Book Reviews: Freiheit!; The Final Symphony
This week I’m bravely, or foolishly, tackling a genre I know nothing about: the graphic novel. (Somewhere my friend Seth Hahne, an expert on the genre, is dropping his face into his hands with a low moan.) Probably I’m the last person alive who should be reviewing graphic novels, but two of them on subjects that interest me happened to come my way lately, so I shall throw caution to the winds and dive in!
Freiheit!: The White Rose Graphic Novel by Andrea Grosso Ciponte (Plough Publishing, 2021).
You’re probably already somewhat familiar with the heroic group of anti-Nazi students known as the White Rose. Ciponte’s graphic novel tells the story of their activities and their martyrdom, emphasizing their fervent belief that even when everything seems hopeless, individuals still can and must find some way to stand against evil.
Ciponte’s drawings of figures and settings are so simple as to be almost stark, yet he fills in the faces with attentive and loving detail. (There’s probably a name for this sort of style, but I regret to say I don’t know it.) I found the story a little hard to follow at times, not because of the graphic novel style per se, but because there’s some jumping around in the timeline. But anyone with even a basic knowledge of the group and its activities won’t have too much trouble. As a valuable bonus, Ciponte includes the texts of all the leaflets distributed by the group in an appendix at the end.
Freiheit! is a book that will reward careful reading and rereading; its haunting tale resonates in this format as it does in every other.
(Full disclosure: Plough is the publisher of my own book The Gospel in Dickens. They did not send me a review copy of Freiheit!; I purchased my own.)
The Final Symphony: A Beethoven Anthology, written by Brandon Montclare and Frank Marraffino, with art by Patricio Delpeche et al. (Z2 Comics, 2020).
Last year was the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven, and several books were published or rereleased in his honor. I bought all the ones I could find.
The Final Symphony: A Beethoven Anthology is one of the more creative tributes. Montclare and Maraffino’s graphic novel doesn’t just tell Beethoven’s story; it also features a number of short fairy tales, myths, and fables, each illustrated by a different artist (Liana Kangas, Luisa Russo, Alice Meichi Li, and many more), that either inspired or were inspired by the composer. Patricio Delpeche is the artist for the main sections, or interstitials, that show key episodes from Beethoven’s life and career. The panels are bold, colorful, vivid — appropriate for their tempestuous subject.
The book’s creators offer an immersive experience by providing a QR code that leads to a Spotify playlist of Beethoven pieces that go with the various stories. (This is in the standard edition; the deluxe edition comes with a double vinyl LP of the pieces.) It’s a wonderful idea for a book like this. The trouble is that if you’re me, by the time you’ve figured out how to make a QR code work (first time, no joke) and reset your Spotify password and figured out that most of the pieces are too long for their sections and figured out how to skip to the next piece and then realized you’ve run into a skip limit and try to play the pieces on your iPod and discover that your iPod is having one of its temperamental days — well, let’s just say that it was a wonderful idea in theory. I ended up simply listening to a couple of Beethoven symphonies, the Sixth and the Ninth, via YouTube while I read, and that was sufficiently immersive.
Technical difficulties notwithstanding, I really did enjoy The Final Symphony. For anyone at all interested in classical music or in Beethoven specifically, it’s a good way to catch the highlights of his story and to learn something about the ideals that drove him. It’s not perfectly historically accurate (for instance, his attitude toward Napoleon was much more ambivalent than depicted here), but it is true to his spirit, and much of it delighted my Beethoven-loving heart. The part where he can’t hear the birds singing in the woods (depicted by empty speech bubbles coming from their beaks), but reaches out to commune with them anyway, moved me nearly to tears. Just as poignant was the childhood flashback that illustrates how, even though music was pushed on him by an abusive father, it became his joy instead of his burden.
Even if you don’t read the book, listen to Beethoven. I recommend it.
Book Links
Freiheit! on Amazon
Freiheit! on Bookshop
The Final Symphony: A Beethoven Anthology on Amazon
The Final Symphony: A Beethoven Anthology at Z2 Comics
Images courtesy of Plough Publishing and Z2 Comics, respectively.