Mariel Baxter, a famous American soprano, has suddenly cancelled all her recitals and flown to Vienna. In the 1980s she came to the city to study the art of lieder singing with the reclusive Ursule Kroll, one of the brightest stars of the Nazi era and a favourite of the Fuhrer himself. The two haven’t communicated since Mariel’s unexpected departure over twenty-five years ago. So why has Mariel come back? As they play a vicious cat-and mouse game, terrible revelations and recriminations about the past slowly begin to unfold and Mariel and Ursule soon discover that some secrets are better left buried.
Editorial Reviews
Review
In German musical circles, unwritten secrets are tips for interpreting vocal scores that have been handed down through the ages from composer to singer and teacher to pupil. In Ronald Frame s new novel, it is these that the legendary soprano Sabine Hebbel imparts to her compatriot Ursule Kroll in the early 1930s and Kroll, in her turn, hands down to the young American, Mariel Baxter, over 40 years later. Frame is particularly adept at depicting the interplay between music, love and desire both lesbian and heterosexual and the price that all practitioners have to pay to perfect their art. –Michael Ardetti, Financial Times
Prolific, versatile, capable of a William Trevor-like understated drama, Glaswegian Ronald Frame has published 14 works of fiction. Unwritten Secrets returns to the musical motifs, and the tangled teacher-pupil dynamics, of his Booker-longlisted The Lantern Bearers (1999). Its cleverly braided double narrative alternates the stories of two singers, bound by the time that the younger woman spent as a student of the elder. Frame evokes the sounds that makes these burdened lives worthwhile with deft and laconic skill: from Mariel singing an aria from La Traviata on a Paris bridge in a “transfigured night”, to the melancholy “sweet balm of memory” audible in Ursule’s recordings of her favourite Schubert songs. His novel strikes with flair and resonance those dissonant chords of money and desire, fame and politics, that rumble behind great music and its makers. Its various mysteries unfold at a presto gallop, free of all Viennese schmaltz, in a tight-knit, allusive and sardonic style: more Alban Berg than Richard Strauss. –Boyd Tonkin, Independent
About the Author
Ronald Frame was born in Glasgow in 1953, and was educated there and at Oxford. He is the author of nine novels, four collections of short stories, as well as many radio and television plays. He has won several prizes for his work, including the Betty Trask Prize for Fiction, the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award and the Samuel Beckett Prize. His novel The Lantern Bearers was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His website is www.carnbeg.com.
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