The Next Mozart

Yiyun Li’s ambitious new novel Music Against the Night tells the stories of two 19th-century musicians, famous in their lifetimes, who have been largely forgotten. The Irish pianist and composer John Field, inventor of nocturnes, has become a “footnote” in the biography of Chopin, who made the genre famous. Field’s wife Adelaide Percheron, an esteemed concert pianist, has fallen further, an afterthought in music history. “There would never be a novel about Adelaide Percheron,” Li’s narrator declares, winking at the reader. Here Adelaide and John take center stage; their performances merit this revival.

Li structures the novel in long sections that alternate between John and Adelaide. In the 1790s, the Field family moves from Dublin to Bath and then to London, John’s violinist father playing in orchestras while his siblings make sacrifices to facilitate his career. Adelaide, born in Pondicherry, French India, is orphaned as a child and is fortunate to find a protector in grandmother Leonora and an abiding passion in the pianoforte. Her unlikely journey leads her to France in 1804, just as Napoleon is made emperor.

The eventual meeting of Adelaide and John, which Li telegraphs from the start, comes after both have endured hardship and loss, all in the service of their dreams. “They lived, it would occur to [Adelaide] long afterward, as two melodies in a piece of composition,” Li writes. The narrator prepares us that their intertwined stories include marriage but do not end happily, yet they produce a harmony that feels symphonically satisfying.

Adelaide compares their parallel lives to musical “counterpoint,” drawing attention to the remarkable differences in their personalities. John, undersized and shy, suffers from a stutter and longs for a comforting touch. Adelaide, a beautiful orphan without prospects, struts about with extreme confidence, unshakable in her belief that she’s destined for greatness. She adopts a guiding principle that “no one’s memory, judgment, and intelligence other than her own should be trusted.” The only place where Field’s bravura matches Adelaide’s is on stage, where the skittish young man shuts out insecurities and allows the music to take over.

For both, music plays the dual role as emotional nourishment and marketable product. Music provides John a private identity, but from a young age he’s pressured to capitalize on his gifts at the expense of his childhood. “Music was a prison now, his talent barred the window, and he could only glimpse the future through it,” John thinks. Adelaide comes to the piano later and, as a girl, without the pressure to “seek mastery.” For her, music compensates for loss and enables her to “command her feelings.”

The title Music Against the Night captures their attempts to seek solace amid coldness and calamity. In India, Adelaide’s governess warns her, “Happiness is like a meteor … Don’t ever set your heart on happiness. Only idiots do that.” John experiences happiness fleetingly, in his teens when his emerging genius wins the praise of his teacher Signor Clementi, but it doesn’t last. “In retrospect, the spring of 1794 was perfect, but no instrument can hold a note forever,” Li writes.

Among other burdens, Field finds that he can’t escape the shadow of Mozart, the child wonder who delighted European crowds a generation earlier. “This boy would be the next Mozart,” people say of young John, not realizing that the comparison is more curse than blessing. To promote John as a wunderkind, Signor Clementi subtracts two years from his age. For John’s performance debut, his mother makes him an outfit modeled on young Mozart: “a full dress coat in crimson over white stockings.” A friend tells him, “You only need a wig to look like Mozart himself.” But Clementi, at least, knows that Mozart, whose father worked him into premature death, is a cautionary tale, as well.

The dramatic scenes move quickly, leaving Li plenty of room to indulge in commentary. The text is composed in an epigrammatic mode, each conflict an opportunity to share kernels of wisdom. “Remember, in life you either take up the knife or wait to be butchered,” the narrator declares. Adelaide’s female cousins believe the old-wives’ adage that “knowledge worked like spices: too much would only imply less fresh ingredients.” Adelaide thinks that “real life was a solo voyage: the earlier you depart, the further you go.”

Li’s novel provides a vehicle for meditations on art, fame, childhood, and the Romantic Era. This entertaining historical novel suggests a new direction for an author who has spent the past decade writing about the suicides of her two sons (Li won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow). In her new novel, two young musicians experience love and beauty; for that alone, they deserve remembrance.