A Classic Caper, and Not Just for Scholars - By Al Past, Author of The Distant Cousin Series
The subtitle of The Mozart Forgeries is A Caper Novel for the Serious Mozart Aficionado,
and that is an accurate description, though the book is a good deal more than that.
For instance while I consider myself a music aficionado, I am not a fan of Mozart, but that
didn't affect my enjoyment of this book. I am also interested in books and paper and how they are made,
and I am an amateur calligrapher--all have relevance to The Mozart Forgeries.
But what matters most is that I also love a good read, and this book measures up on all counts.
There are two main characters, never named (I will come back to that): Librarian and Forger.
Friends since childhood, they grow up with, or acquire, a variety of special skills and abilities:
a photographic memory for texts, the ability to play piano, a career dealing with rare manuscripts,
and not least among others, a willingness to break laws in order to make money.
Both are exceedingly cunning, and Librarian, the leader, in particular has enough caution and planning
skills to make a top-drawer secret agent. In a nutshell, the basic premise is this: several popular works
of Mozart (known to anyone who loves classical music, even me), are known to exist only from copies of
missing originals. Librarian and Forger decide to forge them and to auction them off for millions of dollars.
The novel is a detailed account of how they do this, and I do mean detailed--the process takes up the majority
of the pages. The plot twists and suspense come towards the end, but they do come. The story is meticulously
plot-driven rather than character driven: the reader will learn an astonishing amount about music, how paper
and ink are made, the process of music composition, and most informative to me, the business of forgery.
If the skills involved were not so specialized, the text could almost be used as a how-to guide for enriching
oneself with a quill pen. The volume is handsome and the story is splendidly written. You will not find a more
cleanly edited book anywhere. For my money, though, the style was a tad cool. For example, I see no reason why
the two protagonists couldn't have been called Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones. In an aside early on the author explains
that since the characters desire anonymity he will call them only Forger and Librarian. Whatever that added to the
flavor of the story created awkwardness through the first two thirds of the book, for me at least.
(I finally did get used to it.) Furthermore, though the two men do have vestigial personalities,
they tend to speak as if they are university lecturers, in polished, complex sentences.
Ultimately, however, their personalities are not the point. The caper is the story. In a way, it's the
opposite of all those 'Oceans' movies, where the caper was almost irrelevant and the characters and their
interactions and in-jokes were what mattered. This is a decidedly scholarly caper story. If you are the type of
reader who enjoys florid, breathless, gauzily plotted crisis-a-minute action stories like The Da Vinci Code,
The Mozart Forgeries is not for you. If you enjoy a tightly plotted, rigorously detailed, and even informative,
caper story, I don't know how you could do better.
. . . Joseph M. Boonin, Sr. Librarian (retired)
Former Head of the Recorded Sound and Moving Image Circulating Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Former music publisher-distributor and one-time representative of the publishers of 'The New Mozart Edition'