The Weinstein Sonata - a novel by Daniel Melnick

Daniel Melnick

Author

The Weinstein Sonata - a novel

“The Weinstein Sonata” is a vivid, tragicomic novel about a great classical pianist Alexander Petrov, one of the émigré geniuses who lived in the incredible community of gifted Europeans in Los Angeles during the Second World War. Fleeing from Nazi Germany, the legendary virtuoso settled in West L.A. and – like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, the Werfels, and the Manns – attempted to raise a family there on the edge of the Pacific. In September of 1972, Jack Weinstein – a young composer and a distant relation of Petrov – is newly arrived in L.A., living near Venice beach and seeking a job in the movie studios. Jack develops a friendship with the émigré virtuoso, who is nearing seventy and struggling to maintain his psychic balance and physical health in the midst of intense conflicts with his wife and his adult children. The renowned pianist tells the young man stories of his life from the thirties to the present, and soon Jack is absorbed into the family life of the Petrovs. Jack becomes a catalyst for confrontations among the Petrovs, as he intrudes on the family’s delicate balances. He falls in love with the pianist’s daughter, Sarah, who becomes Jack’s troubled muse, and in one climax, the father erupts in jealousy and desperation, assaulting his daughter’s lover. The son Joseph Petrov is a gifted pianist himself, who also befriends Jack; resentments – new and old – build between son and father, and these too erupt in destruction and self-destructiveness. Joseph is gay, and after a surreal New Year’s Eve party at the Polo Lounge, he makes a pass at drunk, dismayed Jack. Then there is Petrov’s wife, Helen, and her confession to Jack is one of the final assaults on the young composer. The remarkable expatriates living in L.A. during World War II figure both in Petrov’s nearly mythic stories and in Jack’s inner struggle to resurrect himself in the face of his experience of the Petrovs, of music, of sex, of the movie studios, of L.A. itself. During 1972-73, Jack composes a piano sonata infused with his love of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Petrov’s famed recording of it, as well as the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg – those composers even begin to enter Jack’s dreams, blessing and critiquing him as he works in his Venice apartment. The Weinstein Sonata paints a vivid portrait of the conflicts which erupt in L.A.’s singular expatriate community. At the center of the novel is finally the confrontation between émigré parents, who survived the Holocaust at the peculiar remove of Southern California, and their grown children. Each “hungry generation” reveals its troubled, heartbreaking desire for meaning and love.

Reviews

Times Literary Supplement

FICTION IN BRIEF

Daniel C. Melnick

HUNGRY GENERATIONS

181pp. New York: Lincoln Shanghai Universe. $14.95.

0 595 30803 1

Daniel C. Melnick, the author of many scholarly books on music and literature, has written a thoughtful and engaging novel about three musicians living in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Petrov is an ageing pianist who no longer performs; his homosexual son, Joseph, is also a concert pianist, playing on the university circuit in second-tier cities; and Jack, their friend, is a studio composer for United Artists in Hollywood. There are also sisters, brothers, mothers, in-laws, a whole kith and kin from the first and second generations of intellectual Jewish families who came to America around the Second World War. The aged Petrov pines for his musical colleagues who arrived in Los Angeles when he did Stravinsky, Bruno Walter, Robert Casadesus, Leonard Pennario, Schoenberg, Bartok, Werfel — and remembers discussing Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, and recalling Thomas Mann, Alma Mahler, Bertolt Brecht and Bruno Fried from that brief period of time when writers and composers congregated in the great post-war energy of Los Angeles.

Joseph lacks the powerful memories of his father. Los Angeles is now full of hipster singers and tawdry starlets. Their glory is of money, a commercial process. The story starts in the .early winter of 1972, and closes the following autumn, but plot is not the main point of Melnick's short novel, which describes the pained relationship between Petrov and his son. The father is a powerful man with an intense focus; the son, though accomplished, remains timid. Slowly the hostility between the two leads to an agonizing confrontation which ends in disaster. Joseph has been unable to overcome the uncertainties of his youth, and continues to see his father with an adolescent fear and rage. Petrov never really leaves the 1940s. If Adorno had been a novelist he might have written of Petrov's world and his musical sensibilities. Melnick seems to have absorbed the tragedy of music which Adorno knew so well.

Hungry Generations gives a vivid picture of Los Angeles, particularly the western side: Beverly Hills, Brentwood, the famous boulevards

of the rich moguls and the nearly rich artistes. Money is evident. Yards are carefully tended by Japanese gardeners, luxurious cars crawl up Benedict Canyon Drive. Against this background, Daniel Melnick depicts a tragic conflict between an old man and his son. This novel cannot be for everyone, but for those who know and can lose themselves in serious music, it will be supremely satisfying.

JOHN A. C. GREPPIN

—Times Literary Supplement (London), May 21, 2004

In this "poetic story.. -the friendship [between Alexander Petrov, a legendary classical pianist, and Jack Weinstein, a young composer] is more than combustible; it marks a collision of cultures and worlds: Petrov’s Europe, decimated by the Nazis, and Jack's fantasyland of Hollywood. A past that haunts the soul versus a present that has none.”

Plain Dealer, May 31, 2004

Find out the latest indie author news. For FREE.

Password Reset