Consuelo

George Sand follows Consuelo, a poor but brilliantly gifted young singer in eighteenth-century Venice, from the canals of her childhood to the opera houses of Europe and the shadowed halls of a Bohemian castle. Trained by the fierce old maestro Porpora, she rises through a world that prizes her voice while distrusting her virtue, and finds herself drawn to the strange, visionary Count Albert of Rudolstadt. Sand weaves music, travel, and hard questions of art and conscience into one of her most ambitious novels, with real figures such as Haydn passing through its pages. It is a portrait of a woman who will not trade her integrity for success. Free to read here as a PDF and EPUB download.