Duet for One

By Martha Anne Toll
Regal House Publishing, 2025, 232 pages
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Duet for One is a profound and multilayered meditation on love, loss, and grief, with a passion for music resonating throughout. With empathy and insight, the novel also explores the complicated relationships within one musically talented family.

That family is the Pearls: Adele and Victor, who for years performed as a celebrated two-piano team, and their son, Adam, a gifted violinist. At the start of the novel, both Victor and Adam are mourning the recent death of Adele, but they are grieving in distinctly different ways. For Victor, Adele’s death brings an end not only to a long and loving marriage but also to years of a musical collaboration that became deeply woven into his sense of self. In Adele’s absence, he has difficulty seeing a future for himself as a musician. Correspondingly, he’s lost his old drive to play the piano.

As for Adam, the loss of Adele seems to compound a grief he was experiencing long before her death, a grief connected to their fraught relationship. Although Adele was deeply committed to her musicianship, to her piano students, and to Adam’s advancement musically, she (unlike Victor) had a habit of letting Adam look out for himself emotionally, not always offering him support during challenging times. As a result, Adam grew up yearning for a deeper connection to her. 

Yet to the novel’s great credit, Adele is not portrayed simplistically, as a largely negative presence. Instead, the novel reveals complications in her nature that make her a fascinating, and often sympathetic, character. For example, although she pushes for perfection in her own playing, and in Adam’s, she tells him that emotional engagement while performing can cause her to “drop notes,” and this is not a bad thing. As Adam observes later:

In parallel to Adam’s grief over the death of Adele runs another sense of loss, connected to a young woman, Dara Kingsley, he fell deeply in love with when he was the concertmaster of the student orchestra at a local music school, an orchestra in which Dara played the viola. Though Dara seemed to be in love with Adam, too, she broke things off suddenly, for no clear reason to him.

But when we get Dara’s perspective on the breakup, that reason comes to light. In the present tense of the novel, she is a tenured professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, not far from where Adam lives and works as a violinist and instructor, though the two of them, by this point, have fallen completely out of touch. Yet Dara had once hoped to have a future as a musician, a hope bolstered by a kind and talented teacher, Isaac Koroff, whose mentoring helped her gain entry into the orchestra for which Adam was concertmaster. 

But Dara’s dreams of advancing further in her music career were dashed when Koroff died unexpectedly and was replaced as Dara’s instructor by Phillip Hissle, Koroff’s polar opposite. Where Koroff was kind, Hissle was unfailingly cruel, and where Koroff was a sensitive and gifted instructor, Hissle was clearly a hack. While Koroff saw–and nurtured–talent in Dara, Hissle regularly insulted her and her playing, as if determined to destroy her dreams. On that score, he eventually succeeded, prompting Dara to see herself as a failure musically, and to give up on the viola. Knowing that Hissle and Adele were in contact, and understanding Adele’s high standards for musicianship, and for her son, Dara believed–not without reason–that Adele would see her as an unworthy partner for Adam. Hoping to get ahead of Adam’s inevitable disenchantment with her–or so Dara imagined–she broke things off with him, without any explanation.

Yet developments in the present hold out hope for second chances, for both Adam and Victor. When the two men schedule a memorial concert to honor Adele, a concert that Dara decides to attend, this offers the possibility of a reconnection between her and Adam and between Victor and piano playing. (Both he and Adam plan to perform in the concert, and they choose pieces that are especially meaningful to Adele.) In the interest of not giving too much away, I’ll just say that there are no neat resolutions on either score. But each character’s storyline (Adam’s, Dara’s, and Victor’s) comes to a satisfying close, in ways that feel authentic and earned.

 This review would do an injustice to the novel if it didn’t comment on how beautifully it captures the making of music, and the passion that Adam, Victor, Adele, Dara, and other characters have for music, as it is both played and enjoyed. That the author is a trained musician (having studied the viola, specifically) is clear from her detailed and moving writing about the challenges and rewards of playing musical compositions not just with technical acuity but with grace and deep feeling. 

In one of my favorite music-related passages of the novel, Dara’s beloved music teacher, Isaac Koroff, shares this observation with her: “Music captures time; it molds and bends it. Sound is the passage of time.” He also remarks: “There is no music without silence. Rests define time.” 

By paying loving attention to the details of making music, and to the emotional struggles and breakthroughs of each character, Duet for One turns in a star-making performance.