A Different Kind of Composition
By: Julia Giguere
Content
When most writers begin a novel, they start with a character or a plot. Creative Writing MFA candidate Carolyn Walker began with a violin concerto, and a secret hidden inside the music.
Walker’s thesis traces the lives of composer Alban Berg, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, writer Franz Werfel, and the young woman who connected them all: Manon Gropius. Manon died at just 18 years old, but her death inspired some of the most important artists of her time. Their art became a way of keeping her alive. That idea, the ability of art to preserve someone beyond death, has become the center of the thesis.
“Art is not for the killing of time,” she says, quoting Franz Werfel. “It is for the arresting of time. It is for the killing of death.”
The novel Walker is building is deliberately difficult to categorize. It combines historical fiction with elements of memoir and imagined biography, while incorporating music, painting, architecture, and art history. Walker wants readers to encounter these different forms of art as part of the story rather than as background information.
“I’ve been asking myself,” she says, “can a novel be a total work of art?”
The question comes from the German concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” associated with composer Richard Wagner and later reflected in the Bauhaus movement. It is the concept of combining artforms into an all encompassing whole. Wagner designed not only his operas but also the theater, lighting, and audience experience. Gropius imagined architecture, furniture, textiles, and daily life as parts of one artistic vision. Walker’s novel attempts something similar. Music, paintings, architecture, historical documents, and imagined scenes are woven into a single narrative.
“I want the reader not to know what is fact and what is fiction,” she explains. “I want them to just be swept away by the world.”
The thesis began much smaller. When she entered the MFA program, Walker planned to write a short story about Alban Berg during the final hours of his life. Berg died shortly after finishing the concerto dedicated to Manon, and she imagined him drifting through fever dreams where the music and the young woman it memorialized returned to him.
Research changed everything. Biographies, letters, musical scores, and historical records revealed a network of artists whose lives intersected in Vienna before World War II. The short story expanded into a novel about grief, memory, and the ways artists transform loss into art.
Her own background made the project feel strangely inevitable. Before returning to UMass Amherst, she earned degrees in music education and music theory, taught violin for years, and worked as a musician and songwriter. Creative writing had long been a goal, but she did not return to graduate school until decades after her earlier studies.
The MFA program has helped shape the project in practical ways as well. Workshops, deadlines, and conversations with faculty have pushed the manuscript from an ambitious idea into a sustained creative practice.
"It's been nice to have deadlines and to have other eyes and people workshopping and giving feedback, what works, what doesn't work.” she says, “it's just a sounding board to be able to speak your ideas out loud, even if you don't get feedback. Just the process of sharing something is very important.”
This summer, Walker received a UMass Master’s Thesis Research Grant to travel to Vienna, where much of the novel is set. She was able to visit the homes and graves of the historical figures in her manuscript, stand in the theaters where Werfel’s plays were performed, and experience the city that shaped their lives.
The trip follows earlier research closer to home. After visiting Walter Gropius’s house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, she found herself revising scenes because she finally understood the scale of the rooms, and the feeling of being in the space. A visit to Boston Symphony Hall similarly changed how she imagined a historical performance attended by Gropius after his daughter’s death.
Those experiences have convinced her that authentic details matter.
“I wrote the scene before I went,” she says. “Then I attended the concert and realized there were details that would be different because now I’d actually been in the space.”
For her, research is not about collecting facts for accuracy alone. It is about making imagined moments emotionally believable.
That goal mirrors the novel’s central theme. Just as Berg embedded private meanings within his concerto and Werfel preserved Manon through fiction, she hopes her own work will blur the boundary between history and imagination, asking readers to consider how art keeps people alive long after they are gone.
It is an ambitious undertaking, one that combines multiple artistic disciplines while challenging conventional ideas about what a novel can be. But for this MFA writer, that ambition is the point. If Werfel believed that art could suspend time, even briefly, her thesis asks readers to experience that possibility for themselves.