The Silver Swan: A Novel

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Other Press, LLC, 2015 - Fiction - 232 pages
A debut novel about a daughter grappling with the legacy of her famous and imposing cellist father, the secrets he has hidden from her, and the fate of his great Stradivarius cello.

Alexander Feldmann is a revered and sought-after performer whose prodigious talent, striking good looks and worldly charm prove irresistible to all who hear and encounter him. After years of searching, he acquires a glorious cello, the Silver Swan, a rare Stradivarius masterpiece long lost to the world of music.

Mariana is Alexander's only child and the maestro has large ambitions for her. By the age of nineteen she emerges as a star cellist in her own right, and is seen as the inheritor of her father's genius. There are whispers that her career might well outpace his. Mariana believes the Silver Swan will one day be hers, until a stunning secret from her father's past entwines her fate and that of the Silver Swan in ways she could never have imagined.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
27
Section 3
47
Section 4
63
Section 5
75
Section 6
91
Section 7
103
Section 8
119
Section 11
151
Section 12
159
Section 13
173
Section 14
181
Section 15
191
Section 16
201
Section 17
211
Section 18
225

Section 9
125
Section 10
137

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About the author (2015)

Elena Delbanco has recently retired after teaching for twenty-seven years at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Before moving to Ann Arbor, she worked at Bennington College in Vermont, where she and her husband, the writer Nicholas Delbanco, together with the late John Gardner, founded the Bennington Writing Workshops. Delbanco has long been engaged in the world of classical music. Her father was the renowned cellist Bernard Greenhouse (of the Beaux Arts Trio), who owned the Countess of Stainlein ex-Paganini Stradivarius violoncello of 1707. The imagined fate of that instrument, upon her father's death, inspired The Silver Swan, her first novel.

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