c1909 Jean-Christophe: L'Aube

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Eleventh Edition. Jean-Christophe (1904?1912) is a novel in ten volumes by Romain Rolland, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915. The first four volumes are sometimes grouped as Jean-Christophe, the next three as Jean-Christophe à Paris, and the last three as La fin du voyage ('Journey's End'). L'Aube ('Dawn') is the first volume, first published in 1904. Although Rolland first conceived the work in Rome in the spring of 1890, he began in earnest in 1903 after publishing a biography of Beethoven. A letter of 13 September 1902 reveals his plans: 'My novel is the story of a life, from birth to death. My hero is a great German musician who is forced by circumstances to leave when he is 16-18 years old, living outside of Germany in Paris, Switzerland, etc. The setting is today's Europe [...] To spell it out, the hero is Beethoven in the modern world'.