Martha Anne Toll’s second novel, Duet for One, starts graveside with Victor and adult son Adam, mourning the loss of wife, mother and formidable pianist Adele Hammond Pearl. Their grief couldn’t be more different, “For Victor, Adele’s death was a black hole that sucked in music. For Adam, a numbness.” They try, in their own ways, to live and plan Adele’s Memorial Concert and yet, for both, moving forward means grappling with the past.
The past for Adam, a professional violinist who came of age in the classical music world of his accomplished parents, is fraught with unanswered questions. Adam wonders why his mother was “bitingly critical” of him and yet always encouraged and complemented others —like when, after a recital, she loudly commented on the one note Adam missed, but praised the other musician even though their performances were equal. When Adam finds a love letter in Adele’s desk from fellow musician Phillip Hissle he is unsure whether he even knew the woman who helped raise him. Lastly and most relevant to his future, Adam is fixated on Dara, his first love, and why she abruptly left him, the wake of which has left him unable to sustain a romantic relationship.
The past for Victor means revisiting Adele as wife, sometimes reconciling her as mother to their son Adam, and remembering their musical partnership —together they were Pearl & Pearl duo piano players. Victor turns to Adele’s scrapbook and his crystal-clear memory to recount the moments that made their life together, from introducing Adele to his mother after a two-year silence to contemplating the gap between her expansive ability to love and her inability to show tenderness to Adam. Victor struggles to move forward alone and avoids playing the piano despite the consequences, “His left index finger was getting dangerously stiff, and the knuckle on his right thumb was beginning to bother him. It was maddening to let his hands atrophy. On the other hand, why bother?”
As Cecil Rothstein, the classical composer and writer Dara hosts at a University of Pennsylvania event, aptly states, “‘We’re forced to sort the events of our lives, otherwise the past takes over and we lose our ability to prioritize our present.’” Both men do begin to sort, and in doing so a shift from past to present begins. For Adam, this shift starts with advice from a fellow musician friend to not bring complaints about parents into adulthood and continues with a realization after lunch with Dara that, “Adele had given Adam his center. No matter how crowded his emotional life, he could pick up his violin to find equilibrium. His mother was the source.” For Victor, once he starts playing piano again, he finds a new kind of joy in music. This continues as he plays a duet with Adam for Adele’s Memorial, and at the end of the novel plays a piano and vocal song cycle with a colleague. Victor’s letting go of Adele’s clothes marks him becoming a man who can “tolerate” life without Adele.
Toll, a classically trained violist and professional writer, brings a union of knowledge and skill. The result is a novel that captures the experience of music. Music is described with tightly rendered metaphors, like when Adam plays alone in his apartment after burying his mom, “His breathing was inseparable from the sweep of his right arm. He gave himself over to the music with the tenderness of a lover.” Music also comes to life through the mechanics of how it is played and its grueling impact on the body, “the tip of her right thumb was dented and black with the patina rubbed off the leather hand at the base of her bow. The second finger on her right hand had a callus between the knuckles.”
Classical music has a reputation for being inaccessible. In Duet for One though it is relatable. A musician’s work is broken down to its fundamental parts, most importantly the rigor of practice required to strengthen muscles and master a score —like when Adam turns to his music after a long-anticipated lunch with Dara, “(i)n a routine more familiar than breathing, he opened his case, removed his violin from its blue silk bag, and rosined his bow.” The world of classical music is sadly familiar thanks to characters like Phillip Hissle, who says to Dara, “‘Miss Kingsley, you play like a deaf girl!” and “No ears, no ears at all.” For women in any profession, this person is all too common. But so is the mentorship and guidance Dara receives from her mentor Isaac Koroff, who strikes the balance between demanding and kind. Cecil Rothstein again perfectly captures the shortcomings of the unapproachable classical music mindset when he says, “cultural elites don’t know their frying pans from their tuning forks.”
Compositions come to life in Duet for One, making them almost like characters. Familiarity with Chopin’s Nocturnes, Franck’s Sonata in A Major, or Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C Minor, op. 60 is irrelevant, because within the confines of this novel they hold memory, meaning and communicate in ways that go behind words. However, even a Wikipedia page’s worth of knowledge about a composition’s history and reputation does lend a deeper meaning. Composition as characters is another way that classical music becomes relatable and the feeling of music is captured on the page.
Chopin’s Nocturnes first appear the morning Victor promised his students he would return to teaching after Adele’s death. The Nocturnes play in his head “like distant echoes.” The music brings with it a memory of his senior recital at Juilliard, “(h)ow little Victor had understood in his student days! His unabashed confidence, his drive to succeed. In Adele’s orbit, he’d grown up.” The Nocturnes, often praised as some of the strongest short solo works, capture Victor’s solo music life before Adele and give profundity to his return as a widower. Interestingly, the Nocturnes are also one of the pieces Victor selects for Patti, Adam’s newly ex-girlfriend and mentee of Adele, to play during Adele’s Memorial. So Patti, too, is connected to the composition as a romantic solo and mentor-less musician.
Franck’s Sonata in A Major is a character playing the role of both memory keeper and connector. It was the first music Victor heard Adele play and he recalls the moment as if it was love at first sight, “The music emanated from her and not the piano…” When Victor attends a recital for one of Adam’s students he gets lost in the moment and misses the fourth movement, “(t)he movement was part of his unconscious; hearing it was like returning home. So easy to sing, a jubilant culmination to the sonata.” Finally, the Franck brings Victor and Adam together at Adele’s Memorial, with Victor playing the piano and Adam the violin, their new family taking shape. “It was effortless synchronizing with Victor, as if father and son were finishing a string of rehearsals rather than playing together for the first time.”
Lastly, there is the Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C Minor, op. 60, the musical representation of Adam and Dara’s love for each other. At the start of their relationship, alone in his room for the first time, Adam plays Brahms for Dara and tells her, “‘Brahms wrote this for the great love of his life, Clara.’” As adults, Brahms becomes a beacon played to herald forth the memory of Adam and Dara’s love. In planning for Adele’s Memorial, Adam asks Victor if his trio could play the Brahms, knowing Dara was slated to be in the audience. During the Memorial the music has the desired effect, “Dara was engulfed by Brahms. Adam, how could you?” Finally, after the Memorial, when Adam thinks he sees Dara leaving, he telegraphs to her, “Dara! Did you recognize the Brahms? I programmed it for you like an acrostic in a poem…”
Toll captures Philadelphia, her birthplace and the primary setting for the novel, with specificity and amplifies the themes of repetition and memory. The rich history of classical music in Philadelphia, from the Curtis Institution of Music to the Philadelphia Orchestra, makes the city the ideal place for this intermingling of loss, love and music. Iconic locations, from Schuylkill River to Walnut Street, imbue the novel with setting. Even the view from Adam’s apartment of the Delaware River and the colonials become like a mantra he returns to during his violin practice and introspection.
Similar to how Toll captures the importance of practice she too captures how place, particularly the day in and day out, can influence memory and give context. For example, Rittenhouse Square is a backdrop for the Pearl Family —it’s pictured in Adele’s scrapbook with a baby Adam playing in leaves, it’s the location of the Rindelaub’s Bakery where Victor takes Adam after their errands, it’s where Dara and Adam walk when she learns that her beloved mentor has cancer, it’s where Adam sits and “stared at the bare tree branch overhead to see if he could find where the sound of mourning doves was coming…(he) felt disembodied, blurred.” It’s also where he walks after breaking up with Patti where, “his disappointment gave way to anger” over his mother. The predictability and consistency of Rittenhouse Square, with its trees, benches, and bronze billy-goat statue, is a needed contrast to the turbulent events and feelings throughout the novel.
Toll chose to fictionalize some Philadelphia landmarks and people. The Curtis Institute is called the Cadwell Institute of Music, Dara’s beloved teacher Isaac Koroff is based off of Max Aronoff, who founded the New School of Music which is fictionalized as the Twenty-First Street Music School. Max Aronoff was also a member of the Curtis String Quartet, which is fictionalized as the Cadwell String Quartet. This fictionalization allows liberties and gives distance between reality and the intent of the novel. Toll does delight with insider references like when Adam picked up violin strings from Moennig’s with its “old world feel” and Billy working on a cello —a nod to William Moenning & Son, now sadly closed, which was a proud Philadelphia establishment, applauded as America’s oldest violin makers.
There is more: the parallel between sex and music; when musicians are off, like when a fellow student was playing too fast it was described as a “car race.” Similarly, the sex between Adam and Patti was called transactional and “business-like.” In both cases the descriptions are mechanized and disembodied. But when music flows it’s embodied —even if it is an out-of-body experience like Victor’s first time playing after Adele’s death, “(h)e was floating after a long absence from swimming.” So of course, when there is physical harmony between two people, like Adele and Victor then too embodiment is at the core, “…they created a vision for a joint future —playing and loving, at home and at work. Their bodies, their fingers and hands, their rapt ears.” And it would be a mistake to not mention the relationship between music, time, and relationships. Isaac Koroff, Dara’s beloved mentor notes, “(s)ound is the passage of time,” and “(t)here is no music without silence.” This truth speaks to music, grief, as well as love. On the latter, for Adam and Dara silence and the passage of time was needed in order for their relationship to continue.
This novel is a gift, the product Toll, as a writer, native Philadelphian, and violist, is uniquely posed to orchestrate. Though grief and memory pulses throughout Duet for One, in the end it is a story of love, and while not all the answers are given, there is hope.
