Music & Silence Book

To choose music as the restoring element of order, beauty and harmony and silence to weave the nuanced voices of a dozen characters tossed by the turbulent currents of History is not an easy task per-se, particularly if the reality of place and time includes shifting narratives, past and present tenses and a historical frame that happens tangentially to the plots and subplots of the story.
The endeavor becomes even more ambitious when the setting is the Denmark of the 17th Century, an isolated place surrounded by water and murky clouds, and the reality of the Danish court is carved with the uneven chiselers of disparate narrations by historical and fabricated figures, mostly tormented individuals who grope in the darkness of their disillusionments and whose elusive chronicles hum with undertones more redolent of fairy tales than the expected polyphonic visions of high quality historical fiction.

King Christian IV, a renaissance prince, who vouches for intellectual freedom and the abolition of serfdom, is manipulated by his adulterous wife Queen Kirsten and his mother old Queen Sofie, whose basement brims over with gold ingots that replenish her greediness. The Irish Earl O'Fingal is in a frenzy to capture the elusive notes of the epitome of musical beauty that arrested him in dreams while his wife leads a double life with the young and virtuous lutenist Peter Claire, who in turn joins the royal orchestra and finds in innocent Emilia, maid to lascivious Queen Kirsten, his ideal companion.
An entangled gossamer of improbable coincidences and contradictory versions of the facts that mould history gives shape to a world in constant self-conflict that is both tangible and remote, gloomy and fantastic, accidental and bizarre. The characters lack chromatic expression and they rest in conventional stalls made of either pure good or dark evil. The story lacks the recurrent motif that binds independent movements to the thematic unity of the symphony, presenting instead a dissonant assortment of little facts and fanciful perspectives that fails to draw the bigger picture.

The echo of a distant music can be discerned coming from the freezing dungeons of the Danish palace, where the oil lamp dribbles onto slippery floors and a blue flame flickers hesitantly on the dark walls of time and memory, but when the last note has been played, a deafening silence wipes out the faltering melody of these souls who in the end speak only with forgettable, vacant words.

"And if Memory be faulty - as I do think mine must certainly be - then we shall remain all of our lives Indifferent to Music."