Novelist
Robert Ford's first novel, The Student Conductor, was published in 2005. It received a starred review in Booklist, a full-page review in The New York Times, and was the winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters
The Student Conductor
"After eight years in professional exile, thirty-year-old Cooper Barrow returns to the orchestral world, bringing his untested talents to a Germany on the verge of reunification. He is to study with master teacher Karlheinz Ziegler, a conductor haunted by his days at a Nazi concentration camp, his prewar brilliance long since recast as cruelty. Barrow soon finds himself caught up in the rhythms of ruthless competition that dictate who plays, who conducts, and whose interpretation of the score reigns supreme.
"When Barrow falls for the beautiful and seductive Petra Vogel - an oboist in Ziegler's orchestra and a recent East German defector - he is drawn below the surface of his own obsessive discipline into regions of guilt and betrayal he'd never imagined. As his affair with Petra and his lessons with Ziegler take one jarring turn after another, and as the mysteries of the past inevitably catch up with the present, Barrow must wrestle with shame and redemption in a country marked for all time."