Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  “The Classical style in music is seen as having emerged after the Baroque period, and that it relates to the Baroque as if it came into being in order to oppose it, to develop in confrontation with it, making the transition from polyphony and complex contrapuntal works to the simpler world of homophony. And the most important form,” he said, pausing to rake his hand through his hair, as if making an effort to concentrate, “perfected in the Classical period is sonata form. But you already know all this, and so I intend to talk about an intrinsic matter, about style itself,” said Theo, taking off his glasses, rubbing his eyes, and then putting the glasses down on the piano. “What kind of human metaphor, what state of mind, what kind of feeling was expressed by Classical music? That is our ultimate question. The Romantics considered the music of the Classical period abstract music. But when we listen to it today, the first question that comes into our minds, if we’re honest about it, is: Is it sad or happy? We know that minor keys, then as now, were regarded as expressing sadness, and that is no longer abstract.”

  He paused, as if awaiting confirmation. The youngsters’ faces looked thoughtful, and some nodded in agreement. He put on his glasses again. “There is, however, a way to discover what feelings composers thought they were expressing in their music, and that is to examine what music they wrote when they were setting words to it. Even single words. If we look at masses and requiem masses composed from late medieval times down to the present day, we find that the very same Latin words are set to very different kinds of music, and this, of course, reflects the very different worlds in which these works came into being. Every mass opens with a prayer for mercy, the Kyrie, then comes the Gloria, and after these two comes the all-important central section, the Credo.” The audience of young people sat still, in respectful and suspenseful silence.

  “The Credo is the central statement of the core of Catholic Christian faith,” Theo explained. “The text begins with an affirmation of belief in one God but also—and this may sound absurd to us—in the two other persons of the Trinity: Jesus Christ, the son of God, and the Holy Ghost, who incarnated Jesus through the Virgin Mary. Jesus descended from heaven for our salvation, and he was crucified and resurrected from the dead. He ascended to heaven and sits at the right hand of God. This is what the Credo of every mass in every century says.”

  A freckled young man smiled. Nita clasped her hands and stared at a point in the distance. It seemed to Michael that she was making every effort to avoid his eyes, and for a moment he thought that she was about to get up and leave the room. What harm have I done you? he pleaded with his eyes, as if he were trying to clear a path to her, but her eyes would not meet his. He went on looking at her. Not that he didn’t know what he had done to her. He knew very well that he had suddenly disappeared from her house, and that, just as suddenly, the baby girl had disappeared, too. And that since yesterday he hadn’t spoken to her. But somehow he believed, for a moment he was even sure, or maybe only hopeful, that she would have faith in him. Enough faith to understand that he had no alternative, that in order to remain part of the investigation he had to keep away from her. He had thought that the estrangement between them would only be temporary, that it would end in a few days. But now that he had seen her, he realized that he hadn’t allowed himself to think it through. He had considered neither the situation nor her possible reactions. He hadn’t taken into account what her immediate response to the fact of his absence would be, preferring to cling to a vague conviction that she would understand what was at stak as if she could read his mind, as if she could understand on her own everything there was to understand.

  Suddenly she looked at him, and a faint blush spread over her pale cheeks. As if against her will something approaching a smile appeared at the corners of her lips. Maybe he only imagined that he saw a spark of understanding in her eyes, and maybe even a kind of relief that he was here now.

  Theo went over to the stereo system on a shelf in front of a red brick wall next to a fireplace and a pile of logs, took a compact disc out of the player, and examined it closely. “What I want to do now,” he said absently as he put the disc back into the player, “is to compare Mozart’s setting of a passage we heard a few minutes ago in the Credo of Bach’s B Minor Mass, the words Et homo factus est—‘And was made man.’ And in particular to compare how the word ‘man’ is set by each composer. With that, intentionally or not, each composer expressed what it meant to him to be a man, and what’s more,” Theo waved an arm enthusiastically, “with their settings of this one word they also show they think about what happened to God when he turned into a man, whether it was something bad or good.”

  Michael noticed Yuval’s half-open mouth and the gaze fixed on Theo’s face.

  “The more interesting setting, from this point of view, is Mozart’s. Listen to the Et incarnatus est of his C Minor Mass, K.427, written in the early 1780s, after he had left Salzburg for Vienna and began working freelance.” He pressed the button and the room was filled with the sounds of a soprano and a flute, oboe, and bassoon. To Michael it seemed that everyone was holding their breath. As Theo sat down to listen demonstratively, the new man sent by headquarters kept his eyes on him as if by magnetic attraction.

  “How would you describe the mood of this passage?” asked Theo with curiosity after he stopped the music. Michael listened absentmindedly to the answers, which dwelled, among other things, on the beauty and optimism in the flute part. He found himself listening proudly and attentively when Yuval said that for him the soprano, especially in this performance, which he had never heard before, was “the essence of purity.” He went on to say that “this means that, for Mozart, man is something pure and beautiful, a source of hopefulness, especially if we compare it to Bach’s setting.”

  Theo seemed surprised, but he hastened to say: “Not all of the Mozart Mass is like this.” He waved his index finger admonishingly. “It is also a harsh and bitter piece. See the very opening, for instance. In the Et incarnatus est the style is really different.” Theo’s voice rose dramatically and fell to almost a whisper as he added: “In Bach’s Mass that and the Crucifixus are very slow.” He paused as if to give them time to remember. “That is how Bach composed the passage where God becomes man.”

  Michael’s eyes strayed from the ancient, gnarled olive tree whose gray leaves touched the window to a blue violin case lying not far from Nita’s feet, which rested closely together on the floor.

  “In Bach the incarnation is a cause for mourning,” said Yuval loudly. Theo smiled. He praised Yuval’s observation, and then began, again with the tone of a storyteller, to explain: “What produces the feeling of grief, and also confirms that this was Bach’s intention, is the presence of a basso ostinato in the style of a lament. The lament,” he continued with somewhat strained enthusiasm, “which developed in Italy over a period of three hundred years, is an imitation of weeping. From the Renaissance to the Romantic period, opera heroes and heroines die in this style. When Bach thinks of God coming down to earth—he thinks of it as an a priori bad thing. For him, when the Holy Spirit descends, it keeps on going deeper and deeper down, creating a metaphor in sound for something very dangerous happening to the Deity. For Bach the incarnation is the immediate prelude to the Crucifixion. For him Et homo factus leads straight to the Crucifixion. In his eyes the descent of God to the world is in itself the cause of the Crucifixion. The moment in which God becomes man is connected to catastrophe, lamentation, tragedy. In Haydn’s Nelson Mass, you’ll remember, the Et incarnatus est is also given to a soloist. The word ‘man’ is heard,” his voice rose almost to a shout, “but everyone has his own choice of man, and Mozart chooses a soprano, a woman.”

  Again Theo paused before the eyes gazing at him with undisguised admiration, and he smiled.

  “A Romantic would say that the kind of virtuoso music Mozart gives his soloist here is completely unsuited to the text. It sounds like some kind of multiple-instrument concerto. But look at what kind of a concerto bl
ossoms here at the words ‘and was made man.’” Theo told them that they would now hear the passage again, and as he pressed the buttons he declaimed the words Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est. He held his hand up in the air and exhorted them: “And now listen, here begins the ho . . . mo, stretched out in a slow coloratura, and finishing with the words factus est. And after that the opening words are repeated. Right?”

  Without waiting for a reply, he pressed the button, the passage was heard again, and before it ended was switched off. “And then, after the chord under the sustained fa- of factus, comes the astonishing, concer-tolike cadenza for the soprano, accompanied by the three wind instruments. Do you understand what this means?”

  There was silence in the room. An embarrassed silence, because it was clear that the audience did not know what it meant. The young new detective relaxed his arms and recrossed them on his chest. Nita’s eyes were closed, and her face was immobile. She looked as if she were sleeping.

  “From the moment the word ‘man’ is uttered,” said Theo with undisguised excitement, “the music takes on an ideal form, becomes a kind of idea of beauty. There are all kinds of echoes here, symmetries, everything that Mozart knew. This passage is one of the most distilled examples of the beauty of the Classical style. Mozart sees the descent of the Holy Spirit as liberating the world, unlike Bach, who sees the descent as activating it. Either way, man is the solution, as it were, to the Divine mystery.”

  Nita’s eyes opened. She gave Theo a look of concentrated sharpness, as if she was wondering about something she had just remembered. As if he felt her look and wanted to distract her, Theo raised his voice, stressing every word: “The idea of music as beauty is contained in the word ‘man’ here, not architectonic beauty but the ways in which types of beauty are symbols of the activities of life. The syllable fa here is both the F-major key of the aria and the Italian verb for ‘to do,’ or ‘to make.’ Do you remember where else Mozart used this far?”

  Not waiting for an answer, he hurried on: “At the end of the Catalogue Aria in Don Giovanni. Do you remember what Leporello says there? He sings: Voi sapete quel che fa—meaning, ‘You know what he did.’ Meaning, if you’ll forgive the expression, ‘He fucked.’ So there you have the full sense of the way in which Mozart relates to fa, and this sense he introduces into the C Minor Mass in another context: conception, birth, becoming man, incarnation. He sees the transformation of God into human as entry into the most beautiful thing there is. And for its sake he employs the human voice and the instruments into a kind of soap bubble of what seems to him, and not only him, the perfect idea of the beautiful. That is what Mozart did here.”

  Perhaps it was the words “conception” and “birth” that brought back the stab of pain, thought Michael as he placed his hand on his chest and tried to imagine where the baby was now, who was feeding her. He interrupted himself when he heard a kind of collective sigh, as if the audience had let out its breath all at once. No one spoke, but the tension in the room again diminished for a moment. Theo waited and looked around. His eyes gleamed when they met Michael’s. Then he turned his head to Nita, who looked like a wax figure.

  How could she sit there in the same position for so long, Michael wondered. But for an occasional blink—and he had hardly taken his eyes off her—he would have thought she had lost consciousness. He was certain now, as she opened her eyes wide and he saw how enlarged her pupils were, that she was heavily sedated.

  What harm have I done you? he said bitterly to himself. Why can’t you understand that this is the way things have to be for now? But he knew that he would not ask her these questions today.

  “Now I want to turn to something that may sound strange, but in the end you’ll see that it’s relevant. It’s about the slow movements in Classical-period compositions. Some people feel like falling asleep during the passages when the music becomes slow and wearying; that, by the way, is how Haydn could write a Surprise Symphony. In other words, at certain moments some people fall asleep. Classical-period composers often begin their andantes and adagios with a marvelous melody, second and third themes follow, and then there suddenly arises from the background a note that is repeated over and over in a literally monotonous manner that is perceived as wearying.”

  The girl with the flute giggled. “Here’s Mozart in the A Minor Piano Sonata. Let’s listen to it for a while.” He turned around and picked up a CD.

  “Who’s playing?” asked the girl. “Murray Perahia,” said Theo, and he pressed the button. “The slow movement.” After a few minutes he halted the music, saying, “Let’s stop here, where the repeated notes begin yet again, along with a trill.”

  He put the CD back in its box and picked up another. “This time, the andante of Mozart’s Haffner Symphony,” he said, and after a while: “Here they are, the same obsessively repeated notes.” Again the music was turned off. “There’s a vast number of slow, movements whose central internal episode is built up against the background of a single repeated note that acts as a kind of tonal horizon. I’ve tried for a long time without success,” confessed Theo, “to find another musical style, among any of the world’s traditions, that uses repeated notes in this way I’ve never found one. It exists only in the Classical style, and often in rapid movements as well.” The youthful musicians all looked as if they, too, were searching their memories. Someone shifted in his seat, the girl with the flute frowned, Yuval put his finger to his lip. They were wondering if Theo was right.

  After a pause he went on: “Anyone who plays an instrument, as you all do, knows how difficult it is to properly repeat one note again and again. And what is this monotone anyway? Is it a line? Is it a horizon? It isn’t isolated, because it has a rhythm and a tempo, but it isn’t much of a melody because the next note is its twin. And it isn’t a pedal point, which is its congealed cousin. It’s a place of stillness in the very center of the work. If we miss that,” he said, his voice again rising dramatically, “we fall asleep. But when we feel it, we find ourselves at a point of minimal being, confronting this monotone, and I think . . .” and again he paused for a while, “I think that it’s intimately connected with the body’s pulse.”

  Yuval opened his mouth.

  “I really do think that it’s directly connected with heartbeat,” Theo added. Yuval sat up straight in his chair, very agitated.

  “From the end of the Renaissance to Mozart’s father’s time,” announced Theo, “many musicians set andante tempo by the human pulse—seventy-two beats per minute.”

  A kind of relief flooded Michael for a moment, as he remembered Dora Zackheim talking about Baroque tempo. Suddenly the words sounded familiar to him, but he was surprised that it was Theo saying them. Surely, Michael thought, it would have been more fitting for him to be giving a lecture about Wagner. It was surprising to hear him talking of Baroque music with such respect and passion. Dora Zackheim had spoken of his brilliance as a music theoretician, but Michael had somehow failed to take her seriously “The pulse defines the tempo of this line of notes, this thread of life! They dared to construct entire movements with accompaniments based on repetition,” cried Theo. He sat down again on the piano bench.

  “In the Classical period, music for the first time is no longer abstract. It is now exclusively an activity of life itself! Think about Zerlina in Don Giovanni, how she puts Masetto’s hand on her breast and in the accompaniment you hear precisely the heart and its rhythm. Think about it! Do you know that Mozart cribbed this? This isn’t my idea,” said Theo modestly. “H. C. Robbins Landon discovered that Mozart got it from Haydn, who, by the way, wrote some wonderful operas.” He suddenly cleared his throat, as if he were about to choke. “One of them . . . excuse me,” he said, and he coughed lengthily, “Il Mondo della luna, contains many passages built on the pulse beat, because one of the characters has a heart attack in the finale, accompanied by a series of scales. It isn’t always the heart in the sense of a pump,” he said, smiling
, “it’s pulses that might be called molecules of the soul.”

  Michael wondered if he should believe this stuff about molecules of the soul, and, overall, he wondered how, if his intuitions about Theo were correct, he could possibly say the things he was saying here today. In any event, he said to himself as Theo asked the audience to listen again to Mozart’s A Minor Sonata, the things he had said about man were . . .

  His train of thought was interrupted when Theo, bending over the CD player, said: “Classical-period music is the first music that takes place entirely within the ‘soul.’ And the heart, the pulse, the most basic activity of life, is the hidden, constant voice of this music, the music that gave the beat such a dominant place as to grant it the status of an independent voice. Where this happens is the ‘divine’ place, and therefore it puts some listeners to sleep.” Now he put the CD down and stood up again.

  “They become giddy because this place is in essence mystical, as in a kind of return to the womb they suddenly hear their mother’s beating heart, and on it depends the whole world, all of sounding existence. When Haydn and Mozart come to this ta-ta-ta-ta”—Theo pronounced the syllables with deliberate dullness—“to this apparent monotony, they are at the very core of their style, the focal point of the myth of Classical music. From then on it becomes clear that music is no longer an image of the cosmic order, as in Bach, but a matter of mind and mood.”

  Theo pressed a button, and Nita closed her eyes again. A vertical line appeared between her eyebrows. Had Theo really invented all these things, or were they accepted truths? How lucky these gifted youngsters were, Michael thought with a pang, to really understand, to have it all at their fingertips, while he . . . Everyone was silent when the music stopped. And slowly they rose to their feet. Some clapped, others went up to Theo. Michael pricked up his ears, but he only managed to catch the name Wagner and a few words of Theo’s: “Of course not in The Flying Dutchman. . . .” As soon as he saw Michael looking at him he averted his face and lowered his voice. The boy at the tape recorder switched it off. The young man with his arms crossed sitting between Yuval and Nita still didn’t move. Nita, too, remained seated. Michael stood up, approached her, bent over her, and put his hand on her arm. She opened her eyes. The pupils were really dilated. Something flickered in the eyes of the young police detective.