Allegro by Ariel Dorfman

Friends and readers, what a glorious thing it is to have music in the world! Whether you appreciate it for itself, or for the ways in which it can bring you closer to divinity — as Johann Sebastian Bach, among so many others, believed — music is a gift that connects the interior world ineffably with the external.

Writing about music, thus, has always been one of the most difficult literary tasks (and thank goodness we live in an era where any lapses in education and exposure can be remedied by looking up works on the Internet, for those of us with that not uncommon privilege.) Luckily for readers, Ariel Dorfman not only writes about the music of Bach and Handel and Mozart with both appreciation and passion, but also plunges us into the composers’ worlds, using a curious chapter where all three lives intersected in order to propel his story.

In 1765, nine year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has already achieved some renown as a performer and composer. While staying with Johann Christian Bach — the successful musician who was the son of the far more famous name, to modern ears — Mozart is importuned by a surgeon named Jack Taylor to intercede with Christian on a matter of reputation.

Years ago, Jack’s father, the famed ophthalmologist Chevalier Taylor, had operated on Sebastian’s failing eyes. Shortly afterwards, the older Bach died. Ever since, Christian has publicly blamed the chevalier for his father’s death.

Jack is determined to clear his father’s name. He insists that the departed George Handel holds the key, if only Christian will meet Jack and admit it. Christian has no intention of coming face to face with the son of his father’s killer, hence the desperate straits Jack has come to, begging a nine year-old for help. But Mozart is no ordinary nine year-old, and his insistence on seeing this mystery through will last over a decade, even as he seeks to find a place for himself and his music in the world.

In all bluntness, the mystery isn’t really the point of this slender novel, tho I did find the resolution of that plot point extremely satisfying. What this book provides instead is a profoundly moving character study of sons and fathers, of men who value both the sacred and the profane, and of the bonds between family and friends (with a brief aside on how shabbily women were and still are too often treated.) At Allegro’s heart is sweet, restless Mozart, a man who knows he’s worth more than he’s accepting but whose tender heart doesn’t know how to claim what he deserves. I was actually not a fan of Mozart’s before this — you can likely blame that on watching Amadeus way too young, as well as my own penchant for Beethoven’s broodier, more dramatic music — but it was impossible for me not to love the book’s protagonist, as he struggles to do genuine good to all.

The Mozart of these pages is one who loves deeply even as he understandably chafes at the multitude of responsibilities heaped upon his young shoulders, a man who’s both generous and terrible with money, the sort of person who would thrive if humanity could live on music and beauty and kindness alone. In Mr Dorfman’s hands, he is every artist, if not every person, who wants to believe that his hard work will be rewarded with at least the basic material needs, instead of being left to the mercies of a feudal economy that concentrates wealth in the hands of those most willing to exploit others.

The politics of empathy aside, this is also a deeply spiritual book in a way that I’ve dearly missed reading. When Sebastian and Mozart each talk about the power of music in these pages, and how it brings them closer to God and the eternal, I feel profoundly moved in a way that eschews the divisive dogma prevalent in the work of most other modern writers talking about the subject in the 21st century. I am not equipped in this review, what with my many and looming deadlines, to go into a full thesis why, but I can say that the idea of God in this book as something inclusive, that gave us music as proof of a cosmos in which we are all an integral, connected part, is something few people seem to write about any more without pinning the concept to a denomination’s particular expression of the divine.

Because, above all, Mr Dorfman has written a Mozart here who believes in kindness and mercy, and for whom music is the natural expression of faith:

It told us that everything is uncertain in life except pain and beauty. It told us that we are always, till we breathe our last, masters of our own fate. It told us that the only real sin is to add even one more sliver of sorrow to a world already overflowing with loss. No more sorrow than is absolutely necessary, that is what the Allegro told us, what the Minuetto that followed it told us. It told us that grief need not be eternal. It told us to believe that grief need not be eternal.

Obviously, I cried reading this tender, gorgeous book. I hope that if you love music at all, that you read Allegro and that it moves you, too.

Allegro by Ariel Dorfman was published March 4 2025 by Other Press and is available from all good booksellers, including



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