Book Review: Between Two Sounds
Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language by Joonas Sildre, translated by Adam Cullen (English edition Plough Publishing House, 2024).
The graphic novel about a great composer’s life is an intriguing subgenre that keeps popping up on my radar. The latest of these is the new English edition of Between Two Sounds (originally published in Estonian in 2018), which tells the story of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in a series of imaginative sepia drawings.
As a 20th-century composer living under Soviet rule for much of his life, Pärt’s career is a study in contradictions and tensions. He struggled to find his own authentic form of self-expression even while grappling with a regime that squashed any artist who stepped too far out of line. As Joonas Sildre’s book shows us, these struggles led him in the direction of traditional sacred music for inspiration, but unfortunately, anything sacred was looked upon with suspicion by the Soviets, and as his style grew and flourished, his freedom diminished.
Sildre tells the story in a minimalist style, relying on muted colors and the use of simple dots and lines to represent music. At the same time, he displays considerable artistic boldness by portraying his hero chasing musical and philosophical ideas through the pages, running along musical staves and leaping from figurative peaks. The shifts between real life and the realm of the mind are seamlessly done, and Sildre has an impressive gift for holding a reader’s interest through all of Pärt’s ruminations.
I’m not even a tenth as familiar with Pärt as I am with Beethoven (who’s always been the subject of my composer-graphic-novel reviews before this). I know a little of his work, but not much. So I tried listening to some of his pieces via YouTube while I was reading, and found that this enhanced my enjoyment of the story. You might try doing the same if you pick up this book. (A few recommendations to get you started: “Credo,” “Spiegel im Spiegel,” and “The Deer’s Cry.”)
There were only two issues that marred my enjoyment of the book a little—an issue of form, and an issue of content. The first is that the tiny print was a strain for my middle-aged eyes, so much so that at times I had to resort to a magnifying glass. The second, the content issue, has to do with Pärt’s relationships. The focus of this book is his music, which is understandable, but his relationships receive less care and attention, with the result that people appear and disappear rather abruptly in his life, and are sometimes hard to keep track of.
This is most evident with Pärt’s first wife, Hille. She appears in a mere handful of panels, the penultimate of which shows her in her wedding dress riding off with her new husband on the back of his scooter. Shortly afterwards, she vanishes. Completely. Pärt eventually marries a second time, but there’s no mention at all of what happened to wife number one. (This is not necessarily the author’s fault; I couldn’t find any mention of what happened to her when I went searching online, so maybe no one has ever talked about it anywhere. But the whole thing has me going crazy with curiosity. If anyone here happens to know the fate of the first Mrs. Pärt, please pipe up in the comment section!)
But on the whole, Between Two Sounds is a rewarding read, a timely and thoughtfully told story of an artist who found his way against nearly insurmountable odds.
(Cover image copyright Plough Publishing House. In the interest of full disclosure, Plough is also the publisher of my book The Gospel in Dickens. Thanks to Plough for the advance review copy of Between Two Sounds.)
Book Links:
Between Two Sounds on Amazon
Between Two Sounds on Bookshop
(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualified purchases.)