The magus of Fitzrovia

7 April 2007

For Florence, liberation and self-control are discovered in her creation of a string quartet, and the redemptive power of music is at the heart of On Chesil Beach. In an earlier novel, The Child in Time, a bereft mother discovers hope in Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. In McEwan’s new book, it is Mozart’s String Quartet in D major that suffuses the story as a reminder of the sublime.

‘I have written a lot about music,’ he says. ‘I am just finishing an opera with Michael Berkeley and it is very exciting to collaborate. We live reasonably near the Wigmore Hall and we can walk there. In fact the last thing that really made a huge impression on me, hearing it again, was the Schubert Octet. I did write a story in the early Seventies about a string quartet but I’ve lost it, I can’t find it anywhere.’

The opera will receive its premiere in June 2008, and then tour the country. ‘It is a chamber opera, but Michael has scored it in such a way that it is 14 musicians, 15 musicians, but it can be easily turned into a Beethoven style, medium-sized classic orchestra. So he has made an allowance for that if we want to do it in a grander way, and I think there is going to be a performance in Switzerland with a big orchestra, and maybe also Sydney.’

He enthuses about a production of The Barber of Seville he has just seen. ‘My sons [by his first marriage] have no interest in classical music, and I have laid it on them at various times. How can they go through life not knowing the things that we might take for granted? I suppose the pleasure is so intense that it does make one, whether one is a believer or not, thrilled to be alive. Music is the one area where I feel there is something almost inhuman about the genius. I feel this especially about Bach, but Mozart as well.’

The title of his new book invites obvious comparison with Arnold’s Dover Beach (1867), a poem that also featured prominently in Saturday. If Arnold was marking the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the Sea of Faith, what is McEwan saying about the global currents and tides about to change the world in 1962?