After a break of a year or so, I'm starting to have singing lessons again (unique among musicians, most singers have teachers throughout their working lives). So I thought it would be fun to read the most famous book of all about a singer and a singing teacher, George du Maurier's Trilby, first published as a serial in 1893. If George Eliot's prose is just occasionally overloaded by the effort to project intellectual respectability (I've just started rereading Deronda) in the face of a rather scandalous life, du Maurier's book is a confection of the most appalling heartiness, its prose bespattered with exclamation marks - I swear there was a page on which every sentence ended with one! - and choc-a-bloc with toe-curling sentimentality. La Dame aux Camélias meets Three Men in a Boat, without the brilliance of either. While much of the book concerns itself with evoking the Bohemian milieu of three aspiring British painters in mid-century Paris - their parties, their dinners, their habits, their artistic talents and failings - it is the artist's model Trilby, a beautiful, captivating Irish girl, who gives her name to the book and gives it a focus. The great painter of the three, nicknamed Little Billee, falls hopelessly in love with her, his mother intervenes and dissuades Trilby from marrying her son.
What lifts the book rather dubiously above this unpromising romance, and made it into one of the great phenomena of publishing history - a smash in America, a stage play, the origin of the Trilby hat - was the invention of a sinister mesmeric musician, Svengali. Svengali's name has entered the language, a villain to rank with Count Dracula in the popular imagination. His magnetic powers make of Trilby-comically tone-deaf at the start of the novel - the greatest singer of the age, courted by the great and admired to distraction by the musical elite. Svengali's death during one of her performances leaves her bereft of her talent, a laughing stock, emptied out and destined to die.
It is an extraordinary invention, one with which du Maurier regaled his friend Henry James (always at a loss for plots) on one of their Hampstead walks. James noted it down as a possible plot for a novel of his own. How different that would have been; though the possession of one human being by another, the vampiric urge, is the melodrama that lies at the heart of as subtle a novel as A Portrait of a Lady.
