Jonathan Coe's New Novel Puts Ravel and Vaughan Williams in the Same Paris Classroom

Two of the most admired composers of the early twentieth century spent three months together in Paris, and a new novel asks what they taught each other. Lessons in Harmony by Jonathan Coe, reviewed in the Guardian on 10 November 2026, is built around Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

The story starts with a plan that did not quite work out. Vaughan Williams, an English composer, intended to spend some months studying under Vincent d'Indy, a French composer who taught at the Paris Conservatoire, the country's leading music college. A friend, the critic and writer Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, suggested Ravel instead. The pair then spent three months together in Paris.

Vaughan Williams was not a confident student. In 1907 he told the critic Edwin Evans that he found his own music "lumpy and stodgy". Ravel, by contrast, was already a celebrated figure, and he did not go easy on his new pupil. In their first lesson, he asked Vaughan Williams to write a minuet in the style of Mozart. Vaughan Williams refused to consider it.

Coe has said he wanted to write about the two men for years. He first wondered about them after discovering that his two favourite composers had been friends and supporters of each other. That sense of surprise is the spark for the book.

The novel does not present itself as a straight history. It takes the form of an unpublished memoir by Pierre "Mylo" Mylonas, a character loosely based on Calvocoressi, written after Ravel's death. Mylo is the one who remembers the lessons, which means the reader sees Ravel and Vaughan Williams through another man's eyes and memory.

Coe describes the book as a fantasia. In music, a fantasia is a piece that follows the composer's imagination more than a fixed set of rules, and the label suggests that Coe has taken liberties with the record. The story sits in the gap between what is known about these men and what might have been said in a room in Paris more than a century ago.

The book also touches on a bigger question, one the Guardian's headline raises: what music can say about national identity. Vaughan Williams spent his career searching for a distinctly English sound, while Ravel was a Frenchman working inside a long tradition. A novel that puts them side by side in one lesson room gives readers a simple way into that debate.

For readers who love a story about how artists become themselves, the setup is hard to resist. A nervous English student, a dazzling French teacher, and a friend who writes it all down years later. It is a small chain of people, each one passing an idea along, and it ends with a book on the shelf.