A master of bow and pen

Emerson String Quartet violinist Eugene Drucker is also a novelist. (andrew eccles)

Last year Eugene Drucker fulfilled a long-held aspiration. Since his teenage years, Drucker - a violinist in the Emerson String Quartet - has wanted to write fiction, jotting down stories and plot ideas throughout his life. While many artists harbor similar literary ambitions, few follow through.

Drucker is one of those few. Last year he published his first novel, "The Savior," the story of a German violinist during World War II. The book was recently released in paperback, and Drucker plans to sign copies when he performs at the Mohawk Trail Concerts this weekend.

"I've always desired to do something creative in addition to the interpretive work I do as a performing musician," the violinist says during a phone interview from his New York home. "It's quite satisfying to pull together disparate strands of experience, transform them, and combine them with events that are totally products of my own imagination to create something new."

"The Savior" opens with its protagonist, Gottfried Keller, playing for wounded German soldiers, and the reception ranges from indifference to outright hostility. The scenes are rooted in Drucker's own experience preparing for the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Belgium in the mid-1970s, when he would frequently play for patients in New York hospitals. It was a way of steeling his performance nerves against distraction.

"I began to think of [those experiences] as part of a continuum of possible dynamics that can exist between a performer and his audience," he explains. "I thought that in a fictional treatment, there was a lot of potential for character development for a violinist who would be playing in extreme situations."

Keller's situation becomes much more extreme when he is enlisted to play for the prisoners of a concentration camp. In a ghoulish experiment, the camp's commander wants to find out whether music can rekindle the will to live in the death-haunted Jewish prisoners. As Keller's four concerts unfold, he is forced to confront issues of memory, ethics, and his own complicity in the barbarism he has willed himself to ignore.

While some of the narrative is drawn from the experiences of his father - a Jewish violinist who fled Germany for America in 1938 - the deeper moral issues are ones that Drucker, like many others, has pondered for years.

"I imagined that during the war years, a considerable percentage of the German population was neither enthusiastic about the Nazis nor heroic enough to stand up to them," he says. "So I wanted to create an imaginary witness to the horrors and see how he would react."

Drucker says that having the book published has been "an incredible experience." He'll always remember getting the call from his literary agent, telling him that the novel had been accepted for publication. It was two years ago while he was playing in Aspen with the Emerson. "After I got the call, it was hard to calm down enough to play," he says.

At Mohawk, Drucker will play music of Mozart and Brahms with a group that includes cellist Roberta Cooper (his wife), violist Matthew Hunter, and pianist Estela Olevsky. While Drucker and Cooper collaborate often, this will be his first time performing with the other two.

"When you have a quartet that's been together as long as ours, we know what to expect from each other," he says of the Emerson. "When you're playing with a new group, you tend to rehearse every note of the piece. You do that because you have to - we have to make sure that there aren't too many surprises when we walk out on stage."

Tonight and tomorrow at the Federated Church at Charlemont; 888-682-6873, mohawktrailconcerts.org

Carmen on the edge

This year's offering from the Boston Midsummer Opera is "The Tragedy of Carmen," director Peter Brook's adaptation of Bizet's famous opera. Brook's version retains much of the music of the original, yet sharpens the dramatic tension, producing what the company calls "an intimate form of sung theater." The fully staged production is sung in English; Drew Minter directs and Susan Davenny-Wyner conducts.

July 30 and Aug. 1 and 3 at BU's Tsai Performance Center. bostonmidsummeropera.org