ALL WARS BEGIN WITH MUSIC. Her father told her that when she was nine years old. The fife and drum. The marching songs, sung to the rhythm of boots tramping their way to battle. The bugle’s call for an infantry to charge. Even the wailing bassoon sirens that precede bombardment and the piccolo whistles of the falling bombs themselves. War is music and music is war, he said, breath strong from his evening stew and mulled wine. The girl looked up from her pillow and said nothing.
A light, engaging read that keeps switching between two timelines (which ultimately converge) as a young musicologist finds herself on a quest to find the missing movements of a sonata; the movements had been split up during WWII and it wasn't at all certain that they could be traced or who had written them. Of course, she did find the remaining movements, and they turned out to have almost certainly been written by Beethoven during the so-called Lost Years. The best part of this book, however, isn't the narration of the twists and turns of the quest but some truly stunning descriptions of music.