What happens when two gifted musicians who are wrong for each other get married? In the first volume of what is being billed as the Nocturne trilogy, Yiyun Li presents one such couple by exploring the formative years of the Irish composer John Field (1782-1837), who "would become a footnote in the life of Frédéric Chopin," and the French pianist Adelaide Percheron (1790-1869). These musicians would later marry and have, according to history, a spectacularly unhappy union, in large part due to Field's drinking and infidelities, and Percheron's resentment at her husband's unfaithfulness and her comparative lack of recognition as an artist. This fine work explores their early individual experiences and, one assumes, sets up the tragedy of the marriage to come.
Li's surprising trip into Romantic-era storytelling spans the years before their marriage and shifts perspectives throughout. She starts with Field, born in Dublin, a prodigy who heard from everyone that he was destined to become the next Mozart; his musician grandfather told him early on that "there's gold to be made from music," adding that musicians are "better than any king in Christendom." The story then follows Field through his musical and emotional maturation, from his lessons with Tommaso Giordani, an Italian composer and teacher, to his initial successful concerts and eventual passage to London, where he trains with Muzio Clementi, who encourages him to never stop selling himself if he wants a career.
Percheron, meanwhile, was born in French India and orphaned at age three; her mother died shortly after childbirth, and her father was subsequently killed during the Siege of Pondicherry. Being an ambitious woman in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is hard enough--her governess tells the budding pianist, "It's not a girl's job to be Mozart, or Handel, or Bach"--but also working against her is her Pondicherry birth. The denizens of Paris look down upon her when she travels there in 1804 to pursue her passion for the pianoforte; a maid disparagingly refers to "primitives," and Percheron makes the painful discovery that she "was not considered French by most people she met."
A Pulitzer Prize winner for Things in Nature Merely Grow, her gut-wrenchingly poetic memoir about the suicides of her two teenage sons, Li relies more heavily on backstory and research in this novel than her other works. Nonetheless, readers fascinated by stories of musicians' early years and the forces that shape them will appreciate the music she makes with this delicate and heartfelt work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: Yiyun Li's Music Against the Night tells the story of the formative years of two musicians who will one day marry: John Field, the celebrated Irish composer, and Adelaide Percheron, a French pianist.