Jonathan Coe on Ravel and Vaughan Williams and the Music of Nations

An evening of conversation and live music

Jonathan Coe‘s new novel, Lessons in Harmony, imagines the unlikely friendship between the celebrated French composer Maurice Ravel and his British pupil, the rising Ralph Vaughan Williams, in Belle Époque Paris. It is a celebration of music’s power to create beauty, to freeze time and, at its greatest, to express the spirit not just of a composer but of an entire nation, bringing two very different sensibilities, one so French, the other so British, into rare harmony. Jonathan Coe will be in conversation with journalist and musician Philippe Auclair, and the evening will feature live music from the Pomegranate Piano Trio, performing extracts from works by Ravel and Vaughan Williams.

The year is 1907, and Ravel is one of the most admired young composers in France: a charismatic, dandyish figure whose technically flawless music hides a deep emotional core. When he takes on a new pupil, the aristocratic Englishman and folk-song collector Vaughan Williams, a cross-channel friendship begins to blossom between two men who appear to share nothing but a gift for embodying their own countries. As the shadow of war gathers, their friendship and their vocation are tested through one of the most turbulent and creative periods in history, and their differing senses of national identity threaten by turns to liberate and to constrain them.

Copies of the book will be available to buy on the night in both French and English, thanks to our partner bookshop Librairie La Page.