"But in our case, we love talking to our illustrators. "I think that a lot of times illustrators and the writers of books don't get enough time to chat and talk to each other, and quite often it goes straight through the editor or the publishers," Andrews said. And we came up with the little fable that is The Enchanted Symphony."Īndrews, Hamilton and illustrator Elly MacKay pulled back the curtain on their creative process in a Zoom interview with NPR shortly after the book's release in September - the first time all three had spoken face-to-face. "So we tried to imagine what might cause an opera house to be filled with plants instead of people. "We often write books about the arts and about nature, and this seemed to be such a perfect marriage of those two passions of ours," Hamilton said. In June 2020, after several quiet months, Barcelona's Liceu opera filled its more than 2,000 seats with plants for a string quartet performance that was also live streamed for humans and quickly went viral.Īndrews and Hamilton were inspired by the photos and videos of the event: the red and gold opera house packed with lush green leaves, the announcement asking audiences to silence their cell phones, the way the houseplants seemed to stir with applause at the end. "And then the fog itself began to lift."Īs whimsical as it looks, and as fanciful as it sounds, The Enchanted Symphony is inspired by a true story. "The astonished musicians began to play tentatively at first, but gradually building in strength and tempo as the joy of making music again lifted, their spirits and the plants responded in kind, nodding and swaying, their stems standing taller and firmer, the leaves rustling in appreciation," the book reads. Then the velvet curtains open to reveal an auditorium full of greenery. When the day comes, the unsuspecting musicians take the stage and tune their instruments. So they embark on a mission, collecting every houseplant they can find and enlisting orchestra members for a special concert. One day Piccolino tinkers with the piano, and notices that the drooping plants in the lobby seem to brighten at the sound of music. Even though the fog is keeping people at home, the pair continue cleaning the empty building. The protagonist is young Piccolino, whose father is the maestro of the town opera house. In the latest children's book from mother-daughter duo Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton, a village subdued by a mysterious purple fog finds joy again by serenading an audience of appreciative houseplants.
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