| Title | : | The Curtain Rises (Warrender Saga, #4) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 026370825X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780263708257 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 188 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1969 |
The Curtain Rises (Warrender Saga, #4) Reviews
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Nicola Denby, a secretary and an only child, dated a viola player, Brian Coverdale. His goal was to be the greatest orchestral musician in the world. He planned to tour with Julian Evett, a brilliant young Canadian conductor. But before he left, he approached Nicola with the intension to marry her upon his return. She was thrilled. Then unexpectedly, while overseas, Brian passed away from pneumonia.
Devastated, Nicola’s father told her he thought it best if she quit her current job and applied for the position of secretary/companion with her aunt, Gina Torelli. She was a world-famous opera singer. This would give Nicola the opportunity to take her mind off her sadness and to travel.
She earned the post, acknowledged Gina’s prima donna attitude and met Julian Evett. They have a platonic dinner together so Nicola can find out more of Brian’s last days after which her aunt inferred Julian might be hiding something. And, believe it of not, this all happens in the first chapter!
What happened next was perplexing, funny, irritating and amusing. I. Liked. Julian. Ms. Burchell wrote Gina’s character in a realistic fashion; I expected the opera singer’s bi-polarish emotions. Nicola was simply naive and young.
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Nicola now despised the conductor because of her belief that he was at the center of Brian’s death. And, as is usual with a romance, they find themselves in each other’s company. Time and time again. The back and forth banter with her photo? Priceless. Their burgeoning relationship: in a way, and I know I am taking liberties here, Julian reminded me of the quiet but assertive heroes found in Betty Neels’ romances. Nicola and the little misunderstandings? They were there, too. Very Neelish.
This is the fourth story in the Warrender series; I failed to read the first three. Oscar and Althea -from the first story- were present in
The Curtain Rises and I had no problem following along with their marriage. I am not sure if any of the other characters were involved in the previous romances but this story could be read as a standalone.
I am stealing a quote from Josh’s review because what he said was spot-on. ’It was a nice balance of flawed but essentially decent people motivated by believable misunderstanding.’ -
This is the fourth story in the Warrender series and a re-read for me. Oddly enough, what I remembered most about this story was the operatic soprano aunt of the heroine - and I found her stealing scenes yet again. However, the character who pulled my heartstrings was the up-and-coming conductor hero. He is the first beta hero of the series and everything he did and endured was for the unsuspecting heroine.
The story opens with our secretary heroine who is still grieving the death of her almost-fiance, a virtuoso viola player. Her father suggests she help her operatic soprano diva extraordinaire aunt as a secretary/companion. The heroine had never met her aunt by marriage because she spent most of her time abroad, but now she is back in England from Canada for a series of concerts, while her husband recuperates from an illness. Heroine is captivated by the diva (who is a contemporary of the soprano OW in Oscar Warrender's life) and is willing to be prejudiced against the new conductor, just because her aunt is. When she meets the hero, she is a little cool until she realizes he was conducting her fiance in Canada when he died. They meet so the heroine can hear about fiance's final days and the hero is very sweet to her. Hero seems to know a lot about her from what the fiance told him.
I was really touched by how much the hero was willing to put up with for the heroine's sake and how she finally broke him. The aunt is wonderful here and shows great sensitivity and wisdom. The hero's words to her are lovely and show what kind of man he really is. -
Another great edition to the Warrender series. I must say MB certainly knows the world of opera. This story had an added dimension of a mystery/thriller with the unanticipated death of a young virtuoso. What really happened on that tour in Canada? Who was to blame? Where do you draw the line of accountability? What role did evil OW play?
This one was also fun, because one of the main characters is the epitome of Diva, and her antics were priceless. Of course Anthea and Oscar also have a starring role. It was so nice to see Oscar finally get his comeuppance as Anthea wraps him around her little finger.
Definitely a delightful 4.5 star read for me! -
Oh, this book was designed in a lab for ME. Completely obvious misunderstanding but with all the suppressed feelings and at the end of the day it's just a book about people doing their jobs and falling in love and yes. This is my favorite so far.
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It would have been a 5 star if Nicola wasn't so blind when it came to Brian. The person who stole the scenes in this book was Torelli, the aunt. She was the perfect character, she was arrogant and selfish but sweet and loyal in her own way... the perfect diva.
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Sometimes I want to read a series because Im just so in love w the couple from the first book. In this case its Oscar and Anthea. However they only make small cameo appearances in this book…
This was eventually a lovely story. At first I was annoyed at the insistence of the heroine on knowing all about the last days of her dead fiance and she hounds the Hero and the (unknown to her) OW for details.
However, when I did get around to thinking about it, then, I imagine the author was right all along in her assessment. If I had lost my fiancé, in a different country, was still heartbroken and grieving, maybe I also would have been desperately seeking every detail of his last days. So I did start understanding her motivations and was more sympathetic to her.
I could also understand her abrupt fluctuations of emotion when she suddenly hates the Hero because she thinks he inadvertently caused her fiancé’s death.
I felt sorry for the poor Hero, who I could see was smitten with her from the start (he kept her photo) and who was so haunted over his involvement with the fiancé. This Hero is very different. He isn’t dominant like Oscar Warrender, although he is a gifted conductor as well. This Hero is more sensitive and emotional so he feels all the accusations of the heroine so deeply.
This was a way more angsty read, but it ends on a high note. I loved how the Hero thanks the aunt of the heroine in the end, saying the heroine was his gift and he would have been half a man without her.
❤️ ❤️ ❤️ -
The problem with this book, although a very enjoyable read, is that a month after reading it, I couldn't even remember the name of the heroine (Nicola, as it turns out) or the hero (Julian).
The character I did remember is the wonderfully vivacious and temperamental operatic primadonna aunt, Gina Torelli, one of the best-drawn of all Mary Burchell's characters. She is a living, breathing entity who leaps right out of the page. Her own relationship with her husband, Nicola's Uncle Peter, is far more romantic and poignant and vivid than the rather colourless, more-rocky-than-romantic situation between Nicola and Julian.Nicola moved towards the door, but then she was held there for a moment by the sheer fascination of the varied expressions which chased each other across her aunt’s face. She was everything by turns, from a romantically excited girl to a fretfully complaining middle-aged woman, and if she had been projecting it all to the last row of the gallery she could not have been more telling.
"She loves him," Nicola thought, as she slipped away out of the room. "She really loves him very much." And the discovery both touched and surprised her.
Gina is also wonderfully generous and sensitive to other people's affairs, and gloriously puts Oscar Warrender firmly in his place. She also sorts out the conflict between Nicola and conductor Julian: Julian forced Nicola's fiancé Brian to do a performance in Canada, Brian had pneumonia and later died, so Nicola blames Julian for his death. However as it turns out, Brian was actually having an affair with bitchy soprano Michele Laraut. Who (annoyingly typical in a Mary Burchell novel) never really gets her comeuppance.
Anyway I highly recommend reading this book for Gina alone, as she is such a hugely enjoyable character. She also pops up in later instalments in the Warrender series. -
Gina Torelli makes the most eccentric fairy godmother
Initially I was intrigued by the slight mystery indicated in the blurb.
Nicola loses her fiancee while he is on tour and joins on as a secretary to her aunt, a famous opera singer Gina Torelli. Through this she meets Julian Evett, an upcoming conductor who is apparently responsible for her fiancé's death.
There's quite a bit of cruelty on Nicolas side towards Julian, who, since this is a romance, didn't completely deserve it. Nicola herself came across as slavishly loyal, blind to the faults of people she loved and overly critical of Julian. I wasn't a fan of her behavior tbh. But I've found that in this author's books I always seem to dislike one of the main characters.
It has a nice pat happy ending though so 3 stars it is.
Please like if you found this review helpful. -
If it had been a longer book, I would have said it was too angsty for me, but it was pretty compelling while in the grip of Mary Burchell’s storytelling ability. Thank goodness for Torelli, though. She may be a prima donna but she’s also the ONLY thing keeping this book on track. I almost added another star to my rating just for her 😂
Warrender’s arrogant eyebrows jerked up and he said drily, ‘Is that all the explanation I get?’
‘I’m afraid — ’ began Julian.
But Torelli said, ‘No, of course not. They’re in love. Can’t you see that for yourself, Oscar? They went through more than the usual degrees of idiocy before finding it out, though.”
Every romance needs a Torelli. -
Not to be repetitive but I'm really enjoying this series!
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Great story. Felt bad for the H in this one. Nicest guy who took a lot of shit from the h
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Miss Bates ran a gamut of reactions to Mary Burchell’s Warrender Saga. She adored the first and loathed (DNF-ed) the second and third. And yet, the first, A Song Begins, was so good, she get kept trying to read one after another. Well, fourth time’s a charm because The Curtain Rises is masterful. There is much in it that Miss Bates usually dislikes, but it totally totally swept her away with its emotional intelligence. To set the scene for MissB’s reader: Nicola Denby, possessed of looks, sound judgement and reasoning, and a doting, country-life-middle-class-respectability English family, goes off to London to earn her living as a secretary. Family connections see her become assistant to her prima donna aunt (who must never be referred to as “Aunt”) Gina Torelli (Torelli is a fascinatingly machinating character: a mercurial, temperamental fairy god-mother, vain and sharply intelligent, one of romance’s greatest secondary characters). Nicola was engaged to a brilliant viola player, Brian Coverdale. When Brian was on tour in Canada, he took ill and yet rushed to Toronto from Montreal at the conductor’s, Julian Evett’s. Brian, sadly, died of some consumptive-like illness and Nicola is left with great enmity towards Julian, who soon turns up to direct her aunt’s Covent Garden production.
In a Betty Neels vein, there is a pernicious “other woman” mixed up in the Brian-Julian conflict. Yet, none of the characters are typical: they’re so well-round and interesting that even the deleterious Michele Laraut “Other Woman” is, maybe not sympathetic, compelling. Other than larger-than-life Gina Torelli (some day Miss Bates would like to write a post on Gina’s wit, wisdom, and whims), Nicola’s emotional growth is the heart of this great romance. Nicola’s changing feelings, her emotional honesty, centre around a complex relationship with Julian Evett. Julian himself is a wonderful non-alpha-posturing cypher: charming, hard-working, engaging, and, as eventually revealed, a man of honour and integrity.
Nicola’s quandary is a painful, emotionally believable one. She is attracted to, and fascinated by, Julian, the man she blames for her beloved’s death:
… the most extraordinary conviction came to Nicola that she wanted, almost more than anything else in the world, to have him hotly deny that and give chapter and verse for his complete vindication. Until that moment she had not known that any of the strangling, bewildering pain had anything to do with anyone but Brian.
Burchell perfectly captures Nicola’s constantly and consistently conflicted feelings for Julian. Nicola’s desire for releasing Julian from guilt appears “extraordinary”. Nicola yearns for Julian’s “vindication”. She experiences “strangling, bewildering pain” and she is honest with herself about it: discerning it is not borne of grief, but a re-awakened heart.
While some readers may grow frustrated with Nicola’s insistence on hating, resenting, and blaming Julian, the flip side is that it speaks of Nicola’s loyalty and fidelity, heroine and hero virtues the genre is very much about. Initially, when Nicola senses sympathetic inkling for Julian, she squelches it, ensuring she shows him only rancour and dislike:
Nicola stared stonily at him. Moved and thrilled though she was by Torelli’s performance, nothing could thaw the ice round her heart when she actually looked again on the the man who was to blame for Brian’s death.
He gave her a curt nod and passed on, while she found she had given him no more than a frozen, blank glance which was half embarrassment and half pure hatred.
It is evidence of Burchell’s genius that she describes Nicola’s “freezing out” of Julian and her feelings for him with what MissB calls “hard” imagery, ice and stone featuring frequently. Burchell builds towards Nicola’s softening towards Julian.
In her emotional journeying, Nicola’s lack of empathy and feeling for Julian turns to rage, something not-love but strong nevertheless. Julian elicits strong, uncontrollable feelings. This is the moment when the hero, or heroine is most likely to lash out at the Other, trying to destroy those burgeoning feelings, to return to the stasis of stone, not-feeling:
‘Perhaps Miss Denby was not tuned in to compassion at that moment.’ Something in his tone stung Nicola into fury. And she raised her eyes and looked full at him then. ‘I find it hard,’ she said deliberately, ‘to feel compassion for anyone responsible for another’s death.’ He jerked his head slightly, as though she had struck him across the face, and she was fiercely glad that he lost colour.
Miss Bates loved our heroine’s rage, Nicola’s emotional-scourging of the Julian. Nicola revels in hurting Julian, fighting her genuine liking for a man who, at least in all her dealings with him, behaves with decorum, good manners, and affection. Nicola’s enjoyment in hurting Julian, in that “loss of colour” as he pales under her censure: how true, how truly equal, as the heroine, active in her feelings, striking at the hero’s greatest vulnerability (his guilt over Brian’s death) exacts one small indication of her power over him.
Nicola’s fever-pitch of anger, like a boiling pot, overflows and, inevitably, bursts into uncontrollable emotion, not hate, not love, not sure, but strong and beyond her:
And now, to her dismay, she found she could not hold back the tears. They silently overflowed and trickled down her cheeks. It was some minutes before he glanced at her in the passing lamplight and saw what was happening. And, with a curiously helpless note in his voice, he said, ‘Oh, lord, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have shouted at you.’ ‘And I shouldn’t have spoiled your evening of triumph,’ she replied before she could stop herself. But then she hardened her heart.
The Curtain Rises‘s emotional intensity of love, jealousy, frustration, everything that the heart hides and is ashamed of, experiences temporary relief in this one tiny shared moment of sympathy and apology. The apology, rather than the grovel, where hero and heroine meet as flawed equals is a better indicator of future happiness and a better glimpse into their relationship’s evolution than the baby-filled epilogue (though that has its place too). This is one of the finest moments in romance, simply “I’m sorry” and then the naming of the hurtful act. And then that marvelous turn of phrase, so Biblical and inevitable as the turning away from God, “she hardened her heart.”
Equal to the apology is the recognition. Nicola’s recognition of Julian’s true self is as good as the genre gets:
As she watched that thin, sensitive, intensely lively face in the light from the conductor’s desk it seemed to Nicola that she was seeing him fully for the first time. Here was the artist as well as the man, not only directing a great work, but living it and loving it as though he and it were a part of each other. ‘None of it for his own glory,’ thought Nicola indescribably moved. And then she was almost frightened by the wave of admiration and actual love which swept over her at this realization. One could love him as an artist, she hastily assured herself, while disliking him as a man. But after a minute she recognized that for the piece of hollow nonsense it was. And suddenly she capitulated to something stronger than herself and allowed the complete and simple truth to engulf her. She loved him.
Where does Miss Bates begin with the mastery that is the above paragraph? “Seeing him for the first time”, the recognition of the beloved as he is wholly and fully integrated in her heart as “the artist as well as the man.” Nicola realizes in that moment of Julian’s artistry that key to his goodness as an artist and as a man is in “none of it for his own glory”. There is in Burchell, as Miss Bates has found in Eva Ibbotson, the marriage of a religious sensibility with the romance narrative: the surrender of the heart akin to a surrender to God, “the complete and simple truth.”
With her reading companion, Miss Austen, Miss Bates says that Mary Burchell’s The Curtain Rises is evidence “there is no charm equal to tenderness of heart,” Emma. Mary Burchell’s The Curtain Rises was originally published by Mills and Boon in 1969. It was reissued by Endeavour Press in March of this year. This is the edition Miss Bates read. She received an e-ARC from Endeavour Press, via Netgalley. -
They're in love. Can't you see that for yourself, Oscar? They went through more than the usual degrees of idiocy before finding it out, though.
That’s the summary! -
This was my favorite of the Warrender Saga books. Largely because the conflict between the grieving heroine and the sensitive-but-ruthless-about-his-art hero was pretty believable. There was genuine cause for her hatred and genuine reason for him to keep silent about why he didn't really deserve that hatred. It was a nice balance of flawed but essentially decent people motivated by believable misunderstanding. And that's the way I like my romantic conflict.
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Wonderful vintage read
I enjoyed Mary Burchell's books when they were first issued and just as much the second time around ... Her knowledge of the world of opera is superbly authentic and adds real resonance to the story. In this book Nicola's struggle to come to terms with the death of her first love and the reawakening to love with the man she believes is responsible for her firs love's death adds a real poignancy to the story... This is a struggle as old as time. -
4.5 stars. Very nice indeed.
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Faaaaabulous. I like reading about the competent and un-famous. Everything about the conflict here is extremely well done, even if a bit more obvious to the reader than to the protagonist. I can see that Burchell leans into the wide-eyed naïf a bit, but I forgive it here because the lack of recognition feels like an extension of grief.
(Yes, I skipped book three. I read its blurb and chose to ignore it. I will note that this is better than its blurb - but its blurb is halfway decent.) -
The way Burchell wrote so insightfully about grief and guilt really struck my heart. I honestly find it hard to believe these are Mills & Boon romances because they are quite simply in a whole other class above all the rest.
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3.5 stars. I'm enjoying this series.
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This one was interesting in that the main character herself isn't a musical artist. But she's surrounded by them. Her aunt was a great character.
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As usual, I love Mary Burchell's portrayal of the opera world -- her love for the music and performance is plain, and I always enjoy her admiring but critical characterization of the artists themselves. The heroine's aunt (by marriage), prima donna Gina Torelli, is a great supporting character, and there's a nice background thread about her relationship with her husband. Though he doesn't appear in person very often, it's clear that they have a somewhat unconventional but loving marriage. (It's interesting that ) The romance itself has an operatic feel at times, with a lot of strong, intense emotions. Nicola spends much of the book trying to cope with the loss of her almost-fiance and struggling to reconcile her grief with her developing feelings for Julian, the man she believes is responsible for his death. The dynamic between them is interesting because, while the heroine isn't exactly deliberately seeking revenge, she is pretty harsh and mean to the hero and he mostly just takes it without lashing out. None of it is written from his perspective, but the insight we get into Julian's feelings from his actions and words is very well done and moving. There's some great parallels drawn between the pieces he's conducting and his and Nicola's emotional states as well. And I absolutely love the final reconciliation scene between them.
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A Song Begins.
