Jean-Christophe

Jean-Christophe Krafft, born into a Belgian-German family of musicians, seems destined for music from an early age: he is sensitive to sound, learns to play the piano, and, with the help of his grandfather, soon writes his first compositions. This leads him to become a court musician of the Grand Duchy on the Rhine, where he lives. Along the way, he experiences love, setbacks, poverty, but also success.

After a violent incident forces him to flee, he finds shelter in Paris, where he meets a friend for life: Olivier. But his idealistic worldview and stubborn character repeatedly get him into trouble, forcing him to seek refuge in Switzerland.

Jean-Christophe is the story of a man, chronicled from his birth to his death. Romain Rolland, strongly motivated by his own biography of Beethoven, always envisioned it as a novel that flows “like a river”: meandering, propelled by its own force, not to be channeled by plot. This is embodied in Jean-Christophe through extensive digressions on the author’s views on nationality, politics, music, and culture in early twentieth century Europe. Jean-Christophe thus became the first roman-fleuve, or river-novel, a term most famously applied to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. For this contribution to literature, Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915.

Jean-Christophe was published in ten volumes in the original French, while Gilbert Cannan’s English translation appeared in 3 volumes, roughly encompassing Jean-Christophe’s youth and adolescence, his adulthood, and the latter years of his life. This Standard Ebooks edition brings all volumes of Cannan’s translation together.

This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.