When his saviors are exiled and his beloved leaves St. Now, he will forever sing with the exquisite voice of an angel-a musico -yet castration is an abomination in the Swiss Confederation, and so he must hide his shameful condition from his friends and even from the girl he has come to love.

But it is this gift that will cause Moses' greatest misfortune: determined to preserve his brilliant pupil's voice, Ulrich has Moses castrated. There, he becomes the protégé of the Abbey's brilliant yet repulsive choirmaster, Ulrich. Rescued from certain death by two traveling monks, he finds refuge at the vast and powerful Abbey of St. But when his preternatural hearing was discovered-along with its power to expose the sins of the church-young Moses Froben was cast out of his village with only his ears to guide him in a world fraught with danger. Shaped by the bells' glorious music, he possessed an extraordinary gift for sound. The celebrated opera singer Lo Svizzero was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps where his mother served as the keeper of the loudest and most beautiful bells in the land.

Written as a confessional letter to his son, an 18th century opera singer recounts how his gift for sound led him on an astonishing journey to Europe's celebrated opera houses and reveals how he came to raise a son who by all rights he never could have sired.

Moses's ardor impels him to Vienna and its vibrant opera scene, where his brief appearance on stage allows love to triumph before, unsurprisingly, tragedy brings down the curtain. His ability to sound like an angel brings him into contact with a wealthy family, sparking an impossible love affair with a beautiful but crippled woman. A tormented choirmaster castrates Moses to preserve his beautiful voice, transforming him into a 'musico,' a soprano whose voice never deepens, and who will never be a man. When Moses says, 'I wished I could dissolve into sound,' the reader shares his frustration. into something beautiful.' Harvell, however, shows his own limitations when he seeks to describe the resonance of music. Cast from his home, he joins a choir, discovering that he can mold 'that ocean of sound.

Moses, born to a deaf-mute in a belfry, possesses a unique bond to music. Chronicling the journey of 18th-century singer Moses Froben from his Swiss village to Vienna, this debut novel strikes many melodramatic notes in an overwrought plot squalor, beauty, horror, forbidden love, tragedy, and triumph splash broadly, sometimes artfully, but often with operatic excess.

The Bells by Richard Harvell