During the Protestant revolution in Europe, a new kind of music emerged, one that ultimately sought to recognize the deceased and to individuate the sense of loss and grief. But the tradition was virtually wiped out by the Great Funerary Purges of the 1830s and 40s. Kriwaczek tells the fascinating story of this beautiful music, condemned by the Catholic Church for political as much as theological reasons, and of the mysterious Guild of Funerary Violinists that, yes, defends its secrets in our time. This is unquestionably one of the strangest books any publisher has ever risked publishing. Discussing the evolution of European culture, musical forms and society's changing attitudes to mortality and the emotional effects of music upon the soul, this is a dark and magical history.
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"'And so I resolved that henceforth I would only play the saddest music, indeed I would market my concerts as The Saddest Music in the World' Rohan Kriwaczek"
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
From the Publisher
The extraordinary history of the almost lost tradition of the Funerary Violin-and of the mysterious guild guards its secrets
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant Work of Imaginary Scholarship,
By
This review is from: An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin (Hardcover)
Put this one on the shelf next to your old Borges paperbacks and Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars. It is a wonderfully written and illustrated (both with pictures and scores) scholarly history of a wholly imaginary historical episode: the rise, flourishing, and ruthless suppression of a tradition of violin music played at funerals. Kriwaczek tells of his discovery of the almost forgotten tradition of funerary violin, the guild that carried on its tradition, and the lives of its eccentric geniuses. We learn about funerary violins with their characteristic death's head scrolls, the duels at funerals between rival violinists with whitened faces and beauty marks, the great Hieonymous Gratchenfleiss, who proudly rejected his proper title of "Kurfürstentrauerviolistenmeister" in favor of the simple "Herr." The fact that this is all a product of Mr. Kriwaczek's fertile imagination is beside the point; it should have been real. It's wonderful reading and not to be missed.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sustained jeu d'esprit,
By
This review is from: An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin (Hardcover)
This is the imagined history of an imagined art form: solo violin playing at funerals. Written in an academic style, it is a brilliant pastiche and as such is bound to make one smile: the writing itself is mostly dead-pan and does not attempt to be overtly humorous, except perhaps in the invention of the delicious name - Herr Hieronymous (sic) Gratchenfleiss - given to one particular practitioner of the art and in an odd phrase like the one describing a lady as having `married well and widowed better'. The author fits his story into real events in the political, social and musical history from the 16th to the 19th century, which adds an air of verisimilitude to this tongue-in-cheek work. The book is handsomely produced, and is complete with period illustrations (some must surely have been specially concocted for it) and musical scores.
In the 1830s and 1840s the Catholic Church is said to have launched the Great Funerary Purges to eradicate both the art and, wherever it could, the records relating to it: hence the purported incompleteness of the history. As part of the Purge, in 1841 a fire is said to have destroyed the headquarters of the Guild of Funerary Violinists in Cadogan Square, together with most of its archives. A fine chapter near the end has some heartfelt reflections about the nature of funerals today from which the spirit embodied in the art of the funerary violin is sadly absent. A book of fabulously rich invention and ingenuity.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The history that should have been,
By D. Riverblue Cloudwalker "Riverblue" (California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin (Hardcover)
We, particularly the more artistically or melancholically inclined, all have that feeling sometimes: a deep regret that history seems to have omitted what we know in our heart of hearts should have been the case. Rohan Kriwaczek, a 38 year old Brighton busker, has happily done his part to remedy the historical lack of a gloomy tradition that those darker regions of our hearts know is sorely needed: the guilds and the corpus of work for the solo funerary violin. Readers of this richly imaginative work, well documented with appropriate phony photographs and centuries-old letters and diary entries, as well as the frequently expressed desire that other evidence should be discovered to supplant these "tantalising" (a favorite word of the author) fragments, will likely apprehend the fiction of this history based upon the brilliantly macabre anecdotes, or the gothic eccentricity of its characters. For instance the celebrated funeral violinist Babcotte who, it is said, refused a king's invitation to play, "Does your king not know that I play only for the dead!" only to end up soon thereafter buried in an unmarked grave with a stake through his heart.
The reason that the publisher's comments for this book do not indicate that it is a fiction, is apparently because the publisher was duped. See the articles at www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article600440.ece, or the one at www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/books/04viol.html. The last article is entitled "British author espies a funerary violin vacuum and so fills it." How the publisher's editors managed not to miss the cues of the deadpan humor throughout, one wonders, but they thought they were publishing a real esoteric history.
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