Gall for an arranged marriage in Vienna, he decides he can deny the truth no longer and he follows her-to sumptuous Vienna, to the former monks who saved his life, to an apprenticeship at one of Europe’s greatest theaters, and to the premiere of one of history’s most beloved operas. When his saviors are exiled and his beloved leaves St.

Now a young man, he will forever sing with the exquisite voice of an angel-a musico -yet castration is an abomination in the Swiss Confederation, and so he must hide his shameful condition from his friends and even from the girl he has come to love. Like his mother’s bells, he rings with sound and soon, he becomes the protégé of the Abbey’s brilliant yet repulsive choirmaster, Ulrich.īut it is this gift that will cause Moses’ greatest determined to preserve his brilliant pupil’s voice, Ulrich has Moses castrated. Suddenly Moses knows his true gift, his purpose. There, his ears lead him through the ancient stone hallways and past the monks’ cells into the choir, where he aches to join the singers in their strange and enchanting song. Rescued from certain death by two traveling monks, he finds refuge at the vast and powerful Abbey of St. But when his preternatural hearing was discovered-along with its power to expose the sins of the church-young Moses Froben was cast out of his village with only his ears to guide him in a world fraught with danger. Shaped by the bells’ glorious music, as a boy he possessed an extraordinary gift for sound. The celebrated opera singer Lo Svizzero was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps where his mother served as the keeper of the loudest and most beautiful bells in the land. With time, I came to understand I would never know the secrets of my birth, for my father was the only one who knew these secrets, and he would take them to his grave.

“Please, Nicolai,” he would say after a moment, as though we had made a pact I had forgotten. “Don’t be ridiculous.”īut whenever I myself gained the courage to ask him further of our past, he just looked sadly at me. “Of course he’s not my son!” he would say. Though there was never any doubt that my seed had come from another man, Moses Froben, Lo Svizzero, called me “son.” And I called him “father.” On the rare occasions when someone dared to ask for clarification, he simply laughed as though the questioner were obtuse. I grew up as the son of a man who could not possibly have been my father.

The bells by richard harvell