The Melancholy of Resistance (10 page)

Von musikalischen Temperatur
of 1691, the issue remained what it was, a complex problem of tuning, or how one might—after all—employ all seven tones of the European scale in as free a manner as possible while using instruments tuned to a fixed pitch. Reserving to himself the right to change his mind, Werckmeister cut the Gordian knot with a cavalier swish of his sword and, maintaining only the precise intervals between octaves, divided the universum of the twelve half-tones—what was the music of the spheres to him!—into twelve simple and equal parts, so that henceforth, after easily overcoming the feeble resistance of those with a vague hankering after pure tonalities and much to the understandable delight of composers, the position was established. He established this infuriating and shameful position, a position that Eszter historically associated with the most wonderful harmonies and most sublime mutual vibrations, a position in which every note of every masterpiece had, over several centuries, contrived to suggest some great platonic realm, and Eszter was shocked to find that he had been merely dallying in the noxious marshes of its simplicity, a simplicity that had in fact turned out to be ‘false to the core’. Experts flocked to praise Master Andreas’s extraordinary ingenuity though, truth to tell, he was not so much an innovator as an exploiter of predecessors, and they discussed the issue of equal tempering as if this cheat, this fraud, were the most obvious thing in the world; not only that but in their attempts to uncover the true significance of the phenomenon, those elected to enquire into the matter proved even more ingenious than the late Werckmeister himself. Sometimes they discoursed on how, following the genesis and spread of the theory of tonal equidistance, composers unfortunate enough to have been thus far immured within a prison of nine usable tones could now boldly venture into as yet unknown and unexplored territories; at other times on the fact that what they now referred to, in ironic inverted commas, as ‘natural’ tuning, constituted a serious problem of tonality that must be confronted, at which point they usually digressed to the issue of sensibility, for who would willingly forgo the unsurpassable oeuvre of ‘a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms’ simply because the performance of their works of genius entailed some teensy-weensy departure from absolute purity of pitch. ‘We must transcend petty detail,’ they all agreed, and while there were one or two uncertain ivory-tower dwellers who, in the name of appeasement, dared to talk of compromise, the great majority adopted a superior smile and slipped the term into inverted commas, nuzzling up to their readers and whispering to them in confidential tones that pure tuning was indeed a mirage and that there was no such thing as pure tone, and even if there were, what would be the point, since everything was going so swimmingly in any case … At this point Eszter gathered these evidences of human failings, these masterworks of acoustics together, and consigned them to the litter basket, thereby, unbeknown to him, causing great joy to Mrs Harrer, not to mention the nearby second-hand book dealer, and furthermore, so that this personal gesture should serve as the public declaration of the end of his painstaking studies, he felt it was time to draw the appropriate conclusions. He did not doubt for a moment that he was dealing not merely with technical matters but with issues of ‘serious philosophical import’, but it was only as he pondered more deeply that he realized that in progressing from ‘Frachberger’s tiny downward adjustment of the pure fifth’ through his passionate researches into tonality he had arrived at an unavoidable crisis of faith where he had to ask himself whether that system of harmony to which all works of genius with their clear and absolute authority referred and on which he, who could certainly not be accused of harbouring illusions, had based his hitherto unshaken convictions, existed at all. Later, once the first and undoubtedly most bitter waves of emotion had passed and his passions had cooled somewhat, he could confront whatever ‘lay in his capacity to understand’, and once he accepted this state of affairs he felt a certain lightness of spirit for having seen clearly and precisely what had happened. The world, as Eszter established, consisted merely of ‘an indifferent power which offered disappointment at every turn’; its various concerns were incompatible and it was too full of the noises of banging, screeching and crowing, noises that were simply the discordant and refracted sounds of struggle, and that this was all there was to the world if we but realized it. But his ‘fellow human beings’, who also happened to find themselves in this draughty uninsulated barracks and could on no account bear their exclusion from some notion of a distant state of sweetness and light, were condemned to burn for ever in a fever of anticipation, waiting for something they couldn’t even begin to define, hoping for it despite the fact that all the available evidence, which every day continued to accumulate, pointed against its very existence, thereby demonstrating the utter pointlessness of their waiting. Faith, thought Eszter, recognizing his own stupidity, is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate. There were ages more fortunate than ours, or so he pondered at that time; one had only to think of the age of Pythagoras and Aristoxenus, when ‘our fellow human beings’ were not only untroubled by doubt but felt no urge to depart from the assurance of their innocent childlike ways because they knew that heavenly harmonies were the province of heaven and were content that the music they contrived on their purely tuned instruments should afford them a glimpse into the vastness of interstellar space. Later though, after the so-called liberation from ordered cosmology, all this counted for less than nothing, since the confused, supercilious band who had opted for sheer chaos wanted none of it, insisting instead on the complete realization of what was only a fragile dream, which of course crumbled the moment it was touched, leaving them to cobble together what they could, a task they entrusted to people such as Salinas and Werckmeister, who dedicated their days and nights to turning falsehood into truth and succeeded so brilliantly that a grateful public could only sit back, examine itself with satisfaction and wink: perfect, just the job. Just the job, Eszter said to himself, and his first thought was whether he should chop up his old piano or simply toss it out of the house, but he soon realized that this was the least attractive way of relieving himself of the shameful memory of his credulousness, so, after briefly reconsidering the situation, he decided to leave the Steinway where it was and to seek instead some more appropriate mode of self-chastisement. Equipped with a tuning socket and a sensitive frequency meter (a hard thing to get in ‘the current commercial climate’), he began to spend ever more time at his ramshackle instrument, and because he believed that readiness was all and did nothing else, by the time he finished his task he was convinced that what he would hear could not possibly surprise him. This was a period of revisionist tuning or what he chose to call his ‘careful adjustments to the Werckmeister oeuvre’, which were, in effect, adjustments in his own sensibility, and while the former project was an unqualified success the latter was a more complex matter and he didn’t feel at all certain about it. Because, when the great day arrived that he could finally seat himself at the retuned piano and devote himself, as he had intended, to playing but one suite of music for the rest of his life (the most brilliant pearls of the higher catalogue numbers in the Wohltemperierte Klavier which were perfectly suited to his purpose), the very first piece he selected, the prelude in C Major, instead of supplying some expected ‘tremulous rainbow’ effect, fell upon his ears with such an unbearably grating din he was forced to admit that nothing could have prepared him for it. As to the famous Prelude in E-flat Minor, the sound it made on this divinely tuned instrument reminded him of nothing so much as the scene at a village wedding, where guests heaved and retched and slipped off their chairs growing ever more drunk, and the fat, squint-eyed, heavily powdered bride, more drunk than the rest, emerged from one of the back rooms dreaming of the future … To ease his suffering he attempted to play the Prelude in F-sharp Major, the one in the second book, that referred to elements of the French overture, but it sounded as dreadful as every other piece he started. Up till now he had devoted all his time to ‘universal retuning’; the time thenceforth was to be one of long and painful adjustment, a process that involved drawing deeply on his inner resources, a straining of every nerve and sinew, and when, after months of effort, he succeeded, not so much in liking but in simply bearing the ear-splitting racket, he decided to reduce his twice-two-hours-per-day to a bare sixty minutes of torture. Nor did he neglect that hour, not even after Valuska became a regular visitor; indeed, as soon as his young friend had outgrown the role of meal-provider and become his general factotum and confidant, he began to share the painful secret of his deep disillusion and daily self-punishment with him. He explained the mechanics of the scale, drawing Valuska’s attention to the fact that there was nothing mechanical about it, since the seven, apparently fixed, consecutive notes were not merely equal sevenths of a unitary octave, but seven distinct qualities, like seven stars in a constellation; he enlightened him about the limits of ‘insight’, and how a melody—precisely because of the divergency of the seven qualities—could not be played beginning at any point of the scale, since a scale was ‘not a regular series of temple steps we can run up and down on as we please, enjoying congress with the gods’; he introduced him to ‘the sorry rank of brilliant experts’, from the blind man of Burgos to the Flemish mathematician, and he lost no opportunity of treating him—by way of example, so he should know how that wonderful piece sounded when ‘performed on this most celestial of instruments’—to performances of Johann Sebastian. Over several years, day after day, every afternoon, having pushed his dinner aside after a few uninviting spoonfuls, he had shared with Valuska these regular acts of penance for his earlier foolhardiness and, now, hoping to delay the moment when he’d have to discover the secret of the screwed-up note and the nervously clutched case, he trusted to this routine once more, firmly determined to continue it by playing, ‘for his edification’, something from Johann Sebastian; but his scheme was to be frustrated either because he had left too long a gap after his last memorable remark or because Valuska had drawn on extra reserves of courage; in any case, what matters is that his bright-eyed guest got the first word in, and, however hesitantly the subsequent words followed, beginning with Valuska’s own role in the matter of the suitcase, Eszter immediately realized that his fears had not been entirely insubstantial. Not at all insubstantial—for though the message and the identity of the messenger caught him off guard … he had always known that, having left the house, his wife would not only not forgive him for booting her out but would devise some scheme to get back at him, that the cool way he told her to go called for revenge. It did not matter that the day of her departure appeared so distant as to be positively antediluvian, that many years had passed since then; not for a moment did he console himself with the thought that Mrs Eszter would never again disturb him, for though he had deliberately ‘wiped out the memory’ of the formal divorce proceedings and for all the fact that this insulated him to some degree, the theatrical business of the suitcase full of laundry forced him to admit that ‘the slut had by no means given the matter up’. He had to endure this ridiculous comedy in which week after week his gargantuan spouse, while pretending that her husband knew nothing of this secret arrangement, had, ever since his retirement, continued to do his washing and sent it back via the gullible Valuska, who had to pretend it had come from the laundry. ‘That is about the only thing she is good for, dealing with dirty washing,’ was Eszter’s opinion at the time, but now he saw what a terrible price he had to pay for his earlier carelessness, for he quickly discovered her clothes at the bottom of the suitcases and knew it was her surprisingly crude way of announcing that she would be back in the house ‘this very afternoon’. There was nothing here to suggest that the time for revenge had actually come, but it was enough to leave Eszter in a state of confusion until Valuska (who, being terrified of her, never ceased praising her) stuttered something that made it plain: Mrs Eszter’s uniquely wicked ‘scheme’ concerned the near future rather than the present. She did not intend moving in immediately, it was simply a way of hinting that she could do so at any time, a form of blackmail; all she was asking, it appeared from the note, was that he should take his place at the head of some campaign for moral rearmament, which had, so to speak, ‘chosen him as leader’. She was sending a list, Valuska added enthusiastically, mumbling as usual, a list of all the local citizens’ names who should be won round to the cause, so he must start immediately—it was a race against time—doing the rounds of the houses, not tomorrow but today, immediately, now, for every minute was precious—and so that he should be in no doubt what was waiting for him if he failed to act, to end with she hinted at ‘an evening over supper together …’ Rather than say anything while his friend was still in full flow, he didn’t open his mouth even after Valuska—almost certainly cowed by the low, scheming hag—had ceased praising her ‘loyalty and unprecedented tenderness’, but lay silently among the soft cushions of the once ornamental
chaise-longue,
his eyes following the sparks as they leapt from the fireplace. Should he resist? Should he tear the slip of paper up? Should he attack her with an axe, much as sensitive freshmen might attack a piano at the unguarded academy, if she dared approach the house ‘sometime in the evening’? No, Eszter said to himself, there was nothing he could do in the face of such wile and power, so he pushed back the covers and sat with bent back on the edge of the bed before slowly divesting himself of his maroon dressing gown. He told his friend, who was inexpressibly relieved to hear it, that he was obliged, however briefly, to suspend ‘the inestimable pleasures of soothing oblivion’ because