Brother of Sleep: A Novel (17 page)

Goller's nighttime prayer had not been heard. The weird musician had come, at the appointed place, at the appointed time. He stood in the doorway, silent, pale, and exhausted. The idea of flight came to Goller too late. He would have had to be out of his house at the time they had agreed. Oh, St. Cecilia! Why did it only occur to him now? Goller caught his breath, gripped his stiff collar, and invited the friends into the little music room. The glow was returning to Elias's eyes when he saw the keyboard of a curious instrument that Goller called a pianoforte. Elias touched the keys and was at once afraid and astonished. When he played through a frenetically rapid sequence of thirds, Goller stumbled over to him and stuttered loudly for Herr Alder to rest, since the organ festival was due to begin in an hour. No, thought fish face, he was not obliged to listen to this devil under his own roof. How could he ever sit down calmly at his pianoforte again?

Peter drank a great deal of the red wine they were served. Meanwhile Elias looked at the countless manu­scripts that were spread out, open and closed, on ottomans, windowsills, and the parquet floor like the many courses of a wonderful dinner. What wisdom must lie in those books, thought Elias sadly, and he did not eat a single bite or take a single sip of wine. Then they set off, strolling through narrow alleys in the direction of Feldberg cathedral. Now and again Goller made a rather heavy-handed joke and expressed amazement that Elias had come barefoot. No one could play the organ pedals barefoot, he said to himself, no one. And the Feldberg organ was, by St. Cecilia, much harder to work with than the silly little object in Eschberg.

And a sudden smile of relief flashed across Goller's fish face.

THE ORGAN FESTIVAL

THE
Feldberg organ festival was the musical event of the year. The music-loving gentry and nobility made the pilgrimage from as far afield as Liechtenstein to hear the improvisatory art of the pupils of the Musical Institute. The big seventeen-voice main organ, with its powerful trumpet and trombone and the silvery main tone of the choir organ, was one of the most valuable instruments in the Vorarlberg in those days, and it formed a wonderful synthesis between the French and South German arts of organ building. The instrument
had been tuned specially for the festival and was clev­
erly illuminated from all sides.

Goller told Peter to find a seat in the nave, for the cathedral was already full to bursting half an hour before the festival started. The glowing reddish-blue evening light fell steeply on the assembled listeners, and the
rosette high over the west gallery gleamed with fairy-tale brilliance. But Goller led Elias into the sacristy, where the five students chosen to improvise were waiting. With the rather disdainful remark that Herr Alder came from a godforsaken part of the country, led a simple way of life, but was nonetheless a highly curious natural genius, he introduced Elias to the other musicians. There he stood, our hero, in his black and sweaty frock coat, with his greasy strands of hair and his unpleasant smell. The five pink faces, with their smoothed-down hair and gleaming wing collars, turned their noses up at this peculiar apparition. One student even insolently observed that he was unable to share a pew with this primitive creature. But the pink faces would soon be forced to stop wrinkling their noses and making their insolent observations.

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 be­
came 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 so­
norous 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 competi
­tors 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 curi­
ously 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 refer­
ence 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 pos­
sessed 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 also 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 be­
fore. 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.