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Sep 1, 2011

Death and the Maiden, Gerald Elias


The New Magini String Quartet appears to be suffering a musical curse, amid flying lawsuits, delays, accidents and no-shows, the members struggle to put together their make-or-break concert, a multi-media laden performance of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, at Carnegie Hall. 

Daniel Jacobus, renowned blind violin teacher and amateur sleuth is feeling even more curmudgeonly than usual.  He gets pulled into the quartet’s misfortunes by his concern for its newest member, his former student second violinist Yumi Shinagawa, but Yumi is keeping some secrets of her own.

With help from Yumi, cellist Nathaniel Williams and Trotsky (because he can’t runsky) the bulldog Jacobus starts poking his nose in.  Among his suspects, a awol first violinist, a litigious Englishman, the Soviet refugees who made up the original Magini Quartet, a Russian who ‘collects’ rare violins and a music fan with a body odour problem who may be lying dead on the streets of Lima, Peru.

On opening night Death could be visiting the entire quartet, including Jacobus.

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