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Robert Frobisher Timeline & Summary

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Robert Frobisher Timeline & Summary

  • In the 1930s, bisexual composer Robert Frobisher travels to Bruges where famed composer Vyvyan Ayrs lives at Chateau Zedelghem.
  • Frobisher applies to be Ayrs's amanuensis—a fancy-pants term for apprentice.
  • Together, Ayrs and Frobisher develop a new composition, "Der Todtenvogel." Meanwhile, Frobisher engages in an affair with Ayrs's wife, Jocasta.
  • Ayrs and Frobisher work on a new composition, "Eternal Recurrence," but Frobisher gets increasingly more frustrated with the fact that Ayrs takes all the credit.
  • On a trip into town with Ayrs's daughter, Eva, Frobisher begins to believe that she is in love with him.
  • Fed up with Ayrs, Frobisher steals his gun and leaves, moving into a hotel to finish work on his own personal symphony: Cloud Atlas Sextet.
  • Because he hasn't heard from Eva, Frobisher crashes a party at the van de Veldes' and is told by Eva—and her fiancé—that she never loved him.
  • Frobisher finishes his symphony; writes one last letter to his male lover, Rufus Sixsmith; and shoots himself in the bathtub.