Characters in maestro with a mission
Answers
Answer:
Maestro is the coming of age story of Paul Crabbe. The novel is written as a memoir, and it centers on Paul's relationship with his piano teacher, Herr Eduard Keller. Fifteen-year-old Paul has just moved with his parents from southern Australia to Darwin, in the country's far north. The story begins with Paul's first lesson with Keller, an old Austrian immigrant who lives in a room at the Swan hotel that overlooks the hotel's beer garden.
Keller begins the first lesson, seating Paul at an old, peeling upright piano and himself at a grand piano. Paul examines Keller's hands and notices that Keller is missing most of his right little finger, a fact accentuated by the presence of a gold ring on the stump. Keller refuses to let Paul play during his first eight lessons, instead spending them dispensing his musical philosophies and instructing Paul in the personalities of the different fingers. Keller tells Paul, who lightheartedly suspects that his teacher might be a war criminal in hiding, about his musical ancestry—Beethoven taught Czerny, Czerny taught Liszt, Liszt taught Leschetizky, and Leschetizky taught Keller. His parents are shocked and thrilled that Keller actually deserves the label "maestro" that others call him, and this motivates Paul's father to begin attending his son's lessons.
Paul's musical education is very important to his parents, both of whom play piano. Paul's father is a tall, stoic, quiet doctor working as a Government Medical Office. His mother, a housewife and former librarian, is short, emotional, and talkative, and the two parents disagree on everything in a half-serious, half-teasing way. Paul's parents begin hosting a Friday "soirée" night for Darwin's amateur musicians, that Keller never attends, and they join the local Gilbert and Sullivan Society.
Paul begins school at Darwin High, where he becomes a quick target for bullies alongside the other new student, Bennie Reid, who has just moved from England. Paul quickly learns to take refuge in the school's Music Room, practicing on the piano during lunch and after school. At school, Paul develops a crush on Megan Murray and begins waking up with sticky sheets. Paul tries to ask her out, but she turns him down. After school, bully Jimmy Papas beats Paul up in the bike shed for bothering his friend Scotty Mitchell's girlfriend Megan.
By Paul's ninth lesson, Keller is finally ready to let him play, but forces him to swallow his pride and begin with The Children's Bach. When Paul one day arrives at the Swan before Keller, he plays on the maestro's grand piano instead of his usual warped upright. He notices a silver clamshell frame on the piano with pictures of younger Keller, a young plumpish woman who is singing, and a child, dated Salzburg, Oktober, '27. Keller arrives and acknowledges, without detail, that the people in the photograph were his wife Mathilde and son Eric.
Paul and his parents drive south to Adelaide to spend Christmas with his maternal grandparents. He sends Herr Keller a Christmas card and receives in response a card and parcel containing a signed, 150-year old edition of Czerny's Opus 599 studies. Paul begins visiting the Adelaide University library looking for clues about Keller's past. He finds his date of birth is 1887, and one book gives his date of death as 1944, which Paul's mother passes off as a simple error. Paul makes a breakthrough when he finds a book that mentions that Keller's wife, the celebrated Jewish contralto and Wagner specialist Mathilde Rosenthal, died in Auschwitz in 1942. Fascinated by his find, Paul returns to the library the next day, where he hears the voices of a couple who have come to have sex amidst the shelves. Paul removes a large book from the shelf and watches the couple through the hole.
Paul returns to school the next year and meets Rosie Zollo, a new student from the South and the daughter of the new French teacher. Rosie instantly likes Paul and begins to spend her lunch breaks in the music room with him, but he finds her annoying. When Keller is late to one lesson, Paul looks through the scrapbooks Keller filled with newspaper clippings of tragedies and acts of stupidity. He allows Paul to take the "textbook" home but Paul's father does not let him read it. The Crabbes' Friday soirées establish a subcommittee to bring concert artists to Darwin, and their first performance is by the Brisbane Symphony. Rosie sits next to Paul at the concert, and he finds himself suddenly attracted to her. During a Wagner piece, Keller begins to shout in German and is escorted performs for the last time and they go their separate ways. After a particularly long lesson, Keller spends the night at the grandparents'