It had everything to do—the old man approached the object—with sensuality.
There it was, near at hand, precisely so the hand could touch it, caress it, feeling with every nerve ending the perfect and exciting smoothness of that incorruptible skin, as if it were a woman’s shoulder, the beloved’s cheek, a lithe waist, or an immortal fruit.
More than sumptuous cloth, more that a perishable flower, more than a hard jewel, the crystal seal was not affected by wear or tear or time. It was something integral, beautiful, forever pleasing to the eye and to the touch when fingers tried to be as delicate as their object.
The old man was a paper ghost, yet his grasp was as strong as forceps. He closed his eyes and picked up the seal in one hand.
This was his greatest temptation. The temptation to love the crystal seal so much that he would destroy it forever with the power of his fist.
This magnetic and virile fist, which conducted Mozart, Bach, Berlioz like no other—what did it leave but a memory, fragile as a crystal seal, of an interpretation, judged in the moment to be genius and unrepeatable. For the maestro never allowed any of his performances to be recorded. He refused, he said, to be “canned like a sardine.” His musical ceremonies would be live, only live, and would be unique, unrepeatable, as profound as the experience of those who heard them, as volatile as the memory those same audiences kept of them. In that way, he demanded that if they wanted it they would remember it.
The crystal seal was like that, like the great orchestral ritual presided over by the high priest that gave and took away with an incandescent mixture of will, imagination, and caprice. The interpretation of the work is, at the moment of its execution, the work itself. Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, interpreted, is the Berlioz work. Similarly, the image is the same as the thing. The crystal seal was thing and it was image and both were identical.
He looked at himself in the mirror and searched in vain for some trace of the young French orchestra conductor renowned throughout Europe, who when the war began broke with the fascist seductions of his occupied country and left to conduct in London, risking the Luftwaffe bombs, a kind of challenge from the ancestral culture of Europe to the beast of the Apocalypse, the lurking and sordid barbaric creature that could fly but not walk, except crawling with its belly flat to the ground and its tits slathered with blood and shit.
Then came the main reason to keep the object in an old man’s retreat in the city of Salzburg. He admitted it with an excited and shameful trembling. He wanted to have the crystal seal in his hand so that he could hold it and squeeze it until he destroyed it; hold it the way he wanted to hold her, tighter, tighter, until she choked, communicating a fiery urgency, making her feel that in love—his for her, hers for him, theirs for each other—there was a latent violence, a destructive danger, that was the final homage of passion to beauty. To love Inez, to love her to death.
He dropped the seal, heedless yet fearful. For an instant it rolled across the table. The old man picked it up again, feeling a blend of fear and fondness as vivid as that aroused by the adrenaline rush of watching people jump without a parachute in the Arizona desert, a circus he had sometimes watched with fascination on the television he detested, the passive shame of his aging years. He set the seal back on the little tripod. This was not Columbus’s egg, which, like the world itself, could sit on a slightly flattened base. Without support, the crystal seal would roll, fall, shatter …
He stared at it until Frau Ulrike—Dicke—appeared, holding his overcoat.
She wasn’t really fat, merely clumsy in walking, as if she was dragging, more than wearing, her ample traditional clothing (skirts layered over skirts, apron, thick wool stockings, shawl upon shawl, as if she was never warm). Her hair was white, and it was impossible to guess what color it had been when she was a girl. Everything about her—her bearing, her halting walk, her bowed head—made one forget that Ulrike had once been young.
“Professor, you are going to be late for the performance. Remember, it is in your honor.”
“I don’t need an overcoat. It’s summer.”
“Herr Professor, from now on you will always need an overcoat.”
“You’re a tyrant, Ulrike.”
“Don’t stand on ceremony. Call me Dicke, like everyone else.”
“You know, Dicke? Growing old is a crime. You can end up with no identity and no dignity, sitting around in a nursing home with other old people as stupid and disinherited as you.” He looked at her affectionately. “Thank you for taking care of me, my dear Dumpling.”
“Haven’t I said it many times? You are a sentimental and ridiculous old man.” The housekeeper feigned a little hop, making sure the coat fell correctly over the shoulders of her eminent professor.
“Bah, what does it matter how I dress to go to a theater that was once the court stables?”
“It is in your honor.”
“What am I going to hear?”
“What do you mean, maestro?”
“What are they playing in my honor, devil take it!”
“The Damnation of Faust. That’s what it says in the program.”
“You see how forgetful I’ve become.”
“No, no. We all get distracted, especially all you geniuses.” She laughed.
The old man took one last look at the crystal sphere before going out into the dusk along the Salzach River. He was going to walk, his step still steady, needing no cane, to the concert hall, the Festspielhaus, and in his head buzzed a self-willed memory: status is measured by the number of Indians under the chief’s command. And he was a chief, he should not forget that, not for a single instant, a proud and solitary chief who was dependent on no one—which was why he had refused, ninety-three years and all, to have someone come pick him up at his home. He would walk, alone and without a cane, thanks but no thanks; he was the chief, not “director,” not “conductor,” but chef d’orchestre, the French expression was the one he really liked—chef. He hoped Dicke wouldn’t hear; she’d think he was crazy if in his old age he devoted himself to the kitchen. And he? How could he explain to his own housekeeper that directing an orchestra was walking on a knife blade—exploiting the need that some men have to belong to a group, to be members of an ensemble, feeling free because they follow orders and don’t have to give them, to others or to themselves? How many do you command? Is status measured by the number of people we command?
Still, he thought as he set out for the Festspielhaus, Montaigne was right: no matter how high you may be seated, you are never higher than your own ass. There were forces that no one, at least no one human, could dominate. He was headed for a performance of Berlioz’s Faust, and he had always known that the work had escaped both its composer, Hector Berlioz, and its chef d’orchestre, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, and had installed itself in a territory where it defined itself as the “beautiful, strange, savage, convulsive, and harrowing” master of its own universe and its own meaning, victorious over the composer and the interpreter.
Did the seal, which was his alone, take the place of the fascinating and disturbing independence of the choral symphony?
Maestro Atlan-Ferrara looked at it before leaving for the homage being paid him at the Salzburg Festival.
The seal, so crystalline until now, was suddenly fouled with some excrescence.
An opaque form, dirty, pyramidal, similar to a brown obelisk, began to spread from its center, which only moments before had been perfectly transparent.
That was the last thing he noticed before leaving for the performance, in his honor, of The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz.
It was, perhaps, an error of perception, a perverse mirage in the desert of his old age.
When he came home that darkness had disappeared.
Like a cloud.
Like a bad dream.
As if divining her master’s thoughts, Ulrike watched him walk down the street along the riverbank and did not move from her post at the window until she saw the figure of
the professor, still noble and upright though cloaked in a heavy overcoat in midsummer, reach what she calculated to be the point where he would not turn back and interrupt the secret plan of his faithful servant.
Ulrike picked up the crystal seal and placed it in the center of her held-out apron. She made sure, forming a fist around it, that the object was carefully wrapped in the cloth, and then she whipped off the apron with a couple of efficient, professional tugs.
She walked to the kitchen, where without a second’s hesitation she laid the apron with the seal wrapped in it on the rough table stained with the blood of edible beasts and, picking up a rolling pin, began to pound it with fury.
The servant’s face grew agitated and inflamed; her bulging eyes were fixed on the object of her rage as if she wanted to be sure that the seal was crushed to bits beneath the savage strength of the strong right arm of Frau Dicke, with her braids threatening to fall loose in a cascade of white hair.
“Swine, swine, swine!” she grunted in a diapason that swelled until it exploded in a harsh, strange, savage, convulsive, harrowing scream …
2
Cry out, cry out with terror, howl like a hurricane, moan like the deepest forest, let rocks crash down and torrents roar, cry out with fear because in this instant you see black horses racing through the skies, bells fall silent, the sun is obscured, dogs are baying, the devil has taken over the world, skeletons have come out of their tombs to hail the passing of the inky steeds of damnation. It’s raining blood from the heavens! The horses are as swift as thought, as unexpected as death, they are the beast that has pursued us forever, since the cradle, the ghost that knocks at our door at night, the invisible creature that scratches at our windowpane; cry out, all of you—as if your life depended on those cries!—HELP; pray to the Virgin Mary for mercy, you know in your hearts that she can’t save you, that no one can save you, you are damned, the beast is pursuing us, it’s raining blood, the wings of nocturnal birds are beating in our faces, Mephistopheles has poisoned the world, and you’re singing as if you were in the chorus of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta! Think what you’re doing! You are singing Berlioz’s Faust, not to please, not to impress, not even to stir emotions; you’re singing to spread fear, you are a chorus of birds of bad omen, you bring a warning, you come to take our nests from us, you come to peck out our eyes and eat our tongues, then you answer, with the last hope of fear, you cry, Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis, this nest is ours, and if anyone comes near we will peck out his eyes and we will eat his tongue and we will cut off his balls and we will suck the gray matter from his skull and we will draw and quarter him and feed his guts to the hyenas and his heart to the lions and his lungs to the crows and his kidneys to the boar and his anus to the rats—cry out!—cry out your terror, but stand your ground, defend yourselves, there is more than one devil, that’s his deception, he poses as Mephisto but the devil is multiple, the devil is a merciless we, a hydra that knows no pity and no limit, the devil is like the universe, Lucifer has no beginning and no end, learn this, comprehend the incomprehensible, Lucifer is the infinite fallen to earth, he is heaven’s exile rockbound in the immensity of space, that was his divine punishment, You shall be infinite and immortal on this mortal and finite earth, but you, this night, here on this stage in Covent Garden, sing as if you were the allies of God abandoned by God, cry out as if you wished to hear God cry out because his favorite ephebe, his angel of light, betrayed him, and God, caught between laughter and tears—the Bible! what melodrama!—gave the world to the devil so that on this finite rock he could play out the tragedy of exiled infinitude: sing as God’s and the devil’s witnesses, Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis, ora pro nobis, cry has, has, Mephisto, drive out the devil, Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis, horn, sing out … bells, peal … assert yourselves, brass, the mortal multitude is approaching, you, chorus, you too are a multitude, a legion to drown out the clamor of the bombs with your voices, tonight in London we are rehearsing during a blackout, and the Luftwaffe bombing is relentless, wave after wave of black birds sweep by streaming blood, endless troops of the devil’s steeds are racing through the black skies, the wings of the evil one are beating in our faces, feel him, that’s what I want to hear, a chorus of voices that will silence the bombs, no more, no less, Berlioz deserves that, don’t forget that I am French—allez vous faire niquer!—sing until the bombs of Satan are silenced, I will not rest until I hear that—do you understand?—as long as the bombs outside drown out the voices inside, we will stay here, allez vous faire foutre, mesdames et messieurs, until we drop with exhaustion, until the fatal bomb falls on our concert hall and, worse than fucked, we are ground into the ground, until you and I together rout the cacophony of the war with the dissonant harmony of Berlioz, the artist who doesn’t want to win a war, only drag us down to hell with Faust, because we, you and you and you and I as well, have sold our collective soul to the devil; sing like wild animals seeing yourselves for the first time in a mirror and not knowing you are you, howl like the specter that doesn’t recognize itself, like the hostile reflection, wail as if you discovered that your image in the mirror of my music is that of the most ferocious enemy, not the Antichrist, but the anti-you, the anti-father and anti-mother, the anti-child and the anti-lover, the creature with shit and pus under its fingernails that wants to stick its fingers up our assholes and in our mouths and in our ears and eyes, that wants to split open our spinal cords and infect our brains and devour our dreams: cry out like animals lost in the forest, beasts that must howl so that other beasts can recognize them from a distance, shriek like the birds to terrorize the aggressor that wants to take our nest from us … !
“Regard the monster you had never imagined, not a monster but a brother, a member of your family, who one night opens the door, rapes us, murders us, and burns down the house we all share …”
Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara wanted, at that point in the night rehearsal of The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz, that December 28, 1940, in London, to close his eyes and know again the overwhelming yet serene sensation of work that is exhausting but finally accomplished; he wanted the music to flow independently to the ears of the public, even though everything in this ensemble depends on the authoritarian power of the conductor: the power of obedience. One gesture to impose authority. One hand, readying the percussion to announce the arrival at hell, the cello to lower its tone to the murmur of love, the violin to signal a tremolo of coming terror and the horn a dissonant caesura …
He wanted to close his eyes and feel the music flowing like a great river carrying him far away, away from the specific circumstance of this concert hall on a night during the London blitz, with German bombs raining down all around, and the orchestra and chorus of Monsieur Berlioz conquering Field Marshal Goring and assaulting the Führer himself with the terrible beauty of horror, saying to him, Your horror is true horror, it lacks grandeur, it’s niggardly horror, because you don’t understand, you will never be capable of understanding, that immortality, life, death, and sin are mirrors of our universal, internal soul, not your transitory and cruel external power … Faust places an unfamiliar mask on the man who doesn’t recognize it but ends up adopting it. That is his triumph. Faust enters the devil’s territory as if returning to the past, to lost myth, to the land of original terror—man’s work, not God’s or the devil’s, Faust conquers Mephisto because Faust is exiled, expelled, expulsed, master of terrestrial terror, terrorized, interred, and disinterred: the human terrain on which Faust, despite his vicious defeat, forever reads himself …
The maestro wanted to close his eyes and think what he was thinking, wanted to say all these things to himself in order to be one with Berlioz, with the orchestra, with the chorus, with the collective music of this great and incomparable hymn to the demonic power of the human being when that human discovers that the devil is not a unique incarnation—has, has, Mephisto—but a collective hydra—hup, hup, hup. Atlan-Ferrara wanted, moreover, to renounce, or at least believe he was renouncing, t
he authoritarian power that inevitably made him, the young and already eminent European conductor “Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara,” the dictator of a collective ensemble untouched by the vanity or pride that could stigmatize the director, free of Lucifer’s sin. Inside the theater, Atlan-Ferrara was a minor god who renounced his powers on the altar of an art that was not his, not his alone but first of all the work of a creator named Hector Berlioz—though only he could conduct, he, Atlan-Ferrara, conduit, conductor, interpreter of Berlioz, and in any case authority over the interpreters subject to his power. Chorus, soloists, orchestra.
His limit was the public. The artist was at the mercy of the audience. Ignorant, vulgar, distracted or perceptive, intransigent connoisseur or simple traditionalist, intelligent but closed to the new, like the public that wouldn’t accept Beethoven’s Second Symphony, damned by a renowned Viennese critic of the time as “a vulgar monster that furiously slashes its uplifted tail until the desperately awaited finale is reached …” And hadn’t another celebrated critic, this one French, written in La Revue des deux mondes that Berlioz’s Faust was a work of “disfigurement, vulgarity, and bizarre sounds emitted by a composer incapable of writing for the human voice”? With good reason, sighed Atlan-Ferrara, there were no monuments anywhere in the world to the memory of a literary or music critic.
Situated in the precarious equilibrium between two creations—the composer’s and the conductor‘s—Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara wanted to be borne away by the dissonant beauty of the seductive and yet frightening hell of Hector Berlioz’s oratorio. The secret to preserving that equilibrium—and consequently the spiritual peace of the chef d’orchestre—is that no one person should stand out. Especially in The Damnation of Faust, the voice must be collective in order to inspire the unavoidable fall and damnation of the hero.
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