Megan Crespi Mystery

Researching for her book on 19th-century virtuoso pianist Clara Schumann and her eight children, Professor Megan Crespi encounters startling hatred or praise for them and for Clara's composer husband Robert. These strong reactions come in the form of gr

After visiting the nineteenth-century German/Texan sculptor Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin, art crimes detective Professor Megan Crespi identifies an unknown bust of the young, beardless Johannes Brahms in a local antique store, and happily acquires it. Two days later she speaks on Brahms and the Visual Arts in his birth city of Hamburg. She continues to Vienna where she is to lecture on Gustav Klimt and Music and attend a controversial concert series that juxtaposes Austrian-born Anton Bruckner symphonies with those of German-born Brahms. As partisans bicker, the conductor Agatha Endlich encounters growing threats with violent consequences. Suspects include conductors Brahms-lover Lukas Eifer and Bruckner-fanatic Christian Begeist as well as their devious cohorts. Descendants and ancestors of the world-famous Wittgenstein family of Vienna play a role. After the revelation that Brahms produced a secret work in a genre totally unassociated with him, Megan attempts to discover the score that has been hidden for over one hundred and fifty years. Will she be successful? Includes Readers Guide.

Megan Crespi is back in Europe researching for a biography on "the other Mendelssohn," Felix's sister Fanny, also a prolific and until recently long overlooked composer. She is joined by three colleagues from the fields of music, museum, and photography. They encounter a spate of antisemitic demonstrations masterminded by neo-Nazi organizations in the two German cities associated with the Mendelssohns, Hamburg and Berlin. American composer Simon Saragon's groundbreaking A Jewish Requiem premieres at a historic Berlin synagogue with dire results. Following Fanny's footsteps in Italy, where Megan discovers an unknown oil portrait of Fanny, our Mendelssohn Quartet is confronted by a neo-Fascist in Rome's fabled bohemian Caffè Greco. Upon reaching Fanny's beloved Terracina on Italy's southern coast and the island of Ponza, their lives are threatened. Can rescue on this isolated island be on its way?

Retired art and music historian Megan Crespi is traveling across Europe doing research for a book on Cosima Wagner, daughter of Franz Liszt, wife of Richard Wagner, and defiant protector of Bayreuth's Wagner theater and its Wagner-only operas. With Megan are three colleagues from the fields of museums, music, and photography who had previously joined her in an investigation of composer Fanny Mendelssohn. Switching their group name from the "Mendelssohn Quartet" to the "Wagner Quartet," they soon become bound up in a series of anti-Wagner protests that quickly grow from harmless picket lines to physical sabotage of opera houses presenting Wagner operas. The Quartet's travels take them from London and Paris to Leipzig, Dresden, Riga in Latvia, Weimar, Zurich, Tribschen on Lake Lucerne, Munich, Bayreuth, and finally to Venice where Richard Wagner died a sudden death in 1883. Perhaps Megan's richest discovery on this trip was the unearthing of Wagner's forgotten first wife of some thirty years, Minne Planer. How will this affect her book on Cosima Wagner?