Chaucer’s Books Hosts Novelist David K. Israel

Chaucer’s Books (3321 State Street)  hosts David K. Israel for a book talk and signing of his novel The Lost Mozart.

A college music student discovers a long-lost Mozart sketch and sets out to finish the piece and give its world premiere.

Noah Wideman is an overqualified music student trying to graduate with a degree no one asked for. It’s 1987. His parents had hoped for medicine or law—anything with a parking space—but instead, he’s scraping by on odd jobs and the kind of hope only a twenty-one-year-old with a library card can muster. One of those jobs is at Allegro FM, the local classical station, where he stumbles into an unlikely friendship with Bertram Bobker: honey-voiced, immaculately dressed, and somewhere north of eighty.

When Noah is unceremoniously fired, Bertram quits in protest. Soon, Noah is spending afternoons with Bertram’s closest friends: aging gentlemen who sip Poire Williams, collect dusty manuscripts, and speak of dead composers as if they might still RSVP to dinner.

That’s where Noah discovers a handwritten sketch which looks suspiciously—impossibly—like Mozart. An unfinished string quartet. The kind of thing you don’t just find. But Noah is young and full of gumption, so he decides to finish it and bring it to the world, thinking this is the answer to everyone’s problems.

Enter Eos: a fellow student, brilliant and intimidating, with a silence that unnerves professors. Together, they launch a wild plan, part heist, part heartfelt gamble on the power of music, friendship, and second chances. Because who’s to say one more piece by Mozart can’t still upend a few lives, mend a few hearts, and maybe even cover first and last month’s rent?

 

About the Author

David K. Israel’s first job out of college was working as an editor for Leonard Bernstein, producing and publishing definitive editions of West Side Story, On

the Town, and Mass. He has composed extensively for dance, receiving commissions from Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and New York City Ballet, among others. His debut novel in 2005, Behind Everyman was praised by People as “loads of mensch-y charm…leavened with heart and humor.”