This week let me share with you the challenges in writing about composers in the early 19th century
In the opening passage of “Music in the Night” my vision was that Annie would be playing the Moonlight Sonata. The story takes place in 1820, and Owen heard her play it seven years before, in 1813. I checked to see whether the dates were right. I was relieved to find that Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp was published in 1802, but I still had a problem. It wasn’t called “Moonlight” until the German poet Ludwig Rellstab published a review in the 1830’s likening the sonata to moonlight on Lake Lucerne. Alas! I had to refer to it prosaically as a sonata by Beethoven.
At the end in envisioned the stirring Appassionata Sonata. That work was published in 1807 as Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor in 1807 but not called by its name until the publisher of an arrangement labelled it so in 1838. Again I was stuck with a stirring sonata by Beethoven.
Chopin Playing by Siemiradzki, 1829
In the middle of the story, I decided to have her discover a new musical form, the nocturne. (Nocturn–night, get it?) So Chopin!! Alas no. He didn’t write his first until 1830. But I discovered that the first composer to be written under that specific title were by John Fields, an Irish composer who was known to have inspired Chopin. His dated to as early as 1812, close enough for Annie to view them as innovative. Fields it was!
“Music in the Night” is a novella that appears in Dukes All Night Long, a Dragonblade Publishing collection of fourteen novellas, which is still on pre-order until August 17 for a mere 99 cents–the bargain of the summer! https://www.amazon.com/Dukes-All-Night-Long-Historical-ebook/dp/B0F85WV8NR