Hidden Harmonies

by Andre Romijn

Genres: Music

384 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2007

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm sorry, but this book ticked all of my bookish pet peeves: zero character development, unreliable narrator, insta-love, zero thematic development, and very uneven pacing. Full review on this book is shown under the cut.

My reception of this book has changed drastically over the last few months. I enjoy Vivaldi & his music, this book is rather well researched, but read on to see what's not my tea.

First read: Ummm this sounds pretty cool!! Written in Vivaldi's perspective (well, Andre tried to). Which is quite interesting since the other novels are usually written from his students' perspectives. Also the how the characters are related to each other (uh, okay I kind of guessed it bc a few other novels suggested something similar) and the stuff about his operas. It encouraged me to listen to a wider range of music.

What I like:

- It's rather detailed, especially with the background information & names of his operas
- It tries to explore a rather unique perspective
- It definitely quite extensively researched e.g. stuff about his family
- The theory is quite interesting.

However in the subsequent re-reads I have realised that this book has a major, glaring flaw. This flaw had been apparent when I first read the book and only became more alarming the more I read the book.

First off, the characterisation is rather inconsistent. This is very apparent in the portrayal of Vivaldi's parents. Andre was like "Giambattista is more phlegmatic" of blah, but surely, that means he wouldn't have said so much tyrannical passages if this is the case. It felt as if Andre Romijn has managed to spectacularly gather all of the information but to just vomit them all out at us in the book without properly digesting what's actually important, what could actually be left out.

As the consequence, this novel ended up with a lot of chapters which could had been cut, without interfering with the trajectory of the plot.

Another thing that greatly irked me is how skewed is portrayal of Vivaldi. The role of an author of a novel is to allow readers to be able to fully embrace their protagonists, but tragically, Andre failed rather spectacularly to capture his true colour. Vivaldi is quite an independent composer, in terms of his musical direction. The novel suggested otherwise.

And this leads to another major flaw: development of the characters through the book. Surely the characters should mature & shift personality as the novel develops. And this development is absent.

Also absent is the thematic development. I know this is a novel (trying to mimic the biography), but surely there's plenty of literature references which could relate to the whole plot.

Last, but not least, something that baffled me is the fact the novel didn't start from 1703 but in 1709 ???? This, idfgi. The addition of his Pieta years and instead of "padding out" the uneventful last few chapters could had made the novel much more vibrant and exciting. As the consequence of skipping out the Pieta years, Andre has painfully neglected the fact the Vivaldi spent A LOT of his time composing Concerti. (Andre pretty much just underplayed the importance of this aspect and was like "oh so he spent almost all of the time focusing on operas", but the development of his concerti? Surely this is quite evident. Could had explored a little more about the Pieta and his Concerti)

Okay so the flaws in a nutshell:

- The novel has padded out way too much e.g. The insert / flashback scenes are out of place and that some chapters could had been cut without affecting with the overall plot. #SAD that the 2-paragraph blurb already gave away almost everything.
- Umm while the theory is quite interesting, part of the theory didn't sound realistic. If Vivaldi is known to be a loyal person, surely he won't just fall in love with a complete stranger who has absolutely no talent with music??
- The minor characters don't seem human to me. Don't breath lives. Why bother padding so many once-mentioned characters when one didn't even bother developing the characters?
- Of the more major characters, Andre failed to create characters with coherent personalities with adequate developments. And in addition, failed to actually paint a realistic image of these characters.
- The character dynamics failed, I mean, FAILED MISERABLY, to live up to my expectations. Their narrations sound disjointed and flip-flopped. pretty much like "I care about you" blah blah blah, and then the next line is kind of like "omg go away you idiot" blah blah blah (yes, like in the way that one wants to banish the other). This is definitely not the type of dynamics which I would expect to see in close friends / family members. The execution of this is absolutely tragic and dreadful (worse than your dinosaur's velocity scaling thermostat technique). #SAD!
- I've also recently noticed that while this book is mostly written in 3rd person narrative of Vivaldi's perspective, it sometimes drifts out to a random stray minor character's POV rather stochastically? This is subpar and only disrupts the flow of the novel. This is anything but cohesive isn't one of them.
- In a nutshell, Andre had a golden opportunity to convert his extensive research into a lively novel, but sadly he wasted this chance and it reads as bland as one could imagine. Perhaps shifting Vivaldi's perspective to a 1st person narrative and sticking to just this one perspective could liven up the story.

So to weight all these up, the key takeaway is:

This book is good for: People who are not familiar with Classical Music. Also good for trivial facts and tidbits. Since a lot of stuff about Vivaldi isn't in English, this book is a good starting point. Not a great one, but good enough & accessible enough for most readers to follow through.

This book is problematic that: For anyone who takes historical accuracy and the quality of a novel seriously. This is not the book you should stick with. I personally find that The Violinist of Venice by Alyssa Palombo a much more pleasurable read, as a novel. As for historical accuracy in mind, biographies will be much more reliable than this novel (which had tried a bit way too hard to be read as a biography but failed as both novel and biography. #SAD).

I solemnly swear the characterisation of the entirety of the book matches the nature of white noise. Just stochastic and undergoing Brownian motion like a headless chicken jiggling about nowhere in particular. haha well done Andre, well done. Well done for vomiting all your disgusting trashcan information and what the Vivaldi enthusiast musicologists whom you don't even deserve squirrels have gathered about Vivaldi at us.

My biggest suggestion to Andre: Condense the research and give more space for character + thematic development. The research is really good but they also need to be properly digested and evaluated. Instead of just throwing everything at the readers, why not just gently show it and let readers figure those out? After all the premise of a good novel is to leave readers a sense of open-endedness which sadly is absent in Hidden Harmonies. Hidden Harmonies? More like Hidden Poops lmao.

(1.5 stars out of 5)