Brother of Sleep: A Novel Page 14

  Everyone arose in the nave when the vicar-general, followed by cathedral organist Goller, the four pro­fessors of the Musical Institute, and the six organ pupils, stepped out of the sacristy. The vicar-general stepped up to the ambo, from which was suspended a gilded lyre, uttered a Latin preamble, and then solemnly read the words of the 150th Psalm, which exhorts us to praise God with trumpets, psalteries, and harps. Then, in a long-winded sermon, he greeted the professors, doctors, councilors, and gentry, each by name and each with a flattering word of admiration. Finally, the vicar-general requested the venerable casket, for the competition followed a very rigid series of rules. A narrow-chested server passed him the casket, and the vicar-general reached in and drew out the name of the first candidate. His name was Peter Paul Battlog, he was fifteen and the son of the chief tax officer, Christian Battlog. Then the vicar-general drew out a second name, a third, and so on. The name Johannes Elias Alder was the second to last to be drawn.

  That was the order in which the organists were to appear. Now the vicar-general asked the narrow-chested server to bring him a book of chorales. The server brought the heavy book and laid it closed on the ambo. The tension mounted, for the book had a particularly important role to play. The vicar-general, a man with a keen theatrical sense, savored the silence until it be­came unbearable. Then he took the book of chorales, laid it on its back, placed both thumbs on the gilt edging, and let go of the leather cover, and the book fell open. The right-hand side of the book, opened at random, was the one that counted.

  “Candidatus Battlog,” said the vicar-general in a so­norous voice, “will extemporize on the hymn ‘Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid.’ Thus he will execute a variation of the chorale pedaliter and manualiter in one, a prelude, and a three-voiced fugue according to the old rules.”

  Elias, who was sitting alone at the end of the choir pew, did not understand a word that was said. He saw Battlog give a start, leave the choir pew, genuflect, and dash to the organ loft. Elias grew frightened. He trained his eyes on the sacristy. If need be, he would escape into the open through it.

  After a few minutes of reflection, Battlog began to improvise. The two sturdy lads at the bellows laid hold of the levers and raised them high. First, Battlog intoned the melody of the chorale–this was obligatory–and then began his variation. Pink-face’s playing was not exactly graceful, Elias could hear that straight away. But the fabulous splendor of the organ’s tone so fascinated him that he almost lost his breath. We may say that Elias Alder devoted more concentration to the playing of his competi­tors than he did later to his own. When Battlog had brought the three-voice fugue to an end with an excessive burst of volume, Elias knew exactly what was meant by “chorale variation,” “prelude,” and “fugue.” He had played like that in Eschberg but differently, more artistically and, above all, more respectfully, he thought modestly. The candidates who followed did not teach him anything new, although their use of the stops made a powerful impres­sion on him. By virtue of his unusually analytical way of hearing, it had been an easy matter for him to break down the harmony of the movement into its single notes–or, rather, into each individual key, white or black, whether at the top, the bottom, or in the middle. From time to time he secretly improved one or another of them in his head, as he had done while his uncle was alive.

  Then his turn came. The vicar-general placed the book in front of him, put his thumbs on its edging, let it flap open, stood in silence for a while, and then said in a theatrical voice, “Candidatus Alder will extemporize on the chorale ‘Come, O death, O come, sleep’s brother.’ Thus he will execute a variation on the chorale pedaliter and manualiter in one, a prelude, and a three-voiced fugue according to the old rules.”

  Elias gave a start as his predecessors had just done, because he thought this was compulsory. He too genuflected, but then he walked not toward the organ loft but over to Friederich Fürchtegott Bruno Goller, who was sitting in the front row on the epistle side, nervously twisting his mustache.

  “I don’t know the tune of this hymn,” Elias whispered agitatedly in his ear. “Somebody will have to play it for me, and only then will I be able to extromin … extromp … extro … momperize.”

  Goller rose from his pew in embarrassment and crept over to the vicar-general, who had just sat down in his carved choir stall. A disturbance arose among the audience, and some women whispered in one another’s ears, stretched their necks, and peered curi­ously at the barefoot man standing there. Goller had a word with the vicar-general, who stepped to the ambo and announced that the festival would have to be interrupted for a few minutes. He explained this with refer­ence to the disdainful words that Goller had used, saying that Candidatus Alder came from a godforsaken part of the country, led a primitive lifestyle, had never seen or played the organ in Feldberg, and therefore had to get used to it first, but that in summa he was pos­sessed of a highly curious natural genius, which was the reason for his invitation, and why this was justified, and so on.

  Then some of the notables left the cathedral to distract themselves by smoking tobacco. Others again–particularly the guests from Liechtenstein–unwrapped sausage and celery sandwiches and stuffed their provisions irreverently into their mouths. But the upper-class ladies nibbled boredly on sweet juicy strawberries.

  In the meantime Goller had climbed into the organ loft with Elias. There, with exaggerated haste, he demonstrated the function of the registers, opened the organ book at the chorale on which he was to improvise, and tapped out the melody on the softest salicio­nal. When it had grown quiet in the cathedral again, Elias was still brooding on the words of this hymn, for the tune and the words had held him captive from the first moment:

  Come, O death, O come, sleep’s brother,

  Lead me where thou dost decree;

  Thou shalt guide me like none other,

  To shelter safe from stormy sea!

  Let who may forever fear thee,

  I for thee have only love;

  For if I can just be near thee

  I shall join the Lord above.

  Before this man begins to play us his inhuman music, let us take a quick look at Peter, sitting beneath the arch of the organ loft, in the most airless part of the church. His hands are clenched on his knees. He hardly dares to breathe and looks neither to right nor left. He is suddenly a man of radiant beauty. Or is this an illusion produced by the flickering shadows from the candlelight?

  The two lads working the bellows were still pulling faces about Elias’s outward appearance when such a powerful fortissimo surged up from the depths of the keyboard that they thought the organ was falling to pieces. The passage broke off. Elias took a deep breath and produced an even more powerful fortissimo, this time in combination with the roar of a descending bass line. When he had drawn breath for the third time he allowed his figures to surge up, sweeping the pedals with his feet at an almost impossible speed. This sequence ended in a pain-racked harmonization of the two first bars of the chorale, and then the organist strangled his music so brutally that it sounded as though his hands had suddenly slipped from the manual. Elias breathed for the duration of this caesura, filled with an unheard-of tension, attacked the keys in seven voices, played the chorale up to the third bar, broke off, harmonized in unresolved dissonances until the fourth bar, broke off, linked the initial figured motif with the harmonization of the chorale, broke off, breathed, broke off, breathed, and all this over a period of no more than five minutes.

  In this way he wanted to show how we must revolt against death, against fate, and against God. Death as sudden silence, as an unbearable pause. And man humiliated, crying out in meaningless prayer, tearing his shirt off, pulling his hair out, beginning to curse wildly, and being constantly hurled back to earth. For all yearning is useless. God is an evil navel-less child.

  The lads at the bellows had a great deal of trouble keeping the air even. Sweat ran from their crab-red cheeks, and we believe it was the sweat of fear. Unusual things were a
lso happening in the suddenly deathly silent nave of the church. Goller’s carp mouth was wide open, the four pallid professors could not believe their ears, and many of those present turned their bread-filled mouths toward the organ loft, stared at the illuminated prospect of the pipes, and utterly forgot about swallowing.

  After this mad beginning, these cascades of in­credible despair, the music seemed to fade away, although the rage flickered up again here and there, kindling a weird fire from harmonies never heard be­fore. One by one Elias rejected the combinations of registers, the sounds became quieter and quieter, and finally, after a number of different approaches, the music fell into a sinister and barely identifiable minor key. With this, Elias wanted to express the complete resignation of the human creature: lying on the ground, all hope spent, the earth around him frozen.

  Gradually the terrified audience understood the organist’s message. No, that man up there was not just making music, he was preaching. And what he was preaching had a cold truth as clear as glass. For several moments the Eschberg peasant seemed to have merged these diverse human beings into a single spirit. For a weird atmosphere arose in the cathedral, as if the child and the old man were thinking at once; Death in these walls, and sleep, its companion, will bury you. Truth was suddenly apparent in the faces of the people. Their masks had melted off, a numinous silence lay on every face, and in their features one could see how each was trying to come to terms with the voice of death. What a spectacle of distress!

  Elias had been playing for more than a half hour, and the end was not in sight. But more conciliatory voices gradually arose out of the wide, dark chaos. Melodies were followed by other melodies, fragrant and soft as the grass blowing in the spring wind. And these melodies in turn were followed by more new melodies. They were Elsbeth’s melodies. And Elsbeth’s melodies were followed by the melody of the chorale. But the chorale was death. In this way a rondo emerged, an ephemeral rising and falling of new musical ideas. The music moved into an uneven rhythm, fell back, and changed once more. The lightness of the voices that were entering now suggested that Elias was no longer speaking of this world. Man had torn himself from chaos; the weight of the earth was no longer pulling him down.

  Although Goller had only given him a superficial introduction to the registers, Elias was able to combine them in a virtuoso manner. As a painter is astonished by the unimagined richness of his tones, Elias was astonished by the possibilities of this organ. Until now he had sat crouched over the instrument, his eyes glued to the manual and the pedals. His eyes were filled with peace, his limbs relaxed, his back grew soft. The organ, it seemed to him, was suddenly playing by itself. He had learned how to master its tricks, and now he was able to blossom freely. He opened his eyelids, raised his head, and dreamed his way back to Eschberg, while the organ poured out all the images that gleamed up in him with a fanatic magnificence above the heads of the audience.

  Nature was made music. Those mysterious No­vember days when the fog from the Rhine Valley sloshed up and down, into the hamlet of Hof, where his home was. The fog freezing in the forests, drawing icy threads from the branches and coating the barks of the pine trees with rime. When sun and moon faced each other–the moon a broken host, the sun a mother’s cheek.

  The light of the Great Fire was made music. The colors of the church windows in Eschberg, beginning to glow in the east chancel. The bodies of the screaming people, pushing and fighting. The burning property of Nulf Alder. The girl in the smoke-filled room, lying open-eyed under the bedstead, her little mouth biting at her rag doll. The forest animals in the January snow. Elias calling them in incredible sounds, noises, and trills. Their absence from the horizon of burned tree trunks. The deathly laughter of Roman Lamparter, Mostly.…

  That nocturnal episode when he had lain in the black grass of the meager mountain pastures was made music: when he had spread his arms and legs wide, as though he had to hold on to this big, round, beautiful world. And he remembered the words he had sung that night: “He who loves does not sleep! He who loves does not sleep!”

  And Elsbeth was made music. Elsbeth! The color and the smell of her leaf-yellow hair, her barely notice­able limp, the laughter in her dark voice, her round eyes, so very lively, her little snub nose, her blue dress with the big check pattern. Elsbeth stepping carefully through the grass so she would not crush a daisy. Stroking a cow’s muzzle with her little hands, having conversations with it, secretly throwing apple peel to the pigs.…

  While he set these ideas to the most touching music ever heard, he suddenly heard Elsbeth’s heartbeat again. And he grew worried that the rhythm might be lost. But the rhythm remained and melted with the rhythm of his own heart. And it happened that Elias loved again.

  After he had said everything there was to be said about his life, he brought his music to a close with a gentle seventh chord. Now he wanted to come to the fugue, to the apotheosis of heaven, the dream of a living world.

  He had hypnotized the people; they sat motion­less in their pews. Their eyelids had ceased to move, their breath had grown slower, and the frequency of their heartbeats had become the frequency of his heartbeat. Afterward no one was able to say how long Elias Alder had really played. Not even Peter knew. His eyelids had stopped moving as well, and behind that ignoble brow there was peace.

  That strange hypnosis can only be explained by the essence of Elias’s music. There had certainly been masters before him who had been able to give genuine musical expression to their emotional and spiritual states. But they had only touched those emotions; the music lover then rose to give them emphasis and still does so today.

  But in the language of music there is a phenome­non little studied until now. The inexhaustible combination of chords is dominated by constellations which, when they ring out, arouse something in the listener that basically has nothing to do with music. Elias had discovered some of these links and chord sequences in his youth, and he had often been able to examine the effect of these sequences in himself and others. We might think of that Easter morning when, for a few moments, he had managed to fill the character of the Eschberg peasants with magnanimity, as manifested in the fact that they tried to outdo one another in courtesy. So when he played music he was able to shake his listeners to the depths of their souls. He needed only to put the found harmonies in larger organic musical con­texts, and the audience was in thrall to its effects. Against his will he passed through mortal terror, childlike joy, and sometimes even erotic feelings. To have achieved something like this in music was the merit of Johannes Elias Alder. His music did come from the treasure trove of classical harmony. He had never heard anything but the fat-fingered chorales of his uncle, but over the years, as his soul had been progressively shattered, he achieved a powerful tonal language unlike any master before or after him. It is one of the most regrettable fatalities of western musical history that this man never wrote down his compositions.

  When he had presented the fugue theme with the full principal choir, the third of the four pallid professors suddenly cried out. “That’s impossible! That is not possible!” he cried, and it took brutel force to put him back in his pew. For the fugue theme was of such gigantic inventiveness and length that the audience imagined something supernatural was happening in the organ loft. The theme consisted of the ground notes of the chorale on which the improvisation had been based, but it had such a dreamy filigree mood that a younger woman on the right-hand gospel side called out, “I can see heaven!” And the theme was apparently endless; it swung from one sequence to another, ever higher and ever more fragrant, until it finally swung into the dominant, in which the second voice was able to start the same thing all over again.

  What he had heard of fugue technique from his competitors he now introduced into his own conception with a great lightness of touch. He had learned that the theme reappears in a cyclical fashion and that the key in which it does so is in a quite specific relation to the previous entry, in terms of the keyboard. He countered t
he earnest choirboy manner of his predecessors with exuberant ornamentation. He wanted to paint an apotheosis of heaven and a Jacob’s ladder rising inexorably higher and higher into the paradisal state, where earthly light grows weaker and the glow of perfection ever broader and brighter. Elias Alder’s fugue was like a giant mass of water rolling ever faster, growing and swelling to become the eternity of the sea.

  Goller, who had steadfastly refused to succumb to the trance, even if it meant he had to keep pinching his forearm, had counted up to eight treatments of the theme in an embroidery of seven freely evolving voices. And Goller cursed his old master, the famous cantor Rheinberger, who had once taught him that a fugue should have no more than five voices or else it assumes too chordal a texture and the individual lines no longer seem transparent. “What an idiot you were, Master Rheinberger!” he growled to himself, and pulled a hair from his handlebar mustache.

  When the music attained a complexity beyond comprehension, rolling along in an insurpassable fortis­simo, the end of the fugue seemed near at hand. But Elias was unable to finish it. However, since an extreme fortissimo gradually loses its monumental effect, he tried to intensify the sense of radiant volume by ascending the scale and inventing chords which, even when played piano, gave the impression of an inexplicable forte. When he reached the point of extreme impossibility, he tore the entire fabric apart, as he had done at the beginning, and this produced the shock of a caesura, like a huge black hole into which everything will fall.

  The echo of the interrupted chord had not yet faded when out shone the rays of the chorale, “Come, O death, O come, sleep’s brother.” And as Elias’s hands and feet were no longer capable of introducing the eighth voice, he himself began to sing. And, breast swollen, he imitated an eight-foot organ pipe, weaving the melody into the texture of voices in long note values, while both feet played the chorale in canon and in short note values, and both hands in contrast, and with ineffable artistry, led the theme into the stretto, inverting it at the same time.