After Work - An Equal Music

Music is meant to be heard, and musicians work tirelessly to help us hear what they hear so clearly in their minds.  In An Equal Music, Vikram Seth helps us understand the actual creation of music, particularly through the playing of quartets. We experience the alchemy of four people becoming one voice that expresses the musical imagination of long-gone composers.

Thus we meet the characters in a splendid novel of sometimes unbearable suspense and angst.  Michael is the protagonist.  Music is his life, usually overshadowing his relationships with other musicians, his family and the few friends who comprehend his total absorption.  Only the other members of his quartet empathize fully.

Deep love for two drives Michael through An Equal Music.  The love similar to that which many of us experience is for Julia, whom he left years ago while suffering from a black mood of depression.  She didn’t get over him, and he didn’t get over her.  When she accidentally reappears in his London life, he struggles to again intertwine Julia and music.

His second, perhaps even more overwhelming love is for his Tononi, an eighteenth century violin on loan to him for decades.  Through this novel, non-musicians will discover what it means to have a perfect instrument bequeathed by history.  Even though Michael expects the loan to be recalled by his benefactor at any time, he cannot conceive of a life in music without the Tononi’s beloved touch and tone. 

Nevertheless this very concept of loss is forced on him, at the same time as his second loss of Julia destroys his dedication to the quartet.  Music does not save all, but this time it does save Michael from his deep anguish.