“Without music, life would be a mistake” ~Nietzsche

I have spent more than a few minutes sitting quietly on a couch watching my son, Josh, compose the score for several television programs. On the screen, a violent shootout or an emotional confession creates little tension until a musical cue is applied. Music informs the brain to provide context for the heart to respond. 

Since the early 1900s, music has become an essential component in directing mood, thought, and feeling for the visual arts such as television and film, and certainly for opera and dance. Its role in embellishing literature, however, is much less common, yet only natural for a novel centered around music. 

In Desperate Measures, musical repertoire serves not as a passive ambient backdrop, but as an active architectural narrative mapping the emotional evolution of tension, resilience, and redemption. By embedding classical masterworks - predominantly spanning Romantic turmoil, Classical precision, and Baroque solemnity - the novel mirrors internal psychological conflicts and interpersonal dynamics through the expressive vocabulary of performance. 

Within the first few paragraphs of Chapter 1 (A Flame in the Wind), Dmitri emerges from his semiconscious state, preparing for death, and his first instinct is to “... set the mood for this, his final, fatal curtain by recalling the ‘Meditation’ from Thais… He remembered every note, every measure, every vibrato, as well as how he felt watching his entire audience weep.” (add link to Thais). That this intermezzo is a piece of haunting beauty seems reason enough to choose it to help us dive into the psychic trauma of a young boy’s near death experience. That the “Meditation” is a reflection of a soul searching to cast off arrogance, anger, and conceit in favor of spiritual rebirth, makes it an appropriate place for a life to begin anew and for a novel to be born. 

Once the faint sparks of survival become visible, Dmitri and the Old Man use music as common ground to share their personal stories, to rake over the ashes of tragedy, and to begin rebuilding shattered lives. The Old Man reminisces about his childhood through the Yiddish tunes his father used to play, “... visualizing a sweeter time. He hummed ‘Oyfn pripetchik brent a fayerl …’ (Chapter 3 Passing, page 36, link) until his voice trailed off, eliciting an old, delicious pain.” For both, the vehicle that transports them toward a new platform of self-esteem is the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D major (second movement, the Canzonetta, page 16 - link). The Old Man cherishes this composition since Tchaikovsky first dedicated it to his old teacher, Leopold Auer. “Auer was a stickler for technique…If during a lesson… I started to play mechanically, he would stab me sharply in the ribs with his bow and yell, ‘Krov! Blood!’” Dmitri too has an indirect connection to Auer through his father’s education in St. Petersburg, and delivering Krov becomes the guiding principle of his future performance success. The Canzonetta surfaces as Dmitri’s barometer of normalcy; he uses it as a conduit to derive strength from the Old Man’s faith in him, and later as a measure of his own failing health. The concerto returns in the final chapter of the book; its narrative thread spans the novel, elevating music as a mirror of human struggle. 

Throughout the book, the repertoire captures and magnifies the violent friction of conflict, the solitary labor of endurance, and the quest for hard-won harmony that could emerge if only redemption were finally achievable. 

In coming weeks, let’s explore how music exposes tension, highlights power, and becomes a potent instrument of seduction.