Student Conductor [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Robert Ford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 5, 2004

In this daring first novel of political, sexual, and artistic awakening, a young symphony conductor travels to Germany in the autumn of 1989, where he falls in love with a recent East German defector, and has a brutal encounter with the prewar conductor who becomes his great life teacher.

Cooper Barrow has returned to the competitive fray of the orchestral world after eight years of exile-bringing his prodigious talent and insecurity into Frankfurt and Berlin just at the moment that the Berlin Wall falls. Barrow is to study under the cruel hand of a capricious maestro, Karlheinz Ziegler-a man who carries boundless shame from his days in a Nazi concentration camp, and who will force Barrow to define himself within a morally ambiguous world.

But when Barrow encounters the beautiful and boldly sexual Petra Vogel, an oboist with poisonous secrets, he sets in motion a complex psychological dance of guilt, music, and love.

With remarkable intensity and physicality, Robert Ford delivers a pitch-perfect debut, brimming with intrigue and revelation, where passion flowers into desire on every page.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A young American conductor goes to study in West Germany and is troubled by the country's unquiet past in this penetrating, intelligent first novel. Eight years after dropping out of Juilliard, 30-year-old Cooper Barrow makes a bid to restart his career, going to work with Karlheinz Ziegler, a legendary conductor from prewar days who now teaches at a provincial music school. A strongly antagonistic relationship develops between them, exacerbated by Barrow's continuing anxiety, Ziegler's brusquely authoritarian manner and the young American's romantic interest in Petra Vogel, a young oboist in the student orchestra, a refugee from East Germany. It is 1989, the time of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the first stirrings of East German rebellion, and life at the music school is shadowed by old rivalries and resentments. Petra is an enigmatic creature, tormented by dark mysteries in her past, and Ziegler turns out to have his own wartime crosses to bear. The book skillfully captures the bewilderment someone from a simpler world feels at the layers of cynicism and corruption that enfold tormented Germany, and Barrow's alternating exultation at his own developing skills and frustration at his failure to communicate are convincing. The novel can seem overschematic, with each character carefully fitted into place rather than springing to spontaneous life. But Ford's precise, thoughtful writing recalls the rigorous harmonies of musical composition, and his insights into the rarefied world of classical music are rich and often piercingly poignant.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Eight years after walking off the podium during a concert, Cooper Barrow, once a promising orchestral conductor, is attempting to revive his career by studying with German master teacher Karlheinz Ziegler. Everything in this remarkably assured first novel is charged with emotional energy, beginning with the setting--Germany in the days immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Barrow, struggling to put his past demons behind him, wants only to reimmerse himself in learning to conduct, but Ziegler sees instantly that his pupil tends to fall apart "at the point where intelligence and emotion meet." Barrow hits that point not only in his work with the tormented, enigmatic Ziegler but also in his relationship with oboist Petra Vogel, a woman whose own demons stretch back across the now-collapsed wall to East Berlin. In a novel that echoes both Sophie's Choice and Israeli writer Nathan Shaham's superb Rosendorf Quartet (1991), Ford places his three principal characters "in a reborn city, in a reborn country" and asks them to somehow escape the secrets that lock them to the past. The means to that escape--or, possibly, the force that holds them back--is music, and Ford writes about the emotional essence of music with remarkable eloquence. This is finally a novel about power--the power of a great conductor driving a well-trained orchestra, the power of the past to enslave us, the power of the future to free us, and the power of the individual to love and to forgive. There is hardly a wrong note, from the moment Ford lifts his baton to the final refrain. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• ISBN-10: 0425199754
• ASIN: B000HWYR2I
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #272,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shattering, Musical., November 12, 2003

By 

multitasker extraordinaire "milsmet" (Fayetteville, AR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Student Conductor (Hardcover)

If this novel did not have a masterfully intricate plot, intriguingly human characters, and the liquid, powerful feel of absorbing a symphony in bed, I would read it for the language. The language is such that occasionally I was stopped in the middle of an established rhythm to find myself rereading a sentence, struck by how perfectly it expressed itself. My only warning to a potential reader would be to wait until you're willing to spend some time with it. With work piling up on both sides, I sat down for a break with this book and read it in its entirety within the span of an afternoon, evening, and night. Having finished, I wanted to sit down with the author - or any of his characters - over coffee. Well written, Mr. Ford.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful First Novel with a Classical Music Background, January 31, 2005

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Student Conductor (Hardcover)

I am particularly drawn to novels that have a background in the world of classical music. I loved Vikram Seth's 'An Equal Music,' for instance, with its main characters who are chamber music players. But I have to say that as much as I admired Seth's book, this one is better. It is not only startlingly apt in its insider's understanding of the world of classical musicians, but also for its complex, thought-provoking plot with its many subtly revealed secrets, and for its burnished language. Author Robert Ford was a flutist and received an MFA from Yale before becoming a writer and actor. He clearly knows from the inside about the insecurities, obsessiveness and search for transcendence so often seen in top-level musicians. He describes those qualities with spare lyricism and telling detail. (Here, for instance, is a passage about the protagonist, a violinist-turned-student-conductor now studying in Germany with a great if mysterious maestro. He has not played his violin in months but picks it up again for a day-long practice session: "Three months without playing had left his chin smooth and vulnerable. He'd been so intent on tuning intervals, one small correction after another, that he'd forgotten the need to work in a callus. He brushed a knuckle just behind the jaw bone and winced. When he looked, there was a mosquito's worth of blood on the back of his finger.")

The music of Brahms figures as a leitmotiv throughout this book and it is described in detail that only a musician - and a good writer - could provide. While reading 'The Student Conductor' I kept open my own score of Brahms's Second Symphony for frequent reference, and was astonished to realize how many insights Ford gave me about the work--not something you'd expect a novel to do, is it? I also found myself referring to a couple of books that I am sure Ford used in his preparation for writing the book: Jan Swafford's marvelous biography of Brahms, and Norman Lebrecht's gossipy 'The Maestro Myth.'

However the main theme of the book is not the music. It is a love story, of sorts, that takes place against the background of Germany in 1989 when the Wall fell. Not only are there ghosts from the divided Germany--primarily in the character of East German oboist Petra Vogel with whom student conductor Cooper Barrow falls in love--but from the era of Hitler's Germany whose shadow falls on Barrow's conducting teacher, Karlheinz Ziegler. Plot twists bearing on these things make the book compulsively readable.

I would recommend this book urgently to readers who have some background in music. But I would also recommend it as well to those who have no such background because Ford has an ability to describe the inner lives of classical musicians in a way that makes it understandable to anyone. Plus, it's a great story.

Scott Morrison

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a quiet masterpiece, November 29, 2004

By 

Elisabeth Eck (germany) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Student Conductor (Paperback)

Having lived in Germany for nearly 30 years, having experienced the events in November 1989 at first hand and being a historian to boot, I feel I have some insight into modern German history and the German mindset. Robert Ford's book simply took my breath away. It seems as though he has lived in this country for 30 years - so clear and accurate are his insights. The novel is multi-layered, a poignant love story, a morality tale and a brilliant description of just what it is that a conductor does and how an orchestra works. In fact it had me running to a Brahms CD that had been gathering dust for quite some time on our shelf and listening over and over to the 1st symphony with Ford's book as my guide. His description of "ordinary" people living in "extraordinary" times and the moral dilemmas they faced mirrors life in Europe in the 20th century. Needn't we be thankful that we've never been tested in this way?
This is one of the best novels I have ever read - his language is spare and beautiful. I read the book twice in one week, handed it onto my daughter and checked in the internet to see whether it has been translated into German so that I can recommend it to German friends. It is being translated and will appear in German next spring. Gott sei dank!.