Literary Evening

Presentaion of the book The Descent of the Lyre by Will Buckingham

Special guests:
Dr. Will Buckingham, author

Dr. Andrew Caink, moderator

Accompaniment in music by:

Dr. Will Buckingham (guitar) & Lydia Hind (piano)

SYNOPSIS
Born out of the music, the landscape and the folklore of Bulgaria, The Descent of the Lyre is a book about storytelling and sainthood, a reinvention of the tale of Orpheus, and a meditation on music and myth-making.
It is the early nineteenth century and the Bulgarian village of Gela, the birthplace of Orpheus, is suffering under the heavy taxation and arbitrary justice of Ottoman rule. Ivan Gelski, a teenager from the village, is to be married to a local girl, Stoyanka; but on the night before his wedding his bride is abducted by the son of the local Pasha. The boy is seriously wounded in the battle that follows, and whilst Ivan burns with a fever on his sick-bed, his father travels to the monastery of Bachkovo to ask the saints to save his son’s life.
Ivan survives the winter, but although his wound heals, his rage at the loss of his bride grows. At the onset of spring, he takes to the hills to become a bandit, a haidutin. In the mountains, an encounter with a Jewish guitarist, Solomon Kuretic — captured by the bandits whilst he is travelling from Vienna to Constantinople — transforms Ivan’s rage into a different kind of passion. Ivan finds peace in Solomon’s music, and when the guitarist himself is killed, the bandit leader takes the musician’s guitar and leaves Bulgaria on foot, walking North to Vienna. There, by the shores of the Danube, he apprentices himself to Solomon’s teacher.
Several years later, Ivan appears in Paris, where he is taken into the care of the theatre owner Michot and his doctor friend Blanchard, and where he rises to become a star on the concert stage, outshining even the great Spanish guitarist, Ferdinand Sor. But this success leads eventually to his martyrdom, suspended from the roof-beams of a darkened theatre by his own guitar strings.
Ivan returns to Bulgaria, his hands bandaged and his broken guitar on his back where he becomes the subject of rumour and folklore. The book ends where it begins, in a hillside chapel in the Rodopi mountains, before an icon of a saint with a guitar and bandaged hands.