Excerpt from The Schubert Treatment by Claire Oppert, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The leaves of the tall oak in front of the windows have fallen, floating slowly to the ground. The tree's branches are bare in the wind. Quietly, winter has settled in.

The concert is planned for three o'clock. There are posters throughout the building, on every wall. Downstairs, in the great room, a crowd gathers—family members, friends, attendants. Upstairs, the excitement is at a fever pitch. Today's nap has been cut short to allow the performers to get dressed and do their makeup. Each person will wear a flower in their hair and a long, colorful cape adorned with the image of a white swan.

Over the course of five years, we've had one hundred and twenty-two rehearsals around the round table, and nine public concerts. The residents are responsible for creating these multi- disciplinary presentations.

The first concert is entitled "Love From the Earth to the Sky," spanning the musical repertoire on love, from the heavenly purity of a white sky conjured up by Gounod's "Ave Maria" to Bizet's Carmen, with the throb of springtime, love like a rebel- lious bird, the earth stained purple with blood.

The restricted-access elevator door is usually closed, but today—open sesame!—the artists go down one by one. The attendants arrange the wheelchairs in a semicircle in the already packed room.

The unlikely performance starts with the cello, though Madame Beaurivage's powerful voice soon swallows the instrument's sound and, without quite being aware of it, she leads all the others, the stuttering, the hoarse voices, the whispering voices, and the silent voices too. Charles Gounod, "Ave Maria." Ours is a strange unison. The sky is white with light.

Now the colorful silk scarves are twirling, tracing graceful arcs in the air. Eight artists, usually bedridden, dance madly without ever leaving their wheelchairs. Immobile bodies take flight. There is such joy on these furrowed faces. They look like lost angels, with bits of their wings swirling above their heads. The attendants are dancing with the residents, and no one is really sure anymore who has become whose guardian angel. Madame Kessler is an actress: she recites Maurice Carême, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud in a voice so vibrant that she is both the goddess and the muse in her own realm of tremulous words; she seems to have been the actual inspiration for the poetry.

The audience is speechless.

Now and then, a stray word sneaks in, pushing through the poem being performed. Madame Olivier begins to giggle uncontrollably and the poem derails, turns to shouts, and the choir of angels goes off-key and fades to an unintelligible murmur.

We worked so hard, and yet nothing goes as planned. The performers forget their parts, the carefully ordered program stumbles, and words flit off gleefully in transparent spirals.

The singer's lyrical phrase breaks off suddenly. Something is bothering her. Her blouse isn't buttoned straight. The audience waits, impatient. Just then, Madame Gazeau, who has never attended a single rehearsal, reaches out a trembling hand and rings the bell in an ascending scale that seems suddenly virtuosic, and the diva takes heart: Madame Beaurivage forgets her lopsided buttons, grabs a maraca as a microphone and, at the top of her lungs, lets loose that superb voice. The concert is back on—a triumph.

Madame Tisserand has been repeating everyone else's words constantly, catching a random word here and there, and her voice functions as the bassline of our unlikely orchestra, a seamless perpetuum mobile.

The handsome Monsieur Lemaître, meanwhile, is swinging. Madame Barthélemy's hands are fluttering like a swan as the cello sings Saint-Saëns, her crippled fingers beautifully evoking the migrating bird's wings, like a tear of white across the blue sky. Madame Rousseva, who is tetraplegic and who always sits out the rehearsals, is in the middle of the semicircle today, dressed up, her hair done, lying back in her wheelchair. They put her there by mistake. She has been paralyzed for two years, but her left toe is keeping the beat perfectly with the Bizet: "L'amour est enfant de Bohême."

Excerpted from The Schubert Treatment by Claire Oppert. Copyright © 2024 by Claire Oppert. Excerpted by permission of Greystone Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.