The Virtuoso Author:Margriet de Moor, Ina Rilke (Translator) For one entire opera season, Carlotta sits in her candle-lit box held in the spell of a world in which knowledge, beauty and love collide: music. She is falling in love with the castrati, Gasparo. Set in eighteenth-century Naples, a place of carriages, churches visited by criminals, and ships resting in dusky harbors, The Virtuoso is the tale of... more » an exceptional place and an exceptional passion.
A bestseller throughout Europe, The Virtuoso is both a wonderfully romantic historical novel and a literary triumph. With this very unusual love story, her first publication in the United States, Margriet de Moor is sure to attract a great many American readers.
"Margriet de Moor's virtuoso novel meets exactly the taste of our own time for the bizarre made sympathetic, the beautiful seen as the technical. . . De Moor--formerly a singer--describes Gasparo's singing, his swoony effect on his audiences and his lady's delight in his naked body with rhapsodically expert relish."--Sunday Times (London)
"The rapturous verve in de Moor's style is fueled by a swirl of period details which, for once in a novel of this kind, are neither mere set-dressing nor too patently the results of background research."--Times Literary Supplement« less