It's the one thing nobody ever notices. You settle down to enjoy the piano recital or chamber concert; you're highly aware of the artists, the instruments, even, perhaps, the musical scores. But you certainly never notice the page turner. In the high-profile world of live music performance, the page turner is the epitome of invisibility.
David Leavitt noticed, though. The central character in his latest novel is a promising 18-year-old piano student, Paul Porterfield, who, in the opening pages of the book, is given the opportunity to turn pages for his idol, Richard Kennington. Several months after the concert they meet again and their relationship develops into a passionate affair, only to be suddenly terminated by the older man with an almost casual brutality; back in the real world, Paul is left to weigh up his adolescent ambitions against his new self-knowledge, with predictably turbulent results.
Leavitt's prose style, an attractive combination of artful understatement and gentle humour, has won him great praise; his novels and short stories regularly find their way on to fiction prize shortlists and his 1986 The Lost Language of Cranes was filmed by the BBC. But what attracted him to the rarefied world of classical music? "The person I live with is a former pianist," he explains, "and he's writing a book about the piano and virtuosity, so - particularly now that we're living in Italy - we tend to go to a lot of concerts.
I became fascinated just by watching the interactions of musicians on stage with each other and with members of the audience, and I was particularly intrigued by the figure of the page turner - who, in Rome, is usually the same person; a very pretty young woman of about 25. I would watch her turning the pages for pianists and wonder how could the men, in particular, not be terribly distracted by the presence of this very sexy, somewhat seductive girl in such close proximity." He was also struck, he says, by certain parallels between the lives of musicians and those of writers.
"The world of classical music is a world in which people are encouraged to begin their careers very young, and it shows, in a much more extreme form, the difficulty of trying to maintain a career after you've had some initial success as a young artist. "It's also a world where people who are temperamentally very private find themselves compelled to be in a public setting all the time - the curious thing about being a musician, a little like being a writer, is that is a completely private art which depends to a certain degree on public performance."
In the book the temperamental Richard Kennington - a former child prodigy who is approaching middle age, and doesn't like the look of it - sticks his hand into a garbage disposal unit and threatens to switch it on, chops garlic with a blissful disregard for the safety of his thumbs and concludes that "I have the wrong personality for my talent". He always appears to be on the brink of retiring from performance, yet he is always on the way to his next concert. Leavitt's sensitive portrayal of both the insecurities and the ruthlessness of the professional pianist is nicely counterpointed by his acute observation of the agonisingly delicate relationships between his cast of musical characters - and the predicament of Paul's mother Pamela. She has done all the right things by her talented son only to discover that she has a rebellious gay teenager on her hands.
The scene in which she attends a support group of cake-baking, middle-class mothers of gay sons - and meets up, to her mingled horror and gratification, with the woman for whom her husband has just left her - is poignant and funny. But the book's trump card is the way in which Leavitt writes about music - especially about the notoriously ineffable magic which takes place when people listen to music. At the most crucial moment of the story Paul's elderly piano teacher, Miss Novotna, puts on a recording of the slow movement of Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata.
"It is a difficult adagio, one that only a great pianist can keep from falling apart. And in these hands it did not fall apart; it was more than broken things, even though broken things were what it spoke of. Paul heard a voice that was tired, perhaps of life. Then a cuckoo seemed to call slowly, softly - not like a cuckoo at all. And the voice sustained the ability to go on. Nothing so poetic as peace, or a reconciliation ... just that stark sentence: the voice sustained the ability to go on."
For someone who has never played the Hammerklavier himself, this is thoughtful stuff. "I listen to a lot of music," says David Leavitt, "and as I listen I try to put myself into the position of someone who would be playing that music. The music in the book is very important - at one point, as I was writing it, I even thought it would be neat to publish the book with an accompanying CD."
Thankfully he decided not to, and The Page Turner has been allowed to stand by itself. Music tumbles through its pages - the Andante from Schubert's B flat trio, Bydlo from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, the Schumann fantasy, the adagietto from Mahler's Fifth - but Leavitt didn't cop out with a bang-crash, dominant-totonic, happy-ever-after ending. "I wanted the book to end on a positive note, but I didn't want it to be a false one," he says. "I wrote five cop-outs - I have these five discarded last chapters in which all kinds of things happen. Joseph adopts a dog in one, Paul and Kennington go off together in another, in a third they meet at Miss Novotna's funeral. They were all terrible. Far too tidy. "What worked, after many attempts, was to give the ending to two very minor characters, as if to say, `well, Paul is right now in this very grim situation, Kennington is in a grim situation, but even while some people are suffering there is a possibility of happiness for others'." Modulated happiness, you might say.
The Page Turner is published by Little Brown at £15.99 in UK.
