Hermann Burger’s Frenzied Harmonies

Early in Hermann Burger’s 1989 novel, Brenner, the eponymous narrator recalls that “the young Mozart could drive his father to the verge of madness with an unresolved seventh.” Brenner knows this feeling well—the slow torture of an unresolved note, a loose end. It’s one of his first memories from childhood.  Lying sleepless in bed on a bright afternoon, bound with rubber cords by his mother so he won’t get up from his nap, he hears the idle tinkling of a servant girl at the piano.