In the last years of the nineteenth century, two young Irish girls from humble backgrounds meet at a convent school in Paris, where they have been sent to train as opera singers. Soon they move on to Rome for advanced instruction, and find themselves happily immersed in a polyglot hothouse of beautiful music and youthful romance. Rose - red-haired, big-hearted and big-voiced - is soon on track to become a prima donna soprano; Clare, also a soprano but with a subtler talent, is more at home with sacred music. As they pursue their careers and their earliest loves - Rose juggling the affections of numerous men, Clare embarking on a passionate love affair with her fellow-student Luisa - the two girls become women in an extraordinary forcing-house of the emotions. As Music and Splendour, Kate O'Brien's astonishing last novel, is a thrillingly readable and romantic story from one of the handful of truly important Irish novelists of the twentieth century.