The Virtuoso [Hardcover]

Margriet de Moor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2000

From the highly acclaimed Dutch writer Margriet de Moor, an extremely sensitive and sensual recreation of 18th Century Naples.

For one entire opera season, Carlotta sits in her candle-lit box held in the spell of a world in which knowledge, beauty and love collide: music. She is falling in love with the castrati, Gasparo. Set in eighteenth-century Naples, a place of carriages, churches visited by criminals, and ships resting in dusky harbors, The Virtuoso is the tale of an exceptional place and an exceptional passion.

A bestseller throughout Europe, The Virtuoso is both a wonderfully romantic historical novel and a literary triumph. With this very unusual love story, her first publication in the United States, Margriet de Moor is sure to attract a great many American readers.

"Margriet de Moor's virtuoso novel meets exactly the taste of our own time for the bizarre made sympathetic, the beautiful seen as the technical. . . De Moor--formerly a singer--describes Gasparo's singing, his swoony effect on his audiences and his lady's delight in his naked body with rhapsodically expert relish."--Sunday Times (London)

"The rapturous verve in de Moor's style is fueled by a swirl of period details which, for once in a novel of this kind, are neither mere set-dressing nor too patently the results of background research."--Times Literary Supplement

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Margriet de Moor's exquisite (and exquisitely translated) The Virtuoso, a love affair with a castrato becomes the last thing one would expect: thoroughly, almost overwhelmingly physical. A bestseller in Europe, this Dutch writer's novel overflows with the sights and smells, tastes and textures of an 18th-century Naples caught in intellectual and sensual ferment. Here, thieves take shelter in churches, carriages race through the narrow streets, and aristocrats gamble, discuss Descartes, cross-dress, and swoon over their favorite male sopranos. Into this heady milieu comes Carlotta, Duchess of Rocca d'Evandro, married at 15 and a firm believer that "your body is what you are and all knowledge begins with desire."

What, then, to do with a body like Gasparo's? A native of the same village as Carlotta, at age 11 Gasparo underwent the infamous operation that would keep his soprano suitably pure. Years later, Carlotta hears him sing in the San Carlo theater and immediately falls into a fever of desire. One expects such a passion to be primarily metaphorical, and there is indeed something quixotic about her love for Gasparo, with his voice that "attests to a world beyond this world but which comes none the less from a body like every other: warm, full of obscure desires." Well, not quite like every other. A product of both prodigious natural gifts and prodigiously unnatural intervention, Gasparo is closer to a work of art than a man--but that doesn't prevent Carlotta from lusting after his bod. With some coaxing on her part, they manage to have an affair, the mechanics of which Carlotta by no means ignores in her breathless narration.

De Moor writes compellingly about beauty and art, but the book's real strength lies in her almost offhand depiction of Neapolitan aristocracy--its decadence, its playfulness, and even its casual cruelty. ("Only one boy in four fails to survive" Gasparo's operation, Carlotta breezily notes.) Reading The Virtuoso is like immersing yourself in another world entirely, one in which the central love affair makes beautiful sense. History is full of mutilation in the name of art; de Moor's triumph is to make the mutilation itself a subject of desire. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Dutch author de Moor makes her American debut with a tempestuous tale of lust, longing and loss among the aristocracy in 18th-century Naples. Carlotta Caetani, who narrates, is 10 when she feels her first sensual stirrings, listening to the angelic voice of 11-year-old choirboy Gasparo Conti. Her wealthy, older father, Paolo, also finds the boy's voice compelling, and, in a game of cards, gets Gasparo's father to submit his son to a life in the opera, starting with the operation that will make him a castrato. Gasparo disappears from their small village, Croce del Carmine, but Carlotta doesn't forget him. Five years later, Carlotta's dowry has been gambled away by her father and she is resigned to marrying a wealthy, middle-aged, homosexual family friend, Berto. When Paolo dies, Berto offers his grieving young bride a respite, allowing her to spend an opera season in Naples. A poetic passage foreshadows what is in store for her there: "Of course I did not think of Gasparo. But long before reaching the coast the traveler can sense the sea." Once she sees the now-famous virtuoso perform on stage, his angelic beauty and heavenly voice obsess her. Fortunately, her loving older half-sister, Angelica Margherita, and their childhood maidservant, Faustina Maria Delle Papozze, help stabilize Carlotta through the turmoil of first love. Carlotta's passion informs her mistaken belief that virtuosity equals virtue, failing to see that Gasparo is in fact rather boring and vain, temperamental and hopelessly self-absorbed. The erotic couplings and breathless narrative will certainly draw comparisons to Anne Rice's paean to the castrati, Cry to Heaven. However, de Moor's book is a colorful, passionate story on its own merits, with many rapturous passages musing philosophically and poetically about love, beauty and form.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover; First edition. edition (March 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585670030
• ISBN-13: 978-1585670031
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,098,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Done Well, However, March 19, 2001

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Virtuoso (Hardcover)

This work by Ms. Margriet de Moor is very well written, however I believe it will appeal to a narrower group than some other works in the same genre. The Neapolitan setting is wonderfully detailed but is merely a side note to the dominant first person narrative.

And the narrative is a bit unusual in that the woman who is the center of the work has a variety of affairs, intimately detailed but not lurid, however her obsessive affair is with a "Castrato". The book is massively detailed for the musically literate, however for those of us not familiar with the unique singing skills of this physically modified man, the detail can be an impediment to seeing what the Author intends, the larger your musical lexicon the more this story will appeal.

The idea of a love affair between this unusual pair could easily sink into a voyeuristic trudge, but this never happens as Ms. De Moor writes well, and when describing the intimacies never descends to the prurient.

A very good book that should be approached cautiously, for the musically very well informed a wonderful read, for those looking for a bit less romance search elsewhere.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN ELEGANT TIME JOURNEY, May 2, 2000

By 

eugene butler (Overland Park.Kansas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Virtuoso (Hardcover)

What a joy to read literature by an author who can manipulate and craft language to cast a totally enthralling spell over the reader and take one back to another era and place!I was pulled into the love story of the aristocratic Carlotta and the castrato virtuoso singer,Gasparo from the first pages.Margriet de Moor has done her homework on 18th century Naples.One can almost taste,feel,and breathe the atmosphere and her description of an opera performance at the San Carlo Opera house is phenominal.A little knowledge of 18th century Neapolitan opera doesn't hurt but is not necessary to enjoy this rich elegant novel.All in all Ms. de Moor has scored a bullseye.Brava! Brava!

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A differant time and place, April 18, 2000

By 

acejake "acejake" (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Virtuoso (Hardcover)

Historical fiction can be the most interesting andfascinating of all novels.Observing another society in a time long passed, stretches your imaginationin a way contemporary fiction cannot. The storyof Carlotta and Gasparo inThe Virtuoso by Margriet DeMoor is a wonderful exampleof this type of fiction.I was completely fascinatedby their story and the society their lives werelived in. A read like this,gives you a completely differant take on our own time and place. I highlyrecommend it!