Antonietta

Writer and musician John Hersey’s novel Antonietta (1991) is a modern take on the eighteenth-century “novel of circulation,” a novel in which the “protagonist” is an object, whose peregrinations into and out of the hands of various characters tie together the plot. The object in question in Antonietta is a violin. The violin's name derives from the beloved second wife of the legendary violinmaker Stradivari. The novel follows the violin for several hundred years, through many different owners – all of them famous historical figures – before ending up, in a bit of metafiction, in the possession of John Hersey himself, who, in the novel, purchases it with the novel's advance. Critics have generally lauded Antonietta; its elegant and beguiling execution of a long-forgotten genre and formal innovations led Publisher's Weekly to rapturously declare it a “tour de force.”

Antonietta begins with the birth, so to speak, of the novel's eponymous violin and “main character.” The year is 1699, and the place is Cremona, Italy. Fifty-five-year-old Antonio Stradivari, a widower, spies the graceful young widow Antonia from across a piazza – and quickly falls in love. Besotted, the craftsman takes to his workshop, where he begins a new project: he will create his best violin yet, and name it Antonietta, after his beloved. In the process of making the violin, he receives news that gives him reason to doubt his plan to marry Antonietta – the shock causes his hand to slip and slightly mar the instrument's fretboard. Stradivari, who obtains the object of his affection in the end, decides to leave the nick in the instrument as a testament to the feeling, the love, that overwhelmed him – what he calls the “madness of the wings of love.” The imperfection goes on to become a recurring plot point as down through the ages different owners of the instrument explain its origin differently.

The next person seduced by Antonietta is a young Mozart, who finds himself bewitched by both the instrument and the attractive young student that plays her. This section of the novel departs from the standard-issue third-person narration that relates Stradivari's storyline. It is told instead through a series of letters written by Mozart, in which he records, with his trademark irreverence and brash humor, his twin infatuations with the instrument and its player. He ends up borrowing the instrument from a concertmaster. After the concertmaster dies, the violin falls unexpectedly into the hands of pirates. A budding young violinist, Baillot purchases it, and his playing inspires the famed and famously effusive composer Berlioz to write his “Symphonie Fantastique”: the composer, after hearing the final movement of the piece, “burst into tears and went over and kissed the top of Antonietta's case.” Baillot narrates this section of the novel in first-person, in yet another formal shift.



Antonietta's next seduction, some seventy years after Berlioz, is of Igor Stravinsky, while he is in exile in Switzerland. She moves him to create his “L'Histoire du Soldat,” in a section with a roving point of view that takes its cues from the musical form of the fugue. Then in 1989, the violin is bought by an American businessman, the last person to own it before the fictionalized Hersey himself. The businessman, an arbitrageur, cares little for the art object in and of itself; nor does its storied past inspire feeling in him. Status-obsessed and superficial, Antonietta is to him a mere commodity to be eventually traded away at a profit. The novel in this section takes the form, not accidentally, of a television script; a commentary by Hersey on the ubiquity of television and its role as a usurper of music's central place in Western culture.

Antonietta is a fascinating modern take on one of the more obscure genres of English literature. It departs from traditional novels of circulation in its formal experiments; as Antonietta passes into new ownership, each section of the novel is narrated differently, and each time the formal structure of that section reflects the period or person being portrayed. In this, Hersey's novel evinces sympathies with the historical novel, as does his fictionalization of historical figures. However, Hersey doesn't seem interested in hewing to strict biographical details; it has been noted that Antonietta, considered historical fiction, is much heavier on the fiction than the history.

Many people wrongly believe The Red Violin, by director Francois Girard, which similarly follows the travels of a mysterious violin, is the movie adaptation of Hersey's Antonietta. The film's producers, however, insist that they didn't learn about the novel until they were already creating the film, claiming to have banned staff from reading it to avoid plagiarizing.