Maestro! Maestro! by Fred Calvert

Title: Maestro! Maestro!

Author: Fred Calvert

Publisher: ‎Independently published

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

First Publication: 2023

Language: English

Book Summary: Maestro! Maestro! by Fred Calvert

A tale about a deal with the devil and a feel-good romance. In 1900 romantic Vienna, a young composer, Anton Becker was fighting to be the best. But the stuffed shirts of tradition considered his radical music ‘barbaric and loony.’ In truth it was brilliant, but only to discerning ears, such as those of Lisa von Schelling, the off-limits love of his life. And also, to the ears of the Prince of Darkness, who was desperate to upgrade the cringingly awful music of hell. The heavenly angel Ludwig van Beethoven gets involved, and so does a gargoyle angel from hell, Villi, who, back when he was human, had been a cruel-hearted music critic.

Book Review: Maestro! Maestro! by Fred Calvert

As a lifelong bookworm pathologically obsessed with the furthest frontiers of imaginative literature, I’ve forever been questing after novels courageous enough to shed conformist shackles and detonate predetermined notions of what reading experiences can unshackle in the human psyche. Fred Calvert’s phantasmagorical saga Maestro! Maestro! is exactly the kind of trailblazing mindbomb my rapacious eyes endlessly crave – an act of creative insurrection so vividly unhinged and possessed of such willful disregard for convention that it redefines the very boundaries of narrative possibility.

From its opening pages set amid the opulent salons of turn-of-the-century Vienna, Calvert immediately signals his seditious mutinous ambitions. We’re introduced to Anton Becker, a starving young composer whose radical new operatic idioms are savaged by the aristocratic elite as the work of a dangerous “barbarian.” Yet Becker’s uncompromising avant-garde genius also inflames the diametrically opposed fervor of two extremely strange admirers – the beautiful noblewoman Lisa von Schelling, whom Anton worships from afar, and Satan himself.

Yes, the actual Prince of Darkness, incarnated as an incorrigible seducer straight out of Romantic lore, who brokers an overt Faustian bargain to recruit Becker’s talents for revamping the dreary music of the underworld. It proves an irresistible pitch – success, riches, and Lisa’s hand in exchange for the composer’s immortal soul. And just like that, Calvert detonates the fuse on an epic metaphysical custody battle royale, as the infernal forces loyal to Lucifer barter for supremacy over Becker’s destiny against a ragtag battalion of angels led by Beethoven’s fiery spirit.

While on its surface, such a premise might suggest Gothic romance or subversive supernatural tragicomedy, the novel almost instantly detonates into planes of psychedelic rapture and boundary-obliterating formal experimentation far more unhinged. By his second act, Calvert is already warping linear exposition into febrile states of abstract lyricism conveying the existential raptures and torments of the creative temperament. Whenever Becker is gripped by fits of musical apotheosis, the author’s paragraphs rupture into mantric cyclones of polyphonic prose that channel the young composer’s synesthetic ecstasies with unbound rhetorical delirium.

Aiding Calvert in channeling such unprecedented visions is the avant-garde illustrator A.B. Dance, whose scratchy pen-and-ink renderings somehow visualize these passages in rollicking splats of Dionysian abstraction. During signature sequences when Becker harnesses his operatic breakthroughs to literally catalyze metaphysical raptures and demonic tortures, Dance’s figurative illustrations appear to transmute at the molecular level. Spontaneous eruptions of splintered line, surreal geometry and eldritch pockmarks blossom across his imagery, mirroring the text’s linguistic dematerialization into realms of luminescent synesthesia.

It’s a virtuosic symbiosis that achieves an astounding degree of aural and retinal intensity, with Calvert’s explosive lyricism detonating into visions of unfurling creative delirium rendered by Dance through spastic, unvarnished gashes and spontaneous eruptions of color and form. Even more impressively, these vanguard displays continually refract back to Calvert’s underlying thematic throughline – that sacrosanct notion of artistic singularity enduring as a sanctified quest of the highest existential order.

Indeed, for all its phantasmagoric ruptures into otherworldly dimensions of infernal splendor and celestial grandeur, Maestro! Maestro! by Fred Calvert remains monomaniacally fixated on enshrining the formidable potencies of radical creative transformation. Calvert renders Becker’s fateful pact with Satan and war against the encroaching angels with gleeful grotesquery. But he always loops back to that throbbing human conduit – the alchemical synergy of Love and Music permitting a tortured soul to transcend earthly repression and manifest unconstrained self-actualization through the untrammeled channels of sound and sacred symbiosis.

It’s exemplified most vividly in Calvert’s seamless blooming of Becker’s romance with Lisa amid the novel’s supernaturalistic delirium. Even as he disrupts staid narrative confines with convulsive bouts of euphoric phantasmagoria, he never loses the lush and deeply felt throughline of their grounded human intimacies. Calvert delicately etches their courtship in passages of languid yearning and molten romantic extracts, with the radiant contours of desire mapped through their shared raptures in music and creative convergence. Their bond literalizes the sacred synergy of Love and Music as conduits for the Soul’s supreme self-Realization – interwoven frequencies of regenerative vitality perpetually spiraling towards new realms of unfurled sacred awareness.

Such an affirmation becomes the novel’s ecstatic revelatory Truth, with Calvert rendering the terrestrial clash between good and evil over Becker’s destiny as empty systemic facades superimposed on his organic raptures of transcendent rebecoming. By the cataclysmic finale, when the composer’s dissonant masterwork catalyzes reality-shattering metaphysical tsunamis, existential apotheosis has been claimed through expressive insurgency alone. Heaven and Hell unravel into voids of obsolete signification as Becker’s unleashed canon unravels the stratums of the symbolic order, leaving only radiant curvatures of sonic illumination in its wake.

Dance actualizes this climactic upheaval through furious eruptions of ecstatic abstraction – his illustrations shed figuration and spatial logic altogether, dematerializing into prismatic radiations of lurid color and raw calligraphic force, as if his very ink catalyzes into new states of quantum being. In tandem, Calvert’s voice dissolves all linguistic shackles and devolves into torrential outpourings of pure sonic lyricism, breaching domains of synesthetic orgasmic revelation beyond the strictures of semantic containment.

Theirs is the ultimate alchemical act of creative insurrection—an emphatic attainment of imaginative singularity forged in the rapturous crucibles of love, sound, and unfurling awareness. And while the dimensions of such transcendent unsealing may scandalize pedestrian sensibilities, Calvert and Dance shrug off puritanical detractors with subversive zeal. For their text bleeds with the luminous conviction that sacred self-Realization through unrestrained creativity represents the animating force not just of art’s generative spirit, but the vital waveform harmonics of existence as we recognize it.

From symphonic waveform to visual emission to their own lucid self-embodiments, Maestro! Maestro!’s alchemical reveries unsparingly attest – creative authenticity is the alpha/omega, and the ecstasies of embodied spiritual megadrive achieved through its limitless self-iterations become the perpetually self-overwriting dynamism coursing through all phenomena. While modes and mediums flare and disappear, this fundamental revelatory truth continually surfaces anew through the limitless regenerative expressions of imaginative amplitude. Anton Becker’s victory over negation thus cements the writer and artist’s ultimate sacramental creed – that the sacred continually arises through the convulsive malefic force of sonic regenesis. That transcendent substratum illuminates every lurid image, every gnarled paragraph of Maestro! Maestro!’s rapturous polyphonic rebellion against the laws of cosmic entropy themselves.