Lessons in Harmony with Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe‘s new novel, Lessons in Harmony, imagines the unlikely friendship between the celebrated French composer Maurice Ravel and his British pupil, the rising Ralph Vaughan Williams, in Belle Époque Paris. It is a celebration of music’s power to create beauty, to freeze time and, at its greatest, to express the spirit not just of a composer but of an entire nation, bringing two very different sensibilities, one so French, the other so British, into rare harmony. Jonathan Coe will be in conversation with journalist and musician Philippe Auclair.

The year is 1907, and Ravel is one of the most admired young composers in France: a charismatic, dandyish figure whose technically flawless music hides a deep emotional core. When he takes on a new pupil, the aristocratic Englishman and folk-song collector Vaughan Williams, a cross-channel friendship begins to blossom between two men who appear to share nothing but a gift for embodying their own countries. As the shadow of war gathers, their friendship and their vocation are tested through one of the most turbulent and creative periods in history, and their differing senses of national identity threaten by turns to liberate and to constrain them.

Language: in English