There’s music on every page of Chaim Freiberg’s new book

She began her concert with Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from his Orfeo ed Euridice, a timeless tale of love and loss. Under a single hazy beam of light from above, she appeared mysterious and remote. Listening to her performance in rapture, no one among the audience in the darkened hall could have guessed that this time, through her playing, Emilia Livingstone was telling her own personal story.

This passage from Chaim Freiberg’s novella In C Sharp Minor describes a famous concert pianist performing in Liverpool, England in 1932. The heartbeat-paced book is the fourth work of fiction from the St. Petersburg author, who taught piano in New York City for 45 years.

Freiberg’s prose has a light, melodic lilt and heady rhythm, lending weight to his dramatic story about the celebrated Emilia Livingstone and what became of her. And how the music that coursed through her veins carried on, long after she’d changed, and re-focused, and endured more than a few hard times.

“When I read what I wrote,” Freiberg says, “I realized I was telling my story, but costumed with different characters and different locations. But the essence was still there, all the struggles. All kinds of levels in the story have to do with my own experiences in life.”

In C Sharp Minor also follows a young girl named Rosemary, sent at age 7 to live in a convent in Ireland after her parents are killed in an airplane crash. At The Sisters of Fortitude, she meets and is tutored by the nunnery’s music director, Sister Gabriela.

(“I didn’t go to a convent, but I had teachers who behaved like a nun,” Freiberg laughs. “Many times, I felt like I was in a convent.”)

By her late teens, Rosemary is an accomplished classical player who, with the right breaks and connections, could become the next Emilia Livingstone.

The book is subtitled Women Between Two Worlds.

Born in Israel, Freiberg graduated from the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, and from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City,

Once he retired, he moved to St. Petersburg and devoted himself to fiction writing. His previous works, Ms. Adelaide’s Piano (and other tales of Music and Love), Ms. Flora and the Squirrel (and Other Tales of Friendship and Gratitude) and Lily Flowers Finds Love (and Other Tales of Passion), were collections of short stories. All of them supremely musical in both subject matter and execution.

In C Sharp Minor began life as a short story, too, “and it started unfolding, page upon page.”

Since one does not argue with the Muse, he kept going. Writing, he said, “brings me tremendous joy. This is really the center of my intellectual life, doing research and writing.”

Freiberg says he’s particularly fond of early 20^th century period pieces, and of women classical pianists from the era. His model for Emilia Livingstone, he reveals, was the acclaimed Australian pianist Eileen Joyce.

His empathy for and appreciation of these women, he believes, helps him create rich and vibrant worlds for them. “I have the universe open for me to shape them and present them in the most ideal way, and that gives me a wonderful satisfaction,” he says. “I hear the music when I write about it.”

Is In C Sharp Minor Chaim Freiberg ’s own story? Well, no, not really, but the author is convinced the novella came from his subconscious. So he’s in there somewhere.

“I decided to be a musician when I was 5 years old. I remember sitting on a see-saw and thinking that’s what I was going to do. And I became what I am in spite of the difficulties that were in my way.”

 In C Sharp Minor: Women Between Two Worlds is published by St. Petersburg Press. It is also available at Tombolo Books and via Amazon.