Jean-Christophe Reading Order

Jean-Christophe (1904–1912) by Romain Rolland is a ten-volume novel following the life of Jean-Christophe Krafft from his birth into a musical family in a small German town on the Rhine to his death in Paris as an old man, exhausted but complete. The novel traces a Beethoven-like figure — turbulent, uncompromising, enormous in his appetites — through his childhood prodigy years, his early struggles in Germany, his flight to Paris after a brawl in which men are killed, his years of poverty and difficulty in France, his friendships and love affairs, and his eventual achievement of a music that synthesises what is best in German and French culture. Rolland, who had written the first major French biography of Beethoven (1903) before beginning the novel, conceived Jean-Christophe as an act of Franco-German cultural reconciliation in the years after 1870: the protagonist is German, his most important friend is French, and the novel's argument is that the two cultures need each other. The work won Rolland the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915 — awarded during World War One, which made the prize an act of remarkable principle, as Rolland was then in exile in Switzerland arguing openly for peace.