Otto frowned. He had been saying lately that he had had no idea how many idiots wrote songs until he married a singer. The first he glanced at relieved his suspicions, being a duet for tenor and baritone, and he remembered to smooth the frown off his forehead. The last of the four caught his attention, a setting of a Goethe lyric. He moved very slightly as he sat at the desk, a mere twitch towards the piano, instantly repressed. No use raising hopes; to play a note of their stuff was to convince them at once that they were Beethoven and would be produced in the capital by Otto Egorin within the month. But it was a real bit of writing, that tune with the clever, yearning, quiet little accompaniment. He went on to the Mass, or rather three fragments of a Mass, a Kyrie, Benedictus, and Sanctus. The writing was neat, rapid, and crowded; music-paper is not cheap, thought Otto, glancing at his visitor’s shoes. At the same time he was hearing a solo tenor voice over a queer racket from organ, trombones, and double-basses, “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini”—very queer stuff; but no, there now, just when it’s about to drive you mad it all turns to crystal, so simply, so simply you’d swear it was crystal all along. And the tenor, the poor devil singing double-piano way up there, find me the tenor who can do that and fight off the trombones too. The Sanctus: now, splendid, the trumpet, really splendid—Otto looked up. He had been tapping the side of his hand on the desk, nodding, grinning, muttering. That had blown it. “Come here!” he said angrily. “What’s your name? What’s this?”
“Ladislas Gaye. The—the—That’s the second trumpet.”
“Why isn’t it marked? Here, take it, play it!”
They went through the Sanctus five times. “Planh, pla-anh, planh!” Otto blared, a trumpet. “All right! Why do your basses come in there, one-two-three-four-boom in come the basses like elephants, where does that get you?”
“Back to the Sanctus, listen, here’s the organ under the tenors,” and the piano roared under Gaye’s husky tenor, “Sabaoth, then the cellos and the elephants, four, Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus!”
He sat back from the piano, Otto took his eyes from the score. The room was silent.
Otto set straight a drooping red rose in the bouquet on the top of the hired piano. “And where do you expect to have this Mass sung?”
The composer was silent.
“Women’s chorus. Double men’s chorus. Full orchestra; brass choir; organ. Well, well. Let me see those songs again. Is this all you’ve written of the Mass?”
“The Credo isn’t orchestrated yet.”
“I suppose you’ll throw in double tympani for that? All right, here, where is it, the Goethe. Let me play.” He played through the song twice, then sat twiddling out one of the queer half-spoken phrases of the accompaniment. “It’s first rate, you know,” he said. “Absolutely first rate. What the devil. Are you a pianist? What are you?”
“A clerk.”
“A clerk? What kind of clerk? This is your hobby, eh, your amusement in spare time?”
“No, this is…this is what I…”
Otto looked up at the man: short and shabby, white with excitement, inarticulate.
“I want to know something about you, Gaye! You barge in, ‘I write music,’ you show me a little music, very good. Very good, this song, the Sanctus, the Benedictus too, that’s real work, I want to read it again. But I’ve been shown good writing before. Have you been performed? How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“What else have you written?”
“Nothing else of any size—”
“At thirty? Four songs and half a Mass?”
“I haven’t much time to work.”
“This is nonsense. Nonsense! You don’t write this kind of thing without practice. Where did you study?”
“Here, at the Schola Cantorum—till I was nineteen.”
“With whom? Berdicke, Chey?”
“Chey and Mme Veserin.”
“Never heard of her. And this is all you’ll show me?”
“The rest isn’t good, or isn’t finished—”
“How old were you when you wrote this song?”
Gaye hesitated. “Twenty, I think.”
“Ten years ago! What have you been doing since? You ‘want to write music,’ eh? Well, write it! What else can I say? This is good, absolutely good, and so is that racket with the trombones. You can write music, but, my dear man, what can I do about it? Can I produce four songs and half a Mass by an unknown student of Vaslas Chey? No. You want encouragement, I know. Well, that I give. I encourage you. I encourage you to write more music. Why don’t you?”
“I realise this is very little,” Gaye brought out stiffly. His face was contorted, one hand was fiddling and pulling at the knot of his tie. Otto was sorry for him and unnerved by him. “Very little, why not make it more?” he said, genial. Gaye looked down at the piano keys, put his hand on them; he was shaking. “You see,” he began, then turned away with a jerk, stooping, hiding his face with his hands, and broke into sobs. Otto sat like a stone on the piano bench. The small boy, forgotten all this time, sitting with his grey-stockinged legs hanging over the edge of the sofa, slipped down and ran to his father; of course he was blubbering too, but he kept pulling at his father’s coat, trying to get at his hand, whispering, “Papa, don’t, papa, please don’t.” Gaye knelt and put his arm around the child. “Sorry, Vasli, don’t worry, it’s all right…” But he was not yet in control of himself. Otto rose with some majesty, and called in his wife’s maid. “Take the laddie, go give him candy, make him happy, eh?” The girl, a calm Swiss who knew all Central Europeans were mad, nodded, ignoring the weeping man, and said, “Come, what’s your name?”
The child held on to his father.
“Go with her, Vasli,” Gaye said. The child let her take his hand, and went out with her.
“You have a fine little boy,” said Otto. “Now, sit down, Gaye. Brandy? A little, eh?” He opened and shut desk drawers, puffed and grunted to himself, put a glass in Gaye’s hand, sat down again at the desk.
“I can’t—” Gaye began, worn out, at rock bottom.
“No, you can’t; neither can I; these things happen. You were more surprised than I, perhaps. But listen now, Ladislas Gaye. I have no time for the woes of all the world, I have a great many cares of my own and I’m very busy. But since we’ve come so far, I’d like to know what makes you break down like this.”
Gaye shook his head. With the submissiveness that had vanished only while they were going through his score, he answered Otto’s questions. He had had to quit the music school when his father died; he now supported his mother, his wife, his three children on his pay as clerk for a plant that made ballbearings and other small steel parts. He had worked there eleven years. Four evenings a week he gave piano lessons, for which they let him use a practice-room at the Schola Cantorum.
Otto did not find much to say for a while. “The good Lord has seen fit to give you bad luck,” he remarked. Gaye did not reply. Indeed, good or bad luck seemed hardly adequate to describe this kind of solid, persevering mismanagement of the world, from which Ladislas Gaye and most other men suffered, and Otto Egorin, for no clear reason, did not. “Why did you come to see me, Gaye?”
“I had to. I knew what you’d have to say, that I haven’t written enough. But when I heard you were to be here, I swore to myself I’d see you, I had to. They know me at the Schola, but they’re busy with their students, of course; since Chey died there’s no one who…I had to see you. Not for encouragement, but to see a man who lives for music, who arranges half the concerts in the country, who stands for…for…”
“For success,” said Otto Egorin. “Yes, I know. I wanted to be a composer. When I was twenty, in Vienna, I used to go look at the house where Mozart lived, I used to go stare at Beethoven’s tomb in the cemetery. I called on Mahler, on Richard Strauss, every composer who came to Vienna. I soaked myself in their success, the dead and the living. They had written music and it was played. Even then, you see, I knew I was not a real co
mposer, and I needed their reality, to make life mean anything at all. That’s not your problem. You need only to be reminded that there is music—eh? That not everyone makes steel ballbearings.”
Gaye nodded.
“Is there no one else,” Otto asked abruptly, “to take care of mama?”
“My sister married a Czech fellow, they live in Prague…And she’s bedridden, my mother.”
“Yes. And there would still be the wife with the nervous disorder, and the kids, eh, and the bills, and the steel-ballbearings plant…Well, Gaye, I don’t know. You know, there was Schubert. I often wonder about Schubert, it’s not just you that makes me think of him. Why did God create Franz Schubert? To expiate some other men’s sins? Also, why did he kill the man off the moment he reached the level of the last quintet?—But Schubert didn’t wonder why God had created him. To write music, of course. Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir! Incredible. The little, sickly, ugly crackpot with glasses, scribbling his music like any other crackpot, never hearing it played—Du holde Kunst! How would you say it, ‘thou gracious Art, thou kindly Art’? As if any art were kindly, gracious, gentle! Have you ever thought of throwing it over, Gaye? Not the music. The rest.”
He met the gaze of the strange, cold, dark eyes and refused to be ashamed, to apologise. Gaye had said that he, Otto Egorin, lived for music. He did. He might be a good bourgeois; he might be very sorry for a poor devil who needed nothing in God’s world but a little cash in order to be a good composer; but he would not apologise to the poor devil’s sick mother and sick wife and three brats. If you live for music you live for music.
“I’m not made so.”
“Then you’re not made to write music.”
“You thought differently when you were reading my Sanctus.”
“Du lieber Herr Gott!” Otto exploded. He was a great patriot, but his mother and his upbringing had been Viennese and in moments of real emotion he reverted to German. “All right! Did it ever occur to you, my dear young man, that you incur a certain responsibility in writing something like that Sanctus? That you become answerable? That music has no arthritis, no nervous disorders, no hungry potbelly and ‘Papa, papa, I want this, I want that,’ but all the same she depends on you, on you alone? Other men can feed brats and keep sick women. But no other man can write your music!”
“Yes, I know that.”
“But you’re not quite sure anyone would undertake to feed the brats and keep the women. Probably they wouldn’t. Doch, doch—you’re too gentle, too gentle, Gaye.” Otto strode up and down the room on his bandy legs, snorting and grimacing.
“When I finish the Mass may I send it to you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I shall be pleased to see it. When will it be? Ten years from now? ‘Gaye, who the devil’s Gaye, where did I meet him—this is good—a young fellow, he shows promise—’ And you’ll be forty, getting tired, ready for a little arthritis or nervous disorder yourself. Certainly send me your Mass!…You have great talent, Gaye, you have great courage, but you’re too gentle, you must not try to write a big work like this Mass. You can’t serve two masters. Write songs, short pieces, something you can think of while you work at this Godforsaken steel plant and write down at night when the rest of the family’s out of the way for five minutes. Write them on anything, unpaid bills, whatever, and send them to me, don’t think you have to pay two and a half kroner a sheet for this fine paper, you can’t afford fine paper—when they’re printed is time to think of that. Send me songs, not ten years from now but a month from now, and if they’re as good as this Goethe song I’ll give you a section on my wife’s program in Krasnoy in December. Write little songs, not impossible Masses. Hugo Wolf, you know—Hugo Wolf wrote only songs, eh?”
He thought that Gaye, overcome with gratitude, was going to break down again, and though apprehensive he felt pleased with himself, wise, generous: he had made the poor fellow happy and might get something from him, too. The accompaniment to the Goethe song was still running in his head, spare, dry, sorrowful, beautiful. Then Gaye began to speak and Otto realised, slowly, but without real surprise, that it was not gratitude at all. “The Mass is what I’ve got to write, what I have in me. The songs come, sometimes a lot of them together, but I’ve never been able to write them at will, it has to be a good day. But the Mass, and a symphony I’ve been working on, they have size and weight, you see, they carry themselves along over the weeks, and I can always work on them when I have time. I know the Mass is ambitious. But I know all I want to say in it. It will be good. I’ve learned how to do what I must do, you see. I’ve begun it, I have to finish it.”
Otto had stopped in his pacing back and forth and was watching him with an expression both of incredulity and longsuffering familiarity. “Bah!” he said. “What the devil do you come to me for? And burst into tears? And then tell me thanks very much for your suggestion but I shall continue to attempt the impossible? The arrogance, the unreasonableness—no, I can endure all that—but the stupidity, the absolute stupidity of artists, I cannot stand it any longer!”
Abashed, submissive, Gaye sat there in his shabby suit; everything about him was shabby, pinched, overstrained and underfed, ground down and worn thin; and Otto knew he could shout at him for two hours and promise him introductions, publication, performances. He would never be heard. Gaye would only say in his inaudible stammer, “I have to write the Mass first…”
“You read German, eh?”
“Yes.”
“All right. After the mass is finished, then write songs. In German. Or French if you like it, people are used to it, they won’t listen in Vienna or Paris to a lot of songs in a language like ours, or Rumanian or Danish or what have you, it’s a mere curiosity, like folksongs. We want your music heard, so write for the big countries, and remember most singers are idiots. All right?”
“You’re very kind, Mr. Egorin,” Gaye said, not submissively this time but with a curious formal dignity. He knew that Otto was yielding to his stubborn unreason as he would to that of a great, a famous artist, humoring him, getting round him, when he could as well have stepped on him like a beetle. He knew, in fact, that Otto was defeated.
“If you’ll put the elephants aside for a very little while, for a few evenings, in order to write something which might conceivably be published, be heard, you see,” Otto was saying, still ironic, exasperated, and deferent, when the door swung open and his wife made an entrance. She swept Gaye’s little son in with her, the Swiss maid followed. The room all at once was full of men, women, children, voices, perfume, jewelry. “Otto, look what I found with Anne Elise! Did you ever see such an enchanter? Look at the eyes, the great, dark, solemn eyes! ‘His name is Vasli, he likes chocolates.’ Such an enchanter, such a little man, did you ever see such a child? How do you do, so glad. You’re Vasli’s—? yes, of course, you are, the eyes! Oh, Christ, what a ghastly hole this town is, I want to leave on the first train after the concert, Otto, I don’t care if it’s three in the morning. I can feel myself beginning to look like all those huge empty stone houses across the river, all eyes, staring, staring, staring, like skulls! Why don’t they tear them down if nobody lives in them? Never again, never again, to hell with the provinces and encouraging national art, I can’t sing in every graveyard in the country, Otto. Anne Elise, draw my bath, please. I’m simply filthy, I must be grey as buckwheat. Are you the Management from Sorg?”
“I’ve already talked to them on the telephone,” said Otto, knowing that Gaye would be unable to answer. “Mr Gaye is a composer, he writes Masses.” He did not say “songs,” for that would catch Egorina’s attention. He was paying Gaye back a little, giving him an object lesson in practicality. Egorina, uninterested in Masses, talked on. An unceasing flood of words poured from her for twenty-four hours before each concert, and stopped only when she walked out on the stage, tall, magnificent, smiling, to sing. After she had sung she would be quiet, ruminating. She was, Otto said, the most beautiful musical instrument in the world. He had m
arried her because it was the only way to keep her from going on the light-opera stage; stubborn, stupid, and sensitive in proportion to her talent, she dreaded failure and wanted to succeed the sure way. So Otto had married her and made her succeed the hard way, as a lieder-singer. In October she would take her first opera role, Strauss’s Arabella. That probably meant she would talk for six straight weeks beforehand. Otto could bear it. She was very beautiful, and generally good-humored, and anyway one need not listen. She did not care whether one listened so long as one was there, an audience.
She talked on, the sound of rushing water came from the bathroom, the telephone rang, she began to talk on the telephone. Gaye had not said a word. The child stood beside him, grave as ever; Egorina had forgotten all about Vasli after making her entrance with him, and had been swearing like a sergeant.
Gaye stood up. Relieved, Otto took him to the door, gave him two passes to Egorina’s recital tomorrow night, shrugged off his thanks—“We’re not sold out, you know! This is a dead town for music.” Behind them Egorina’s voice flooded magnificently on, her laugh broke out like the jet of a great fountain. “Jesus! what do I care what that little Jew says?” she sang out, and again the great, golden laugh. “Gaye,” said Otto Egorin, “you know, there’s one other thing. This is not a good world for music, either. This world now, in 1938. You’re not the only man who wonders, what’s the good? who needs music, who wants it? Who indeed, when Europe is crawling with armies like a corpse with maggots, when Russia uses symphonies to glorify the latest boiler-factory in the Urals, when the function of music has been all summed up in Putzi playing the piano to soothe the Leader’s nerves. By the time your Mass is finished, you know, all the churches may be blown into little pieces, and your men’s chorus will be wearing uniforms and also being blown into little pieces. If not, send it to me, I shall be interested. But I’m not hopeful. I am on the losing side, with you. So is she, my Egorina there, believe it or not. She will never believe it…But music is no good, no use, Gaye. Not any more. Write your songs, write your Mass, it does no harm. I shall go on arranging concerts, it does no harm. But it won’t save us…”
Orsinian Tales Page 15