The 1913 C. Bechstein grand piano in F M Wilson’s Dorset home predates the opening of ‘Facing the Music’ by a single year, a coincidence so precise that it already belongs in fiction. Wilson has spent much of her life at the keyboard and an equally substantial part writing about the people who sit there, listening for the point where technique ends and personality takes over. Her first novel grows from years of close attention to musicians, their habits, ambitions and the identities built through daily practice.
After reviewing concerts, interviewing pianists and editing The Cross-Eyed Pianist since 2010, Wilson now claims the freedom reserved for a novelist: she decides who enters the room, which piece reaches the music stand and what follows the applause. A critic receives the finished performance, while a novelist can enter the rehearsal, interrupt it and follow the players home. Wilson has moved from observing musicians to controlling the clock around them. By introducing pianist Theo Browne and violinist Jonathan Lane-Fox in London in 1914, just as their careers begin and Europe edges toward war, ‘Facing the Music’ places the reader in a peculiarly painful position. Theo and Jonathan can plan their futures, while a century of hindsight has already changed the meaning of every plan. Wilson’s task is to keep their ambitions vivid under a date that has become a verdict. Published through her own Nine Barrow Press, the novel brings her years as a pianist and critic into a form where every performance can alter a life. We spoke with F M Wilson as her first novel entered the world.
Hi Frances, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. Your novel Facing the Music follows gifted pianist Theo Browne and violinist Jonathan Lane-Fox, two young musicians whose emerging careers are interrupted by the First World War. Before history takes control of their lives, which small habit tells us the most about each man?
Theo and Jonathan handle pre-performance tension in very different ways. Theo becomes very still. He sits quietly backstage, often with cold hands, turning inward and conserving his focus for the moment he steps onto the platform. This says a great deal about his introspective nature and the seriousness with which he approaches music.
Jonathan is almost the opposite. He paces about, smokes, jokes and talks; he needs activity rather than stillness. Yet beneath that apparent ease, he is every bit as serious a musician as Theo. He simply wears his musicianship more lightly.
Perhaps the most revealing habit, though, belongs to them both. Before going on stage, they have a little ritual of checking one another’s bow ties, shirt studs and cufflinks, followed by the exchange: “Right, Theo?” “Right, Jonny?” immediately before they begin to play. It’s a tiny thing, but it captures the instinctive trust between them.
Theo and Jonathan have spent years playing together, so they probably know each other’s musical strengths, vanities and weak spots extremely well. If each man secretly planned the other’s solo recital, which piece would be chosen as an act of affection, and which would be chosen as a provocation?
Jonathan would probably give Theo Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata as an act of affection. It is entirely Theo’s territory: intellectually rigorous yet exhilarating, expansive and full of possibility, without being overly showy. Jonathan knows how formidable Theo is in Beethoven, and I think he would want to hear his friend at his most confident and brilliant.
As a provocation, he might give him something extravagantly virtuosic by Franz Liszt – the Mephisto Waltz No. 1, some of the Transcendental Studies (“Mazeppa” and “Chasse-neige”), or perhaps the Paraphrase de concert sur ‘Rigoletto’ – music that demands a degree of theatricality Theo would instinctively resist. Jonathan would enjoy seeing whether he could persuade the rather serious, inward-looking Theo to become a showman for half an hour.
Theo, in turn, might choose Bach for Jonathan as an act of affection: perhaps the Chaconne from the D minor Partita. He knows Jonathan has the technique to play almost anything, but he also knows that beneath his charm, swagger and apparent insouciance lies a deeply thoughtful musician. The Chaconne would allow that less visible Jonathan to emerge.
For provocation, Theo might choose Paganini. Not because Jonathan couldn’t play it – quite the reverse. He would play it infuriatingly well. But Theo would know that Jonathan’s vanity would be thoroughly indulged by all that brilliance, and I can imagine him teasing Jonathan mercilessly about it afterwards!
Theo is in love with Alison, while his friendship with Jonathan carries a deep musical intimacy of its own. If Alison could witness one of their rehearsals while remaining unseen, which rehearsal would you choose for her, and what would it reveal about the part of Theo that belongs to music?
I’d choose a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata. Theo and Jonathan have played it together since they were boys, so by the time Alison knows them, the music is almost a private language between them. I’d want her to see them rehearsing when they had forgotten everything except the music – interrupting one another, arguing over a phrase, trying it again, and then suddenly arriving at that point where neither seems to be leading, because each knows instinctively what the other is going to do.
I think Alison would understand something important about Theo from watching that. The Theo she loves is quite contained: thoughtful, serious, not always very good at expressing what he feels. At the piano with Jonathan, another side of him becomes visible. He is spontaneous, playful, argumentative, intensely responsive – and completely unguarded.
The two musicians later become officers on the Western Front, entering battle with ears trained to notice tiny changes in rhythm, tone and volume. Which sound would alert Theo to danger first, and which sound would remain in Jonathan’s memory long after the battlefield fell quiet?
For Theo, I think it would be a sudden change in an established pattern of sound. A musician is trained not only to listen to what is there but notice what is missing: a bombardment that abruptly stops, a familiar rhythm of gunfire that alters, an unexpected silence. Theo would register that change almost instinctively, rather as he might notice another musician fractionally altering the tempo or character of a phrase.
For Jonathan, I think it would be the cries of men in the darkness. During Third Ypres (Passchendaele), he experiences the battlefield as an extraordinarily hostile soundscape: artillery, rifle fire, shouted orders, men struggling through mud and water. But it is the human sounds that would remain with him afterwards – particularly the voice of someone calling out when he cannot see them and perhaps cannot reach them.
Works by Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Bach, Schubert and Chopin accompany different moments in the characters’ lives. If one of those works became the novel’s secret third narrator, which would you choose, and which truth would it carry beyond the characters’ words?
It would have to be Beethoven’s Spring Sonata. It appears at the beginning of Theo and Jonathan’s musical partnership and returns at the very end of the novel, so, in a sense, it knows their whole story before they do.
The great truth is that something can be changed without being destroyed. When Theo and Jonathan first encounter the sonata as boys, its freshness, optimism and conversational quality seem to belong entirely to youth: two instruments meeting as equals, listening and responding to one another. Neither of them can know then what will happen to them, or how difficult it will become simply to be musicians again. By the end, the same music carries everything that has happened in the meantime. The notes have not changed, but the people playing and hearing them have.
The Dorset coast offers Theo and Jonathan a place associated with freedom before the war. Imagine the same stretch of coastline described once in 1914 and again years later through memory. Which detail would remain identical, and which detail would reveal how completely their eyes had changed?
The sea would remain the same: that endless movement of water against the shore, the wind coming off it, the horizon apparently untouched by anything in the human world. Before the war, Theo and Jonathan would barely think about its permanence. They were young, free, physically confident, walking along the beach and the coastal path for the sheer pleasure of being out in that landscape and in one another’s company.
Years later, I think the landscape would look different to them, even though nothing about it had actually changed. A fold in the ground, a bank of earth, perhaps even the sudden appearance of a figure on a distant ridge might evoke an unsettling image from France. They have acquired a completely different vocabulary for landscape: ground is no longer simply beautiful or picturesque; it can offer shelter, conceal danger, or expose a man to view.
Your conversations with musicians during the Covid period helped shape your thoughts about an artistic life brought to a sudden halt, while the novel itself remains firmly inside the First World War. Which emotion from that modern experience slipped most quietly into the world of Theo and Jonathan?
I think it was disorientation. In my conversations with musicians during Covid, what struck me was not simply the loss of performances, but the unsettling question of what happens to your sense of yourself when the thing around which you have built your life suddenly stops.
For a musician, playing is not merely something you do; it can be fundamental to who you are. That feeling slipped quietly into Facing the Music, particularly into Theo’s story in the later part of the novel. The circumstances are, of course, entirely different, and I would never want to draw a direct equivalence between Covid and the experience of the First World War, but the question of artistic identity under extreme disruption is common to both.
For Theo especially, the deepest uncertainty is whether he can still call himself a pianist if he cannot live the life of one. That was perhaps the most important thing those modern conversations gave me: an understanding that when an artistic life is interrupted, what is threatened is not just a career but a sense of self.
You returned to the piano after twenty years away and later earned performance diplomas in your late forties. While writing about musicians who fear losing the activity that defines them, which physical memory from your own return to the keyboard kept the story honest?
What surprised me when I returned to the piano after twenty years was how much was still there. The keyboard didn’t feel unfamiliar: a remarkable amount remained in my fingers and my brain, as if that physical and musical memory had simply been lying dormant.
What probably kept the story most honest, though, was my understanding of the practice of practising. I know the routine of sitting at the piano every day, working repeatedly on a passage, listening closely, making tiny adjustments, and the particular satisfaction – and frustration – that comes with that process. It is such an ordinary part of a musician’s life, yet fundamental to maintaining a sense of oneself as a musician.
Scenes of war can tempt a writer toward beautiful rhythm and imagery, even when the events themselves are horrific. Did you ever delete an image because it made destruction appear too elegant? What standard helped you decide how much beauty the scene could ethically carry?
I deliberately tried to avoid overly poetic or elegant descriptions of war and the battlefields of the Somme and Flanders. There is always a danger that carefully wrought prose can aestheticise horror, and I didn’t want the reader to admire my description of a battlefield. So I did extensive research using first-hand accounts and visited the Somme battlefields several times (before beginning the novel and again during the initial draft) to help create what I hope are atmospheric and accurate portrayals.
That doesn’t mean I wanted the prose to be entirely without beauty. Beauty still exists in the novel, but I have allowed it to reside elsewhere – in music, friendship, memory, the Dorset landscape, and moments of tenderness. On the battlefield and in the war section in general, I wanted the prose to remain more immediate and unsentimental.
Imagine Theo could preserve one part of being a musician: perfect technique, inner hearing, memories of performance, or the bond created through playing with Jonathan. Which would he choose? Which would you choose for yourself, and why might those answers differ?
I think Theo would choose the bond forged through playing with Jonathan. Perfect technique can be lost, memories fade, and even the ability to perform can be taken away. But what he and Jonathan have built over years of playing together has become part of who he is. They have learnt to anticipate one another, to breathe and phrase together, and to communicate through music in ways they probably could never put into words. For Theo, preserving that connection would also mean preserving something of the young musician he was before the war.
For me, I would choose inner hearing. When I returned to the piano after twenty years, I was surprised by how much had remained – not only in my fingers but also in my musical imagination. I could still hear how I wanted the music to sound, and the teacher I saw as an adult returner encouraged inner hearing a great deal as a way to bring the music to life and make it personal. Technique is the means by which we try to realise that inner conception, but for me the music begins in the mind and the ear.
Perhaps our answers differ because Theo’s musical identity is so closely bound up with another person. His formative musical experience is collaborative: Jonathan is woven into it. Mine has been much more closely associated with the essentially solitary aspects of being a pianist (which I enjoy) – practising, listening, imagining, and trying to translate what I hear inwardly into physical sound.
Facing the Music is published in the UK by Nine Barrow Press and available in paperback and eBook editions https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1036994562
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