A review by thebookishelf
Maestro! Maestro!: Good Times on the Way to Hell & a 1900 Spring Romance by Fred Calvert

lighthearted reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Billed as "a tale about a deal with the devil and a feel-good romance," Fred Calvert's dazzlingly unhinged novel Maestro! Maestro! makes good on that audacious promise while twilighting into far more uncharted territory. For embedded within this phantasmagorical saga set in 1900s Vienna is nothing less than a ferocious metaphysical fantasia on the primal, inextinguishable potencies of creative individuality and the myriad supernatural forces arrayed to suppress it. 
 
We meet our protagonist Anton Becker, a daring young composer whose "radical music" innovates discordant new sonic grammars that scandalize Vienna's aristocratic elite as "barbaric and loony." While the city's stuffed shirts recoil in horror from Becker's convention-shredding masterworks, they earn the rapturous appreciation of two markedly divergent admirers - the beautiful noblewoman Lisa von Schelling, described as the tormented artist's "off-limits love of his life," and Satan himself. Yes, the Prince of Darkness himself, depicted as desperately seeking fresh talent to "upgrade the cringingly awful music of hell." 
 
In an inspired bit of comic book mythologizing, Calvert conjures the infernal embodiment of pure unconstrained id - a demonic figure who sees in Anton's avant-garde genius a primordial eruption of the forbidden music that can blast his stagnant hellish realms into shocking new frontiers of profane grandeur. And so the Dark Lord brokers an overt Faustian pact, offering Becker success, riches and the matrimonial conquest of his beloved Lisa in exchange for his immortal soul's damnation to the ranks of hell's house band. 
 
If the ensuing plot convulsions that stem from this deliciously insane premise recalled Milton's Paradise Lost by way of Robert Johnson at the Crossroads, readers will likely be caught off guard by the ungovernable bursts of hallucinatory excess, profane slapstick and altogether unprecedented narrative shapes that emerge instead. For Calvert almost immediately unleashes an aesthetic of uncompromising delirium, with passages of swooning romanticism combusting into synesthetic fugues of deconstructed lyricism. During signature sequences when Becker's earthshaking compositional breakthroughs catalyze ruptures across the metaphysical continuum, Calvert's prose assumes an unshackled musicality of its own - with grammatical and syntactical moorings dissolving into exquisite cyclones of polyphonic abstraction. 
 
It's in these vertiginous literary raptures that Calvert's collaborator A.B. Dance makes his signal contribution. Working in a scratchy, unfinished pen-and-ink style with echoes of Ralph Steadman and Gillray alike, Dance's renderings attain new heights of phantasmagoric expression precisely when Calvert's language metastasizes into convulsive shape-shifts of linguistic being. At these climactic moments, Dance's wild calligraphic splotches and smears of line seem to levitate off the page into lurid synesthetic evocations of unfurling sonic psychedelia. His disjointed, libidinously warped figurations of bone, lump and crevice appear to unhinge from corporeal grammar altogether, accruing instead into pure transcriptions of libidinous force and abstract elemental propulsion. 
 
Representing the book's lurid visions through improvisational scribbles and visceral painted gashes onto stock illustrations, Dance makes inspired vessels from the contents of pot shards and gutters alike. His renderings of Calvert's Satanic haunts and torture chambers resonate with the same reckless spirit as Goya's Disaster of War etchings, lending depraved cosmic tableaus an earthy, homemade vitality that transcends genre cliche and attains legitimately explosive primordial terror. And when Dance periodically collides earthly bodies into unholy demonic archetypes spilling blasphemous secretions and bodily exhaust, his deranged scrawls recall nothing less than Blake's revolutionary engravings of proletariat insurrection. 
 
Throughout these passages, Calvert complements Dance's demented experiments in abstract evocation by summoning into being a teeming cast of profane and sacred entities locked in ageless existential battle over Becker's creative destiny. Representing the novel's hellish vanguard is Villi, a petulant gargoyle henchmen prone to pathetic pandering and explosive bouts of flatulence. Rendered by Dance as an equine amalgamation of emaciated limbs and protuberances, this unctuous villain was previously incarnated as a "cruel-hearted music critic" whose sadistic reviews once drove multiple composers to take their own lives. 
 
Working in satirical contrast to Villi's venal appetites is the Angelic host led by none other than the composer Ludwig Van Beethoven himself. Characterized with cranky, salt-of-the-earth dignity by Calvert, this totemic musical revolutionary wields the impatient petulance of Working Class heroism itself as he tries to steer the errant Anton back towards integrity and transcendent self-actualization. His motivations reflect the highest sacred imperatives even as Calvert renders him in all-too-human terms, as a crusty celestial grunt whose efforts are continually thwarted by demonic saboteurs like Villi and the inscrutably vague machinations of his heavenly hosts. 
 
That Calvert's supernatural myrmidons continually upend our mortal perceptions of their roles and archetypal auras itself reflects Maestro! Maestro!'s sly subversive brilliance. For even as his absurdist cosmos atomizes conventional narrative into exquisitely granular impressionist abstractions, it reifies the only text that ultimately matters - the unvarnished soul manifesting its sanctified rites of perpetual creative regeneration through hieroglyphs of unfurling desire and euphoric transliteration. Calvert's hydra-headed tale sheds its generic masks again and again until all that remains is a primal symphony of the unbound human instrument, exultantly transcribing its voice across the stars in eternal guerilla warfare against puritanical suppression and creative constraint. 
 
And so by the novel's cataclysmic finale, when Anton's avant-garde dissonances erupt into literal metaphysical ruptures scrambling the primordial DNA of heaven and hell alike, readers will find meaning has been meted out. Demonic entities and heavenly angels burst like soap bubbles amidst the raging elemental fires of the young composer's magnum opus, revealed as empty cultural signifiers in the path of creative light's inexhaustible forward march. As his ecstasies unspool in dionysian orgies of pure vivid synesthesia, readers blink and realize this journey unto terra nova wasn't some druggy reinvention after all - it was a rediscovery of artistic deliverance's original source code, with Maestro! Maestro!'s avant-sorcerers charting their odyssey into the great prismatic uncreation through dazzling reconfigurations of text and image into unexplored dimensions. 
 
As such, Calvert and Dance have somehow alchemized an outrageous supernatural picaresque, a rapturous erotic romance, a demented comedy of infernal humors, and an avant-garde masque of narrative disintegration into a single unified text unshackled from constraints of convention or decorum. Maestro! Maestro! reveals itself as nothing less than ground zero of iterative creative expression, that singular lightning strike of transcendent artistic revelation extracted from the profane muck of suppression and censorship through rapturous acts of lasting psychic deliverance. 
 
No force of reaction or puritanical denial will stop its thundering advance into luminescent realms of prismatic becoming. For as its transmissions make abundantly clear, the radical morphogenic fires of Music and Love radiate from the same unquenchable source as boundless human imagination itself. And that inexhaustible creative beacon demands singular expression at all costs - no demonic infringement or heavenly constraint shalt halt its inevitable victory march. This is the ecstatic final amen that Maestro! Maestro! howls across the cosmos in defiant convulsive splendor.