some brighter lipstick - and smile technology if I can find some. What a treat it was, nevertheless, to have the chance to work with Mishka, who seemed cool as the proverbial cucumber despite these strange cicumstances and sounds simply spectacular. I can't thank her, John, the Wigmore Hall's fabulous team and Unbound enough.

Please find the video attached, and I hope you enjoy it.

Many thanks again for all your support!

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

Wigmore Hall's digital launch for 'Immortal'

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMMORTAL_front_cover.jpg?v=1690914160" width="321">


It's the big day. 29 October 2020 and IMMORTAL is officially out. All you wonderful people who have subscribed should already have your copies, and I know that some of you have even finished it (apparently long books are in vogue at the moment - er, something to do with lockdown - and probably just as well, given the size of this one). So there we are. Is this the end of a journey, or the beginning?

The answer, really, is both. It's the end of the fun bit for me, which is the writing. Things become scary when reviews start arriving, and they are already bubbling up, with <a href="https://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?p=6199">Lark Reviews</a> first to appear and a blog tour starting today with the Bookliterati site. Its blogger, Juliet, has made my day: she says the book has made her listen to some Beethoven, which for me means "mission accomplished". (<a href="https://bookliterati.com/immortal-by-jessica-duchen/?preview=true&amp;frame-nonce=e60dbed174">Here's her full review</a>.)

I'm also hoping to have a very special video to share with you shortly - and we're plotting an online event on Zoom for a couple of weeks' time, so there'll be another update with details of that soon. A proper launch party, with drinks and hugs, will have to wait until such things are allowed again, but if you have pledged for attending it, do not despair, we will get there! 

If you have enjoyed being part of IMMORTAL's journey thus far, here are a few ways you can help this next stage:

• You could post a review on bookshop sites, a blog, social media, wherever you like - best, naturally, if you liked the book...

• You could buy extra copies for friends and family for Christmas and birthdays.

• If you're a member of a book club, you could suggest it for them. In normal times I'd offer to come and have a chat with the group - and if you meet online, come to think of it, I could still do so.

• If you're a member of a music society that is able to host activities or concerts, whether online or in person, you could recommend it to members or stock copies to sell at events.

• Persuade your local bookshop to stock some copies. This doesn't happen automatically.

• Simply tell your friends how much you enjoyed it (assuming you did!).

Thank you a thousand times, and please keep fingers crossed for us all - Luigi, Pepi, Tesi and me - in the days ahead.

IT'S PUBLICATION DAY

Dear friends and supporters,

You will already have recevied your copies of IMMORTAL, but the rest of the world has to wait until 29 October, which is Official Publication Day. Here's an update on what is planned to help set it on its way.

First of all, there's this amazing modern phenomenon called The Blog Tour. The dedication of book bloggers never ceases to amaze me: that there are so many people who love nothing more than reading books and writing about them is a cause for maximum celebration from the writers' side. They are often extremely well organised on social media, too, which adds considerable punch to what they do (though I hope not literally...). Ten of them are going to read and review IMMORTAL, one per day for ten days starting on 29th. Huge thanks to the indomitable Debbie Elliott and to Random Things Blog Tours for setting this up.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Immortal_BT_Poster.jpg?v=1690914176" width="500" height="318">


Next, I'm writing some bits and pieces for various webzines with a range of different approaches: from Female First to The Arts Desk. I'll post them when they're ready. Some radio and internet interviews are in the work too: Scala Radio, Talk Radio and the Living the Classical Life livestream series, all of which I'm looking forward to tremendously. And some magazines are intending to review the book... 

As for live events - well, here we have to touch every piece of wood in sight. Three fabulous highlights are, at time of writing, still in place: an interview, reading and Q&amp;A at the Fidelio Orchestra Café's festival <a href="https://www.upcloseandmusical.co.uk">Up Close and Musical</a> on the morning of Sunday 8 November, and two words&amp;music concerts with the great pianist Piers Lane for<a href="https://www.barnesmusicsociety.org/copy-of-rachel-roberts-tim-horton"> Barnes Music Society</a> (12 Nov) and Maidenhead Music Society at Nordern Farm Arts Centre (19 Nov). But we are just praying that no further lockdown levels are going to prevent these from taking place (and I'm not someone who normally prays). Live audiences will be very limited in number and the Maidenhead Music Society will be offering a ticketed livestream, which you can access here (£): <a href="https://www.maidenheadmusicsociety.org/jessica-duchen-and-piers-lane">https://www.maidenheadmusicsociety.org/jessica-duchen-and-piers-lane</a>

With the small matter of book launches...I am gutted that we can't have a party just at the moment. Some of you have put in pledges for the planned party, and all I can say at the moment is that this is only postponed, not cancelled! As soon as partying is possible, we'll go for it.

Some authors have been staging Zoom launches and I've been considering this, but maximum procrastination and prevarication means that although a very kind friend has offered to produce for me, I haven't yet fixed a date or even decided whether to do it at all. I am not actually a great fan of Zoom. It certainly is useful: like everyone, I virtually live on it at the moment, and it's great that we have this technology, but I doubt I'm the only person who feels it is kind of the thin end of the wedge. I want to Actually Be There With All Of You. If I do decide to take the Zoom plunge I will be in touch with further details.

Watch this space! And thank you again for all your support for IMMORTAL: I hope that you're enjoying the book.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

One week to go!

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/josephine-brunsvik-721596e6-dd73-4848-a219-2511879d68f-resize-750.jpg?v=1690914190" width="250" height="287">


Dear friends and supporters, 

Hopefully you will now have received your shiny new copies, or indeed shiny new ebooks, of IMMORTAL itself. I hope you're enjoying it - do please write and tell me your thoughts when you've had a chance to read it!

Meanwhile, I was saddened to hear the other day that the celebrated musicologist Maynard Solomon has died, aged 90. I have admired his writings for many, many years, I love his book on Mozart and have found his articles about Beethoven absolutely invaluable when working on Immortal, especially his explorations of the composer's conversation books. He sounds a fascinating person and I am only sorry that I never had the chance to meet him. Here is an excellent obituary from the New York Times.

This is therefore a good moment to put some "difficult stuff" about Immortal briefly under the spotlight and get it, hopefully, out of the way.

Maynard Solomon's theory of the Immortal Beloved was that the woman in question was Antonie Brentano, the wife of one of Beethoven's closest friends and supporters. There were two principal reasons: first, that she was definitely in Prague on the right day in 1812; secondly, that Solomon undertook a sort of posthumous psychoanalysis of Beethoven which seemed to support this theory. His suggestion has been much approved and amplified, notably by the writer and scholar Susan Lund, who has worked on Beethoven since the 1970s and has written a novel, a play and a factual book about it. 

The theory has also been widely contested, even objected to, the alternative being that the Immortal Beloved was Josephine Brunsvik (pictured above). Chief among the scholars exploring in this direction was the late Rita Steblin, whose articles and books have been a mainstay of my own information (I was devastated to hear that she died a year ago, leaving some important research unfinished). Before that, Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach had written a fascinating, extremely detailed book on the Josephine theory and the zealous John Klapproth translated into English some crucial early texts on the subject, including La Mara (1920s) who had published some of Therese's memoirs. Some of these writers entered into spirited and occasionally angry exchanges with Solomon on the Josephine v Antonie topic. 

But if you saw the BBC's Being Beethoven series recently, you will have noticed (or you might not - it went by very fast and in almost sheepish tone) that one of the Viennese academics acknowledges, after much "we don't know who she really was", that they do now think there is a 90 per cent likelihood that the Immortal Beloved was Josephine. Ninety per cent is not a small figure. The doubt remains because the traces of this affair were extremely well concealed at the time. It's impossible to prove the final ten per cent without digging up Beethoven and the person - or indeed more than one person - who may have been his illegitimate child and doing a DNA test. I doubt that is going to happen any time soon. 

The fascinating thing about either theory, Antonie or Josephine, is that both present Beethoven with a possible "love child" at the crucial moment. Antonie's youngest son was born about three weeks before Josephine's daughter in spring 1813. So whichever of these infants was the one to whom he could never be a father, the likely outcome - his obsession with adopting his nephew - still applies and makes sense.

It's true, too, that we don't know for certain, and that last 10 per cent of doubt is why I have tackled Immortal in the way I have: a fictional first-person narrative from a not necessarily reliable observer, leaving a little room for a question mark around the potential of Antonie. I'm not a zealot about this (I've died on a few hills before and this isn't going to be another, especially not when we are facing the biggest crisis to hit the world in my whole lifetime...). I do know that the Josephine theory looks, walks and quacks like a duck; the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn favours her as the likely solution; and I can't deny that I am not wholly in favour of psychoanalysing someone who is not present to speak for himself, though I find the nephew explanation perfectly plausible.

Let's cut to the chase: the problem with the Josephine v Antonie dilemma is that it is not really about Josephine and Antonie, or not any more. It is about today's factions. The fact is that if the Immortal Beloved was Josephine, it means Solomon's solution is not correct, which would be a painful admission for his disciples and admirers. Moreover, on Josephine's side it's unfortunate that Klapproth - who died several years ago - entered into some startlingly belligerent and rather wild-toned arguments about it, even with scholars of the calibre of Jan Swafford (whose book stays sensibly neutral on the issue, though seems unusually in favour of Bettina Brentano). It's not impossible that Klapproth harmed his own cause through sheer obsessiveness; moreover, his translations are not of the quality one could wish for, but their existence may perhaps have prevented others from producing more lucid ones. 

Rita Steblin's clear, rational, scholarly writings have clarified much, however; she confirmed that Josephine expressed a wish to consult someone in Prague at the right time, and furthermore revealed that as late as 1818 Therese was mooting to her sister a possibility that they could consider going to London with Beethoven (see her article in The Musical Times, summer 2019). Steblin's involvement was key to the turnaround. There are probably power struggles rumbling away beneath the entire situation, and it's quite likely that they could involve the reverence sometimes accorded to senior male scholars, the propensity back in the 20th century for squishing away the women who see things differently...and much more besides.

This is a topic that can get under your skin. I'm not surprised it provokes obsession - and some of the texts in existence are almost terrifying in this respect. That was one reason that I hesitated for several years before plunging into writing Immortal. It is dangerous, disturbing and disruptive. 

But it's also a fantastic story, strong and important enough to become known beyond academia, especially as it potentially casts fresh light on some of Beethoven's music. I've found that it's better recognised in Germany and, indeed, Hungary (the Brunsviks were Hungarian) than it is in English-speaking countries. Few writers of my outlook would be able to resist it, so...here we are. 

Immortal is a novel because it couldn't be anything else. It travels from the spheres of Jane Austen at the beginning towards the emotions of Tristan and Isolde at the end. If you like it, great; if not, a pity; either way, it is not intended as a definitive statement on the ultimate truth. I'll leave that to academia and, possibly, the DNA lab. Meanwhile I heartily recommend that readers should also explore the writings of Solomon and Lund, weigh up the theories and decide for themselves. In the end, that's all we can actually do.

The difficult stuff

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/120346022_10158480110356480_8881572774162451993_n.jpg?v=1690914156" width="375">


Dear friends and supporters,

Here it is! The first copies are in. Yesterday they sent me a couple of boxfuls so I can do the necessaries for those of you who've pledged for a signed copy. It looks splendid: a chunky paperback with a cover image that should hopefully be recognisable to anyone who's heard of Beethoven and that allows the book to do more or less what it says on the tin. Release date is one month from today.

The cats came running to investigate and I thought they were being pleased for me, but as it turned out, they were more interested in the cardboard boxes.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/120365525_125338895983200_8080051111275300732_n.jpg?v=1690914156" width="500">


[Of course, the longer the book, the more can go wrong. I spotted a couple of "howlers" that had eluded my numerous read-throughs and at least three pairs of editorial eyes, and which are nobody's fault but my own. These are being corrected for the next print-run and the ebook.]

Moving swiftly on, there's some news about the narrated concerts we have lined up in November. My beloved concert partner Viv McLean has reluctantly decided he can't go ahead with them for family reasons. I'm devastated to lose him, but all being well we will reunite in the spring for more shows then. 

A few weeks ago, however, I bumped into an incredible musician who mentioned that he's been learning all the Beethoven sonatas this year...with the result that for at least two of the November performances, our pianist will be the great Piers Lane. The first of these concerts is at the <a href="https://www.barnesmusicsociety.org/copy-of-rachel-roberts-tim-horton">Barnes Music Society</a> at St Mary's Church, Church Road, Barnes, London SW13, on 12 November. The other is a week later for another society, for which I will confirm details ASAP. Both will admit socially distanced audiences from their membership. I'm thrilled and honoured that Piers can take these on and am crossing fingers desperately that nothing happens to shut down concerts between then and now.

Meanwhile, if you are a Friend, Associate or Benefactor of the <a href="https://www.twomoorsfestival.co.uk">Two Moors Festival </a>(Exmoor/Dartmoor), you now have access until 26 October to a talk about Beethoven that I was hoping to give in person as a pre-concert event, but for obvious reasons ended up recording at home in my study. 

Next, if you haven't yet found the <a href="https://fideliorchestracafe.com">Fidelio Orchestra Café</a> concerts in Clerkenwell, it's time you did. Some of the finest musicians in London perform in an intimate but suitably distanced setting and a luxury dinner is included in the ticket price. In November the café is hosting a festival involving talks, workshops and performances, named Up Close and Musical, across a long weekend. I'm looking forward massively to taking part in it with a Q&amp;A session and a reading. <a href="https://fideliorchestracafe.com/whats-on/up-close-and-musical-taking-you-to-the-heart-of-classical-music-3fbbx-h2z7a">You can find more details here.</a>

Last but not least, I'm brainstorming with those who know how to do digital book-launches. More on that soon, I hope.

What a roller-coaster this has been. I am completely knackered and am thinking of going (situation willing) for a short escape in October so that I can do nothing for a few days. Anyway, we're nearly there...

I hope you're all keeping well, safe and smiling and that the book will provide some welcome escapism as autumn and winter progress.

Thank you, as ever, for all your much-needed support and enthusiasm! Ludwig - or "Luigi" - lives.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

It's arrived!

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMMORTAL_front_cover_25000e3e-5e91-4baa-925e-ba7ce5a9df4b.jpg?v=1690914165" width="321">


 

Dear friends and supporters,

You've probably received a message from Unbound announcing that IMMORTAL has gone to press. So there we are: done, dusted and ready to rock. People have been asking how I feel, expecting "great", "thrilled", "proud" and "let's PARTAAY...except we can't..." .

The reality is that I'm scared witless.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who, throughout this hideous year, hasn't been enjoying the dark. I've woken in the small hours almost every night in a state of anxiety that does violence to my mind, heart and physical state. Sometimes it's about the cat throwing up: is it really just hairballs? Next up, so to speak, the collapse of the arts: 64 per cent of the UK's musicians are thinking of leaving the profession, according to the ISM. If you've lived half a century fuelled, inspired and/or paid by music and theatre, the prospects are bleak. Then the knock-on effects: where will we all be in a year's time? Will we even be alive to witness the wreck our country will become if there's a no-deal Brexit? Oftener than not, I'm feeling as if I'm on the Titanic yelling about the iceberg ahead, and everyone's shrugging and saying "but it's not in anyone's interests to hit an iceberg...".

But  that's not what's waking me in the nocturnal garden of panic. It's something worse: THE BOOK. Have I overwritten? Have I left out something crucial? Have I interpreted x, y or z right? Are people in the right place at the right time doing the right thing? Have I thanked all the right people, and what will they say if I haven't? If not, tough: it's too late. I find comforting words to talk myself down: the book is long because it starts in the 1790s, ends in 1828, and is written from Therese's perspective in 1759, so there is a lot to fit in - and I have actually cut 21,000 words. It could easily have been double the length. Gigantic 19th-century novels were fine in the 19th century, but no longer. I excised a whole chapter exploring notions of romanticism and it pretty much broke my heart; but then, I never finished reading Les Misérables because Hugo takes us into a labyrinth of a section set in a nunnery, which goes on and on, and I failed to find my way out. If only someone had said, "Look, Victor, about that nunnery..." As for people being in the right place at the right time: sometimes they're not, because if Therese is observing her sister, she has to be there with her. Therefore there are moments when I've put her in Vienna although she was, in reality, in Budapest. I am upfront about this in the "author's note". Is there still such a thing as "artistic licence"?

I can justify all these questions and alarms all I like, but I still wake up panicking. A Facebook post asking how people deal with anxiety attacks produced such a welter of responses that it's clear innumerable others feel exactly the same way. If you do: my sympathies and solidarity.

I still don't know which, if any, of our autumn narrated concerts will go ahead. I don't know when we can have our launch party or give one special benefactor his private concert. I don't know if the book will be welcomed and praised, or if it and I will be torn limb from spine. You may like it. You may loathe it. It's up to you; either way, there's nothing more I can do about it now. 

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support, your kindness and your enthusiasm for the idea of IMMORTAL. I hope the reality will live up to it. 

Please excuse me while I go and pop another Kalms.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

Nights in the garden of panic

Dear friends and supporters,

You're probably familiar with a Beethoven stand-alone piano piece usually known as "Rage Over A Lost Penny". It is published as his Op. 129. I'm attaching a video in which we can follow the sheet music while listening.

Of course it has nothing to do with a lost coin, whether penny or florin. The only reason we think it has is...Anton Schindler. Yes, it's good old reliable (not) Schindler again. Why did he pin such an association onto it? You can see how dangerous this is if/when you reflect that many of us overlook the thing as inconsequential and don't think to look into its raison d'etre until it's too late.

The real title is 'Alla ingherese' - a word that doesn't exist. He could have put 'Ungherese' - Hungarian - or 'Zingarese' - Gypsy style. 'Ingherese' is a kind of composite, a description that is more apt than it might seem: it fuses the other two possibilities at a time when they were very much conflated in the musical imagination of the day. (See also: Franz Liszt a few decades later.) 

Moreover, it's not a late work. It's an earlyish one. It is thought to date from the late 1790s. It's a pretty good piece - catchy, showy, fun - but it was left unpublished. Why? 

It was in 1799 that Beethoven met the Brunsviks for the first time. It's possible that this rondo predates that, if by not very long. The main influence is his teacher Haydn's whirling, thrilling Gypsy finales - and reflecting on that, perhaps the dizzying semiquaver patterns in this piece suddenly make sense. Perhaps he already had "a bit of a thing" about Hungarian-style music before the Brunsviks of Korompa and Martonvásár walked into his life. Perhaps he wrote it just a tad later. Perhaps it's all happy coincidence. One way or another, though, there was some reason a little misinformation about it started doing the rounds that encouraged people to consider it something it was not. That whooshing sound is a busy broom close to a welcoming carpet.

Such is the deeply ingrained preconception that resulted that, regrettably, the lost penny is now also missing from IMMORTAL. Now I am in a rage over a lost reference, because the proofing is finished and it's too late to add it. 

Anyway, there's no proof of anything and the book is quite long enough already. That's one useful quality of the Unbound 'writing shed' updates - I can tell you about it here instead. 

Enjoy!

Love and best wishes, 
Jessica x

Rage over a lost...Hungarian Rondo?

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Chateau_Heralec.jpg?v=1690914216" width="500" height="242">


(I know, I know, I couldn't resist it...)

Dear friends and supporters,

Today has brought one of those infuriating Things That Happen Sometimes. It is the deadline for returning the corrected proofs of IMMORTAL. Would you be able to sleep if it's 30 degrees plus and you have a few hours left to perfect 125,000 words that will probably be sitting on someone's shelf long after you're pushing up the daisies? Surprise, surprise, I was wide awake and googling at 4am. 

It's extraordinary the kind of things that slip through to proof stage when you know you should have trapped, squished and binned them months ago. The correct spelling, for instance, of Hungarian Vizslas. (Yes, there are some dogs in the book.) Or a significant statue, deriving from ancient Greece: do we call her Venus Callipyge or Aphrodite Kallipygos? And where, oh where, is that chateau in south Moravia that Josephine and her second husband, Stackelberg, tried to buy in 1810-11 which left them financially ruined in the runaway inflation? As with so many couples of all eras who try to heal their relationship by buying a house, this move was a terrible mistake. 

I've been hunting for this house for about four years. I have never managed to find it. Therese's memoirs call it 'Witschapp' and all I knew was that it was a large estate not far from Znaim (today's Znojmo), that it belonged to a widowed Countess Trauttmansdorff - and that there appear to be more chateaux per square metre in south Moravia than there are chocolate shops in Bruges, which is really saying something. Aristocratic families such as the Trauttmansdorffs, Liechtensteins, Kinskys and Lobkowitzes owned many, if not most of them. 

This morning at 4.30am I found it. At least, the most likely candidate yet. It was in the right region; it was owned by a Countess Trauttmansdorff around the right time; and it is gorgeously romantic. You can imagine Josephine falling in love with such a place, deep in the countryside in the Moravian 'highlands', surrounded by glorious landscapes, priding itself on its pure air, deep nights and spring water. 

The reason that this place is not in most online guides to Moravian castles is that it's currently a luxury spa hotel. (Just think, maybe I could have gone and stayed there and claimed it on expenses as a research trip...) It's called Chateau Herálec. Pictured above. Isn't it gorgeous?

So there we have it, I am 90% sure this is the right place and I had a few hours to integrate some impression of its reality into the otherwise rather bare and nasty dramatic scenes that take place there. Not wanting to push up the word count again, knowing it's really too late to do more remedial work to the book, I slotted in a few sentences, adjusted some adjectives, lobbed in a landscape, and that was about it. 

Years of googling, finally fulfilled, result in three or four sentences. And this is probably why more people do not let themselves be drawn into writing this type of book. What appears in it is perhaps 10 per cent of the preparatory research, and you can bet your bottom dollar that every reader will find a different mistake or omission to point out to me once it's too late to do anything about it.

The plan is that the book goes to print at the end of this week. The next stage will be all about planning for the concerts and other events that were/maybe are still supposed to happen in the autumn around the release date - if any can go ahead in any form. Watch this space...

Stay cool, keep well and enjoy the sunshine.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

Witschapp doc?

The final edit is done! I am now waiting for the page proofs. This is a scary prospect, because it is too late to change anything substantial. I'm an inveterate tinkerer when it comes to revisions, and especially when so much of the hard graft has been done under tricky circumstances: in lockdown, like so many other people, I have found concentration tough, distraction everywhere, anxieties glooping up about my friends and family in hotspots such as New York and South Africa, and the sheer ache of remembering what else should have been happening now. My phone insists on reminding me again and again that I am meant to fly to Hong Kong tomorrow, and Sydney thereafter. I was going to take the 'Immortal' concert to the Australian Festival of Chamber Music next week...

So this is why revisions are crucial and must be careful. Yet at the same time, it is weirdly easy to overwork things. I printed out the manuscript for the second edit: you can see things on the printed page that are not obvious when you're used to staring at your words on the screen. I also read everything aloud, and I mean everything, because it will show you when something jars. If it doesn't flow, it's got to go.

And yet I made some changes to the printed-out ms that, when I came to input them on the computer later on, I found I did not want to implement after all. They were better the first time round. Less pure, perhaps, but more "real". 

Meanwhile, what's left of the music industry is busy Beethovening as much as it can. A three-part series on BBC4 entitled 'Being Beethoven', with Peter Capaldi as the voice of Ludwig, is well worth watching, but frustrating for me on a few counts. How many times have I heard the words "Beethoven did not write much music in 1817" - but there's no reference to the effect of the external circumstances. 1817 was a fearful year, following Napoleon's return from Elba in 1815, the ensuing battles in which dozens of thousands were killed just when everyone had thought it was all over, and the chronic failure of two harvests, one under the malign influence of a cloud of volcanic ash from Indonesia. They called 1817 'the year of the beggers', there was a terrible famine across Europe and there was a typhus epidemic. So, no, Beethoven didn't write a whole lot of music that year, and can you blame him? This is exactly my objection to the ghettoisation of classical music in its little detached bubble. It's intimately connected to everything that is happening in the world around it, because it's a human creation and it cannot help but be so. Oh, and they got their princes in a twist. It was Lichnowsky who gave Beethoven his first stipend, not Lobkowitz. Apart from that, it's great - do take a look it.

Today, somewhere, there is likely to be a great composer sitting in his/her study trying to work, but having to homeschool the kids, spend hours waiting on the phone trying to arrange a bank loan to make sure the family can eat, writing furious letters to their MP about how the furlough scheme has not included them and they have no income at all, and wondering if a note of their music will ever be heard in a concert hall again. And someday a biographer (assuming we still have them) will say something like: "XYZ was experiencing a fallow period in 2020 and it can all be traced back to his/her relationship with his/her father."

I'm sure you get my drift. I'll shut up now and leave you in peace. I'm trying to get ahead on other work before the proofs arrive...

Keep well, keep safe and keep listening to Beethoven.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

The proofs are in the pudding

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Young_LvB.jpg?v=1690914179" width="192" height="263">


Dear friends and supporters,

There are TWO (2) DAYS left in which you can get your name listed in IMMORTAL as a patron. Next week I shall send back the final edit (if you think I've been quiet recently, well, it's a lot of work) and the book gets turned into proofs. After that, only errors can change: no more additions. So if you have not yet put in a pledge and you want to be there, it is literally your last chance.

In the meantime, I'm thrilled to reveal that some sneak previews I sent out have resulted in three absolutely incredible endorsements for the book. Here we are:

“IMMORTAL is a revelation, offering the ideal blend of historic exactitude and a book you simply won’t want to put down." -- Daniel Hope, violinist and new president of the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn

“The perfect companion for this landmark Beethoven anniversary year. Jessica’s writing is, as always, deeply knowledgable, emanating from a profound understanding of her material. This new book brings the human, vulnerable side of Beethoven into focus for our 21st Century audience.” -- Marin Alsop, conductor

"From its first, dazzlingly-rendered pages, IMMORTAL pulls you into a vanished world and an utterly compelling love story – at its centre, one of music’s greatest and most enduring mysteries. Few authors understand better than Jessica Duchen the way music can change the course of a life; and few writers make that music leap more vividly off the page. If you’ve ever wondered what Ludwig van Beethoven was like as a man, here he is, painted as if from life: inspiring, infuriating, and intensely, unapologetically real. Because for all her understanding of art and character, and her brilliantly-described evocations of early 19th-century Vienna in all its splendour and squalor, Duchen never forgets that at the core of all great music – and all great stories – beats a human heart."

 -- Richard Bratby, music critic and author

Thank you to all three of them, many thousands of times!

Progress here is good and I have to say that preparing a book for publication doesn't half keep your mind off pandemics and lockdowns. Take care, everyone, keep well and thank you again for all your support. More soon...

Love and best wishes, 
Jessica

Some wonderful endorsements for IMMORTAL - and last chance to be a patron!

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_6448_a70bde28-f2b6-473a-b550-b51e7049a9f0.jpg?v=1690914172" width="500">


Dear friends and supporters,

Here is the 'Letter to the Immortal Beloved', scrawled in pencil by an impassioned Ludwig van Beethoven on 6 July in a year that careful research eventually - after a very long time - traced to 1812. I took this photo in Vienna during my research trip last October. You can see his increasing haste, the relatively sedate beginning, the whirl of the conclusion (written the next morning): Ewig mein, ewig dein, ewig UNS. Ever mine. Ever yours. Ever US. 

How I would love to get a professional graphologist onto Beethoven's handwriting. I was fascinated by this art/skill several decades ago when it was all the rage, and now, applying what I remember of that, I detect the following:

The base lines slope upward. He's optimistic. 
The squiggles and loops are extravagant and original, yet not out of balance. He is idiosyncratic, but utterly sane. 
The lower loops often form cradles, as if he is romantic, but cut off, as if that yearning is as yet unfulfilled. 
He is in a hurry, especially on the last page, which was written the next morning. 
Ever thine, ever mine, ever us: it is the US that gets the most emphasis! 
The writing goes "whoosh" - he is in a ferment of passion. 
The writing is large and spaced out - he takes up a lot of space of his own. 
The lower loops sometimes tangle with the lines below - he is over-involved. 
Look at the left margin. The beginnings of the lines start further and further left. This could indicate that he is drawn to the past (unless I've remembered all this wrongly). The lower loops also list left. That is interesting, because could it be bound up with the fact that he had known her a long time? Indeed, he first met Josephine in 1799. 
 
I'm optimistic too: I am expecting the final copyedit back at any moment, and the book is due to go to print on 14 August. Release date has been moved from 1 October to 29 October, I'm afraid, but this is actually very good news even though it will keep the volume away from you for a few more weeks: it's because the "posh" list to which it has been moved requires advance copies further in advance of publication. 

I hope you're all keeping well and cheerful. The news of extra support for the arts world, as announced today, has certainly given me a bit of a boost in terms of mood and I hope it will be as positive as it sounds. I have been spending spare hours, when there are any, practising the piano, learning some Beethoven sonatas I've never tackled before because I thought they'd be too difficult, but it turns out they're not... but that deserves an update of its own.

A massive thank you for all your support, your pledges, your faith in me and in "Luigi" - onwards and upwards!

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

On this day, 1812...

Dear friends and supporters,

I know everyone says their news is exciting (and if it wasn't then it probably wouldn't be news at all). But what I have to report now is, I promise, seriously good.

GHOST VARIATIONS and ODETTE both came out on Unbound's Digital List - so-called, though it is also paperbacks - and I was delighted with how they went. IMMORTAL was signed up on the same basis. But Unbound has, in fact, two lists: this one and another, which is somewhat more, well, snazzy. Think business class v economy, assuming we can ever fly again. And you know how sometimes you reach the check-in desk and they look at their screen and utter those magical words "We're upgrading you today". And at once in your mind's eye you see leg-room, salad and free champagne? These joys may or may not turn out to be true, and the destination remains the same, but you might reach it feeling a little better supported than you would have otherwise.

And so it is with IMMORTAL. Yes, we just got upgraded to the extra-super list, and I did open some champagne and Tom had your share because I can't invite you in at the moment, and I do rather feel as if I am flying. 

None of this would have been possible without your support, which has made this book into reality. Thank you - to you, to everyone at Unbound, and to those special people who provided the pitchfork that prodded me into action - and let's reach 33,000 feet together!

Attached, some music to help us get there. Enjoy. 

Love and best wishes, 
Jessica

PS - if you are not already a subscriber to IMMORTAL, there is still time to get your name in the book by making a pledge. Plenty of nice options remain! Check the full list on the main project page to see them.

Exciting news. No, REALLY exciting news

Dear friends and supporters,

I hope you're keeping well and safe. Aren't we lucky that this has been the sunniest spring in...possibly ever?

As lockdown continues, sort of, vaguely, and as the government's award-winning communication strategy leaves nobody quite sure what we're meant to be doing or how, many of us are starting to think of new ways to function. Some of us are trying ideas we've never tried before. I have been brushing up my German online and starting to do some Pilates - though mostly I am working on IMMORTAL. At the end of April I was supposed to be chairing a discussion for the Royal Philharmonic Society and Garsington Opera about Beethoven, especially Fidelio. It bit the dust, to everyone's disappointment...

...except that it hasn't. We can do it online, from the comfort of our own homes. It has been rescheduled for 26 May at 6pm and will feature our originally planned panellists: tenor Toby Spence (who was going to sing Florestan for Garsington), pianist and scholar David Owen Norris, composer Freya Waley-Cohen and conductor and Garsington music director Douglas Boyd. I will be 'Dimblebying' for the occasion. I understand they're even hoping to figure out a way that Toby can sing us something with David at the piano. 

You can watch the talk live on the Garsington <a href="https://www.facebook.com/GarsingtonOpera/">Facebook</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/GarsingtonOpera">YouTube</a> pages at 6.00pm (BST) on Tuesday 26 May. Members of the RPS will be able to see it online at the RPS's members' site thereafter.

Please join us for a lively discussion and some immortal music. 

Meanwhile I'm going through IMMORTAL, reading it aloud, which is an absolutely essential part of the process. And I'm doing it backwards (well, not literally backwards word for word, but starting with the last chapter and working slowly forwards - otherwise one risks ending up with early chapters that are well wrought and late ones that are another fine mess, which is not ideal). Please forgive me if I am not being massively communicative at the moment!

Take care and, as they say, hang in there.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

PS, did you know that Beethoven wrote a version of 'Sally in our Alley'? Here's Toby singing it. Enjoy.

Beethoven Matters: a discussion with the Royal Philharmonic Society and Garsington, online

The website Five Books very kindly interviewed me about my top five choices of reading about Beethoven. It's a relatively in-depth discussion, if a bit rambly on my part (I didn't realise it would be a word-for-word transcript of the phone call), and aimed to identify some good material primarily for the general rather than academic music lover.

It seems to have gone down quite well, so <a href="https://fivebooks.com/best-books/beethoven-jessica-duchen/?fbclid=IwAR3xZhZhw4qRZr6zOO1-jMIEOajs50YiOdQz2CctCBYOu5g10MjCWQcm-Hk">here's the link</a>. Enjoy! And please read the books as they are all wonderful in their own ways. 

Work on Immortal presses on apace...

My top 5 books on Beethoven

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="287" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/josephine-brunsvik-721596e6-dd73-4848-a219-2511879d68f-resize-750_a0117227-f0af-40e5-97a7-a7b1e897e69b.jpg?v=1690914201" width="250">


I am trying to see "my" characters. Normally it's quite easy; and it's vital, because the better you can visualise them in your mind's eye, the more vividly they will come across (at least, this is the theory). I used to make a character chart for each person in a novel, setting down everything from their height and eye colour to their favourite objects, their preferences in food, the time they get up in the morning, and more. I gave this up, because I reckoned if I forgot what colour their eyes were, I shouldn't be writing the book at all.

You'd think it would help when a "character" is real and portraits of them exist. In Beethoven's case, it makes it more difficult, because one is locked down, so to speak, with the images that one has known all one's life. When I imagine him, though, I see something, or someone, slightly different. The picture lingers in the mind's eye: the stocky, dark figure, hat in hand, lurking at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Therese to invite him up to visit Pepi. I know this person, although he is not the one in the portraits. He is slightly shorter, slightly bulkier, and he wears the appropriate garb - blue coat with tails, boots, pale yellow waistcoat à la Werther. He looks up the stone staircase towards me - I am Therese - and I know that dark, defiant, pained gaze, the snub nose, the wide smile that lights up the hall when I say "She's not here, but come in and have some coffee..." I know he is not here to see me, and this hurts a little bit, but she has run away from him and I don't want him to go without telling me how he is, what he's been writing, what his plans are for summer in the country. So who am I - when I am not being Therese - really seeing?

It takes me a moment to realise that this person is actually my old duo partner from university. Oops. Well, is that so wrong?  He was also a composer and I loved his music. He won an opera competition, the piece was staged in the West Road Concert Hall and I helped with proof-reading the orchestral parts. He was a wonderful violinist and we had a lot of fun together playing Mozart and Brahms and lollipops like the Fauré Berceuse, performing which used to get us into May balls for free. I haven't seen him for more than 20 years now and am far from sure where he is. Like most composers, he probably wanted to be Beethoven. He wasn't; but maybe I've just fixed that for him by mistake.

What about Josephine, or Pepi as she's called? I think she is a ballerina, one of the lead dancers from the Royal Ballet as was when I was a teenager. Perhaps she is Lynn Seymour, with her huge brown eyes and dimpled cheeks, dancing Anastasia, or Marguerite (not that Lynn Seymour ever did dance Marguerite, but that's another matter), or maybe Mary Vetsera in Mayerling. She is sensual, indomitable, complex and slightly nuts; fragile, empathetic, true hearted, controlling, trapped, determined, haughty, devoted, idealistic, destroyed. Seymour, the finest of dance actresses, could have been a glorious Josephine in the ballet of Immortal - the problem being that Beethoven's music does not suit ballet, never did and probably never will, so that might be kind of tricky. [Pictured above: a portrait of the real Josephine.]

Therese is more difficult because I am experiencing the book through her eyes. I see her figure in the distance slip through the shadows in the archways of the Minoritenkirche, or pace through the Vienna streets in her habitual you-cannot-see-me black dress, steering clear of the soldiers. Her image comes into focus by the lake at Martonvásár, watching the moonlight on the water and vowing into the night sky to consecrate herself to the service of God and Truth: her eyes - they are hazel-green, I don't know whether they really were or not, but I see them this way - are full of tears for her dead father. She knows she is the old maid to be, the least attractive among her sisters because of an affliction of the spine that looks and sounds in the 21st century like scoliosis; but she knows, too, that she has other and better things to do with her life. When I think of Therese I imagine the portrait of her with her hair wound into Grecian-Priestess ribbons, the one that found its way into Beethoven's possession and is still in the Beethovenhaus now; but chiefly I see her either from within her own head, or in the distance, the shadowy woman who sees more than she is seen.

Weirdly, of the three Brunsvik sisters the one I visualise most clearly is "Lotti": Charlotte, real name Caroline, the youngest and in fact the least prominent in the story. Perhaps because I have never seen an actual portrait of Lotti, my mental image is unfettered. She is nobody but herself. She is dark with huge eyes and a wonderful wide smile; she is short and relatively curvy beside her garden-rake elder sisters, and her beloved, Emerich Teleki, loses his heart to her in moments. But by the time Therese visits Lotti in Transylvania near the end of the book, Lotti's jet-black hair has turned snow white. We need Lotti for several reasons. Notably, her eldest daughter, Blanka Teleki, was Therese's pupil and became the first person in Hungary to petition for equal rights for women; she participated in the 1848 revolution and was thrown in jail for ten years together with her female partner, Klara. Also, we know that after Christoph von Stackelberg died in Estonia, Minona went to live with Lotti and Emerich in Transylvania and stayed there as her uncle's housekeeper and librarian after her aunt died. 

Sometimes one senses more than one knows. I had a scene in Ghost Variations where Jelly, at a party turning on the charm and chatting happily to an admirer, kicks off her shoes. It seemed simply something she might do, though I had no reason to believe that she had or would. Last summer, coincidentally, I was at a party in Italy with her one living relative; we were in a beautiful Tuscan garden, talking to people before a concert, and she sat down on a bench and kicked off her shoes. I nearly dropped my prosecco.

Back to the edits - at least this task is keeping me out of mischief during lockdown. Thank you all for your support for Immortal! I hope you are keeping well and cheerful. Please stay safe and if you're stuck at home, as you probably are, read a good book or several. (If you have not already placed a pledge for the book, you can still do so - the majority of the levels are still very much up for grabs.)

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

Visualisation

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="301" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Beethoven_bust_89430980-c24f-4a8f-8b6d-f0a2fd09dd1b.jpg?v=1690914168" width="500">


Dear friends and supporters,

It's Friday, apparently - not that I'd have guessed. The days are measured out in porridge, coffee, soup, tea and job-lots of 10,000 steps and by 9.30pm I am knackered and ready for a good long sleep. How do I normally manage, out at 3 or so performances a week, back at 11pm or later, navigating busy trains and the throngs of central London?

The 10,000 steps is Tom's insistence (I'd be quite content sitting at my desk checking the book edits all day). Generally, I can't keep up. He is loving his time off with a passion. He does yoga, practises the violin all morning, goes to Waitrose a couple of times a week, puts on the washing, sometimes goes running or demands a good long walk in the park, and has been doing most of the cooking while I'm trapped in 1812 tussling with Luigi and Josephine. I've always known he has more energy than I do, and now I'm glad and grateful that someone has the oomph to mow the lawn.

And so to Immortal... The editing is going pretty well. The big issues are coming out in the wash, so to speak, and I am ever more impressed with the job that the doughty structural editor has done on my 135000 words: where she has made big cuts, I first of all stare with dismay, but then read the new version and think "ah, riiiight..." - because she has found ways of allowing certain things to speak for themselves, instead of being spelled out, which is something I should know but can't always spot from up close. Josephine's first husband's waxworks museum is a case in point. The book is haunted by his ghoulish image of King Ferdinand IV of Naples. The glass eyes of ETA Hoffmann's Dr Coppelius are never far away. But you will need to go and read Hoffmann to learn more about this.

I am continuing with daily (almost) readings from Ghost Variations as my personal Jessanory on my new Youtube channel. Each day I upload 13-17 mins of it around 5pm. The filming is done with PhotoBooth on my computer and it is pretty amateurish, not least because I can't be bothered getting glammed up and the cats may wander in in the background at any moment. Meanwhile, my evening reading is Anthony Trollope's The Warden, which is such a laser-sharp picture of small-town politics and fat-headed journalism that it could almost have been written this century. So with this mental mix, tempered by high anxiety, last night I had a nightmare: I had been filmed for a TV interview with Lang Lang and some other pundit and something went awfully wrong and the video of me was so terrible that some newspaper website ran it whole as a shaming exercise. I woke up shaking and relieved to discover that all I really have to deal with is a global pandemic. I might need to avoid Lang Lang's recordings for a few days.

And so we plough on. I have a few things to write and some of the concerts we had planned for this year are now going to take place next year instead (touchwood). All is not lost. It is still springtime and this weekend is going to be sunny. Enjoy it, and stay safe.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

Off the wall in 10,000 steps

Under normal circumstances (whatever "normal" means any more), I'd have to pinch myself to make sure all this is real. 
 
It's springtime. All week there hasn't been a cloud in the sky in which one could seek a silver lining. The magnolias are out and each day on my government-approved-exercise-walk I notice the new leaves have advanced another few bright millimetres. The cats are busy catting, aware only that it's sunny and warmish and they have licence to bounce. 
 
'Immortal' has come back from the structural editor. It is 10,000 words shorter, though I am going to want a few of those back. The editor is the same person who worked on 'Ghost Variations', and she did a splendid job with that one, so I totally trust her. I now have 3 weeks to put right 125,000 words and check a number of historical queries - but all the libraries are shut, so that is going to be interesting. The thing is, all my programme notes, spring/summer concerts and travel plans have gone up in smoke, so I have that weird thing called time to work on the book. 
 
And along with the time I have peace. There are no planes. The nursery school over the fence is shut too, and I no longer have to slam my window against the squealing and squalling of its playtime (yes, I am a nasty person sometimes - tough). 
 
There is no traffic on the South Circular. We can actually breathe. It's wonderful. 
 
Meanwhile as of yesterday I think I may qualify for government support, for the first time in my life. OK, I haven't read the small print yet, but I've been making an average living from self-employment since 1993, and any work I have that is related to live performance has gone. Which is a lot of it. 
 
My husband is at home, being incredibly positive and good company, and willing to do a lot of cooking. 
 
I don't have to go into central London and deal with crowds. I don't have to fight my way upstream at Waterloo Station in the rush hour. I hate that so much that it gives me dizzy spells. I don't miss it. 
 
For years I've been grumbling that there are no arts on TV any more. Now suddenly the BBC is going to start broadcasting the Royal Shakespeare Company. And 'Fidelio' from Covent Garden, and the 'Metamorphosis' ballet starring Edward Watson and a whole heap more. On the internet the National Theatre and the OperaVision channel and the Met and the Berlin Philharmonic and the LSO and even the LPO are busy streaming all kinds of archive material at the touch of a button. 
 
I've learned how to make a video, if in a rudimentary manner. Log on to my Youtube channel each day at 5pm for another episode of 'Jessanory' - I'm serialising 'Ghost Variations', because why not. You can subscribe for notifications about uploads. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC47WAiazMCFHpyHFyzvP55A">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC47WAiazMCFHpyHFyzvP55A</a> 
 
They renationalised the railways. They did. I can't help laughing (see 'Hungarian Dances' for why). 
 
I'm not eating junk food, because I can't just nip into Waitrose and buy gf chocolate muffins or whatever (they have implemented a deeply civilised queuing system, but you should only go there if you absolutely have to). I am taking care to get enough exercise, so reaching 10,000 steps per day when I usually, totally, don't. And I am so anxious that the weight is dropping off me in any case. So I'm getting in shape quite by accident. 
 
Frankly, it's beyond my wildest dreams. 
 
There is only one snag. We are all effectively under house arrest because any of us may catch the illness. We may die at any time. 
 
And that is so frightening that we are taking care to appreciate each and every day as if it could be our last. 
 
Take care, dear all, and please stay home.

Springtime for Ludwig?

Dear friends and supporters,

I hope you are all keeping well, coping well and not feeling too anxious. It is a strange time and I've been hesitating to write updates because things change so rapidly, from day to day and sometimes hour to hour. 

I was hoping to invite you to some nice IMMORTAL concerts in late spring, but most of the planned events are being cancelled. In a way, this is positive because hopefully they can be rearranged for autumn or next year, once the book has actually come out. Losing my work writing programme notes for concerts has a silver lining in providing extra time to tackle the Beethoveny rewrites that will doubtless be necessary when the book comes back from its editor.

Meanwhile, I have just turned my semi-dormant blog site, JDCMB, into a coronacrisis diary. I'm aiming to write it daily, for several reasons: to chronicle what's going on, to feel connected to readers, friends and neighbours all over the world, and to make sure I write something reasonably creative every day. I used to treat it as a warm-up exercise, just as dancers take class every morning even if they are preparing to be Princess Aurora that night, and now I plan to do so again.

A colleague once told me that it's not enough to write: "You have to do something." Well, for writers, writing is doing. We write. That's what we do. And sometimes what we write makes other people do something much more effectively. 

You can find my daily diary at the blog site, here: <a href="https://jessicamusic.blogspot.com">https://jessicamusic.blogspot.com</a>. I won't put an update on Unbound about it every day, but if you want yet another regular inbox delivery you can sign up for it in the box on the blog sidebar. 

I hope you enjoy reading it and that it is helpful in some way, shape or form. 

Hang in there, as they say, and see you soon.

Love and best wishes, 
Jessica x

My London diary, going live on my blog

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="322" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Julius-Schmid-Beethovens-walk-in-nature.jpg?v=1690914198" width="500">


Dear friends and supporters,

In these weird times, it's good to try to maintain business as usual as far as humanly possible, so here is a Friday update. 

I spent a splendid afternoon yesterday talking to the academic and writer Leah Broad about IMMORTAL and other matters musical, an interview that will go out on her podcast series. Among a range of interesting questions that she put forward was: how we find out who Beethoven really was, under layer after layer of mythologising that has built up over two and a half centuries (don't imagine that the myths only began after his death - even his father was at it). I've been thinking this over... Here are some of the bigger myths, and a few suggested solutions.

1. Beethoven was mad. (See also: portraits over the years)

No. He did have a heck of a temper, but that is different. He was one of the strongest, sanest and most intelligent people you'd have been likely to meet around Vienna. 

2. Beethoven was stone deaf.

Some evidence has come to light in his conversation books that he may have retained a little bit of hearing in his left ear. He gives advice to others about the importance of not straining the ears and mentions that this has done him some good. In the Vienna museums you can see some of the aids he used at various points: ear trumpets designed by Mälzel (who developed the metronome too), a hood that sat on the piano to concentrate the sound within, and a thin piece of wood that he could place against his teeth, jaw or behind the ear to convey the vibrations from the piano to the bones.

3. Beethoven was misogynistic.

If you ask any person who has a bit of hearing loss or tinnitus what it is like to attend a noisy party, they will often agree that it is hellish. The distortion of sound, the assault on the ears, can be painful and it is generally impossible to hear what anyone is saying to you. It's not surprising if he didn't want to put himself through this. And living alone? This wasn't out of choice, at least not at first.

4. But people thought he was rude, horrid and nasty.

He would have shouted because he couldn't hear well enough to judge the volume (see also: many other people who are also deaf). He didn't suffer fools gladly, but I can't say I blame him. Nevertheless, look at the way young people adored him. Take, for instance, Fanny Giatassino, the teenaged daughter of the head of the school to which Beethoven sent his nephew, Karl, for a while. She had a crush on the composer and would have loved to develop a relationship - but he told her gently that he loved someone else, even there was no prospect of him ever being able to marry that person. Then there was the young musician Karl Holz, who was second violin in Ignaz Schuppanzigh's quartet after the great man came back to Vienna from a spell working in Russia and reformed his ensemble; Holz was devoted to Beethoven and was one of the three people who after his death discovered the Heiligenstadt Testament and the Immortal Beloved letter in the apartment. The kindest gesture of all is one that he sent to a little girl named Emilie in 1812 - probably the nicest response a fan letter has ever had. 

5. There are three periods of Beethoven works: early, middle and late.

At the time of the "Eroica", Beethoven deliberately jettisoned his old methods in order to seek a "new path"; this was the start of his "heroic" period, which produced such masterpieces as the central six symphonies, the "Waldstein" and "Appassionata" sonatas, the "Razumovsky" Quartets Op. 59 and much more. It is also true that the late works occupy a space all their own. But the risk with the term "early" is that works falling into this category, i.e. before about 1802, are too easily dismissed as juvenilia. If he had never changed the way he wrote, he would still be among the greatest composers of his time for pieces that include the first 14 piano sonatas, the first two symphonies and piano concertos, the Op. 18 string quartets...the list could go on. If in doubt, just listen to this lecture by András Schiff about the Piano Sonata Op. 10 No. 3: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50x4VDgTYg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50x4VDgTYg</a>

6. Beethoven was mean about Haydn, saying he learned nothing from him.

To see why, consider his relationship with his father; then look at his aspirations for musical study; then see what he did later. His father, who was an alcoholic and used to beat up his sons, tried to turn the gifted young Ludwig into a child prodigy performer. Ludwig didn't take kindly to this and it probably accounted for some of his later problems with authority figures - including Haydn. Next, remember that he wanted to study with Mozart, but because of his mother's illness and his subsequent responsibility to look after his younger brothers, the opportunity passed him by. Mozart agreed to accept him, but Ludwig had to go back to Bonn, and by the time he returned Mozart was dead. So Haydn, regrettably, was second best. Later, once he was well established, Beethoven could acknowledge his debt to Haydn with humility. At the last gala performance of The Creation in Haydn's presence, it is said that the crowds parted like the Red Sea to let Beethoven through to kneel at the elderly composer's feet and ask for his blessing. 

7. Beethoven hated playing on demand.

He did not like various patrons' demands that he serve them as performing monkey, that's for sure, and the virulence with which he rejected such demands is unmistakable (see also: his father's prodigy-coercion attempts). Yet he liked nothing better than improvising for those he was close to, or - particularly - those whom he could help. From time to time he acted almost as a kind of music therapist, using his improvisation to tap into the troubled spirits of listeners such as Antonie Brentano, who was deeply depressed after her father's death, finding the right shade of emotion in the music to move them to tears and enabling them to find this crucial release. 

8. Beethoven drank himself to death.

He liked his wine, and as his father and brothers had drink problems, chances are strong that the trait went into him too, to some extent. It is not entirely clear whether he died of liver cancer or of sclerosis - I have seen both theories. BUT personally I think he may have had coeliac disease. It would not have been recognised at the time, of course, but this serious illness that involves gluten intolerance could have accounted for the continual stomach upsets he suffered, the periods of exhaustion and depression, and an early death from cancer of the bowel and liver. This is my personal theory and I've not seen it explored anywhere, but I think it could be worth looking at. Another theory is lead poisoning, and I suppose that is possible too. But I want some clever person to take a look at the coeliac idea. I hear you scoff at the rubbish that you think gluten intolerance is. I promise you, coeliac disease is a serious matter and predisposes you to bowel cancer, only sometimes they don't tell you this until it is too late. This is what happened to my father. Descriptions of Beethoven's ill health look familiar.

9. The Immortal Beloved was his sister-in-law Johanna and the nephew, Karl, was his natural son - must be, cos the movie says so.

Bunkum. He may have had a "natural" child, but it wasn't Karl. He had good reasons for fighting Johanna for custody - he was concerned that she had been convicted for theft, for instance, and he seems to have held great anxiety about keeping the family name squeaky clean, since undoubtedly it would reflect on him and potentially his work. The entire incident did the boy Karl a great deal of harm and rebounded horrifically against Beethoven in the end.

10. Beethoven is Early Music and should only be played by Early Music ensembles in an Early Music style.

In the grand scheme of things, 250 years is nothing! We don't call Shakespeare "early theatre" when the art form goes all the way back to ancient Greece. Ditto for music. Beethoven speaks to us as strongly now as to any previous generation - perhaps more so than ever. We should never, ever ghettoise him with terminology and restrictive attitudes. I see him as the first Romantic, in many ways; but more than that, he is an eternal voice that speaks across the centuries, showing us the best of all that humanity can be.

Thank you, everyone, for your support and kindness - and remember, if you haven't yet pledged for the book, you still can! Most of the pledge levels are still available (except the LPO concert and the Early Bird) and every little helps. If we can raise some more funds we might be able to get a good historical picture for the cover, which at the moment is looking unlikely (these things can cost a lot). 

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

Top Ten Beethoven Myths to Debunk Right Away

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Beethoven_caricature_by_Anne_Marie_Steen_Petersen.jpg?v=1690914149" width="347">


Dear friends and supporters,

If you're not yet familiar with the website of the <a href="https://www.beethoven.de">Beethovenhaus Bonn</a>, do please take a look at it. This museum and research centre at the composer's birthplace is the world centre for work on him, and their digital library is a treasure trove, available to view wherever you may be. During the writing of IMMORTAL I have spent innumerable hours online, browsing their collection of letters, images and more. Today I'd like to draw your attention to the section on <a href="https://www.beethoven.de/en/archive/view/6007892788379648/Head+and+half+length+portraits">portraits of Beethoven</a> - and the contrast between those created while he was alive, and others imagined after his death. (Above: a caricature of Beethoven drawn by Anne Marie Steen Petersen, from a BRF record sleeve, viewable in the Beethovenhaus online collection.)

Look at the paintings and etchings of Beethoven as a young man from 1801 to 1806, even as a middle-aged-ish one around 1814. He looks...I don't want to say "normal", because you can detect in these images a certain bearing in his posture, a strength of character in his eyes, a person with what we'd possibly term "attitude". But certainly more "normal" than, say, the drawing above.

Was this man arrogant, aware of his own gifts, more intelligent, focused, hardworking and hot-tempered than most of those who came within his daily orbit? Perhaps: but he was, as an individual, quite believable. Then <a href="https://www.beethoven.de/en/archive/view/4863656995061760/Half+and+full+figure+depictions">look what happens later.</a> In the famous portrait in which he holds the manuscript of the Missa Solemnis, the cheekbones are elegant, but the scowl is strengthening; a drawing of him full-length shows him stocky and short-legged, almost a caricature. These pictures were all created before his death in 1827.

Now turn to the next section: <a href="https://www.beethoven.de/en/archive/view/5996912335388672/Half+figure+depictions">depictions after 1827</a>. At first they are honest, scowly, but with that distinguished bearing of confidence and assurance - an inner dignity despite all. Then they begin to change. They become more scowly still, and less controlled. The eyes seem to pop or to lower out from under heavy, gloomy brows; the stance has lost its uprightness. The attitudes begin to be wild. The artists seem to think they are depicting someone eccentric, even ghoulish. Some look downright mad.

They are, perhaps, showing Beethoven as people started to think of him as the years went by and whispers were transforming the composer posthumously from strong yet troubled soul to profound nutcase. Everything becomes exaggerated, Gothic, fit for legend, but little else. It makes headlines and encourages gossip if Beethoven is considered crazy or violent. Posterity had begun to strip him of his dignity and intellectual strength - qualities that simply shine out of those early, actual portraits.

I've seen descriptions of him as "physically ugly" time and again. But those Young Beethoven images - why? Physically ugly? No: he is strong, characterful and full of charisma. Besides, the attraction of a male musical star has never depended upon classic good looks (I've not noticed Hollywood-style matinée idols among the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or any recent pop singers, for instance...). Just because he was short and dark, that is no reason that Josephine or Julie or any other female would have failed to be magnetised by him.

Researching the 19th-century opera singer Pauline Viardot for a words&amp;music project some years ago, I was struck by exactly the same thing: writers kept on describing her as ugly. Even today, some articles still have to harp on the idea that she was ugly. But did that matter to the writer Ivan Turgenev, who was passionately in love with her for most of his adult life? Did it hell. It is commentators, not the people themselves, who appear to believe that only a physical beauty that matches classic preconceptions (ie, tall, slender, smiley and probably blonde) can account for attraction; and some have even been known to argue that an appearance considered less than perfect must discount certain candidates from probability when we look back at their relationships. 

The passage of the years builds up layer upon layer of false "tradition", sensationalised impressions, a distortion of reality. You can sometimes hear it in music too: take the way that the historically informed performance movement has stripped away layers of false tradition in Beethoven, whose symphonies, for instance, had somehow grown heavier and slower and more and more portentous until the mid 20th century. By the 1970s, enough was enough and a whole generation of musical researchers set about returning to original sources, intending to divine the truth of the composer's intentions and the way instruments would have been played in his day. The effects were transformative and have changed, probably forever, the way we listen to his music. 

Yet now, decades on, this approach too is building up its own layers of false tradition and imposing certain mannerisms for reasons that are never adequately explained. For example, one sometimes encounters performances in which phrases that drive forward suddenly fade out towards their end. Why? I've never seen any justification for it, in any score or treatise. Just as playing slowly and portentously used to be, mannerisms of this type are now handed down from generation to generation... Musicologists of the 2050s are going to have some fun unravelling it all.  

Anyway - I shall shut up about that now and get back to work. The book is now in the hands of its editor and I am expecting to see the results from her in about a month's time. This is nerve-wracking. I know it's too long. I also know that whatever you are expecting from it, you will probably find it is something different and I hope you're not too startled.

I'm going to leave you this week with a performance by Peter Serkin of the 'Hammerklavier' Sonata on a Graf fortepiano - my favourite recording of the work that remains closest of all to my heart. How many times have you heard people say "I respect the Hammerklavier, but I don't love it..." Received opinion yet again. I ADORE it. I think it is the greatest piano piece ever composed. Peter Serkin, whose playing I loved rather more than that of his father, Rudolf, was a peerless musician and exceptional human being. He died a few weeks ago of pancreatic cancer. His loss is being keenly felt around the musical community and I would like to offer this by way of tribute.

My profound thanks, as ever, for your support for the book and faith in "Luigi".

Love and best wishes, 
Jessica x

In portrait: how views of Beethoven transformed

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="482" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/beethovenmiddleaged.jpg?v=1690914126" width="425">


Dear friends and supporters,

Happy Valentine's Day to you all, and may the love of music be with you for this and every day! 

Ludwig (or Luigi, as Therese calls him) van Beethoven's love story is bigger than most of us had thought, myself included; and there's a chance that the repercussions go deeper into his art than one might expect. For the occasion, then, Udiscovermusic, the webzine attached to Universal Records, asked me to write an article on the Immortal Beloved topic. Here it is, and while I should say it includes spoilers, there is also plenty of information in it that is not in IMMORTAL, because I wanted to take a thoroughish look at the alternative scenarios that have been put forward, often very convincingly. 

Today, is there actual proof that our lady is Josephine? Actually there isn't. But there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence which makes this the most likely solution when you take into account the state of her life, her personality and Beethoven's. 

Here's the link: <a href="https://www.udiscovermusic.com/classical-features/beethoven-immortal-beloved/">https://www.udiscovermusic.com/classical-features/beethoven-immortal-beloved/</a>

The story of why it has taken Josephine's history so long to reach prominence really deserves another book to itself. The Immortal Beloved was suppressed almost out of existence by her own family after her death; for many years her and her family's estates were hidden away behind the iron curtain and impenetrable (to westerners) languages in Hungary and the Czech Republic; Minona herself is thought to have burned some papers; and the story goes that a servant stole a clutch of letters from her and absconded with them to America. I understand these are the 13 love letters that only re-emerged and were published in 1957. 

In the meantime, the cauldron is bubbling on. The book is still queuing for an editor and designer, and I HOPE THEY WON'T HAVE TOO MUCH OF A FRIGHT WHEN THEY SEE HOW LONG IT IS... The concert scripts are my next crucial project; again, there's a lot to fit in and my pianist concert partner Viv McLean and I are planning a thrashing-out session soon to test-drive a few different ideas. (And I have sourced a costume that feels reasonably Therese-like.)

Have a wonderful day, Valentine's or not, and if you are at a loose end tonight (never a pleasant thing, I know) come along to the Royal Festival Hall to hear a beautiful French concert by the LPO in which Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is playing the Ravel G major Piano Concerto (now, there's a composer who needs a novel...).

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

Happy Valentine’s Day, Luigi

Dear friends and supporters,

Welcome to the first Friday Update of the new year. We slunk out of winter for a few weeks far, far away in the sun (we must have been the only Brits in town not going to the cricket...) and are now back and trying to come to terms with the dubious future that our home country is facing in 2020. There's a rock of strength to draw upon, though, and his name is Ludwig van Beethoven. 

The other day the Oxford Philharmonic set off the 250th anniversary celebrations in high style with a launch at the German Embassy featuring John Suchet, director of the Beethovenhaus Bonn Malte Boecker, the orchestra's founder and conductor Marios Papadopoulos - and a bijou appearance by Alfred Brendel.

As well as enjoying a wonderful performance of part of the 'Kreutzer' Sonata by Natalia Lomeiko and Marios, we had the chance to hear and meet two of the musicians I'll be working with in our narrated concert at the Holywell Music Rooms in November, baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist Manon Fischer-Dieskau: if their performance here of 'An die ferne Geliebte' was anything to go by, we're in for a major, major treat. Please put 6 November into your diaries if you're within shooting distance of Oxford.

The atmosphere of celebration surrounding this anniversary is something very special: we need this unifying force deeply. It's a relief to feel we can mingle with friends united in a love of Beethoven, the universal energy of his music and the audible proof that boundaries do not exist. 

Some pieces of news reached me that evening that range from the encouraging to the distressing. The first is confirmation that IMMORTAL has targeted the right direction: it seems that around 99% of researchers now agree on who the 'Immortal Beloved' really was, and Josephine's rightful place is emerging at last. Also, that Minona Stackelberg probably was Beethoven's daughter. And that an opera has just been written about Minona's life by the Estonian composer Jüri Reinvere, who was able to research the Stackelberg side of the history in the archives of his native Tallinn. More about the opera here: <a href="https://www.evs-musikstiftung.ch/en/prize/prizes/grants-aid/composition-commissions/minona-opera-two-acts-and-four-pictures-juri">https://www.evs-musikstiftung.ch/en/prize/prizes/grants-aid/composition-commissions/minona-opera-two-acts-and-four-pictures-juri</a>. The premiere is in Regensburg - tomorrow.

The distressing news is the recent death of the musicologist Dr Rita Steblin, a few months ago. I am deeply indebted to her research and many articles on this subject. (I had, indeed, been trying to contact her...) If you are not familiar with her work, I recommend her articles on Beethoven and also Schubert very highly.

This follows the demise, not all that long ago, of John Klapproth, a controversial figure who is responsible for the only English translations of several key texts, including Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach's book about Beethoven and his Immortal Beloved. Klapproth was a pugnacious writer based in Australia. He had a tendency to take issue with anybody who refuted his interpretation of these events, sometimes excessively so. Nevertheless, I'm almost starting to wonder if there is a Tutenkhamun-type curse on all this. 

And IMMORTAL itself? As far as I'm aware, it is in the inbox of the editorial director and publication date is slated for 1 October. I'm waiting with some anxiety for feedback: no doubt there will be oodles of revision to do and I can't help wondering how much will have to be cut. Ghost Variations came back from the editor 14,000 words shorter, which was a bit of a shock, but worked; sometimes (usually) a sharp outside eye and an experienced editorial mind are the best things a writer can encounter. Stay tuned.

Here are a couple of treats for you to enjoy meanwhile. First of all, I've written an article about the 'Emperor' Concerto (and why the nickname is ludicrous) for Universal Music's website Udiscovermusic and you can read it here: <a href="https://www.udiscovermusic.com/classical-features/beethoven-emperor-concerto/">https://www.udiscovermusic.com/classical-features/beethoven-emperor-concerto/</a>

Next, if you subscribe to BBC Music Magazine, you will have noticed who's on the February issue's front cover. If you don't, no prizes for guessing. I was thrilled to be asked to contribute to this anniversary edition - I've done the biographical element, Beethoven's life in 20 key dates, and am grateful to them for mentioning IMMORTAL in a round-up of forthcoming books about him. More info and subscriptions/orders here: <a href="http://www.classical-music.com/magazine/current-issue/bbc-music-magazine">http://www.classical-music.com/magazine/current-issue/bbc-music-magazine</a>

And finally, a listening treat... see/hear attached 'Emperor' Concerto with Bernstein and Zimerman. I know there are those who prefer early music interpretations and this is not one. I, however, adore it. Enjoy.

Love and best wishes, 
Jessica

Beethoven Year is up and running

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="347" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Beethoven_messy_study.jpg?v=1690914194" style="font-family: -webkit-standard; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" width="236">


It's the morning after the night before. Happy Friday 13th, everyone. What sort of a place will the UK be three years from now? How the blazes did we get here? (And can Beethoven help?) (Above: I'm glad to see his study was even messier than mine.)

These concerns do have elements in common with IMMORTAL, which is why I'm devoting this week's Friday update to them.

One thing that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson share is that both have been on TV shows - Trump as centre of the US's The Apprentice, Johnson as satirical news quiz host on Have I Got News for You. People are used to being entertained by them. (And they are both blond. People seem to like blonds.) 

It's a peculiar quirk of human nature to prefer the utterly monstrous to the vaguely meh, and to prefer the entertainment value of the former to the latter's earnest, well-meaning anxieties. The question is: what constitutes entertainment?

Once upon a time, back in the frivolous Noughties when music features in national newspapers could be 1200 words long and might be actually read, I had a little flirtation with a rising trend of the time: contrarianism. Having heard Handel's Messiah once too often, I penned a semi-satirical piece about how irritating da capo arias are and how we revere Handel just because he lived in England, when actually Bach was a whole heap better. This caused such a rumpus that I ended up being roasted over an open flame by Sarah Montague on Radio 4's Today programme. Which kind of proved the point I was trying to make, of course...but the thing is, it should never have been taken seriously. It simply made a splash by being controversial and therefore entertaining. It got attention. (And I didn't much like it.)

There's been a lot of attention-grabbing contrarianism around us in the decade since. In a world where people want fast-food soundbites instead of meaty material for real-life consideration, a one-second thumbs-up rather than a speech about the fact that the UK is heading for 40% child poverty due to Tory policies, the wrong things get noticed. Entertainment should have no place in politics, but it's a bit late for that now.

Truth versus entertainment is, naturally, a problem in historical fiction. Part of the unwritten contract between novelist and reader is that we have to remember that you want to be entertained. If we did not want to entertain, we would write the sort of musicological tracts that I have often ploughed through in the past year or two for the sake of this book. The dessicated text sometimes needs to be decoded with a musical Enigma machine, and ultimately communicates little to our life experience unless we are music faculty PhD students. I can't even use them for programme notes these days. That writing of course has its place - which is not here.

So - yes - entertainment is required for a novel, even if it is about music. Does that mean not letting the truth stand in the way of a good story? 

Here the waters become still muddier, because around the Immortal Beloved, nobody can say with 100 per cent accuracy that they know what the truth is. That's probably because Beethoven on the one hand and the woman's family on the other did an extremely good job of concealing it. This provides a good reason to tell her story as fiction - because essentially, barring a remarkable discovery in someone's attic, it always will be.

As for Beethoven, he too has fallen victim to the entertainment of disinformation: it has always been more popular to think of him as a furious grouch than to look at the many facets of his actual personality. I've found him to be a misunderstood, principled individual whose isolation was the result of his debilitating deafness and the fact that he was always an outsider in Vienna. He was kind and generous; his friends were devoted to him; women and young people loved him, and he loved them. Yes, he had one heck of a temper, bore lifelong grudges and drank too much. I can't say I blame him. 

So... there are two contracts to fulfil in IMMORTAL: one with the requirements of a story based on fact, the other with readers wishing for entertainment. This is why I've written, for once, in the first person. I am, dear reader, your classic unreliable narrator. And I have some remarkable stories to tell you... 

A quick PS re the Handel grilling. I feel a teensy bit vindicated. Recently BBC Music Magazine ran a feature in which around 100 contemporary composers ranked the composers through history who have influenced them the most, and the staff then crunched the numbers into a top 50. Bach was number 1. Handel was...not there at all. Brahms was high on the list. Bruckner was...absent. And Beethoven was, if I remember correctly, number 3. 


 If you've enjoyed this post, there's still time to get your name into IMMORTAL as a patron: simply visit <a href="https://unbound.com/books/immortal/">the book's page at Unbound</a> and click on the pledge level you want to set it in motion.

The real battle: truth versus entertainment

Dear friends and supporters,

Amazing news: the first draft of IMMORTAL is finished.

I've written 140,000 words in six months. That was the fun bit. 

It is more than ten years since I last wrote a first draft in such a short time, so it is a relief to find I can still do it. Ghost Variations was interrupted by bouts of intense stress, annoying illnesses and frustrating situations (until I found Unbound) and took five years in all; Odette was being resuscitated after 26 years. Meanwhile it has been wonderfully heartening to find so much excitement around IMMORTAL. And oddly, it becomes easier to write the short-form journalism and programme notes that are my bread &amp; butter while also working on something so unwieldy; it's like playing a musical instrument, a smoother business when your fingers and brain are well trained and fully in gear.

What happens now? I must go back and cut, cut, cut. I must make sure I haven't told readers something crucial at the beginning that they shouldn't find out til the end. I must locate any characters who disappear halfway through and work out what to do with them; of course it's not their fault if they died - one of the traps in fact-based fiction is that the course of events does not always suit good story structure. I must decide how much music is enough without being too much; I appreciate that not everybody will want to read about every piano sonata Beethoven ever wrote, to say nothing of the symphonies - but do I also need to bring in pieces I've left out? For instance, I love the Violin Concerto, but it doesn't do anything here... Then I need to take the plunge at some point and actually show the manuscript to people - notably the developmental editor who will no doubt have red and green pens poised to do more of the above; it's just a question of how soon...

So there we go. There wasn't a book. Now there is. That is, at least, a good start.

Thank you, as ever, for your support and enthisiasm for IMMORTAL! 

MORE NEWS: We're on a Black Friday - Book Friday - special offer! If you haven't already secured your advance copy(ies), you can do so UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT, FRIDAY 29 NOV and get 15% off by entering the code BOOKFRIDAY15 at checkout. Please tell your friends.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

BREAKING: The first draft is finished!

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_6448.jpg?v=1690914138" width="500" height="375">


Dear friends and supporters,

It occurs to me that in all these Friday updates I've never explained why I started on this crazy project, or why then. If you think I set myself a heck of a deadline, given that the Beethoven 250th year is nearly upon us, you are spot on. Several times a week (um, a day) I think I must be insane to try to make this work. Here, then, is the rationale.

A few years ago I was asked to give a talk in a festival at the Artrix Arts Centre in Bromsgrove during a weekend in which the Dante Quartet were performing all the string quartets by Beethoven. I was asked to talk about Beethoven's women. I didn't actually know much about "Beethoven's women", other than that there were several likely candidates to be the Immortal Beloved, but I thought it would be an interesting topic to tackle. I started reading...and was amazed by some of the things I found (see the "Holey Smoke" update). The talk went extremely well; afterwards I knew it was anything but over. The wheels began to turn.

It seemed that with Beethoven year ahead, a narrated concert would be the perfect solution; perhaps in character, like my Anna Magdalena Bach project "Being Mrs Bach" (hooray - I could go back to the National Theatre costume hire department! What fun!). I ordered a ton of second-hand, out-of-print books; and another ton of brand-new but weighty ones. Soon these characters, rising up out of the 19th century, were becoming more real in certain respects than the living.

In spring this year I met up with a very old friend from New York: the person to whom I owe, actually, almost everything I've ever done. This is not an exaggeration. We were close in the mid 1980s and have remained fast friends ever since. He was in London for a few days for work and had come straight from Heathrow with his suitcase. We went to a Lebanese restaurant and feasted royally. Hours swept by. And somehow I found myself telling him the Immortal Beloved story.

This is someone who knows more about music than most other people rolled into one and whose opinion I trust more than anybody else's - and he sat "with eyes on stalks" as I talked. When you pitch a story, that's the reaction you want. If people yawn and change the subject, you have a non-starter. But if they go "WHAT?!?", chances are you may find some readers... It's tempting to turn it into a book, I said. "You have got to do this," said he. I've been in the habit of listening to him for 36 years, and most things he has recommended before have worked rather well (try studying piano with Joan Havill; what do you mean, you've never heard of Korngold?; why don't you try music journalism?...). 

It was late in the Beethoven day, but with encouraging words from Xander at Unbound, it seemed a book might be possible if I wrote fast enough and the fundraising worked out. It wasn't as if I hadn't done the reading; I couldn't get the Brunsviks out of my head, book or no book. I couldn't believe how obvious it all seemed, or how crazy some of what I'd read had been, or how uncomfortable it can become when people are totally, utterly obsessed with one or another aspect of this history and end up working against the very thing they long to support. I don't want to do that. But I do want to get the story out there, in a form which is highly accessible, readable, modern and musical - not a lousy translation of an obscure tract, nor trapped up bits of its own anatomy, but leaving room for error, consideration, argument, context and the effects of character upon perception.

 want you to enjoy this book; to find it as fascinating and astonishing as I found the story when I stumbled upon it; to be intrigued by the underlying complexities of the characters and infuriated by the societal restrictions that ruined their lives; and perhaps we can learn more about Beethoven's music through this intense delving into a sphere where music and its creator are inextricably entwined. Every musical note, remember, is the result of a choice by the person who put it there. It can't exist on its own. It never could. It never did.

And so I plough on. My manuscript is currently 130,000 words long (which is very long) (TOO long) and I am into the final fifth. I shall finish the first draft by Christmas, if it bloody kills me.

If you haven't already pledged to the book in advance, by the way, it would be utterly wonderful if you did - whether it's booking a private concert by me and Viv McLean, or pre-ordering a paperback copy. We've passed 100 per cent, but anything on top of that is absolutely invaluable as it enables special extras like a really wonderful cover image from a photo library or booking a special illustrator or a picture inside or...well, you get the idea.

Happy Friday, and thank you again for all your support, confidence and enthusiasm for this project! 

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

How it all began

<img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="/images/12687/preview/medium" width="500">



 (Above: the house in which Beethoven wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament in 1802. It was behind a bakery at the time.)


Dear friends and supporters,

This is your Friday update, except it's Monday. I came home from Vienna on Friday evening sick as the proverbial dog and barking like one. I was already unwell when I set off the previous Sunday; charging around the city, trying to see everything, walking about 7 miles a day during a nasty cold snap, did me so little good that I wondered if Beethoven is trying to kill me. 

Nevertheless, it was worth every second, because this trip will radically transform the atmosphere of IMMORTAL. Seeing what's available of the pleasant yet very plain apartments that the composer lived in, then visiting the former residences of his princely patrons in a grand city centre where palace piles up next to baroque palace, hammers home the desperately divided nature of that society. Among his chief supporters, Prince Kinsky's extravaganza is phenomenally OTT; Prince Lobkowitz's odd corner block is rather more tasteful (it is now the Theatre Museum, which is handy); and those are just two examples, neither of them the most extreme. 


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_6381.jpg?v=1690914153" width="375">



 (A palace interior, now hosting a gallery - I can't even remember which one... Get a load of those chandeliers.)


The fascinating thing about research trips is that what you learn is never quite what you were looking for. One of my most startling impressions was that for tourism purposes, Beethoven is nowhere to be heard (seen, yes; heard, no.) Wherever you find a touristy concert in a church or palace, they are playing... Mozart. Occasionally Haydn, sometimes even Schubert. But Beethoven? Dearie dear - you have to go to the Musikverein or the Konzerthaus to listen to his music. You won't stumble upon it in the street. Nobody touting for tourists' business near the Hofburg is going to say to you "Psst, wanna hear some Beethoven?"

So is he too difficult? Too demanding? Too German? Too...foreign? Beethoven was indeed a foreigner in Vienna. He was an immigrant; he arrived as a student and never went back to Bonn. If not exactly a refugee, he was certainly reluctant to go home after Napoleon invaded the Rhineland (even though Napoleon was his hero for a while). The Brunswick sisters were similarly outsiders. Vienna would have been as foreign to them, from Hungary, as it was to Beethoven. 

Much is intact; much is not. Beethoven's longest place of residence, the Pasqualati House, is high on a hillock beside what used to be the city walls; he would have gazed out over the Glacis and the Prater towards the Vienna Woods from the top floor flat. Today you see only Vienna University, constructed directly opposite some decades later. Josephine's house, the Palais that her first husband built and where she lived on and off for the rest of her life, is long gone, demolished in the late 19th century. On its site you can now find a McDonald's.

But if you walk through the back streets, you come across lanes little changed since the 18th century; straight, well-proportioned channels lined with elegant buildings and occasionally opening onto a cobbled square beside an ancient church. In one such location you discover what used to be the university, run by the Jesuits in Beethoven's time; today it is the Austrian Academy of Sciences. "Beethoven? Oh, you'll want the first floor," says a remarkably relaxed gatekeeper. "It's open, just go in." And there, in what's now a ballroom and lecture theatre, equipped with state of the art AV equipment, is the room in which Beethoven premiered his Symphony No.7 - and in which a gala performance of The Creation was held in the presence of the elderly Haydn himself. There Beethoven broke through the crowds to kneel at his old professor's feet (and not before time).

One could not help noticing that these are some massively significant occasions in the history of music - yet there was nobody else around. I didn't even know, previously, that this place existed. 

Vienna is a layer cake of a city, its historical strata spreading one on top of the other. Century piles after century. The reason I haven't seen the Beethoven sites before is that whenever I've been there I've been looking for Korngold or Mahler or Johann Strauss, or celebrating new year waltzing round the Rathausplatz. My souvenir this time? A Klimt umbrella. Beethoven is subsumed, in a way, beneath everyone he influenced.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_6435.jpg?v=1690914153" width="500">



 (One of Beethoven's ear-trumpets...)


The place has its advantages - including a fantastic, easy-to-use public transport system and two of the world's best concert halls - but also its drawbacks. For instance, my specific annoying dietary problem is easier to solve even in Hungary than it is here (honest, guv, in Budapest I found a gluten-free bakery on Andrássy Boulevard). Eventually I came across a vegetarian buffet on the Schottenring that had a good selection, but I've never before eaten so many beans in three days. Otherwise it's tafelspitz or risotto; occasionally a gf cake if you're very lucky. 

Now I am back and setting to work not only on my target of finishing the first draft before Christmas, but also the remedial updating necessitated by the insights of this past week. My feet are covered in blisters, I'm coughing something chronic and I need to sleep for a fortnight, but fortunately writing takes place indoors. If Beethoven is trying to kill me, he hasn't succeeded. At least, not yet.

Onwards and upwards! Thank you again for all your fantastic support, both moral and financial, and see you soon.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

Is Beethoven actually trying to kill me?

Dear friends and supporters,

It's not Friday, but never mind - no day is too soon for this. Tonight (Saturday 26 October) IMMORTAL hit and surpassed its funding target. Yes, we are at 100%+ and I am absolutely over the moon. I can't thank you enough for helping to make this dream book into reality.

FIVE THINGS YOU MAYBE DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT IMMORTAL:

1. Unbound usually gives us a 90 day timeframe for the crowdfunding, which we can then ask to extend if we want to persist. Today was Day 89. 

2. Even though the book is fully funded, it's still very much open for pledges: this can continue until the book (and its list of patrons) are nearly ready to go to print. That won't happen for a bit, as I'm still busy writing, so do please keep spreading the news if you can. The more, the merrier.

3. Now that the funding is in place, all I have to do is finish the writing (...) and we can then set about getting the book published in time for the 250th anniversary next year. At least this is now entirely down to my actual writing, and not a matter of biting my nails and writing frantic tweets and emails.

4. There are some IMMORTAL concerts on the way next year, as far afield as the Lake District and Australia. More details as soon as they are official. If you would like a private performance, to be given by Viv McLean (piano) and me (narrating) the pledge level for this is still open, too. 

5. The book is going to be a bit bigger than I'd originally planned. You may be able to use it as a draught excluder.

And now - well, tomorrow - I can head for Vienna secure in the knowledge that this book really is going to happen. It's not only a research trip; it's a celebration! I'm planning to see the various Beethoven museums (Heiligenstadt and the Pasqualati House), the Hofburg, the Theatre Museum (formerly Prince Lobkowitz's palace and the site of the Eroica's premiere), as many other palaces as we can squeeze in, Schönnbrunn and the suburb of Hietzing - and much more.

The big relief is that I don't have to worry any more that nobody is going to want this book. It's clear that you do! And that will make me redouble my efforts. The Friday updates will continue: I really hope you'll want to keep being involved in this IMMORTAL family that we are building here. Next week's might be on Saturday after I get back. 

Thank you a hundred million times, and see you soon.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

Great news! REALLY great news!

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/leonard_bernstein_at_the_berlin_wall__1989-1481656257-960x480.jpg?v=1690914099" width="500" height="250">



 (above: Leonard Bernstein at the Berlin Wall. Photo by Andreas Meyer-Schwickerath from classicalwcrb.org)


Dear friends and supporters,

It's been a strange week. I'm down with my second awful cold in a month, and it seems symbolic that I've lost my voice, since I'm also lost for words when I see the state of our politics at present. I'm escaping on Sunday for six days scouting Beethoven locations in Vienna, but we still do not know if we're going to crash out of the EU with no deal next Thursday. The very notion is insanity personified. 

Therefore I want to remind you what Beethoven can do, and did do, and is still for.

Here is the celebratory performance of the Ninth Symphony in Berlin 1989 after the fall of the Wall. Leonard Bernstein conducts. "The wall is down and the city is euphoric. Never was a musical work more suitable for a celebration than the work we're about to hear. Alle menschen werden Bruder. This is the message we send from Berlin this Christmas." Enjoy. And never forget. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8ftSEeOCPw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8ftSEeOCPw</a>

Even if they put up walls, we will pull them down.

Even if they divide us, we will find ways to unite and be together.

Even if they make us a laughing stock, we will produce great art that proves them wrong.

Even if they turn us into a pariah state, still we will call out their criminality.

Even if hope seems lost and the future grim, we will sing joy in testing times as well as good times, because there is no greater symbol of resistance than that. They can try to take our freedoms, but they cannot take our souls. 

Beethoven is with us all the way.

 

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all your support, both financial and moral, and do please keep spreading the word - we are into the final ten per cent of fundraising now (only £512 left to raise!) and in the writing I am in "act IV". Lots of love to everyone, and I will report back from Vienna!

Jessica x

A reminder of what it's all for

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="301" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Beethoven_bust.jpg?v=1690914145" width="500">


Dear friends and supporters,

Welcome to our regular Friday update on IMMORTAL and its progress. If you're new to the IMMORTAL family, I extend to you the warmest welcome and biggest THANK YOU in south-west London! 

First, some numbers. This morning the crowdfunding stands at 90 per cent towards target, with 90 supporters. Some of you I've known all or most of my life, others I "met" on social media, while a goodly number I have never met at all and can only imagine that you like the sound of the book, which is a particularly wonderful thought. Regarding the writing, this week I passed the 100,000 words mark and have about a third of the story left to accomplish. If you think it sounds long, you're right. No doubt I will have to spend almost as long cutting the book as I did writing it. This is par for the course, if that is any comfort.

Several pieces of news. If you're in the area tomorrow, please pop along to the Wells Literary Festival, where I am interviewing the conductor and author Jane Glover about her gorgeous book Handel in London. I was fortunate to review it for The Sunday Times when it came out and revisiting it is a tremendous treat. She brings to life everything from the delicate symbiosis between the composer, his singers, his audience, royalty and the city to the gripping tales of rivalry between prima donnas, catty castrati and operational opera companies. Moreover, even in the 18th century London was arguing about which language it wanted to hear in its opera performances. So in some ways ENO can trace its raison d'etre back to Handel's oratorios. We are on at 12.15 on Saturday 19 October, and you can find details <a href="https://www.wellsfestivalofliterature.org.uk">on the website</a>. (Nevertheless, I do urge you to go to the People's Vote march in London instead if you possibly can. I am gutted to miss most of it, but hope to be back in time for the tail end, trains willing.)

Next, on 13 November I'm joining forces with the fabulous Fenella Humphreys, rock-star-classical violinist, and the vonderful Viv McLean, my long-time concert partner, for a performance of ODETTE: A CELEBRATION OF TCHAIKOVSKY at the Barnes Music Society. We'll be at the lovely OSO by Barnes Pond, London SW13. The programme mingles extracts from my <a href="https://unbound.com/books/odette/">most recent novel, Odette</a> - a  contemporary fairy-tale based around Swan Lake - with the story of Tchaikovsky himself and the way his own experiences, influences and tragic loves fed into the original ballet. Fenella and Viv perform music by Saint-Saëns, Liszt, Chopin, Gershwin and, of course, a heap of Tchaikovsky including some of the great violin solos from those pas de deux. <a href="http://www.barnesmusicsociety.org.uk">More details here.</a>

Last but not least, on Sunday week I'm heading for Vienna for a few days of intensive Beethoven location scouting. Since I first visited Heiligenstadt - 28 years ago - the Beethoven museum has been completely overhauled; there is also the Pasqualati House to visit (he lived on the top floor on and off for some years) and the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, where the Eroica was premiered - this is now the theatre museum; the suburbs of Hietzing, Jedlersee plus Schönbrunn Palace; the Hofburg (I've been past but never in), and the general distances to explore from the Stephansdom to the Schwedenplatz, and so forth. I'm also trying to find the hall that was host to such events as Haydn's last public appearance at a performance of The Creation, and the premieres of Beethoven's symphonies nos 5, 6 and 7. I hope it still exists.

On top of that I'll be visiting our friends at the exil.arte centre to explore their work on Viennese composers who were forced into exile by the Nazis, and attending a dear friend's book launch at the Musikverein. 

I have six days, but I think I probably need two months.

Here is some music from Jonas Kaufmann's new album, Wien, to help build the mood... Beethoven it's not - but Kaufmann is singing Florestan in Fidelio at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, next year. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT7fWb81xlg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT7fWb81xlg</a>

Thank you all again, a thousand times, for all your support, both financial and moral. Do please help to spread the word about IMMORTAL if you can - we are nearly there, but naturally there's no such thing as too many supporters.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

Immortal, Handel, Odette und, ach, Wien, mein Wien

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Brunszwik_Terez__28Kampfl_J_C3_B3zsef__1994_29__Budapest.jpg?v=1690914205" width="285" height="500">


Dear friends and supporters,

Welcome to our Friday IMMORTAL update! Thank you again for all your kind contributions and faith in this book-in-the-making.

As things stand today we have 82 patrons who have brought the level to a tantalising 83% of funding target, 73 days after launch. This is fantastic, of course, and I am profoundly grateful to all of you for your help. But please may I ask you something? If you have friends or social media contacts who might come into the IMMORTAL target demographic - music-lovers who are keen to read something a little bit different about the greatest mystery of Beethoven's life - please could you consider helping to spread the word about the funding? All the social media chestnuts are valuable in this respect. Essentially, the sooner we can get all the funding in place, the less wobbly I will feel as I press on with the writing.

The manuscript is reaching a crucial turning point: the bankruptcy of Austria a couple of years after Napoleon's victory. It is strange to gain such perspective on how world events shape personal ones, which then continue to resonate across the centuries. Were it not for this situation, which had a direct bearing on Beethoven's income (his princely patrons started to default on their payments into his annual stipend), he would not have gone to Prague in summer 1812 - and neither would the person he (probably) unexpectedly saw there - and we would not now have 'An die ferne Geliebte', without which we would also not have Schumann's Fantasy in C major Op. 17. 

But world events are shaping us, too. In particular, with the news absorbing all our attention at the moment, to say nothing of three and a half years of constant anxiety, the impossibilites of planning ahead and the terror that everything we hold dear - including openness, tolerance, freedom, internationalism - is about to be flushed down the drain that is Brexit, it's very difficult to keep a focus on the early 19th century. Even though there is so much we could learn from that era. 

I have been working on chapter 17, in which Therese talks to Luigi about Goethe, then finds herself re-reading a certain passage of The Sorrows of Young Werther: "How are ye changed, my friends, since the days when we flew along the hills together like gales of spring." Her tears arise; life is slipping away; everything is on the brink. And Goethe's reference, in this passage of "Ossian", to the name "Minona" is soon to prove important. Being Therese, though, she gives herself a good shake and prepares to keep calm and carry on...soon there will be still more mess created by her sister to help clear up.

So, dear friends, since parliament went back into session, the rate at which people have been pledging to IMMORTAL has dropped rather dramatically. I think this is a function of reality being stranger than fiction. But it would be wonderful if we could somehow reverse this trend, sooner rather than later! 

Huge thanks, love and best wishes,

Jessica x

When reality is stranger than fiction...

Dear friends and supporters,

Happy Friday and welcome to our regular IMMORTAL update. As things stand, we are 82% of the way towards target, which is fabulous - but please, keep 'em coming. Huge thanks to all of you for your generosity, moral support and faith in Beethoven!

Writing is going a little more slowly because of pressures of other (paid) work and the eternal distraction of the news (aka The "Oh No, What Now?" Show). I am nevertheless far enough through the process to find myself being horrified, again and again, by the sheer number of holes in what I'm reading.

 

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="389" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/swiss_cheese.jpg?v=1690914134" width="500"> 
<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swiss_cheese.jpg">Image credit: T. Rodgers via Wikimedia Commons</a> 

I have a doorstop on my desk. It's called 'Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph'. It's by an eminent musicologist and writer, Jan Swafford, and it is over 1000 pages long. Looking for references to the String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95, in such a tome should be easy through the time-honoured mechanism of the traditional big-biography's Index of Works. The only trouble is...there isn't one. Just an ordinary everything-index, in which works are mixed up with general references - they're not even under 'Beethoven: compositions' or any other sensible categorisation. Only two of his quartets - some of his most significant works - are mentioned in that index at all. This quartet is referenced amply in the text, if you can hazard a reasonable guess for where to start looking for it, but there is no mention of it in the index! Whose bright idea was that?!

General books about Vienna in the 1800-1827 period are tragically limited when it comes to music. I have in my desk pile a fun book about the Congress of Vienna of 1814, which is hot on scandal and politics, but includes just a brief, entirely hackneyed description of Beethoven - and when commenting on the Viennese waltz that would have been danced in the ballroom, says this was not yet the waltzes of Johann Strauss... which is putting it mildly, because Johann Strauss I was all of 10 years old at the time. His innovations would have been a bit of a way off. 

Next in my pile is a book that should be my Immortal Beloved bible, but is so horribly translated that it is quite agonising to read. It was published by a German musicologist, Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach, in 1983 and has been put into English-of-sorts by an obsessive-sounding German living in Australia who, I discover, died during a walking holiday about a year ago. Before that, he had run-ins with most of the eminent Beethoven scholars, and probably did his favourite topic - Josephine von Brunsvik - a grave disservice through his seemingly rather belligerent attitude. However, his translations (he tackled several books on this topic) are all we have if we are not 100% comfortable with interpreting dense German texts and out-of-print obscurities. That book needs a proper, scholarly translation, but because an English version exists, though a bad one, a good one will probably never happen.

And there are massive holes in other Immortal Beloved theories: emotional ones. Many arguments based on what slender evidence there is either do not take into account the emotional sense of those situations - or lack of it - or ignore the probability that evidence was likely destroyed, perhaps by the protagonists themselves or by family members terrified of further scandal. 

The trouble with research is that the more you dig, the more material you find, and the more holes you find within it. In the 1950s, a cache of 13 love letters from Beethoven to Josephine were published, very belatedly. That, believe it or not, instead of solving the issue just creates more problems - because there are no dates on them. Different books offer varying theories about when they were written. If 1805, they were right after she had been widowed. If 1807, they are roughly contemporaneous with the 'Appassionata', which is dedicated to Josephine's brother. If 1809, they make perspective radically different, both on her actions thereafter and on the relationship in the intervening years. Who does one believe? 

So that is why I have not yet finished the draft. And by the end of today, I know I will have stumbled over, or into, at least five more holes. 

I might just nip out and buy some cheese.

Thank you all again and see you soon.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

Holey smoke

<img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="/images/12465/preview/medium" width="500">


Dear friends and supporters,

Happy Friday, and thank you again for all your pledges, messages and enthusiasm for IMMORTAL. We are 80% of the way towards the funding now - hooray! A reminder that until the end of Sunday 29 September there's a special offer of a 10% discount on pledges up to £100 (on this and other Unbound projects that are over 75% towards toward target) to help get the book "over the line", so do please share the info if you can to encourage friends to join our Immortal family now. Use the code OVER75 at checkout.

So, here we are in late September and I have written 86,000 words. The entire book was supposed to be 80,000, but I am only about 3/5 of the way through the story.

This is the point at which the term "going swimmingly" acquires new meaning. Imagine you're splashing across a big German mountain lake (like the one pictured above, perhaps - underneath Neuschwanstein Castle, visible on the distant hillside). You love it in the cool, clear water, which holds you up with its depth and purity. You're determined to get to the other side, where someone is waiting for you with a towel and ice-cream. It's a long way across. You reach the middle and there are mountains as far as the eye can see when not full of lakewater. It has already taken ages and you're out of breath. It would take as long to go back, and need as much lung capacity, and would seem a waste of time (you'd miss the ice-cream, apart from anything else), but it's equally far to the other shore. Do you have the physical capacity to get there? Isn't it a lot further than you thought? (Yes.) How are you going to manage it?

The only thing to do, as far as I can tell, is pace yourself. Go at a speed that won't wear you out. Make sure your breathing is coordinated with your movements. Break it down into manageable sections with suitable landmarks; each is then easier to achieve. Be a tortoise, not a hare. As you have a self-imposed deadline, this isn't easy, but it is quite important - go too fast and you'll set yourself up with all sorts of problems later on. 

Therefore, this is how my to-do list looks now:

Write, write, write; cut, cut, cut (this is much harder than the writing); check, check, flippin'well check; get rid of adjectives and replace with detail, detail, detail; and keep going, if only a few paragraphs at a time. This is tricky, because I tend to plunge in carry on all day - and then can't find my way home from 1810. 

With your support, though, I can do this. Because you believe in me and this book, I can more easily believe in myself. And I certainly believe in Beethoven.

Thank you a thousand times.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

Swimmingly?

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Cosi_pitches.jpg?v=1690914106" width="375">


Dear friends and supporters,

Here is a message from me, Ludwig on my t-shirt and Cosi the cat on my desk chair!

We are delighted to say that IMMORTAL is now 79% funded. Just 21% to go. TODAY AND TOMORROW, to help the nearly-there books to hit target, Unbound is offering 10% off pledges up to £100 on those that are currently in the last quarter of funding, including mine.

So, if you fancy upgrading your pledge to a higher level (perhaps to book some copies as Christmas presents 2020 well in advance), or you have friends who would like to "become Immortals" (as one supporter puts it) too, or you've been thinking about pledging but haven't got round to it yet, here's the perfect chance. There are still tickets for the London Philharmonic concert in February to be grabbed and plenty of places at our super-splendid launch party. Please take a look and see what takes your fancy. Use the code OVER75 at checkout. Valid until midnight on Friday 27 September.

Everybody who contributes is thanked in print (unless you ask to be anonymous), and everyone earns my eternal gratitude for helping to bring this remarkable story to wider attention in Beethoven's anniversary year. 

Love and best wishes, 

Jessica

Achtung! Special discount week!

Today is the 200th anniversary of Clara Schumann's birth. I was looking for a portrait of her to put on my blog, JDCMB, and found that she had been painted as a young woman by the same artist who created the portrait of Beethoven that we use in the IMMORTAL introductory video: a gentleman named Granger. 

Here it is:


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/clara-schumann-1819-1896-granger.jpg?v=1690914110" width="344" height="500">


When Beethoven died, Clara was eight years old, and Robert Schumann sixteen. Robert was devoted to and inspired by Beethoven to a great degree - indeed, he offered his Fantasie Op. 17 to the publisher who was trying to raise money for the Beethoven memorial in Bonn, but they turned it down. (Publishers do sometimes get things wrong...)

This extraordinary work bears some hallmarks of Beethoven's influence, including the heroic central march with its continual dotted rhythm, which feels akin to the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata in A major Op. 101; but there is a still more direct connection, namely that Robert quotes a theme from Beethoven's song cycle An die ferne Geliebte - the final song with its words, "Take them, then, these songs that I have sung for you...". The pair of lovers, though separated, are united by the music. When they sing the same song, they are together, however great the distance between them.

Robert appropriated this theme as his message to Clara, whose father was fiercely opposed to their marriage and had forbidden contact between them. And yet the impassioned composer probably had not the slightest idea that Beethoven himself was using the theme and the cycle from which it's drawn for a very similar purpose.

The melody is significant, and especially the melody of the first song in the cycle. It is closely related to that of the final song, which is the one Schumann quoted directly. 

Here's the Beethoven cycle, sung by the incomparable Fritz Wunderlich with the pianist Heinrich Schmidt. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUdpQJB-b2A">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUdpQJB-b2A</a> 
 
Here's Schumann's Fantasy in C major, played by the great Hungarian pianist Annie Fischer (I was very pleased to find this, since Fischer is not nearly as well remembered as she deserves to be!): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq1XTh2U4pc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq1XTh2U4pc</a>

It is not rocket science to spot the theme. But in the Beethoven, pay special attention also to the first line of the first song. Its second phrase, with the repeated rhythm on descending harmonies. Then listen to this: 
 
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEmaEgWPphc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEmaEgWPphc</a>

Sound familiar? It's the Andante Favori, a piano piece that Beethoven wrote supposedly for the Waldstein Sonata's slow movement, in which it gels not at all. It exists instead a stand-alone andante, and he sent it to a woman...with the words "here is your - your - andante".

That rhythmic cell that it shares with the song cycle is what sparked off IMMORTAL... 

I am moved by the idea that Schumann tapped into the same wellspring as Beethoven for his own immortal beloved, Clara Wieck, and the notion that only about 10-12 years after Beethoven's death, that message of love was renewed like a phoenix by another composer of genius - one who eventually died just a short drive away from where Beethoven was born. Endenich, the site of the mental asylum in which Schumann breathed his last in 1856, is today a suburb of Bonn. Beethoven had never seen Bonn again after he moved to Vienna, but he was often homesick for his much-loved Rhine. The Fantasy might have been known, and played, by people connected to the Beethoven history - but how much did they know about it? 

If you would like to read more about Clara Schumann's musical influences, there's some more - in similar vein to this, but about a very different piece - on my blog, JDCMB, today at this link: <a href="https://jessicamusic.blogspot.com/2019/09/clara-at-200.html">https://jessicamusic.blogspot.com/2019/09/clara-at-200.html</a>

I hope you've enjoyed this little musical excursion for our Friday update. Thank you again for all your support for IMMORTAL, both moral and financial! And if you haven't yet pledged, please think about doing so... you can simply pick your preferred level from the list. (NB, the Early Bird discount paperbacks are not unlimited, so if you want to grab one, best do it sooner rather than later!) 

With love and best wishes as always,

Jessica

Beethoven and...Robert and Clara Schumann

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2019_33_beethoven.jpg?v=1690914209" width="500" height="312">


The other day I was in a London music library, trawling the Beethoven shelf. My goodness, but there's a lot of writing about him. Some of the books were published in the early part of the 20th century - topics such as, to paraphrase, "Beethoven is all about strength" (disconcerting in view of what was happening in the late 20s to 30s); others involve up-to-the-minute scholarship with tables of symbols that analyse the workings of, for instance, his late string quartets.

I enjoy browsing: you never know quite what you're going to find. The most useful publications, for my needs, were a small volume of personal reminiscences of Beethoven by those he knew, and a book of academic papers, Beethoven Studies 3, which contained a meticulously translated and annotated version of Beethoven's diary, prepared by the leading Beethoven scholar Maynard Solomon. 

The books on that particular shelf had certain things in common. First, they are squirrelled away in the music library, where a lover of general 19th-century history, society, literature, painting or fiction is never going to see them - unlike "biography", which is in the main library and comprises accounts of the lives of people who have done interesting work in any field other than classical music. Then: what of their function? In the old books, the writing is dated. In the academic ones, the writing is sometimes like chewing dry muesli. There are a few, good, newish ones, but they are fairly polarised in tone and length. John Suchet's is highly readable, and I wish it were longer. Jan Swafford's, by contrast, runs to 1077 pages and you do not want it to fall on your toes. 

Intriguingly, I can think, offhand, of only 3 female writers who have published widely distributed work on Beethoven. One is Emily Anderson, whose translation of the letters is absolutely invaluable and dates back to 1960. Another is the academic Rita Steblin, whose splendid articles I have been running to earth in various journals whenever and wherever possible. And in the 1980s the German scholar Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach wrote a book about Beethoven and the Immortal Beloved, which is full of fascinating material, but has been translated only into excruciatingly awful English. Tellenbach and Solomon have had heated exchanges on the Immortal Beloved topic in various articles, as have Solomon and the translator, and Swafford and the translator. Tellenbach and Steblin share a theory about the Immortal Beloved which to me is the only interpretation that makes emotional sense. 

I am certainly not saying that only a woman can make emotional sense of this situation - the theory they present is shared by some of the men, notably Suchet. But gosh, a few of the other men have missed the point. Some suggest that the letter itself is a fictional construct and the Immortal Beloved a non-existent idealised vision of the Perfect Woman. If you look at the text, though, she gave him an actual pencil. Muses do not generally carry pencils. Nor do you write to them complaining about slow post or transport delays. 

One thing is certain. We will never know the whole truth: not least, because Beethoven himself was extremely good at hiding it. It seems that a lot of papers either vanished, were stolen or were perhaps destroyed by...someone with a personal reason for getting rid of them. Unless those turn up one day, we will stay in the dark.

We can infer. We can go by what little there is, which is all we can go on - but even that depends on how you interpret the material. Most theories make assumptions about phrases in Beethoven's letters that could, in fact, mean something completely different. Here's an example: much has rested on the interpretation of an initial in Beethoven's Tagebuch that is thought to be an A, in a phrase that has been interpreted as relating directly to the Immortal Beloved individual. Looking at a photograph of this manuscript, I was convinced it does not look like an A: it appears as if either the ink has been smudged, or the letter has been tampered with - or, as Steblin has suggested, it is not an A at all but a messily-written "St", which is the most plausible of all, while the context of the sentence is open to many different views. That doesn't mean it is definitely not an A. It could be. It just means that the issue is not as clear-cut as some would like.

This could - and does - go on and on and on. I've been reading about it for years. But there are a few contextual issues that are clear to me that do not seem to have been opened up to general music-lovers. One is the societal structures at work against Beethoven and the mysterious woman. Another is her likely fate. Another is that there are certain things in the music that relate directly to this matter. And we can pooh-pooh the notion as much as we like, but that doesn't mean they are not there.

New interpretations arise all the time. This applies even to something as famous as the 'Moonlight' Sonata. I have just bought Murray Perahia's new edition of it, which has a fascinating preface. Next time, I will tell you what it says. It's a revelation (though, spoiler alert, not about the Immortal Beloved).

In the meantime, I haven't answered the 'why fiction?' question. OK: because it can show the context, the characters and the fallibility of our assessments in a new, vivid, necessary way. It is one interpretation of a situation that is, by its very nature, unknowable - and being fiction, it acknowledges in its very form that unknowability.  

We can't be sure. What we can do, though, is have an unreliable narrator...

Meanwhile, here's a progress report.

I am about halfway through writing the first draft, and loving the process. The first draft is the fun bit. The transformation of that into a proper book is the headache. I have that to look forward to... Meanwhile, the crowdfunding has reached a wonderful 76 per cent.

I'm delighted that Universal Classics has provided a bundle of four stunning CDs to offer as a NEW pledge reward - recordings on Deutsche Grammophon and Decca by the Takács Quartet, Maurizio Pollini and the Vienna Philharmonic - and you can find this by scrolling down the pledge level list. They gave me two lots, and one has already been snapped up, but you can still get the other one - you could upgrade your existing pitch for this if you've already signed up. 

My profound and heartfelt thanks to everyone who has pledged so far - your moral support is absolutely invaluable to me and your generosity has left me awestruck! I will do my best to give you a really good book to read.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica x

Why IMMORTAL? Why fiction? Why now?

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="183" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/beethoven_2.jpg?v=1690914095" width="275">


At the moment, watching the heinous goings-on that pass for running our country, it would be easy to despair and to think that writing a novel about a 19th-century composer is a futile distraction. Fortunately, though, our composer is Beethoven - and there is no better music to bolster idealism, determination and resilience than he. 

Have a listen to his Egmont Overture, played at the Proms the other week by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim. It was their encore, so if you go to this link you'll find it at about 2:08:00 <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0007lj7">https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0007lj7</a> 
Egmont is a play by Goethe: a great tragedy about a freedom fighter who makes the ultimate sacrifice, but never gives up.

It is worth remembering a few things that proved Beethoven's resilience. He dealt with: 
An alcoholic father 
The death of his mother 
An awkward social persona 
Deafness 
The collapse, because of that, of his career as a pianist 
Falling in love with a woman he could never marry  
Suicidal impulses, which he conquered through devotion to his art 
Violent disillusionment with his former hero, Napoleon 
The shelling of Vienna in 1809 (he had to shelter in his brother's cellar) 
The collapse of the currency in 1811-12 
The ignominy of being financially dependent on aristocratic support 
Frequent ill health, including chronic stomach condition 
Innumerable fallouts with friends and supporters 
Increasing isolation  
The disaster of trying to adopt his nephew 
The possibility that he had a child. And knew it. And could not be part of his child's life. 
Alcoholism, it seems 
Liver disease (which defeated him in the end). 
 
A little anecdote for you. A few months ago I went to a dinner party and found myself in a vipers' nest of hardline Brexiters - many of whom I had known for years, indeed decades, and used to like and respect before the ill-planned referendum plunged this particular dagger into our country's innards. Experiencing a sudden insight into how deeply the rot has set in, and into what it must have been like to be Jewish in the Weimar Republic shortly before Hitler came to power, I considered walking out. First, I paid a visit to the downstairs loo. In the cloakroom there was a small statue of Beethoven. 
 
I stayed in there for a while, meditating on this image, trying to 'hear' what Beethoven would advise. He had no time for politeness when none was deserved, one knew that much, but he stood his ground. He would stay. He would be resilient. He would hold his head high and never give up. (That's what I thought on the day, at least. Now I suspect he would probably say exactly what he thought, pulling no punches, then crash out into the night, walking home for many miles in the pouring rain - which is what happened when Prince Lichnowsky tried to force him to perform at a soirée in his country palace... ) Either way, he would be true to himself, his ideals and his inner strength. 
 
You can hear that integrity, determination and noble spirit in every one of his works. If that isn't "relevant" now, I don't know what is. 
 
Huge thanks and great hugs to everyone who has supported IMMORTAL already. I'm delighted to report that after one month the book has reached an amazing 72 per cent of the fundraising target - thanks to your extraordinary generosity and enthusiasm for the idea. The writing is progressing well. I am around halfway through and loving every minute of it - except those moments when I realise I must leave out something I would like to include if I were writing a book that could run to a thousand pages, which unfortunately I'm not. If you haven't already pledged for the book and your appetite is whetted, please take your pick from the numerous different levels and rewards that you'll see to the right of the page (NB if you only see two levels when reading this update, please click on the word IMMORTAL at the top of the page and it will take you to the main project where you can see them all). 
 
Onwards and upwards! 
 
Love and best wishes, 
Jessica

A composer for our testing times

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="168" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Kaufmann_as_Florestan.jpg?v=1690914118" width="300">


With the Beethoven 250th anniversary coming up next year, just about every opera company I can think of is preparing to stage Fidelio, and plentiful orchestras are planning concert performances. It is the only opera Beethoven wrote - or at least, the only one he completed.

He started another, earlier, entitled Vestas Feuer, set in ancient Rome. The libretto was by Schikaneder (of The Magic Flute fame) who was employing him as composer quite literally in residence at the Theater an der Wieden - Schikaneder was artistic director there and Beethoven moved into an apartment in the theatre to set to work on the piece. The libretto did not inspire him, to put it mildly. He said it was "only fit for washerwomen". Fidelio followed - with a long history of fits and starts, invasions and censorship; after flopping in the midst of the first occupation of Vienna by Napoleon, it did not reach its final form until 1814. 

I'm puzzled - exceedingly so - by the complaint I always hear about Fidelio: people almost invariably say they admire the music, but find it unsatisfying as a drama. I simply do not understand this. What is there to be unsatisfying? It sometimes strikes me that this is one of the few operas that features a strong, brave heroine who wins against all the odds. Can it be that most opera fans like the wilting 19th-century flowers who die of consumption, go warbling mad or meet a violent end at the hands of the men in their lives? Or is it that Florestan, being jailed, never has the chance to do very much except long for Leonore to rescue him? You'd think this aria (sung in this extract from the Salzburg Festival by Jonas Kaufmann) would be enough of a challenge to keep him busy and his listeners happy, though: 


 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxhAaftYrZs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxhAaftYrZs</a>


The story is based on a French play that itself was apparently taken from a real incident during the French Revolution. Because of the official censors - every artistic product of words, music or images in Vienna had to be assessed by censors at the time - Beethoven and his librettist elected to set the piece in Spain instead of France, which did not help very much; it also accounts for the lack of specificity about the political background of the story. We never find out what Florestan did to make Pizarro hate him so much, other than - one infers - being some kind of freedom fighter. That doesn't help either.

Or does it? It opens the door for directors to take a view on the story and bring out its power in new ways of their own. Sometimes, of course, it's flunked. I've seen a ridiculous number of daft productions over the years, perhaps the nadir being the time Covent Garden had little Blakeian red and green demons strutting around the final scene on stilts, honest guv. The audience laughed aloud. You might want Blake, but you don't want that. I suspect that next year will bring up some better takes, and that many will be interesting, provocative and, if you'll excuse the term, "relevant".

I love Fidelio with a passion for its idealism: its extolling of liberty and love, its message of resistance to tyranny and its iron core of devoted love. Its dignity. Its humanity. And, yes, its drama. 

And Leonore...who is the devoted wife Florestan longs for? Is she inspired in some way by the 'Immortal Beloved'? No prizes for guessing...but you'll have to read IMMORTAL to find out. 

Again, thank you all for your support for IMMORTAL, which is halfway towards its funding target and now just needs the other half! If you haven't pledged yet, please feel free to do so.

Love and best wishes,

Jessica

FIDELIO rising

Here's a little truism for a Friday lunchtime. Our sheer reverence towards the great composers of the past sometimes interferes with our understanding of their work. Occasionally it even affects performances of them. Do you agree?

Last year I undertook a project for BBC Music Magazine, comparing recordings of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata and choosing the "best" (I use inverted commas with reason - it could only ever be my choice, rather than something provably empirical). It served me right for once naming this piece as the greatest piano work ever composed; I had to bite the bullet and do it. (<a href="http://www.classical-music.com/article/best-recordings-beethovens-hammerklavier-sonata">You can read it here</a>.)

I listened to around 50 recordings. It shouldn't have been easy to choose a winner. But it was. Peter Serkin's recording from the mid 1980s on a piano of Beethoven's time stood out by miles to my ears: the music rocketed out of the instrument as if heading for outer space, not merely fresh and startling, but utterly volcanic. You might feel you were sitting next to Beethoven himself as he played it. There were many other versions I'd describe as good, or very good. But there were also some in which nice, middle-class performers played reverent, kow-tow accounts: desperately correct and totally missing the point. This is radical, elemental, furious, passionate, despairing music and if it doesn't sound that way, why bother learning all those notes?

It's slightly the same with musicology. Sometimes there are deep, dark questions to ask, ones that challenge our preconceptions of people, creators, whom we have transformed into a pantheon of Apollonic gods. Beethoven is one of the first among them. We know he had a temper, that he drank too much, that he was deaf and impossible and angry. But we still treat him with kid gloves. Yes, he was a mensch: a man of great ideals, both political and personal, and a touchstone for the resilience and spiritual strength that we all respond to in his music. But can we ever be certain of what he was thinking? Did he tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, on every occasion? And did his associates do so too? Caution!

Take this one incident, which I've touched on recently in the first draft of IMMORTAL. And have a listen to the work in question: the Piano Sonata in D minor, Op.31 No.2 - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJjoFQtMvg&amp;t=63s">here is a video of Barenboim playing it.</a>

It's often called "The Tempest" - because Anton Schindler, Beethoven's sometime secretary and early biographer, told the story that he once asked the maestro for the "key" to the work and was told "Read Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'". As a consequence we try to find in it Shakespearean soliloquies, deep meditations on power and magic, and the storminess of the seascapes from Prospero's island.

It's possible none of that is there at all.

Schindler was notoriously unreliable. He told porkies by the pile, destroyed material including some of Beethoven's conversation books (his visitors wrote their questions and responses down for Beethoven after he could no longer hear them), and essentially he can't be wholly relied on at any time. Yet for a while he knew the composer as well as anybody ever did. Everything has to be weighed up.

What would Beethoven have said to him? He wouldn't have said "The Tempest" in English. He'd have said "Der Sturm" in German. And "Sturm" could mean a multitude of other things. How can we be sure he really said "Shakespeare's" Sturm? How can we be certain that that was not simply Schindler's misinterpretation of "Read Der Sturm"?


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="251" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Sturm.jpg?v=1690914114" width="201">


One of Beethoven's favourite poets was called Christian Christoph Sturm (1740-1786) (pictured above), a German preacher and author best known for a tract called Reflections on the Works of God in Nature which we know definitely did have a profound influence on Beethoven - because among the composer's possessions was a highly annotated copy of the book. Having played the sonata (in my final recital at university) and read a bit of CC Sturm, I would be happy to place a bet that the reference to Shakespeare might have been a little bit of poetic licence from Herr Schindler. 

Unfortunately most of us do not read obscure German religious poets today. Therefore it's a lot easier to stick with the famous Shakespeare and not ask the question: did he really say that? Did he really? 

Because of the nature of musicology - that we can only go by what is down on paper and must never add two and two together in case we make five - even if we do actually make four - it is easier by far to ask these questions in the course of a readable, accessible novel in which Therese and Josephine, playing the work themselves, can do all the adding we need. So the question is asked. It doesn't matter if it is answered or not. It doesn't matter if their interpretation is wrong. The question has to be asked: did he really?

Did he really?

Dear friends and supporters,


 <img alt="Hqdefault" src="https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/media.unbound.co/p/videos/2161/medium/hqdefault.jpg?1564920447" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: -webkit-standard;">


Thank you so much for your generous pledges! IMMORTAL is off to a flying start - 28 per cent funded after just five days - and I couldn't be happier. (Well, I could if it was 100 per cent, but y'know... this is really good.) It's incredibly encouraging and I value the moral support as much as the actual £ - because it means that you want this book, which means I need to get on with writing it.

I've noticed a couple of friends remark on the fact that in my introductory video I'm playing the piano barefoot. Now, there are a few ways you could interpret this. You could think I'd expected that the person wielding the camera was filming me only from the keyboard up. You might surmise that it's summer, it's warm and it's nice to pad about barefoot. But what you mightn't suspect is that playing the piano barefoot actually feels wonderful. And increasing numbers of soloists are currently on a footwear rebellion.

Think of the superstar violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaya, or the superb pianist Alice Sara Ott (pictured above) - coming soon to a venue near you, without shoes. If you're barefoot, you're in control. You're not going to find yourself immobilised when your stilettos are stuck between the floorboards. You're not going to twist your ankle due to the precarious height of your heels as you tackle a particularly thorny cadenza. If you're playing the piano, you won't find yourself wishing that the pedals were at a different height - basically they're designed for men wearing normal shoes, and for sensitive pedalling you need total control over them, which you might find more difficult if your foot is in an awkward position... 

Last year at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music I attended a wonderful concert-chat session chaired by artistic director Kathryn Stott in which she and several fellow pianists found themselves comparing the relative merits of different types of footwear. Notably, Australian pianist Timothy Young likes to wear rubber-soled yoga shoes - just a notch away from playing barefoot because of the flexibility, the sensitivity to levels of touch and the removal of an unnecessary thing that can come between you, the instrument and the music. The pedals are a vital part of the pianist's equipment: the finest performers, I think, are those ones who know how to transform their sounds most effectively, and the pedals provide an Aladdin's Cave of treasurable colours to add to those of actual keyboard touch, if you've fully mastered their particular potential.

Please enjoy this video of Alice Sara Ott, playing Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata barefoot - apparently lost in her own world, oblivious to the fact that someone is cleaning the piano as she plays. [I hope this works. The site tells me the video has attached successfully...]

Much love and thank you again for your pledges.

Jessica x

Flying start, barefoot

Who was Beethoven's 'Immortal Beloved'?
After Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, a love letter in his writing was discovered, addressed only to his ‘Immortal Beloved’. Decades later, Countess Therese Brunsvik claims to have been the composer’s lost love. Yet is she concealing a tragic secret? Who is the one person who deserves to know the truth?
Becoming Beethoven’s pupils in 1799, Therese and her sister Josephine followed his struggles against the onset of deafness, Viennese society’s flamboyance, privilege and hypocrisy and the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. While Therese sought liberation, Josephine found the odds stacked against even the most unquenchable of passions...

VIENNA, 1859
“Mariam Tenger, Madam.”
The maid stood back to admit my guest. I knew her at once. She was not “Mariam Tenger” at all.
Those smiling, innocent eyes and upturned face had scarcely changed since her childhood. She used to hide behind my skirts when she was eight years old, too shy to show her face in front of visitors. The years roll back and I am once more in our Ofen town house, high above the Danube, with little Marie and my ever-grumbling mother.
“Marie Hrussoczy! My dear girl.” I held out my arms and my visitor crossed the room to embrace me in a rustle of silk. Clearly she was doing well: her clothes were tasteful and practical, but finely tailored. A wedding band glinted among her rings. “Sit down, my dear, and tell me everything.”
Marie, beaming, settled herself on the cushioned settee nearest to me. “I had to come and see you, Countess Therese. Everything I am and that I do now, I owe to you. I was so excited when I heard you were passing through Vienna.” Her gaze bounced off the wooden walking stick propped against my chair. Probably she would be wondering, in tactful silence, whether a lady of my years should be travelling at all. Yes, my dear: I should.
“I am spending some time with my nieces - my darling Blanka has had a difficult decade and she is leaving for Paris to build a new life. Now we are going to Dresden, but we had just once more to see Vienna…” I did not mention that this might be the last time I would ever visit the city of our dreams.
“Blanka Teleki?” Marie’s eyebrows lifted.
“Finally she is released. Ach, terrible, terrible, what has happened to her. There is no limit to the cruelty in this world. Yet no limit, either, to its wonders…”
Marie gave an earnest nod. She had a writer’s eyes. Eyes that notice: sensitive to atmospheres, the unseen, the unspoken, more so than we who deal in daily realities and politics can afford.
She would be perfect.
Marie was in her late thirties, blooming with health. In contrast, the curve in my spine has grown considerably more pronounced and I give thanks each day that my sight and hearing are still keen. My distorted back is not the worst problem one could have at eighty-four. I can still play the piano, write and enjoy seeing friends or courting supporters for my schools and the associations. I spend my days as I have for years: correspondence in the morning, a light meal at lunchtime - I do not need to eat much - and for two hours in the afternoon I practise the piano.
My youngest niece, who lives in Ofen as companion to Countess Banffy, has met Franz Liszt and presented me with copies of some of his works. But I always return to my volumes of Beethoven. Their spines are almost as bent as my own, and sometimes pages fall out, taking the Master’s annotations with them. I mend those precious books as tenderly as I would bandage a child’s injured hand. The music inhabits my fingers the way Beethoven himself inhabited a room. Sometimes I think he has taken possession of my bones, sinews and guts.
My visitors may come either before lunch or after five in the evening for kaffee und kuche. Now the maid placed a three-layered silver stand on the table and stood poised with the cake slice, smiling, waiting for Marie to choose a piece.
“Don’t pretend you don’t want the Sachertorte,” I encouraged. It was invented when she was eleven and Vienna went mad for it; we’d waited impatiently down the Danube in Ofen for the patissiers to filch the recipe.
Near the door a mahogany clock was grinding towards the half hour chime. Clocks are a comfort to me. We should not forget how few hours we have left. I don’t sleep much. I can do that when I’m dead. To live is to be awake. Every morning either the maid or poor Blanka has woken me gently at my desk, where I’ve fallen asleep around two o’clock at night.
“Countess?” Marie had finished her cake while I was rambling on.
“I gather you are a very successful writer, my dear. Tell me, why do you write?”
Marie took a minute to consider. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps I want to feel I’m producing something that will give people pleasure for a long time. Something to leave behind - a legacy, of sorts.”
“I understand.” That is why I do what I do, too.
“Actually, I brought you a copy of my new book.” Marie opened her hold-all and extracted a small volume bound in green, which she placed proudly in my hands. It was the first part of a three-volume novel, entitled Drei Cassetten. She had inscribed on the flyleaf “For my dear Countess Therese, with profound gratitude, from your pupil, ‘Mariam Tenger’.”
“You chose an interesting name: exotic, rather oriental… At least you have not taken a male pseudonym.”
“I might try that next,” she said. “They might sell more copies.”
“And next, you want to write - ?” I guessed what was coming.
“My next book is about Ludwig van Beethoven.”
“Any particular aspect of our great Master’s life?”
“You know about the letter?” said Marie. “The mysterious, unaddressed letter to someone he calls his ‘Immortal Beloved’. They found it in his apartment after he died and it is in Schindler’s biography.”
I closed my eyes: there he was. I could feel his presence as strongly as if he had just walked in. He always seemed to fill a whole room when he entered it; one might imagine his body became as sizeable as his spirit – despite that terrible old green coat of his. Something to do with how he moved, the length of his stride, the tilt of his head as if facing into the north wind…
Marie was looking at me with concern. I must stop drifting off when people are talking to me, or they might think I am about to die.
“You’ve found out who she was?”
“I was hoping that… perhaps I can be the one who does. Oh, Countess Therese, you knew him so well. You must have some idea who Beethoven loved?”
“Have you seen the letter itself? Is it genuine?”
“I visited Schindler and he showed me the original.” Beethoven’s elderly secretary used to totter about declaring himself the Master’s closest associate and spreading lies. To make matters worse, he was now tottering about our family home at Martonvásár. Franz had been far too good to him.
“I wondered if it was a forgery,” I admitted. I wouldn’t put anything past Schindler.
“It is definitely Beethoven’s writing. I promise, Countess - there’s no doubting its veracity.”
“Schindler the Swindler…Forgive me, dear, for speaking ill thoughts - but, really. Poor Luigi couldn’t stand him!”
“Luigi?”
“The Master. I called him Luigi. Many of us did, in my circles. What did Schindler say?”
“He says it’s Giulietta Guicciardi, and he says your brother confirmed it. She was your cousin?”
Good brother, Franz. Well spoken. “So why are you asking me?”
“Because I don’t believe them.”
Not so good. I leaned back in my chair. I had been waiting for this chance. How kind of Marie to provide it.
“It’s funny you should say that,” I mused.
“Tell me?” She was holding her breath.
“Because, my dear, I myself was the Immortal Beloved. And if you would like to tell the world about it in your new book, it will be not before time. I can swear, with hand on heart, that the only man I have ever loved was Ludwig.”
Though tears were now quivering in her eyes, Marie was a professional. In no time her notebook and pencil were in her hands, poised and ready.
“I first met the Master,” I began, “not half a mile from this room. The year was 1799…”
*
My dear niece,
I can still picture your expression when you came in and heard the news of Marie Hrussoczy’s visit. But the story I must now tell you will take longer than one session of kaffee und kuchen, and you, closest to my heart among all alive today, deserve to know the whole of it. May I suggest you find a quiet, private place to read and absorb what follows.
It is, of course, not 1799 at all. Our story begins well before that - with my grandfather Anton von Brunsvik family’s purchase, through a “donation” to both sides of its lineage, of a huge sweep of puszta, the Hungarian plain that spreads far beyond the line of land and sky, southwest of Ofen and Pest.
It was useless. In some places, a marshland. A few peasants and shepherds lived in desultory huts, dotted about, working any fertile land or tending the animals. Nothing much existed here after the Turkish occupation flattened everything within sight.
But in the middle of it was Martonvásár, a higgledypiggledy little town filled with the sound of hooves on cobbles and everywhere the strains of the gypsy violinists playing on the corners for money from passers by; and beyond the town stood our home, the castle where we grew up and where the story that Marie will tell began in earnest. As did the real one…

Immortal

Ebook

Immortal - paperback

Be a part of our community! 334,112 people from 207 countries have pledged £11,980,334 to fund 646 projects - and counting!

About us

How it works

Jobs

View our catalogue

About

Help centre

Delivery

Refunds

Contact us

Help

Footer menu

Politics & Social Justice

Memoir & Biography

Nature & Folklore

Gaming & Pop Culture

History & Sociology

Food & Drink

Science & Technology

Language & Literature

Philosophy & Ideas

Gift & Humour

Fiction

Health & Wellbeing

Art & Photography

Business & Economics

Psychology & Self-Help

Unbound Firsts

Genres

Crowdfunding

Published Books

Pre-Order

Second column

Our Books

Shop Now

Tom Cox Collection

Jackie Morris Collection

Jonathan Meades Collection

Ian Livingstone Collection

Daniel Hardcastle Collection

Russell Jones Collection

Column

Author Collections

Submit Your Work

Trending Now

white

black

eBook
Paperback
Hardback
Signed Hardback
Signed Paperback
Fox
Otter
Patron
Ebook
The Readers - a print by Mick Cox (plus signed hardback).
Advanced Book Proof (plus Signed Hardback).
Name a character or animal. (Plus a signed hardback).
Personalised Hardback - Your Photo on the Cover
Ebook via Glassboxx
Be on the Podcast
Virtual Meet the Author
Executive Producer
Hush-Kit article chosen by you
Your name written on a warplane in the book plus a print
Hand drawn illustration by Joe
Patron plus Hardback
Dedicated Hardback
In Memoriam
An Evening with John Healy
Lamp Fish Print Bundle
Unicorn Autopsy Print Bundle
Exclusive Mystery Print Bundle
Surreal Trio Print Bundle
Signed First Edition Bundle
First Edition Bundle
'Cockatrice' Dayglo Poster Bundle
Foil Postcards and Poster Bundle
'One With Nature' T-Shirt Bundle (M)
'One With Nature' T-Shirt Bundle (L)
Patron Bundle
Ebook
Signed Proof Bundle
Book Club Bundle
Annotated Copy Bundle
Afternoon Tea with Natalie Bundle

Trending Now

Crowdfunding

Immortal

About The Book

Join Our Newsletter

Your Bag