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A review by jolenetang
The Butterfly and the Violin by Kristy Cambron
3.0
3.5 Stars
Loved the story for the most part. Interesting premise, and the author did a good job of moving between the two stories and time periods.
Being a music history aficionado, though, one thing irked me that probably most people don't even notice. Towards the end, Adele is performing in front of a group of Nazi officers and plays Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor. And at the end of the work, they are all cheering in awe of her talent. Well, Mendelssohn was Jewish. And his compositions were banned from being performed very early on in the Nazi regime, so I find this plot point hard to believe.
I get taking creative liberties. (I mean I loooove reading historical fiction.) But if the author still wanted to use Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in her book, she should have at least acknowledged that the musicians were taking a risk by playing it, and that they hoped no one would recognize the work. Because if someone had recognized it, they would have been punished for sure.
To her credit, a woman who played in the Auschwitz-Birkenau orchestra wrote a memoir, and in it claimed that they played Mendelssohn in the camp once. But her memoir has been highly contested, and that fact was denied by three other women who played with her in the orchestra.
Loved the story for the most part. Interesting premise, and the author did a good job of moving between the two stories and time periods.
Being a music history aficionado, though, one thing irked me that probably most people don't even notice. Towards the end, Adele is performing in front of a group of Nazi officers and plays Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor. And at the end of the work, they are all cheering in awe of her talent. Well, Mendelssohn was Jewish. And his compositions were banned from being performed very early on in the Nazi regime, so I find this plot point hard to believe.
I get taking creative liberties. (I mean I loooove reading historical fiction.) But if the author still wanted to use Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in her book, she should have at least acknowledged that the musicians were taking a risk by playing it, and that they hoped no one would recognize the work. Because if someone had recognized it, they would have been punished for sure.
To her credit, a woman who played in the Auschwitz-Birkenau orchestra wrote a memoir, and in it claimed that they played Mendelssohn in the camp once. But her memoir has been highly contested, and that fact was denied by three other women who played with her in the orchestra.