Infinity
The Story of a Moment
"The piano is not an instrument for young ladies Massimo, he said, it is an instrument for gorillas. Only a gorilla has the strength to attack the piano as it should be attacked, only a gorilla has the uninhibited energy to challenge the piano as it should be challenged".
Thus Tancredo Pavone, the wealthy and eccentric Sicilian nobleman and avant-garde composer, as recounted by his former manservant in the course of the single extensive interview which is this book. But as Massimo recalls what his master told him about his colourful life in Monte Carlo in the twenties, in Vienna studying with a pupil of Schoenberg's in the thirties, in post-war Paris and in Nepal where he underwent the revelation which fuelled his later music, and repeats Pavone's often outrageous opinions about everything under the sun, from the current state of civilisation to the inner life of each note, from why beautiful women are always unhappy to the vanity of his fellow composers, it becomes comically clear that not only does Pavone not always distinguish between memory and fantasy, but that Massimo does not always understand what it is he is repeating. Yet what ultimately emerges is the picture of a moving relationship between two people from very different walks of life, and, above all, the fact that behind Pavone's outrageousness and eccentricity lies a wounded and vulnerable man of profound integrity, for whom living and making music were always one.
About the Author
Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University of Sussex. He is the author of sixteen novels, three volumes of short stories, eight critical works, and numerous stage and radio plays, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic. In 2001 he published "A Life", a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch (London Magazine editions). His most recent works are "Two Novels: After and Making Mistakes" (Carcanet), "What Ever Happened to Modernism?" (Yale University Press) and "Heart's Wings" (Carcanet, 2010).
