Is There Still this “Flower”? Contrasting Representations of Music in Two Literary Works

Abstract

Presto con fuoco, a novel written by Italian author Roberto Cotroneo, is an articulated reflection on music in general and on the mental life that typifies the concert musician, seeking to translate what is characteristic of another artistic language. The “music” that emerges from Cotroneo’s novel, though sensitive and cleverly treated, remains faithful to the condition of the inapprehensible and ineffable, typical of the Western aesthetic tradition. Without rebutting such a condition, but setting it in the contemporary life that is somehow hostile to it, the memo book written by the oboist Blair Tindall, Mozart in the jungle: sex, drugs and classical music, exhibits the remains of classical music practice after the shock with the gear of “art business” and amid the web of vices that obscure the world of the symphonic orchestras. This article, instigated by the intersection of the artistic languages involved, analyzes the success and limits of the representations of the musical universe in the cited works.