(For a PDF version of this translation, go to The Worldview Annex).
The Fermata
Johnann Erdmann Hummel’s serene and sprightly painting Social
Life at an Italian Locanda has acquired something of a reputation thanks to
the Berlin Art Exhibition of the autumn of 1814, where it was deemed a positive
delight to the eyes and the hearts of many a viewer. A bower, thickly overgrown with foliage—a
table brimful of wine and fruit—at the latter, two Italian ladies sitting face to face—the
one is singing; the other, playing the guitar--between and behind the pair of
them, standing, an abbot who has assumed the duties of a conductor. With battuta
held high, he stands poised for the moment when Signora, now lingering over
her cadenza with eyes cast heavenwards, rounds out the latter in a long trill;
then, he will strike the downbeat, in concert with the guitarist's strumming of
the dominant triad. The abbot is the very image of awestricken-ness, of
blissful enjoyment—and terribly overwrought to boot. He would not, for all the world, miss this
downbeat by so much as a fraction of a second. He hardly dares to breathe. He
would tie fast the wings and mandibles of every bee and gnat in the bower to
silence their buzzing. And to make
matters worse for him, their officious host has just come barging in, at this
most precious, this most decisive, of moments, to deliver their order of
wine. Behind the bower, a view of an
arcade intermittently illuminated by shafts of sunlight—there we see a man on
horseback; who, having just now drawn to a halt, is being handed up a dram
of the locanda’s vintage.
Before this painting stood two friends, Eduard and Theodor.
“The longer I gaze at this admittedly rather grandmotherly—and yet, for all that, supremely virtuosic—singer, in her splendid costume,” said Eduard, “the longer I savor the solemn, authentically Roman profile and lovely features of the guitarist; the longer I revel in the sight of this most excellent of abbots, the more freely and strongly imbued with actual, kinetic life the painting as a whole seems to me. To be sure, at a more fundamental level, life is merely caricatured in it, but with what serenity and sweetness! How very much I should like to climb into that bower and uncork one of those exquisite demijohns that are smiling down at me from yonder table. Indeed, I believe I can fairly smell the noble wine’s sapid bouquet. But alas: this intoxicating vapor shall not be suffered to mingle with the sober, commonsensical draft that chills us here below. And so, in honor of this wonderful painting—of art, of gay old Italy, where the love of life burns on undiminished—let us repair thither and crack open a bottle of genuine Italian wine.”
Throughout Eduard's delivery of this disjointed monologue, Theodor had been standing in perfect silence, immersed in his own thoughts. Then, as though waking from a dream, he rejoined, “Yes, let's do that!”; but no sooner had he managed to elude the painting, and—having reflexively trailed his companion's footsteps—found himself at the threshold of the room, than he cast a yearning glance or two back at the singers and the abbot. Eduard’s proposal was realized effortlessly. They crossed the street and, by and by, found themselves face-to-face with a wicker-sheathed demijohn—a serviceable enough simulacrum of the ones in the wine-bower—in the little blue dining room of the Sala Tarone. “It seems to me,” said Eduard after a few glasses had been drained, to no effect on the score of Theodor's self-immersion, “It seems to me that you were not especially taken with this painting; and certainly by no means as heartily as I was.” ‘Rest assured,” replied Theodor, “I more than fully appreciate the gaiety, the charm—the vitality—of the painting in the highest degree; but the astonishing fact is that it accurately—and, indeed, with the fidelity of a master portraitist in the case of the dramatis personae—depicts a scene from my own life. You will, I trust, grant me that even the sunniest remembrances have an uncanny power to discompose the mind when they catch it unawares, when they suddenly and unaccountably spring forth as if brought to life by the touch of a magic wand. In just such a fashion has my mind just been discomposed.” “From your own life?” echoed Eduard in astonishment, “You would have me believe that this painting depicts a scene from your own life? I likewise took the singers and the abbot for faithful portraits, but as for the thought that you had encountered them in the flesh? Pray do make some sense out of all this for me: we are, after all, alone; no one comes here at this time of day.” “I would be all too happy to oblige you in that regard; but, unfortunately, to do so would necessarily involve my going back quite a long way indeed—all the way back to the period of my youth.” “Do tell on, and freely,” replied Eduard; “as of now, I know very little of your early history. However long it takes, the worst that will come of it is that we crack open another bottle, which we have resolved to do anyway; what harm can it do anyone, either Mr. Tarone or ourselves?”
“Well: that I ultimately cast all other endeavors aside,” began Theodor, “and gave myself over body and soul to the noble calling of music can come as no great surprise to anyone, for even as a boy I could scarcely trouble myself about anything else, and would plunk away night and day on the keyboard of my uncle’s1 rickety, jangly old grand piano.” [4] Our little town5 was less than a backwater musically speaking; and there was no one there who could give me lessons, apart from a certain capricious old organist who was basically nothing but a bloodless arithmetician,2 and who habitually tortured me with the most dismally cacophonous toccatas and fugues. Undeterred by these performances, I conscientiously pressed on with my studies. Oftentimes the old man scolded me with great vehemence; but he never dared to correct my technique in any other way but by playing through the same virtuoso passages over and over again in his idiosyncratic but masterly style, and I soon made my peace both with him and with my chosen art. What strange states could I be thrown into in those days!--certain passages, particularly in the works of old Sebastian Bach, were like ghost stories to me; and on hearing them I would thrill with such shudders as one willingly surrenders oneself to in one's fantasy-ridden youth. A veritable Eden opened itself to me when, as was wont to happen in the wintertime, the leader of our municipal band of musicians and his colleagues, supported by a couple of feeble sub-amateurs, gave a concert, and I played the tympani in the orchestra, which part I was vouchsafed in virtue of my impeccable sense of rhythm. I realized only much later how insanely laughable these concerts often were. Usually my teacher would play two piano concertos by Wolf or Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a member of the band would muddle through a bit of Stamitz, and the excise-collector would huff and puff away on the flute with such lung-bursting violence that he blew out both the candles on the conductor’s podium, and they always subsequently had to be relighted. Of vocal music there was nary a trace, a state of affairs much lamented by my uncle, who was an ardent admirer and champion of the musical arts. He still recollected with great fondness the old days, when the four choir-masters of our four churches joined forces in a rendition of Lottchen at Court4 at the concert hall. In particular, he loved to extol the latitudinarian spirit in which the singers had laid aside their differences for the sake of art, all the more so as the Catholics and Lutherans alike were alienated from the Calvinist community on account of the linguistic schism between German and French; the French choir-master permitted himself no liberties with Lottchen and sang the role--so my uncle averred--in the most charming falsetto that ever had been wrung out of a human voice-box. At that time there subsisted amongst us (i.e., in our town) a fifty-five-year-old spinster surnamed Meibel, who received a niggardly pension allotted to her in remembrance of her services as a much-fêted vocalist at court; and my uncle sagely surmised that Mlle. Meibel could be persuaded, for a certain fee, to be fêted once again, however modestly, at an official recital. She put on airs and allowed herself to be implored on bended knee for a good long while; but in the end, she gave in, and emerged from the wings of our concert hall to greet her devoted public. She was quite an original, to say the least, this Mlle. Meibel. To this day, the image of her haggard, dwarfish person remains vividly etched in my memory. In an attitude of great solemnity and seriousness—vocal part in hand, and clad in a dress woven out of the most garish combination of hues—she took her place at center stage and saluted the audience with a curt bow. She wore a highly curious head-dress surmounted by a nosegay of ceramic Italian flowers; and as she sang, this coiffure shuddered and pivoted itself about her head in a quite peculiar fashion. When she had finished, and the assembly had rendered unto her its more than modest tribute of applause, she handed her part, with a lordly glance, to my teacher; whose duty it was to fetch forth and present to her her porcelain pug-dog-shaped snuff-box, from which vessel she thereupon extracted a pinch of tobacco with great contentment. Her intonation was hideously shrill; she indulged herself in all sorts of ludicrous ornaments and coloraturas; and you can well imagine how these vocal defects, in combination with her preposterous appearance, must have struck me at the time. My uncle gushed forth a stream of plaudits; I could hardly fathom his behavior, and thus forsook his company in favor of that of my organist, who, in taking a pretty dim view of vocal music in general, and being his constitutionally splenetic self, was more than capable of essaying an amusing parody of the silly old girl's performance.
“The more warmly I seconded my teacher's diatribes against vocal music, the more highly he rated my genius for music tout court. With enormous alacrity he threw himself into the task of instructing me in counterpoint, such that soon enough I was competently composing academic fugues and toccatas. On one of my birthdays (the nineteenth one), I happened to be performing one of these 'compositions' in the presence of my uncle, when the waiter of our finest inn appeared, announcing the visitation of two foreign ladies newly arrived in town. Before my uncle had had time to divest himself of his floral-patterned dressing-gown, let alone don proper day-clothes, the visitors were already entering the room. You are, of course, aware of the electrical force exerted upon the isolated inmates of a small town by the appearance of any stranger in their midst—well, these two ladies, in traipsing so unexpectedly into my life, were tailor-made to exert just such a force on me, as if by the touch of a magic wand. Picture to yourself two tall, slender Italian women, bedizened in the most splendid hues of the latest fashion, marching right up to, of all people, my uncle, and holding forth to him in the most forceful, albeit mellifluous, tones—but what is this curious language they are speaking?—it only intermittently sounds at all like German!—my uncle cannot understand a word of it—nonplussed, taking a step or two backward—utterly stupefied, he points to the sofa. They seat themselves—the two of them converse between themselves—and their conversation sounds just like music.
At length, they manage to make it more or less clear to my uncle that they are touring singers, that they want to give a concert in our town, and that they have had recourse to him in his capacity as a competent organizer of such musical events.
Now, in eavesdropping on this conference, I had happened to glean the singers' Christian names, and it was accordingly plain to me that, to the extent that I had heretofore been bemused by their apparition as a pair of virtual twins, I could in like measure now properly distinguish them as individuals. Lauretta—to all appearances the senior of the two—addressed my discomfited uncle point-blank, her radiant eyes flashing in all directions, with great ebullience and much animated gesticulation. Though far from tall, she was decidedly voluptuous; and I was completely transfixed by her many and considerable charms, all of them as-yet terra incognita to me. Teresina, taller, thinner, and of a longish and serious countenance, contented herself with supplying the occasional, albeit more intelligible, interjection. From time to time they would, oddly enough, burst into laughter, as if much diverted by the vainly repeated efforts of my worthy uncle—encased in his silk dressing-gown like a snail in its shell--to conceal the yellow ribbon securing his nightshirt, which had a perfidious tendency to wiggle itself out lengthwise from under his lapels at every attempt. Finally, they rose from the couch; my uncle promised to see to it that a concert would be scheduled for the next day but two, and was most civilly invited, along with yours truly—whom he had presented to them under the style of a ‘young virtuoso’—to take ciocolata with the two sisters at lunchtime. We ascended the staircase with great gravity and ceremony, as though setting out on some sort of adventure that neither of us was quite cut out for. After my uncle, suitably girded for such an enterprise, had delivered himself of a great deal of high-flown oratory on the subject of art, to the comprehension of no one present (either himself or the rest of us); after I had twice scalded my tongue on the boiling-hot chocolate—and yet, for all that, grinned and borne my unspeakable anguish with a stoic equanimity worthy of Scaevola9—Lauretta announced that she would sing something for us. Teresina took up her guitar, tuned it, and strummed a few open chords. Never before had I heard such an instrument, whose elusively unresonant timbre reverberated to the core of my very being. Lauretta entered quite softly with a single note, which she sustained and built up to a fortissimo, before abruptly and audaciously segueing into an intricate figure spanning a full octave and a half. Although I was well acquainted with the opening words of the song—Sento l’amica speme—they now deprived me of the very capacity to breathe, as I had never dreamed they were capable of doing. But this was as nothing to the moment when Lauretta, with unflagging intrepidity, cast off every last vestige of dependence on the score; and when, enfolded as I was in wave upon wave of circumambient sound, my inner music, which had for so long lain dormant and as good as dead, caught fire and burst forth in mighty jets of flame. Ah! For the first time in my life I had heard real music. Next the two sisters joined vocal forces in a rendition of those serious, profoundly understated duets by the Abbot Steffani. Terisina’s rich, pure, heavenly alto voice pervaded my soul; I could no longer contain my inner tumult, and the tears fell liberally from my eyes. My uncle cleared his throat and cast a disapproving glance or two in the direction of my person, but to no avail; for I was in no mere metaphorical sense in another place. This reaction of mine seemed to please the singers, who began inquiring into the precise nature of my musical training; for my part; I blushed at the thought of owning my ‘musical’ busywork under such a head, and with a forwardness imparted by the inspiration of the moment, affirmed outright that ‘today, for the first time in my life, I have heard real music!’. ‘Il bon fanciullo,’ murmured Lauretta in a most fetchingly lovely tone. No sooner had I got home, than, overtaken by a kind of mad delirium, I gathered up my collected ‘works’—all those wretched toccatas and fugues, along with a set of forty-five canonic variations composed by the organist and presented by him to me as a gift in fair copy—and pitched the lot into the fireplace, erupting into great peals of spiteful laughter as the reams of invertible counterpoint crackled and smoked their way into oblivion. I then seated myself at the keyboard and attempted, first, to replicate the sonority of the guitar; next, to plunk out the tunes that had been sung by the two sisters; and, finally, to accompany these purely instrumental efforts at mimesis through the medium of my own voice. Eventually, around midnight, my uncle appeared, exclaimed, ‘It’s high time you left off all this caterwauling and hit the hay!’, snuffed out both my candles, and returned to his bedchamber. I had no choice but to heed his plaint. In sleep—so it seems to me—I was at last vouchsafed the key to the song; for therein I sang Sento l’amica speme with great fluency and feeling. By the next morning, my uncle had arranged for everybody in town who could play a note on a string or a wind instrument to participate in the rehearsal for the concert. Out of sheer civic pride, he hoped to demonstrate the superiority of our local musical culture. Alas! From the very beginning things took a turn directly contrary to the realization of this hope. Lauretta, from a purely dramatic point of view, put on quite an impressive show; but unhappily she opted to deliver the whole of her performance in a meandering recitative that none of her would-be accompanists knew quite what to make of or do with. Lauretta screamed, wailed, and, indeed, wept in rabid consternation. The organist was then seated at the piano; and upon him she saw fit to let flow a stream of the most vituperative reproaches. Unmoved, he stood up and silently made straight for the exit. As for the bandleader, Lauretta having flung an Asino maledetto! at his head, he had by now insolently flung his hat on to that same head and slung his violin under his right arm. He likewise headed straight for the back door; his colleagues, with bows fixed athwart fingerboards and mouthpieces upturned, followed his lead. Now the only local performers left were the supernumeraries, the sub-amateurs, who began casting tearful glances in every which direction; and the excise collector lugubriously exclaimed, ‘Oh God! This has made a changed man of me!’ Every ounce of my bashfulness had by then evaporated; I flung myself into the path of the bandleader, and out of sheer panic begged, besought, and implored him to stay on the security of my pledge to provide him with six fresh minuets with double trios for the public ball. I managed to appease him. He turned round and slowly resumed his place at the podium; his colleagues likewise marched back in; and, in due course, all the requisite instrumental forces were once again assembled and ready to play, apart from the self-evidently still-absent figure of the organist. By then this man was wending his leisurely way across the market square, his progress unhindered by the gravitational pull of so much as a single hand-clap or huzzah. Teresina, in her capacity as a mere spectator, had greeted the whole imbroglio with grimly sardonic laughter; Lauretta, for her part, was now every bit as cheerful as she had so recently been irate. She fulsomely praised me on account of the ‘considerable pains’ I was taking; she asked me if I could play the piano, and before I quite knew what was happening, I found myself seated in the organist’s spot, with the score in front of me. I had never before accompanied a singer, let alone conducted an orchestra. Teresina sat down next to me on the piano-bench and marked time for me; I received one spirited ‘Bravo!’ after another from Lauretta, and the orchestra fell into line and began playing; everything was going better and better by the minute. At the second rehearsal everything went off without a hitch, and in the concert itself the transfixing power of the sisters’ voices simply beggared description. It then transpired that the Prince's forthcoming return to the capital was to be attended with much pomp and circumstance; that the sisters had been summoned thither to sing in recital and on stage; and that, pending the necessity of their presence at court, they had elected to tarry a bit longer in our little town: hence they came to grace us with a few further concerts. The adulation of the audience at these events verged on sheer mania. Old Lady Meibel alone dissented in circumspectly taking a pinch of snuff from her porcelain box and opining that such impertinent shrieks as these were hardly deserving of the appellation of vocal music, that a proper vocalist must always sing nice and doose.5 Thenceforth my organist, for his part, would have nothing to do with me; and I, for mine, hardly missed his company. I was the happiest man on earth! All day long, I sat next to the sisters, playing accompaniment and copying out parts from scores for their subsequent use at the capital. Lauretta was my ideal; all her petty sulks, all her horrible temper-tantrums—to say nothing of the round of virtuosic keyboard drudgery she put me through—I bore the lot with exemplary forbearance! After all, she and she alone had disclosed to me what real music consisted in! I began to study Italian and to try my hand at composing canzonets. And whenever Lauretta sang—and, moreover, praised—one of these compositions; why, I was in seventh heaven! It often seemed to me as though I had neither conceived nor written the composition in question myself; as though the central idea of the piece could shine forth only through Lauretta’s realization of it in song. As for Teresina—well, I never could quite accustom myself to her presence, as she sang only occasionally and seemed to regard my industry as being of but little account; and from time to time I even found myself wondering whether she were not laughing at me behind my back. At length, the day of their departure drew nigh. It was then that I first became conscious of the nature and force of my attachment to Lauretta, and of the impossibility of parting from her. Oftentimes, when inclined to act the part of a smorfiosa6 to the hilt, she would caress me; which action, notwithstanding the manifestly innocent attitude of the caresser, never failed to set my blood boiling, and I was restrained from embracing her in an access of amorous fury only by the singular coldness with which she consistently contrived to rebuff my advances.
I had a passably decent tenor voice, which, having heretofore
allowed to lie fallow, I now cultivated with the greatest assiduity; such that
I found many an occasion for collaborating with Lauretta in the rendition of a
handful of those tender Italian duettini that number in the thousands.
On the very eve of her departure, we happened to be singing one of these duets,
which just happened to be entitled Senza di te ben mio, vivere non poss'io. What
hardened soul could bear such a coincidence? In despair, I threw myself at her
feet. Bidding me to rise, she exclaimed, 'Ah, my friend! Is our parting really
so inevitable?' I pricked up my ears in delighted astonishment. She went on to
propose that I should accompany Teresina and her to the capital; inasmuch as I
must sooner or later travel abroad in any case if I wished to pursue a career
in music. Picture to yourself a man plunging headlong into the fathomless pit
of despair, a man who has given up for good on life itself; but who, even as he
is bracing himself for the blow that needs must spell his utter annihilation,
simultaneously finds himself recumbent upon a magnificent bed of roses while a
hundred little glimmers of light of a hundred different colors circle round
him, each of them whispering into his ear, ‘Dear heart, you have yet to live!’
Such a man was I at that instant. ‘To the capital, and forthwith!’ my soul
peremptorily commanded. I shall not try your patience by relating the
particulars of the case I made to my uncle for the necessity of my undertaking
this expedition of no great distance. Eventually, he succumbed to the force of
my argument; nay, he even vowed to accompany me on the trip. What an upset to
all of my calculations this was! Naturally, it was out of the question
for me to breathe a word to him of my ultimate purpose in traveling with the
two lady vocalists. I was delivered from this plight only at the last minute,
when my uncle came down with a serviceably nasty head cold. I left town in the
post-carriage, but traveled only as far as the first stage, where I tarried in
expectation of the arrival of my goddess. My generously-larded wallet stood me
in good stead to handle anything that might be in the offing. Being in a
romantic, high-chivalric frame of mind, I wished to escort the ladies on
horseback like some knight errant of yore. To this end, I procured a
none-too-handsome but (so the dealer assured me!) perfectly docile old nag;
and, sitting astride the beast, set out at the appointed time for my rendezvous
with the sisters. By and by, the little two-seated carriage pulled up, its back
seat occupied by the sisters themselves, its boot by their podgy chambermaid
Gianna, a sun-burnished Neapolitan. In addition to its human cargo, the
carriage was crammed full of an assortment of cases, baskets, and boxes: the
inalienable paraphernalia of the itinerants. My salutation of this long-anticipated
pair was, incidentally, attended by much yelping in my direction on the part of
two minuscule pug-dogs seated in Gianna's lap. Everything went smoothly and
according to plan until we reached the last stage, at which point my horse was
untowardly smitten by a hankering for his native land. Experience, inasmuch as
it had taught me that outright bullying was to little purpose in such
situations as this, now counseled me to seek to win my point by the gentlest of
all possible means, but the stubborn old nag was obdurate to my genial coaxing.
I was all for pressing onwards, he for turning back; and the upshot of all of
my pains was that we went round in circles. Teresina leaned out of the cart and
laughed immoderately; while Lauretta, with both hands clasped over her eyes,
screamed and wailed as though I were in mortal peril. Emboldened by sheer
desperation, I dug my spurs into the very ribs of the beast; and at virtually
the same instant, I found myself unceremoniously tossed on to the roadside. The
horse stood his ground, and, with neck outstretched, glared down at me in an
attitude of unmitigated scorn. I was patently incapable of getting up on my
own, and the driver hastened to assist me, while Lauretta, herself newly sprung
from the cart, resumed her screaming and wailing and Teresina kept right on
laughing. As I had sprained my foot, there was no question of my continuing the
journey on horseback. What choice did I have? The horse was hitched to the
carriage, into whose confines I was now obliged to withdraw. Picture to
yourself two fairly sizable women, a downright fat serving-girl, two pug-dogs,
a dozen cases, baskets, and boxes, plus Your Humble Servant, all crammed
into a tiny two-seated carriage--picture to yourself, moreover, Lauretta's endless
whining about the uncomfortable seats, the Neapolitan's equally interminable
chattering and Teresina's irremediable sulking; not to mention the unspeakable
aching of my foot: then, and only then, will you come fully to appreciate the
peculiar charm of my situation. Teresina could not, as she put it,
take it anymore. We drew to a halt, and in a single bound she was out of
the carriage. She unhitched my horse, mounted him side-saddle and trotted and
curvetted him hither and thither in our plain view. I had to admit that she cut
quite a splendid figure. And in the offing were still greater proofs of her
grace and sublimity of carriage and movement in the art of horsemanship. She
called for, and obtained, her guitar; and, with the reins slung round one arm,
and strumming open chords by way of accompaniment, proceeded to sing a
succession of stately Spanish ballads. The luminous folds of her silk dress
glittered and fluttered this way and that, as zephyrs lovingly wafted the white
feathers of her hat aloft and aground and aloft again in time with the music.
It all amounted to such a vision straight out of the romances of yore that I
could scarcely take my eyes off of Teresina; Lauretta, now cast aside,
metamorphosed into a perfect specimen of feminine asininity whose impertinence
was becoming ever more insufferable. But, luckily enough, we proceeded apace—either
because the horse had overcome his former stubbornness, or because he simply
found the company of the songstress more agreeable than that of the paladin—and
it was only when we had arrived at the very gates of the city that Teresina
climbed back into the carriage.
Picture me now in concerts and operas, picture me reveling in
every conceivable form of music-making—behold me in my new capacity as a vocal coach,
furiously swotting up the core repertoire for piano, for solo voice, for paired
voices, for everything else I have ever heard of. And observe, my friend, what
an essential, fundamental change I am now undergoing, pervaded as I am by this
wondrous new spirit of virtuosity. Every vestige of my small-town boy's shyness
evaporates when I sit down like a proper maestro at the keyboard, in front of
the score, to conduct one of my donna's performances. All my thoughts, all my
sensations, are comprised by a single sweet melody. I am now composing, in
blithe disregard of the rules of counterpoint, all manner of arias and
canzonets, which Lauretta is only too happy to sing—in the privacy of her
apartment. Why will she never sing any of my pieces in public? I cannot get my
head around it! But from time to time, the vision of Teresina astride her proud
steed, and with lyre in hand--like the veritable incarnation of the romantic
ideal in art—spontaneously impels me to compose one solemn lied in the high
style after another. To be sure, Lauretta dallies with notes like a perennially
shrewish Queen of the Fairies. How can
she but succeed at anything she attempts? Teresina eschews the full trill,
opting, rather, for a simple appoggiatura—or, at most, a mordent—but her clear,
drawn-out, undecaying notes illuminate every last nook and cranny heretofore
consigned to irremediable gloom, as newly-animated magic spirits gaze, with
eyes transfixed, into the innermost recesses of the heart. I can hardly fathom
how I have managed to live so long sequestered from such bliss.
At a certain point during the sisters' contractually-allotted
benefit night, Lauretta and I were performing a rather lengthy aria by Anfossi.
I was sitting, as usual, at the keyboard. We had just arrived at the very last
fermata of the piece. On this single measure, Lauretta lavished the full
panoply of her vocal technique: she warbled in ascending and descending
intervals like a nightingale (on sustained pitches throughout), then launched
into a most intricate, variegated succession of trills touching on every note
of the scale! To be quite frank, the whole thing struck me as being too long by
half, and I was beginning to feel a gentle breeze wafting against my shoulders:
Teresina, you see, was standing directly behind me. Now, at just this moment,
Lauretta was still building up to her final signature hairpin harmonic trill
from which she was planning to segue, a tempo, back into the letter of
the score. Here (at just this moment), Satan took possession of me: I pounded
out the resolving chord of the cadence with all ten fingers. The orchestra
followed my lead, forestalling, at the most fatal instant imaginable,
Lauretta's execution of that final trill, with which she had fully expected to
bring the house down. Lauretta, looking poisoned daggers at me, snatched up her
vocal score, flung it at my head (on encountering which obstacle it fell to
pieces), and stormed through the orchestra and clear on out into the wings. No
sooner had the tutti fallen silent, than I was on my feet and hurrying
after her. She wept, she raved. ‘Out of my sight, you malefactor—!’ she
screamed at me, ‘—you devil, who, out of sheer spite, have brought this
opprobrium upon me: upon my fame, upon my honor, upon my—ah!-upon my trillo!
Out of my sight, you heinous son of hell!’ She immediately fled my presence; I
dashed through the exit in pursuit. Meanwhile, of course, somebody had had to
keep the show going, that somebody in this case being by default
Teresina and the conductor, who, indeed, kept it going long enough to placate
Lauretta's fury to such a degree that she was persuaded to return to the stage;
this time round, however, I circumspectly recused myself from my keyboard duties.
In the sisters’ final duet, Lauretta did in fact and at last execute the
signature hairpin harmonic trill, which was delivered with impeccable
intonation and received with unanimous applause. But as I well knew that I
would never live down Lauretta's chastisement of me in full sight of the great
wide world, I was firmly resolved to depart for my native city the very next
morning. While I was busy packing up my belongings, Teresina entered my little
closet of a bedroom. On taking stock of the import of my preparations, she
exclaimed in frank astonishment, ‘Do you really intend to desert us?’ I
explained that, in light of the disgrace I had suffered at Lauretta's hands, I
could no longer remain in their company. ‘Are you really to be driven away so
suddenly,’ asked Teresina, ‘by the demented histrionics of such a self-centered
silly old goose, which in any case the goose herself now sincerely regrets? Do
you really think you can better shift for yourself on your own than with us?
Let me remind you that you have it well within your power to forestall any such
future outbursts on Lauretta's part, provided you can bring yourself to set her
a suitably stern example. But so far you have been altogether too soft, too
good-natured, too indulgent for your own good. To put it bluntly, you vastly
overrate Lauretta's talent. True, she has a decent voice that carries far
enough and then some; but as for all of these outlandish trills and endless
arpeggios—why, what do they amount to but so many cheap circus tricks admired
after the same fashion as the so-called death-defying feats of
tightrope-walkers? Can anything of this lowly sort penetrate our souls or touch
our hearts? I can scarcely stomach the harmonic trill that you sabotaged; I
find it both nerve-racking and depressing. And what of all of this labored
striving toward the stratospheric heights appropriated to the third position of
the violin: does it not constitute a perverse transgression of the natural
range of the human voice, within whose limits alone that instrument is truly
capable of rousing the emotions? Thank
heaven for the middle register!—and the lower one. For me, nothing can quite
compare to a genuine, heartfelt, soul-stirring portamento di voce. Strong
and steady intonation, unadorned by superfluous embellishment; a direct
emotional expressiveness that takes heart and soul alike into its bold embrace:
these qualities together comprise the essence of vocal music, and by these
qualities alone do I swear in my singing. Suffer, then, no longer for
Lauretta's sake, and turn your thoughts to Teresina, who will gladly suffer for
yours, provided that—in conformity with your proper calling—you are willing to
serve as my composer and accompanist. Far
be it from me to wish to offend you!—but all your pretty little canzonets
and arias taken together can scarcely hold a candle to the mighty—’ Here
Teresina sang, in her richly sonorous voice, a simple andante setting of a
liturgical text that I had composed a few days earlier. I had never imagined that it could sound
anything like this. The notes forced their way into my soul with
miraculous ease; my eyes filmed over with tears of mingled desire and delight;
I seized Terisina's hand; I pressed my lips to hers a thousand times; I vowed
never to part from her. Lauretta jealously, grimly, furiously observed the
flourishing of my liaison with Teresina; and all the while she continued to
stand in need of my coaching, because, being a poor sight-reader with a shaky
sense of rhythm, she was quite incapable of rehearsing anything new on her own.
Teresina was an accomplished sight-reader; her sense of rhythm, moreover, was
unequaled. Never did Lauretta so fully give vent to the obduracy and vehemence
of her passion as when accompanying her sister. Never, on such an occasion, was
the instrumental part even remotely up to snuff. She treated her part as one
does a necessary evil: you could scarcely hear the keyboard--always pianissimo,
and always getting slower and slower--and each measure, as though having
spontaneously popped into her head as a self-contained entity, was different in
time from the preceding one. By now I could no longer be bothered to humor her;
indeed, I engaged in open war with her perversity in telling her quite
pointedly that one might as well not play at all as play without energy, and
that there was a difference between carrying a song and floating it
to pieces against the tide of its basic pulse. Terisina loyally seconded my
opinion. I was now composing sacred music exclusively, and reserving the solo
vocal parts in my compositions for the alto register. And although Teresina
belittled me often enough, I put up with her nitpicking inasmuch as she was
more musically erudite than Lauretta and was likewise (so I assumed) more
favorably disposed towards German seriousness.
We were traveling through southern Germany. In a small town of
that region we happened upon an Italian tenor en route to Berlin from Milan.
Both of my ladies were utterly smitten by their compatriot--he, for his part,
could not be parted from either of them; but he took an especial shine to
Teresina, and to my hardly negligible annoyance I suddenly found myself
consigned to playing a bit part in the drama. One day, just as I was on the
verge of briskly marching into the sisters' room with a full score slung under
one arm, I happened to overhear an animated conversation taking place on the
other side of the threshold, a conversation between my two ladies and the
tenor. My name was mentioned: I snapped to attention and eagerly pricked up my
ears. By now, I understood Italian so well that not a single word escaped me.
Lauretta was recounting the tragic events of that night when, by my ill-timed
striking of the downbeat, I had cut short her trill. 'Asino tedesco!'
cried the tenor. I was of more than half
a mind to burst into the room and throw the puffed-up drama king out the window,
but restrained myself. Lauretta continued by saying that she had wanted to send
me packing from the beginning, but that out of sheer pity she had yielded to my
abject entreaties to take me under her wing as a pupil in the art of singing,
and as my teacher reluctantly continued to endure my company. Teresina, to my hardly negligible
astonishment, corroborated this description of me. ‘He is a good boy,’
she added, ‘and as he is now in quite smitten with me he writes only for the
alto register. While he is not completely lacking in talent, he has yet to
shake himself free—as he must do—of that awkward stiffness peculiar to Germans.
I still hope, for my own purposes, to make a composer out of him; to incite him
to compose a few trifles for solo alto, and afterwards to let him go. His
endless cooing and pining alone render him thoroughly insufferable; but, on top
of that, he persistently tortures me with his tiresome compositions, which have
so far been consistently wretched in quality.’ ‘Well, I, at any rate,’ chimed
in Lauretta, ‘am happily free of such molestation; but I trust, Teresina, that
you will recall how this fellow used to nettle me with his arias and duets?’
Lauretta now launched into one of my duets, a composition that, I must
emphasize, she had formerly roundly commended. Teresina followed with the
second vocal part, and between the two of them, by way of intonation and
diction, they executed the cruelest imaginable travesty of my work. The tenor
laughed so hard that the walls echoed; an icy shudder shook my frame—my
decision was firm and irrevocable. Noiselessly, I slunk from the door back to
my own room by way of the window overlooking the side-street. Directly opposite
lay the post office. The Bamberg mail-coach had just driven up, and it was now
waiting out its loading interval. The passengers were already standing at the
gateway, but I still had an hour left. I hastily gathered up my belongings,
magnanimously paid our full reckoning at the inn, and hurried away to the post
office. As I rode through the high street, I happened to espy my two ladies,
along with the tenor, still standing at the window of their chamber; and,
indeed, subsequently poking their heads out at the sound of the post-horn. I
withdrew into the background and privately gloated over the ineluctably
devastating impression to be made by the bilious letter I had left for them at
the inn.”
With remarkable aplomb, Theodor quaffed the fiery dregs of the aleatico
that Eduard had just poured out for him. “I would never—” the latter said, as
he opened another bottle and poured away the layer of oil drops swimming on the
surface of its contents,”—I would never have supposed your Teresina capable of
such calculating duplicity. I quite simply cannot exorcise from my mind the
enchanting image of her sitting astride that horse, and dancing to and fro in
those graceful curvets, and singing those Spanish ballads.” “That was her
finest moment,” Theodor interrupted. “I myself can still recall how peculiarly
I was moved by that very scene. I forgot all my troubles; Teresina seemed then
to be the actual manifestation of some higher order of being. It is only too
true that such moments cleave fast to one's being and, quite in defiance of
one's expectations, assume many a form that time itself is incapable of
effacing. Thus, now, whenever I happen to hear a spirited ballad, the image of
Teresina starts to my mind in all its original brilliance of color.”
“But,” said Eduard, “Let us not forget the talented Lauretta; and
let us accordingly—having set all grudges aside--drink to the health of both
sisters.” And so they did! “Ah,” said
Theodor, “how this wine fairly overwhelms me with its enchanting aroma of Italy—how
my every nerve and vein fairly glows with new life! Ah, why ever was I obliged so suddenly to
forsake that glorious country a second time!” “Still,” Eduard interjected, “in
none of what you have so far related do I discern the remotest connection to
our divine painting, and thus do I surmise that you have more to tell me
regarding the sisters; for I readily perceive that the two ladies in the
picture are none other than Lauretta and Teresina themselves.” “Indeed they
are,” replied Theodor, “and, indeed, all my present wistful hankering after the
aforementioned glorious country segues perfectly into what I have yet to
relate. Two years ago, when I was living
in Rome but about to leave it, I undertook a little excursion on horseback. In
the course of this excursion, I came upon a friendly young girl standing in the
forecourt of a locanda, and it seemed fitting that I should beseech this pretty
child for a draught of the noble grape. I stood there, on horseback, at the
entrance of the house, in an arcade illuminated intermittently, from the side,
by shafts of sunlight. From some distance away, my ears caught snatches of
singing and guitar-playing. I listened more closely, so peculiarly struck was I
by the two female voices, inasmuch as they conjured up in my mind the most
unaccountably mysterious remembrances, remembrances that yet refused to take
definite shape. I thereupon dismounted and, harkening to every note, approached
the wine-bower from which the music seemed to be emanating. The second voice had
fallen silent. The first was singing a
solo canzonet. The nearer I drew to the
bower, the further the initial impetus of familiarity receded. Now, the voice
was lingering over a fermata, in an elaborate chromatic cadenza. It warbled up
and down, up and down the scale, and finally alighted on a single sustained
note; but then, a female voice—a speaking voice, not a singing one—suddenly
erupted into a torrent of frenzied fault-finding—of curses, oaths, and
calumnies! A man protests; another man laughs. A second female speaker joins in
the melée. With ever-mounting fury, and ever-evident Italian rabbia, the
tempest rages on. At length, I reach and hold fast at the threshold of the
bower. Thence an abbot suddenly emerges and runs straight into me; and, indeed,
practically bowls me over in his exit. He takes one look at me and I immediately
identify him as none other than Signor Ludovico, my trusty intelligencer on all
musical doings in Rome! ‘What, in heaven's name—?’ I cry. ‘Ah, Signor
Maestro, Signor Maestro!’ he exclaims, ‘Save me, I beg you: protect
me from this termagant, from this crocodile, from this tiger—this hyena, this
demon of a girl. It is true; it is true: I was conducting Anfossi's canzonet
and struck the downbeat too soon, in the middle of the fermata; I cut short her
trillo—if only I had not looked into
her eyes, into the eyes of that Sataness! The Devil take all fermatas, all
fermatas!' With remarkable expedition, the abbot and I hastened into the
wine-bower; and there, at a single glance, I recognized my two sisters,
Lauretta and Tersina. Lauretta was still screaming and fuming, and Teresina was
still vehemently remonstrating with her; the landlord, his bare arms folded
across his chest, was looking on and laughing as a girl replenished the table
with a complement of fresh bottles. No sooner had the singers taken notice of
my presence, than they rushed towards me—‘Ah, Signor Teodoro!’—and
overwhelmed me with caresses. All
contention was instantly forgotten. ‘Behold,’ said Lauretta to the abbot, ‘behold:
a composer with the grace of an Italian and the strength of a German!’ The two
sisters now fell into animated conversation between themselves, a conversation
touching on such topics as the happy days of our time together, the
precociousness of my youthful musical erudition, our exercises, and the
superiority of my compositions (they could never have wished for better songs
to sing than mine); Teresina rounding out the whole by informing me that she
had been engaged by an impresario to sing some leading tragic roles next
Carnival season, but she wished to make clear that she would undertake this
engagement 'only on condition that at least one newly-commissioned opera by you
figures in the program,' for after all, high tragedy was just my line of work,
etc. Lauretta, on the other hand, maintained that it would be a pity were I to
curb my contrary predilection for elegance, for levity—in a word, for opera
buffa. She said that she had been engaged as a prima donna in several
performances in that genre, and that it went without saying that nobody but me would
be allowed to compose any opera she was to sing in. You can well imagine the
curious mixture of emotions I felt as I was standing between the two of them
just then. You will, moreover, have
realized by now that the little gathering I happened upon was the selfsame one
depicted by Hummel, and that I happened upon it at the very moment when the
abbot was cutting short Lauretta's fermata.” “But surely," said Eduard, “they
recalled the circumstances of your parting, and your bilious letter?” “They
breathed not a word in allusion to either of them; nor, for that matter, did I,
for every last shadow of resentment had long since fled my mind, and my
adventures with the sisters become a source of private jocular amusement. I
allowed myself but one sop to the bad old days in relating to the abbot how I,
a few years previous, and likewise in the middle of an aria by Anfossi, had
suffered the same calamity that he had suffered today. Brusquely condensing my
entire period of collaboration with the sisters into this single tragicomic episode,
and deftly sniping at them along the way, I made the two sisters feel the full
measure of my superiority to them, and of the years rich in artistic and
private experience that had raised me to such a height. ‘And yet I was right,’ I concluded, ‘to cut
short the fermata when I did, for otherwise the thing would have gone on
forever; and, indeed, I believe that if the lady had had her way I would still
be sitting at that piano right now.’ ‘But Signor,’ replied the abbot, ‘surely
no maestro may presume to give orders to his prima donna; and your
transgression, in the concert hall, was perforce of a much more criminal nature
than mine, in this bower—actually, I was only a theoretical maestro; no
one could have supposed me otherwise—and had I not been overawed by the sight
of the sweet fire emanating from these heavenly eyes, I would not have made
such an ass of myself as I did.’ The abbot's last sentence had a decidedly
salutary effect, for Lauretta, whose eyes had begun to let off sparks of
rekindled fury during the earlier part of his speech, was now completely
quiescent.
We remained together into the evening. The fourteen years since my
parting from the sisters had wrought great changes. Lauretta had visibly aged,
but she was still attractive enough. Teresina had held up better and retained
her fine figure. Both were fairly colorfully dressed, and their mannerisms were
the same as before—in other words, fourteen years younger than the women themselves.
At my request, Teresina sang a few of those solemn lieder that had once moved
me so deeply, but they seemed not to resonate in my soul in the same way that
they formerly had done; and it was the same with Lauretta’s singing, which,
although her voice had not perceptibly declined in either range or volume, was
nonetheless entirely dissimilar to the Laurettan vocal idiom that still resided
in my heart. The obtrusion of this contrast between an inner idea and its
none-too-agreeable counterpart in the external world was bound to put me out of
humor, as the behavior of the sisters towards me—their simulated ecstasies,
their tactless fawning, their condescendingly pre-fabricated offers of
patronage—already had done. Eventually, the comical abbot—who flirted with the
sisters in the sweetest manner imaginable—together with the fine wine, imbibed
in copious quantities, restored to me my good mood, such that the evening
cheerfully expired in a puff of unalloyed geniality. With the greatest zeal,
the sisters invited me to pay them a visit so that we could come to an agreement
about the requirements of the parts that I was to compose for them. I quitted
Rome without bothering to seek them out beforehand.”
“And yet," said Eduard, "it is to them that you owe the
original awakening of your inner song.”
“To be sure,” replied Theodor, "and quite a few fine melodies
to boot, but precisely for that reason I would have been better off had I never
seen them again. Every composer can call to mind some original, powerful
impression immune to the ravages of time. The spirit immanent in living sound
has spoken to him, enunciating a Logos that has appropriated him to its own
ends, awakening the spirit long dormant in his soul and causing it to shine
forth with eternally unconquerable radiance. Indeed, in being imbued with such
radiance, all melodies that come from the heart seem to us to be the rightful
property of the women who first ignited the melodic flame therein. Once having
heard them, we commit to paper only what they have sung. It is, however, the
lot of us fallible mortals, bound as we are to this mud-heap of a world of
ours, to endeavor to circumscribe such etherealities within the pitifully
straitened limits of terrestrial actuality. So comes the lady vocalist to be
our mistress—nay, our wife!; the spell is broken, and our inner melody,
erstwhile herald of the glorious realm beyond, debased into the housewife's
lament over a broken soup bowl or an ink stain in a batch of clean laundry. Fortunate beyond compare is the composer who
never sets his terrestrial eyes a second time upon the woman who had the
mysterious power to kindle his inner music. Let the young man be violently racked by the
torments and disappointments of love, for once he has been separated for good
from his fair enchantress, her image will metamorphose into a divine sound that
will perdure in an eternal exuberance of youth and beauty, and from this sound
will be born the melodies that are and never can be anything but unchanging
iterations of this eternal she. What,
then, is this she, if not the highest ideal, which, in the course of its
unceasing emanations from within, contingently finds itself mirrored by some
essentially alien image in the external world?”
“Strange, but not implausible,” said Eduard, as the two friends
strode arm in arm from Tarone's restaurant into the open air.
THE END
Notes
1. My uncle: Johnanna C. Sahlin, editor and translator of Selected Letters of E. T. A. Hoffmann (Chicago, 1977) writes: “According to [Theodor Gottlieb] Hippel's memoirs, [Hoffmann's Uncle] O[tto]. Doerffer was H.’s ‘first teacher in music.’ H. tells about his uncle's musical pursuits in Der Musikfeind, in Fermate [sic] (Pauses [sic]), and in the Kreisler biography” (p. 46 [note to a 23 January 1796 letter to Hippel]).
2. Our little town: Presumably, by default, Hoffmann's native city of Königsberg; in other words, as far as this narrative is concerned, a town as remote from Italy as any German locale could be.
3. Arithmetician: for Hoffmann’s Rechenmeister, but occupationally speaking, the inexcusable anachronism math teacher is probably nearer the denotational mark (while the third plausible alternative, mathematics instructor, is, in the words of a certain translator of Chekhov whose name escapes me, “pure translationese’). Sahlin conjectures that the biographical antecedent of this Rechenmeister was one C. G. Richter (Selected Letters, p. 116 [note to a 28 June 1806 letter to Ludwig Zacharias Werner]). But in her index she gives Richter's dates as 1778-1809; thus, by her account, Hoffmann's “old” organist was in fact two years his junior.
4. Lottchen at Court [Lottchen am Hofe]. A 1767 singspiel with music by Johann Adam Hiller (1728-1804) and libretto by Christian Felix Weisse (1726-1804) after Goldoni and Favart.
5. Doose: In the original text, duse (italics Hoffmann's), presumably a phonetic rendering of Mlle. Meibel's uncultivated (specifically East Prussian?) pronunciation of the French douce. Thanks here are due to Prof. Arndt Niebisch (formerly of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and now of the University of Vienna) for clueing me in to the word's probable Gallic original and putting an end to my futile efforts to derive it from the Italian dulce.
6. Smorfiosa: translatable as either “coquette” or “prude.” Teresina’s behavior obviously alternates between that of both types.
Translation
©2008 by Douglas Robertson
Translation
revised in August 2104
