Exploring History and Mystery: Sarah Ladenwich on Her Debut Novel | Episode 137

Sarah Landon Witch, welcome to the Bahalic podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. Yes. Yes. And today we're going to dive into your very complex story, The Fire Concerto. And it sounds so interesting. It was published on June 10th, so it's already been out, but definitely a book that we can reach and see on all type of book selling platforms. Is that correct? That's right. It's available everywhere. And the audio book is coming out on August 12th, just a couple of weeks from now. Hooray. Okay. Well, let's dive into this complex story. So, as I was reading the synopsis of the book, it's seems to be a very complex story. It's a mix of it's a literary fiction plus historical fiction plus it's um little bit of mystery in there. That's right. Yeah. So, this is your debut novel. So, I'm just asking as a debut novelist, why such a complex undertaking? What a great question. My answer is I didn't intend for it to be such a complex undertaking, but you know, you followed the story and the story just kept taking me on these, you know, turns and twists. And the way that I write is I try to think, okay, what's the next thing that would happen in a film, you know, in a in something where you could anticipate easily what would happen, and then I say, I'm going to do anything but that. So, I take a different turn and it yields a lot of fun experiments that sometimes go wrong. But in this book, kind of writing against those expectations of where the plot would go kept getting me into these really fun corners of my mind where the plot deepened, the characters deepened, and the layers kept kind of unraveling. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this story seems to be an intersection of your life because um you're a writer, of course, and you're a classically trained pianist. So, it also mentions in your bio that you're a writing instructor. So, is this something you tell your students to write about things that they know? I love that you asked this question because I don't that is a really common um you know common advice to give to writers. And what I tell my students is write what you want to know more about. If you just write what you know, you maybe have a couple of books in you, a few essays, and then you're finished. But so much of writing is about spending a lot of time with your topic. And if you write something that is on a topic that makes you constantly intrigued and curious, you are going to take the reader with you on that fascinating journey. Absolutely. So in this book Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, go. In in this book, I do I have a background in classical music, so I do know a lot about that. But so much of this book delves into areas that I knew truly nothing about. For instance, there's a large component of this novel that's a historical mystery that's set in Poland, a place I had truly no knowledge of before writing this book. And I had to do so much research because the history of Poland is very complicated. Absolutely. But it's fascinating and those fascinations I feel like really come through in the book where little things about Poland, Polish history, Polish culture that I found to be very interesting. I hope I spotlight that for readers as well. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, famously in our minds, you always connect Poland to the beginning of the rise of Hitler. Exactly. And so that's what most of us have ingrained in our mind. But of course, I'm sure there's a lot more to Poland than just that that hopefully. So, you know, for Poland. So, definitely. Yeah. So, one of the chapters of this book is set on September 1st, 1939, which is the day the Nazis invaded Warsaw, Poland, and then Warsaw, which is like you. That was what I knew about Polish history is World War II, the devastation of that country from that time, which was such a devastating time for Poland. But the 19th century in Poland was was also a period of great unrest in Poland. There were a lot of invasions, occupations. The country that we now know as Poland was at one time part of three different countries and not by choice, right? These were partitions based on that on the world powers of that time. And a lot of that kind of that history was totally unfamiliar to me, but really fascinating. Right. Absolutely. Well, you've got me intrigued on that. I'll probably be circling back to that a little later on today because I'm a history buff. But, you know, our protagonist, we have Clara Bishop. And so you take her, she's she's getting ready to go to do a concert that's what in honor of a distant relative, etc., etc. So this is po poised to be a big night for her. But then of course something goes terribly wrong and then our protagonist goes all the way down to a devastating challen I say to become a bartender in Texas. trajectory is terrible. So, so how do you how do you she could she takes quite a fall I think in life and so how did you make this a realistic bridge in your book? So you're right. Yeah. Her her life before the novel opens was an extraordinary one. She was a child prodigy. She was a rising star. She had this incredible life ahead of her. But then it was ended very abruptly by a concert hall fire fire that burned her hand and arm thereby ending her ability to play. And so as the novel opens, it's 10 years after that and she is working as a bartender in Austin, Texas. And she is totally concealing her past life from everyone that she knows in Texas because she has so much baggage and so much trauma with that that she has completely left it behind. One of the themes of this book as with the themes of many book is is about facing the past in order to move into the future which is over the course of the book what she has to do. Absolutely. Well, there's another character in the book, another female, Madame we read about, and from what I've read, maybe she's alive in flashbacks or something, but really it's upon her death that the story starts to take on another iteration. And so, I kind of saw that Madame was hovering above the story line. How did you come up with that? then how do you treat that particular character that's deceased but has a lot to do with the story? Yeah. So, at the beginning of the book, kind of the inciting incident of the novel's action is that Madame calls all of her most esteemed pupils to her home for what she has called her final concert before her retirement. But then all these pupils gather, they show up and realize there's only a few people here. Madame's not there. And then a lawyer comes in and says, "This was never intended to be a concert. This is a gathering of the beneficiaries of Madame's estate because she has died." Oh. And you gathered here are each inheriting something of her prized possessions. And so what she gives to Clara is an antique metronome from the 19th century that Clara has never seen before. Does not know what it's about. And her questions about what this metronome is, why Madame had it, why she gave it to Clara are what prompt her on this investigation into the past. And throughout the book, Madame, as you say, is hovering over her because Clara has a very complicated emotional relationship with Madame, with her memory. She blames Madame for the injuries that she sustained in that fire. She also blames Madame for being a very cruel teacher who was really a tyrantist. Absolutely. Yes. And so she has this this object that she soon discovers is a longlost metronome of a famous composer that has been missing for over 100 years and it's very valuable. But she doesn't understand why Madame had it, why she gave it to Clara. And these questions kind of draw her back into the world of classical music which she left behind and also draw her back into her feelings about her relationship with Madame and having to contend with them. Yeah, I can only just, you know, feel I can feel that and I've not even read, you know, the pages of the book that describe that, but I can feel that and I can see how somebody could take that in and that Clara that's a direct reflection about how a lot of people feel in life in general. So I can see how that can be a moving part of the book and really connect the reader with this with an intersection of reality and a novel. Absolutely. Now when you pull in another is it another beneficiary a guy Tony Tony Park. Yeah rival. He's a rival. Now we've already discussed that this is historical. It's literary. It's a little bit of a mystery. Is it a little bit of romance? Sure is. Yeah. Got to have a good love story in there. So Clara and Tony when they were children were both pupils of Madames and she kind of pitted them against one another. Oh. To kind of, you know, she stoked their competition in order to help them rise, you know, rise their level of of play. But as with anytime that happens, there's a lot of complicated feelings. So Claire and Tony grew up in this kind of contentious relationship, and now they're adults. They're 30 years old. He has gone on to have this incredible career in music. Is a famous performer. Clara is a bartender. All of their promise did not pan out. But here they are thrown back together all these years later because Tony also has been called to this strange gathering of the beneficiaries. And he has been given all of Madame's papers and historic manuscripts. And he also is kind of like, I don't really understand why she gave these to me, but okay. But this moment of reunion kind of puts these two back together. And then Tony becomes Clara's sidekick in a way on her journey to discovering the truth that this metronome may hold for both herself and for history at large. Wow. Wow. Fascinating. Now, one of the things it al Yeah, it also talked about in the previews that I read is that you did want to bring about attention to past creatives, musicians of the 19th century that were women that didn't get their just due in history. Yes. So, this book, I think you took some of their names and kind of mixed them and mashed them with other names, but can you tell us specifically of some people that you're referring to? Absolutely. There are so many. I would love to just talk about this all day. Let's let's do Okay. So, as you say, many of the characters in the book are named in homage to women, usually musicians, composers, and scholars who are very little known or pretty much unknown to history. And one of the greatest examples of that is with one of the primary figures of this book in the past vein of the story named Constantia Pleel. So in the novel, Constantia Playel was in the 1880s a very famous pianist of in her own right who suffered an injury to her hand that ended her career. And the great mystery of this book is that she killed the famous composer to whom the metronome belongs. She murdered him in 1885. And so this act of violence has repercussions throughout the decades of this book and the generations. But Constantia playel who is not a real person is named after three women who were real. The first one is Constantia Guovska. She was a famous vocalist, a soprano known for her beauty and for her great talent, but who is now primarily remembered for being briefly engaged to the composer Frederick Shopan. That's why we remember her is because she was engaged to him. Okay. Constant Pleel is also named after another woman, Marie Mo Playel from the 19th century, a great virtuosa pianist who went on to become a teacher at the Brussels Conservatire in the 19th century. So that's very remarkable. She is remembered for all of her romantic entanglements with famous musical men. She was engaged to the composer Hector Beerios and famously caused this big problem when she jilted him and instead married another famous person from the musical world, Camille Play, who was a piano manufacturer and then later in her life had an affair with Fran's list. So if you look her up, it's all of these associations with men instead of yes, this woman was a great musician and performer. One more that I'll throw in is Constant Pleel's maiden name in the book is Baronovska. And she's named after a woman named Teela Baronovska, a Polish composer who was one of the only female composers of the 19th century to achieve popular success in her lifetime. She wrote this piece for the piano called The Maiden's Prayer that became an international sensation. And she wrote it when she was just 18 years old. But immediately and for 150 years after that, the male music critics said, "This is such a pile of garbage written by a woman. No one should play it." That even they were so derisive toward her that when she died, an early death, she died when she was 23. One music critic actually wrote, "Her early death has saved the world from more bad music." I mean, this is the you can't make this up, right? Terrible. Yes. So, these are just three of many examples that illustrate the challenges that women were up against in this time of history if they wanted to have a musical career. Wow. Wow. Just awful. You know, it reminds me, and I hope this is not a spoiler alert for anyone. I'm watching The Gilded Age uh on HBO Max and in that show they do a kind of little side story about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge was of course a man but he was married to a a woman. He got ill. He got sort of in incapacitated to some degree at that time. He was still living but incapacitated. his wife had to do all the directing of the engineering. She did that herself. She was an engineer herself. So, she really is the one responsible for the total completion of the Brooklyn Bridge. Another piece of history I never knew about. And I Yeah. And they're talking about the challenges of her being a woman and and letting people know about that during the guilded age. They were like, you know, if they discover that a woman built the Brooklyn Bridge, oh no, what will we do? So, you know, it's not not just music. It seems like in every category you can think of, women have been derided throughout history from having agency and power, you know, where there's just always sometimes these sometimes negative males that go against them. Bug, I'm glad you're putting a spotlight. I'm glad you're putting the spotlight on. So, with this fascinating debut, what do you have up your sleeve next? I'm sure you're already writing something else. Yes. I'm well underway on a new book that's also a past present narrative. So, story in the present, story in the past. And this one has absolutely nothing to do with music, but it does delve into those similar themes of women who have been wrongly remembered or wrongly forgotten. So, this new one is set in 2022 and 1881 in rural Indiana. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, that sounds great. I love the the the the trajectory you're on of trying to raise back up the memories and contributions of women that people try to throw away, shove under a rug, however you want to put it. I'm grateful for that. It's been fun. So Sarah, I am going to say right now, you are welcome back to my channel anytime you have another book that we should discuss because I think it's important and I'm so glad you came and joined me today. Oh, thank you dear. This was a great pleasure. Yes, thank you. And so everyone, we will have Sarah's information in the podcast show notes and in the video description box below about the fire conerto. Sarah, thanks for joining today. Thank you.