Hannah Waters and the Daughter of Johann Sebastian Bach

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

An 18th-century violin made by Georg Aman and owned by Johann Sebastian
Bach plus Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins come to link a pair of
12-year-old girls separated in time by almost three centuries. Like
Bach’s concerto, which incorporated much counterpoint, the book’s
contents are an engaging interplay of two voices, one being that of the
large-boned, timid Catharina Bach, who becomes virtually speechless in
her father’s commanding presence, while the other voice belongs to the
tiny but outspoken Hannah Waters, who is continually silenced by her
seemingly taciturn father.

Catharina, spellbound by her father’s new concerto, wants to perform
it with him, but only following her mother’s death does she finally
find the courage to reveal her singing abilities to him. Hannah’s
mother, a professional violinist and Hannah’s first violin teacher,
had promised Hannah, “We’ll play [the Concerto] together someday.”
However, that promise would remain unfulfilled because Hannah’s mother
dies. Following her death, Hannah’s grief-stricken father moves the
two of them from Toronto to a tiny Saskatchewan community. There, he
closets not only his emotions but also his wife’s Aman-made violin
until Hannah’s circumstances cause him to make both publicly available
again.

Despite its fantasy thread, this well-written novel does not fall into
the time-slip genre. Instead, each girl simply has an awareness of the
other’s presence. Stylistically, Catharina and Hannah share the focus
of each of the book’s dozen chapters, with the girl who closes one
chapter then beginning the next. Highly recommended.