Old Masters (22 page)

a music fanatic yes, but a concert fanatic no longer,
it is also getting more and more troublesome for me to go to the Musikverein or to the Konzerthaus, neither is easily accessible to me on foot and I do not take taxis and there is no tram there from the Singerstrasse. And the Konzerthaus audiences, just as the Musikverein audiences, have lately become very common and provincial, I have to say they are dulled and for years have no longer been knowledgeable, which is regrettable. The days when that singer of singers George London sang
Don
Giovanni
at the Opera or the butcher's daughter Lipp the
Queen of the Night
are gone for good, as are the days when a sixty-year-old Menuhin conducted at the Konzerthaus and a fifty-year-old Karajan at the Musikverein. We now only hear the mediocre ones, the worthless ones. The idols, the top artists, the most ideal and the most competent performers have grown old and incompetent, Reger said. The present generation, curiously enough, no longer makes the highest demands on music, those which were made on music a mere fifteen or twenty years ago. The reason is that listening to music has become
a trivial everyday affair as a result of technical progress.
Listening to music is nothing out of the ordinary any more, you can hear music wherever you go, you are practically forced to hear music, in every department store, in every doctor's surgery, on every street, indeed you cannot
avoid
music nowadays, you wish to escape from it but you cannot escape,
this age is totally accompanied by background music,
that is the catastrophe, Reger said. Our age has witnessed the eruption of
total music,
anywhere between the North Pole and the South Pole you are forced to hear music, in the city or out in the country, on the high seas or in the desert, Reger said. People have been stuffed full of music every day for so long that they have long lost all feeling for music. This monstrous situation of course has its effect on the concerts you hear nowadays, there is nothing out of the ordinary nowadays because all music all over the world is out of the ordinary, and where everything is out of the ordinary there, naturally, nothing out of the ordinary remains, indeed it is positively touching to see a few ridiculous virtuosi still taking pains to be out of the ordinary, but they are so no longer because they can be so no longer. The world is through and through
pervaded by total music,
Reger said, that is the misfortune, at every street corner you can hear extraordinary and perfect music on such a scale that you have probably blocked your ears long ago to stop yourself going out of your mind. People today, because they have nothing else left, suffer from a pathological music consumption, Reger said, this music consumption will be driven forward by the industry, which controls people today, to a point where everybody is destroyed; there is a lot of talk nowadays about waste and chemicals which have destroyed everything, but music destroys a lot more than waste and chemicals do, it is music that eventually will destroy absolutely everything
totally,
mark my words. The first thing to be destroyed by the music industry are people's auditory canals and next, as a logical consequence, the people themselves, that is the truth, Reger said. I can already see people totally destroyed by the music industry, Reger said, those masses of music-industry victims eventually populating the continents with their musical cadaverous stench, my dear Atzbacher,
the music industry will one day have the population on its conscience,
it will most probably ultimately have the whole of mankind on its conscience, not just chemicals and waste, believe me. The music industry is the murderer of human beings, the music industry is the real mass murderer of humanity which, if the music industry continues on its present lines, will have no hope whatever within a few decades, my dear Atzbacher, Reger said excitedly. A person with a sensitive ear will soon be unable to go out into the street; just go to a café, go to an inn, go to a department store, everywhere, whether you like it or not, you have to hear music; take a train or board a plane, music today pursues you everywhere. This ceaseless music is the most brutal thing present-day humanity has to suffer and to tolerate, Reger said. From early morning till late at night humanity is stuffed full of Mozart and Beethoven, Bach and Handel, Reger said. Go where you will, you cannot escape that torture. It is a downright miracle, Reger said, that ceaseless music is not yet to be heard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum as well, that would be the last straw.
After the funeral of my wife I locked myself up in the
Singerstrasse
flat and did not even admit the housekeeper,
Reger said. Immediately after the funeral he had gone to the nearby synagogue and lit a candle, without really knowing why, and the strangest thing was that from the synagogue he had gone straight into Saint Stephen's and lit a candle there too, again without really knowing why. Having a lit a candle in Saint Stephen's, he had walked down the Wollzeile for some way with the idea of killing himself. However, I had no clear idea of
how
I would kill myself and eventually I was
able to dismiss
the idea of killing myself from my head, at least for a short time.
I had the choice between wandering criss-cross about the city for days and perhaps weeks, or staying locked up for weeks,
Reger said to me,
I decided in favour of staying locked up for weeks.
After his wife's funeral he had not wished to see anybody at all ever again and at first not even to eat anything ever again, but nobody could stand drinking nothing but pure water for days on end for more than three or four days, and he had in fact lost weight very rapidly and in the morning, suddenly, had
barely the strength to get up, that was a signal,
Reger said to me, and I started eating again and next I started studying Schopenhauer again, it was Schopenhauer my wife and I had been studying when she had her fall behind me and
broke the so-called neck of her femur,
Reger said thoughtfully. During these six weeks of locked-up existence I merely conducted a few telephone calls with my lawyer and read Schopenhauer, that probably saved me, Reger said, even though I am not sure whether it was right for me
to save
myself, probably, Reger said, it would have been better
not
to have saved myself, to have killed myself. But the mere fact that I had so much running about in connection with the funeral did not leave me any time to kill myself. Unless we kill ourselves
at once
we do not kill ourselves at all, that is what is so frightful, he said. We have the wish to be just as dead as the person we loved, but still we do not kill ourselves, we think about it but we do not do it, Reger said. Curiously enough I could not bear any music during those six weeks, I did not once sit down at the piano,
once in my mind I attempted a piece from the
Well-Tempered
Clavier, but immediately abandoned the attempt,
it was not music that was my salvation during those six weeks,
it was
Schopenhauer,
again and again a few lines of
Schopenhauer,
Reger said.
It was not
Nietzsche
either, only
Schopenhauer.
I
sat up in bed and read a few lines of Schopenhauer and reflected on them and again read a few Schopenhauer sentences and reflected on them, Reger said. After four days of nothing but drinking water and reading Schopenhauer I ate my first piece of bread, which was so hard I had to chop it off the loaf with a meat cleaver. I sat down on the window stool facing the Singerstrasse, that hideous Loos stool, and looked down on the Singerstrasse. Imagine, it was the end of May and there was a flurry of snow. I shrank away from people. From my flat on the Singerstrasse I watched them rushing about down below, one way and another, laden with clothes and foodstuffs, and I felt nauseated by them. I thought I do not wish to go back among these people,
not among these people
and there are no others, Reger said. Looking down on to the Singerstrasse I realized that there were no other people than those rushing about the Singerstrasse this way and that. I looked down on to the Singerstrasse and hated the people and I said to myself I do not wish to go back among these people, Reger said. I do not wish to go back to that infamy and that shabbiness, I said to myself, Reger said. I pulled out several drawers and several chests and looked into them and kept taking out pictures and writings and correspondence of my wife and put everything on the table, one item after another, and progressively inspected everything, and because I am an honest person, my dear Atzbacher, I have to admit that I wept while doing so. Suddenly I gave my tears free rein, I had not wept for decades and suddenly I gave my tears free rein, Reger said. I sat there, giving my tears free rein, and I wept and wept and wept and wept, Reger said. I had not wept for decades, Reger said to me at the Ambassador. I have no need to conceal anything or to hide anything, he said,
with my eighty-two years I have no need to conceal or to hide anything at all,
Reger said, and I therefore do not conceal the fact that suddenly I wept and wept again, that I wept again for days, Reger said. I sat there, looking at the letters which my wife had written to me over the years and read the notes she had made over the years and just wept. Of course we get used to a person over the decades and love them for decades and eventually love them more than anything else and cling to them and when we lose them it is truly as if we had lost
everything.
I have always thought that it was music that meant everything to me, and at times that it was philosophy, or great or greatest or the very greatest writing , or altogether that it was simply art, but none of it, the whole of art or whatever, is nothing compared to that one beloved person. The things we inflicted on that one beloved person, Reger said, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of pains we inflicted on this one person whom we loved more than anyone else, the torments we inflicted on that person, and yet we loved them more than anyone else, Reger said. When that person whom we loved more than anyone else is dead they leave us with a terribly guilty conscience, Reger said, with a terribly guilty conscience with which we have to live after that person's death and which will choke us one day, Reger said. None of those books or writings which I had collected in the course of my life and which I had brought to the Singerstrasse flat to cram full all these shelves were ultimately any use, I had been left alone by my wife and all those books and writings were ridiculous. We think we can cling to Shakespeare or to Kant, but that is a fallacy, Shakespeare and Kant and all the rest, whom during our life we built up as the so-called great ones, let us down at the very moment when we would so badly need them, Reger said, they are no solution for us and they are no consolation to us, they suddenly seem revolting and alien to us, everything which those so-called great and important figures have thought and moreover written leaves us cold, Reger said. We always think we can rely on those so-called important and great ones, whichever, at the crucial moment, at the moment crucial in our lives, but that is a mistake, precisely at the moment which is crucial in our lives we find ourselves left alone by all those important and great ones, by those, as the saying goes,
immortal ones,
they provide us with no more at such a crucial moment in our lives than the fact that
even in their midst we are alone,
on our own in an utterly horrible sense, Reger said. Only and solely Schopenhauer helped me,
because quite simply I abused him for the purpose of my survival,
Reger said to me at the Ambassador. With all the others, including Goethe, Shakespeare and Kant, nauseating me I simply threw myself into Schopenhauer in my despair and sat down with Schopenhauer on my Singerstrasse-side stool in order to survive, for suddenly I wanted to survive and not to die, not to
follow
my wife but to remain
here,
to remain
in this world,
you understand, Atzbacher, Reger said at the Ambassador. But of course I had a chance of survival with Schopenhauer only because I abused him for my purposes
and in fact falsified him in
the vilest manner,
Reger said, by quite simply turning him into a prescription for survival, which in fact he is not, any more than the others I have mentioned. All our lives we rely on the great minds and on the so-called old masters, Reger said, and then we are mortally disappointed by them because they do not fulfill their purpose at the crucial moment. We hoard the great minds and the old masters and we believe that at the crucial moment of survival we can use them for our purposes, which means nothing other than misusing them for our purposes, which turns out to be a fatal mistake. We fill our mental strong-room with these great minds and old masters and resort to them at the crucial moment in our lives; but when we unlock our mental strong-room it is empty, that is the truth, we stand before that empty mental strong-room and find that we are alone and in fact totally destitute, Reger said. A person hoards things all his life, in all fields, and in the end he stands there empty, Reger said, also where his mental possessions are concerned. Think of the colossal mental possessions I had hoarded, Reger said at the Ambassador, and in the end I am standing here totally empty. Only by dint of a vile trick did I succeed in misusing Schopenhauer for my purpose, for the purpose of my survival, Reger said. Suddenly you realize what emptiness is when you stand there amidst thousands and thousands of books and writings which have left you totally alone, which suddenly mean nothing to you except that terrible emptiness, Reger said. When you have lost your closest human being everything seems empty to you, look wherever you like, everything is empty, and you look and look and you see that everything is