Seiobo There Below

by László Krasznahorkai

  And yet she had nothing at all, not even any meaning — this was a very sad thought; Chaivagne even tried continually to drive it out of his head, he didn’t want to think about it, he tried to convince himself, well, why was it not enough that every morning he could get up and immediately stand there again in her presence? — of course it was enough; at such times, he relaxed, and sleep really did chase these thoughts out of his head, and once again the next morning he appeared at his workplace with the same little smile on his face, and he took up his designated position in the room entrusted to him, tactfully withdrawing into one of the inner corners — from where he could keep an eye on the visitors, but could simultaneously also see the rising figure of Venus — another year went by like that, and again it was autumn, and it frequently rained in the city, although he took virtually no notice of this, because he did not move from his place, and the Venus de Milo did not move either, the reconstruction was still going on down there, and no one could even predict when the statue would turn up in its old spot, and neither he changed, nor did the Venus change — nor did that long crack in the Parian marble, which extended from the back of the statue along the back contour of the right thigh, and which of course was kept under strict observation by the restorers, but no, nothing happened — and well, really, nothing happened even with him, nothing, the days came and went, the crowds flooded in every morning, and flooded out every evening, he stood in the inner right-hand corner, observing the eyes and face of Venus high above, but never where the eyes and the face were looking, he observed the crowd as they trampled on each other, then once again he raised his gaze to the statue, and he just stared on and on from one autumn to another autumn, he diligently soaked his feet, he went in with the seven, the four, then the one, then he went home with the one, the four, and the seven, he meticulously parted his hair in the middle of his head in the morning with a damp comb, he stood and stood with his hands always clasped behind his back in the inner right-hand corner, he always smiled a little, so that he was always being approached, now by a group without a tour guide, now by a solitary visitor, and he always started by saying — and never saying anything else but — Praxiteles, always just Praxiteles.

  377

  PRIVATE PASSION

  Music is the sorrow of one

  who has lost his Heavenly home.

  Ibn al-Faradh

  The end has come and there is nothing, he said, and even if there is something, it is only the squalid fulfillment of that process, hidden at first, which has made chance, ever more blatant, and then finally insolent vulgarity — shaming even the most horrifying premonitions — completely victorious; because there was an age when something reached its own culmination, the height of its own boundless possibilities, for it is not the case — no, not at all — that each age is granted its own articulatory world, a world incomparable with the others, and that the art of every single epoch, for each given genre, carries the inner hypothesis of its own internal structure to perfection; no, decisively no; still, it is true, well; I, he added, am speaking of something else, that is to say that there lies before us, after the hazy bestial zero, a long continuum arising from all the noises and rhythms having to do with music, which then reaches — as it did indeed reach a perfection no longer perfectible — the roof of a seemingly infinite celestial vault, a particular border of Heaven close to the godly spheres, so that something — in this case music — comes into being, is born, unfolds, but then it’s all over, no more, what must come has come; the realm dies away, and yet lives on in this divine form, and for all eternity its echo remains, for we may evoke it, as we do evoke it to this very day and shall evoke it for as long as we can, even if as an ever more faint reflection of the original, a tired and ever more uncertain echo, a misunderstanding ever more despairing from year to year, from decade to decade, in a disintegrating memory that no longer has a world, no longer shatters people’s hearts; no longer elevates them to that place of such achingly sweet perfection, because this is what happened, he said, and he straightened his suspenders, such a music came into being that shattered people’s hearts, if I listen to it, I still feel, at some given point, after an unexpected beat, I feel, if not that my heart is being shattered, that at least it is falling apart, as I collapse from this sweet pain, because this music gives me everything in such a way that it also annihilates me, because how could anyone think that they could get away without paying the price for all of this, well, how could we even imagine that it is even possible to traverse that distance where this music exists and not be annihilated one hundred, one thousand times — if I listen to them, I am in a thousand tiny pieces, because you can’t just roam around in the company of the geniuses of inexplicable musical fulfillment and at the same time, say, be able to fill out a personal income tax form or prepare the technical blueprint for a building while this music is sinking to the depths of your heart, well, it doesn’t work, either this person filling out tax forms or completing technical blueprints is annihilated, or will never understand where he has arrived, if this music strikes him from above, it definitely comes from above, of that there is no doubt, and I — he pointed to himself, on the podium, with both hands — I am speaking solely and exclusively about music, not about anything else; the discussion here cannot be generalized, it is not possible to extend my train of thought to include all of the arts, and blabber about those kinds of absolute generalizations; what is being referred to, what one wants to say, must be stated precisely, and I too say it now, that I am merely reflecting on music, and that I consider my statements valid only with regard to that, so that I cannot begin by stating, ladies and gentlemen, this evening, within the framework of this widely promoted lecture that you shall hear, through an analysis of music’s essence, about the essence of so-called art itself, when my subject, the subject of this widely promoted lecture, is only music; that is while delivering this lecture, it’s as if I were standing here with a smoking bomb in my hands and I were telling you that it was going to explode in a minute; now, try to imagine that I began by saying, ladies and gentlemen, and so forth, with this bomb in my hands, you would all rush headlong out the door, would you not? — which would not be a bad idea, well, perhaps at one point I shall turn into a real bomb; anyway, for now just imagine a smoking bomb in my hands, as I try this evening to share my thoughts with you about that moment in time when the pinnacle of music, within the world history of music, came to be, so that you will hear such things from me tonight that you never heard from others, nor shall you ever, because I myself represent — truly, like an anarchist holding a bomb — my own thesis, and, as it happens, it is precisely because of this thesis that I am, even from our own degenerate society, excluded, exiled, expelled; so that I am an object of scorn, indeed, put more crudely, I am jeered at; it is possible that there are those among you who are thinking but, well, you are an architect who shall give a lecture about his private passion, about music, and how can an architect be excluded from society when he is at the exact center of society, in that case, perhaps, someone among you is thinking, that he, an architect, is as deep as anyone can possibly be in the whole thing, only that in my case that person is mistaken; I am an architect who has never seen a single plan constructed, I don’t know how many buildings I have planned already in my life, I am now sixty-four, so you can imagine how much I have planned and planned and planned, how many maquettes and drawings and who knows what else rose up beneath my hands, it’s just that not one of them was ever built, this is the situation, you see here today a lecturer who is also an architect, but who has not built a single thing, who is himself a total architect-fiasco, who moreover does not even deal with architecture in his free time, and is not even peddling architecture here from village to village, thanks to the Kíler district library’s program, “Village Cultural Days,” and who will not even speak of architecture, but of something perhaps unexpected from an architect: of music, of one of its highly particular embodiments, because that of which I am going to speak
is truly unique, a sacred fact, because I shall, with this finger — and he raised his index finger — draw your attention to a certain age of musical history, an extraordinary, a peerless, an unrepeatable moment of what we call music, or, put more simply, you will hear about the essence of music of the very highest order, a music whose time had come, so that from the very beginning of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century it came, let this suffice for a starting point, in place of a more precise designation, as you cannot really expect dates from me, generally I do not believe in dates, things flow into each other and grow out from each other, the whole thing proceeds somehow like tentacles, so that there are no definite eras or other such asininities, the world is much too complicated for that, because just think about it, where does an accident begin and where does it end, so there you are, there is no point in looking for dates or demarcations of eras, let us leave that whole thing to the experts, to those who are either feeble-minded or pig-headed know-it-alls — those who, thanks to their position, instead of simply saying what happened, what largely came to pass between these two time-designations — could trumpet throughout the world how music, the story of music truly has a pinnacle from which it doesn’t go on, or rather it does, but this is only and exclusively the so-called sad descent, because afterward, nothing else occurs but the slow degradation of the form, so it is perhaps more correct to express it by saying that the whole thing isn’t even sad, but pitiful, a mockery, a long, drawn-out vulgar ceremony, but no, those who take part in this perpetually clamoring, false, base propaganda, hammering into us that music is, like art in general, a science, and altogether, that culture and civilization only advance in such a way that the whole thing, starting from some confusingly designated cause, goes onward and moreover surpasses itself again and again, that is it develops, and according to their conceptions, attains ever higher and higher levels; look upon them as people who, in a word, are there to mislead you with their prestige, and who not only keep silent, but try explicitly to ter-min-ate, to an-nih-il-late the fact that the history of music has its pinnacle, after which the entire history of music, summa summarum, begins to decline, in the end it simply rushes into vulgarities masked as a crisis, and drowns in a kind of sordid sticky flood, but enough about that, let us speak instead of how I ended up in all of this; perhaps it might be interesting if we were to pause for a moment at a little anecdote, for surely I, too, am aware — even though I’m not a professional lecturer, apart from these appearances organized by the district library through which, strictly between ourselves, I merely try to supplement my meager income — I am well aware that from time to time a little relief is called for, a small personal touch, as they say: a well-placed comic sentence, a little material drawn from experience, and in this case, I will offer just a brief account of an afternoon in the office where I go now and then as an early-retired pensioner, that is to say about that afternoon when, with maybe thirty similar architects, I was plying the trade completely senselessly, bent over a meaningless architectural blueprint for who knows how many times now, and the colleague sitting next to me, fiddling with the little pocket radio set out on the desk finally settled on one particular station, and left the dial there, and this, this random movement with which the finger of my co-worker stopped the dial right at that point, was fateful, I am not exaggerating, it had a fateful effect upon me, because there began to resound forth, of course in terrible quality and not for the first time in my life, but audible to me for the first time in my life, a faultless, eloquent melody, produced on the strings, together with a second faultless, eloquent melody, and then with another, and this, this melody-architecture having become wondrously complex, created with the leading part high above, such a heart-wrenching harmony, causing within me such joy, in that large, soulless, bleak architect-hangar, under the fluorescent lights, that I was simply breathless; well, I will stop here, although I recall with exactitude every single moment of that afternoon, and of course as well, what music was wavering, crackling, whining right next to me: an Oratorio of Caldara, one of the arias for Santa Francesca Romana, it was the Si Piangete Pupille Dolente, and so I have now incidentally betrayed that I entered the Baroque through a small side-gate, if I may express it in this way; he said and then again adjusted his suspenders with his right hand, and managing it only with difficulty, because his trousers, in spite of the suspenders, continually wanted to slip down beneath his gut, rolled into thick protuberances, in the meantime with his other hand he reached for the glass of water set on the table behind him, where otherwise he had also thrown his coat when he arrived, during which the eight people — six old women and two old men, who comprised, here in the village library, the courageous audience of this completely incomprehensible lecture, entitled “A Century and a Half of Heaven,” were given yet another opportunity to scrutinize the older gentleman who had arrived from the capital city, and to determine that naturally he had many peculiar features: the short, fat, yielding build, the few strands of hair brushed to the right side of his balding pate, the soft flabby double chin tipping over onto his chest, or his voice, which sounded as if someone were trying to scrape out stew-scraps from a saucepan with a wire brush, and the old-fashioned eyeglasses with black plastic frames that might have turned up on him only by mistake, because they were so large as to conceal that entire upper section of his face like scuba goggles, but it was really his gut that captured the attention of the locals, because this gut with its three colossal folds unequivocally sent a message to everyone that this was a person with many problems, it was no wonder that he was continually adjusting the elastic straps on his trousers, like someone who didn’t even trust in them himself, or like someone whose confidence in the straps built up gradually and cautiously, but had been lost time and time again, one nearly felt that one wanted to help him, because everyone sensed how these trousers were continuously, ceaselessly sliding downward across those three thick folds of fat, down toward the thighs, it is doubtful that any kind of trousers can be of any use at all with a gut like that, and that this gut could be of any use whatsoever to any kind of trousers, so that in a word the listening public, comprised of eight persons, was without exception preoccupied with these trousers, these suspenders, and this gut, for they understood not one solitary word of what the gut’s owner was talking about, and, moreover, the person in question spoke without pause, never lowering his voice once and never raising it, never subduing it and never strengthening it, and there was no pause and stop and rest and forbearance, he just spoke and spoke and spoke, he put the glass of water back on the podium borrowed from the school next door, and he said: well now, let’s get to the point, and let us take one of the masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach, the Quia Respexit Humilitatem from the Magnificat, in which the greatest musical genius of all times, in an aria for alto, created a kind of compound from pain and humility, from sorrow and supplication, clearly due to heavenly exhortation, which in and of itself could serve as enough of an example here, it would be enough just to speak of these small individual compositions for us to arrive at an instantaneous understanding of the essence of the Baroque, of that entire era, for that is our subject today, the Baroque, and this is what I have spoken of so far as well, and this is what I shall continue to speak of, for I maintain, and I can prove, that it was through the Baroque that music reached that divine sublimity I mentioned earlier, from where there was no going any further; and yet as it was only possible to sustain for a brief time — that is, it was not possible to sustain it — for that star within us that could have sustained it has inevitably died out, that star is extinct, its geniuses vanished into death, those who came after transcended them, transcended the so-called Baroque musical world, because this is the phrase the experts use, they “transcended” them, which is already itself a scandalous expression, and perfectly betrays just who we are dealing with here, what kind of characters employ such turns of phrase, because what does that mean, transcend them — transcend Monteverdi p
erhaps?! transcend Purcell?! transcend Bach?! — still, to transcend them, we should have transcended them by not listening to them — but that accursed 18th century, those accursed last decades, poisoned everything and destroyed everything, and made everyone unsure if they should listen to the words of the soul — or the mind, as they put it, the mind — the lecturer now shouted, and there was no one in the room who did not sense that a great wrath was trembling in his voice, even if, still, they had not the foggiest notion as to the meaning behind this wrath — and the mind, he shouted again, and to transcend — he raised his voice more and more, so much so that the more timid members of the audience began to steal cautious glances toward the exit, for, all of this — to speak in this vein — is not just baseness but iniquity, for they, the experts, knew full well whom they could honor in this Monteverdi, this Purcell, and this Bach, they knew exactly, and yet they still spoke of how time had passed them by, they announced this in unison, as if time could pass beyond something for which the medium is eternity — Sublime God in Heaven — the lecturer raised both of his hands toward the ceiling, freshly whitewashed not too long ago, he raised his hands and vehemently began to shake them, so then, after Monteverdi, after Purcell, after Bach, there comes someone who would be a greater genius in music? — or what?! — so who came after them?! — I ask you, the lecturer asked, now with lowered hands, and the public really began to feel uncomfortable, because it seemed, since he was looking at them, that they were the ones causing this problem, they were the ones he was angry at, saying: perhaps you’re thinking of Mozart?! about this child prodigy?! who was capable of everything as well as its opposite, are you thinking of this genius of pleasantness?! — the charm of this undoubtedly amazing showman?! — this truly dazzling entertainment artist?! — at which point one or two members of the audience tried to indicate an uncertain “no” with their heads, who they?! — never would they think of any such thing, never would it even have occurred to them, they could cautiously indicate this with their heads, the lecturer was already seized by zeal and went on saying no, it was not his obligation, and particularly not here, within the context of a lecture such as this — to pronounce his opinions and analyze those who came after this Monteverdi, this Purcell, this Bach in the Classical era, it was generally speaking not his task to slander them — although he could slander the Classical era, or launch into an attack, although he could attack the Romantics and so on; his task here instead, he opined, was to praise that which can be praised, and the music of the Baroque unconditionally fell into this category; precisely, only it belonged in this category; because only this was praiseworthy, to which it was now important for him to add, he said, that he, first and foremost, wished to share his perceptions concerning the vocal music of the Baroque; he did not, in every one of his lectures, speak only of that, but today yes, perhaps because at the center of the anecdote he had selected in this lecture, there was a vocal piece, the aria that Caldara wrote for a certain mezzo-soprano, perhaps this was the point where he might betray that although he did not always speak about the vocal music of the Baroque, when he did speak of it, as today, he did so with the greatest pleasure, because there was something in the human voice that he loved more than anything else, if a melody sounded upon this, the human voice; and if he had to choose between this one or that one, if he heard a melody on a certain instrument, he would instead in an instant choose the human voice, there was something in it, the human voice, in the cultivated human voice, the expression of which for him was such a powerful enchantment, irreplaceable by any kind of amazing instrument, whether the harpsichord, violin, viola, oboe, horn, church organ, or even all of them put together; nothing, but nothing could attain the same level as the cultivated human voice, and if they were pausing here, then he would have to make the personal remark that within this genre, it was the cultivated female voice that made the greatest impression on him, a dramatic soprano, a dark alto, always had, so to speak, a power within, difficult to explain; in any event this was the situation, so that heaven for him was when that organ, that harpsichord, those violins, violas, oboes, horns, and so on sounded forth at once together, raising above themselves that certain cultivated female alto voice, well, when they were all together like this he was filled with unspeakable happiness, at such times he felt something like the Old Believers of the Orthodox Church when they kiss the icon of the Virgin Mary and the Infant, or like a Japanese Zen monk in the kyūdō jo as he releases the arrow from his bow toward the target, really and truly, he was not exaggerating, not thinking figuratively: never did he feel the direct closeness of the presence of God from any other sort of art form, he had never gotten it, never found it in any other kind of music, not in the music that came before nor in the music that came after, only, only from the Baroque; picture to yourselves now the fantastically variegated musical world in Europe of that time: the essence of music resounded in a hundred ways, and from our perspective, it resounded simultaneously, because the essence of music is the Baroque; and now he enumerated who and when, pronouncing the names one after the other: Reincken, Porpora, Fux, then Charpentier, Paisiello, Böhm and Schütz, then Buxtehude, Conti, and the greatest ones, Vivaldi, then Handel, then Purcell, then Gesualdo, then Johann Sebastian Bach?! — but just imagine alongside them, the endless rank and file of musical lackeys, truly in the hundreds, perhaps in the thousands, who lived and sustained the Baroque with their works, from the English court to the villas of the Italian princes, from the chateaux of France to the castles of Hungary, because this was the case, the music of the Baroque filled those approximately one hundred and fifty years granted to it, you can hear one continuously resounding work of musical art — wondrous intonations, wondrous harmonies, wondrous compositions and melodies — if I think back on it, he said, if I picture myself back in the time of the Baroque, and I hear the first few bars of the Matthäus-Passion as the orchestra becomes audible, I am choked with tears, and I can understand, I truly understand how even one composer of a later era, who, at a performance of the Matthäus-Passion, could not bear to hold back his tears and lived for days in painful ecstasy, yes, I can understand, for I, too, have lived through that each time, if for example I hear an undisturbed performance of The Indian Queen, or the great Messiah; undisturbed, I say, said the lecturer, and the wording here is no coincidence, because I suffer dreadfully, unspeakably, if one of those Karl Richter-types, one of those coarse dilettantes sticks his ugly snout into the Baroque, because these people destroy everything that is the Baroque, because they understand so little that they debase all that is the Baroque, it is horrible when they wreck the artwork that serves as their prey, but what is even more horrible is how they wreck it, here words fail me, because they play Bach as if they were playing Beethoven, which in the end is the real scandal, characters like this should be cast out from the orchestral world of Baroque performance, or they should simply be locked up in prison, that would be the most fitting, because then on principle they wouldn’t be able to get at any sort of music, let alone to scourge the Baroque with their filthy hands and insensate souls; the performance, in a word, must be undisturbed, there is no doubt that the spirit of the Baroque is present only in the case of an undisturbed performance; then it appears, then it resounds, and then it subdues one, breaks one’s heart to bits, knocks one to the ground, and what this means is that a mistake may not be made in the choice of conductor, so that — if we take into consideration the circumstances of today — then the coarse Harnoncourt NO, and Christie YES, the airy Bartoli NO, but Kirkby YES; then the enfeebled Magdalena Kožená NO, but Dawn Upshaw YES, the so-called Barock Kammerorchester of Zugdorf NO, but Les Arts Florissants YES; in a word, with a faultless selection we can attain a level where the Baroque begins to resound, insomuch as today the Baroque can even make itself heard, because even this is not so self-evident, for just think about it, if you listen to the Scherza Infida from Handel’s Ariodante, with David Daniels, under the direction of Sir Roger Norrington recorded at EMI’s Abb
ey Road studio, or not even that, let’s drop it, it isn’t obvious enough — because it is actually too much so — but let us assume instead if you were to go to a performance of Ariodante, where the Baroque makes its appearance, without its own world — as there is no more world of the Baroque, because in the chaos and disintegration of that dreadful eighteenth century, as has already been mentioned, it went to rack and ruin — there one sits in the audience and before one is, let’s say, the Ariodante with Lorraine Hunt, in the Stadthalle in Freiburg, but in vain is Lorraine Hunt the right one, in vain is the Barockorchester of Freiburg the right one, neither Handel nor the Ariodante is there, only the memory of them, for the Baroque isn’t there, the entire world has already become anti-Baroque, the theater is anti-Baroque, the curtains are anti-Baroque, the stage, the theater-boxes, the audience, Freiburg itself is anti-Baroque with its innumerable reeking beers and with all those innumerable reeking tourists, and all of Europe is anti-Baroque, there is not a single nook in all of Europe where this anti-Baroqueness is not palpable, only, the annihilation of something that doesn’t even exist anymore just goes on and on, for the so-called Baroque musical performances keep on coming, one after the other, and they do not call forth but instead demolish the essence of the Baroque written down in the scores, scarcely has it begun when the whole thing is already ruined, so that a person truly needs an enormous ability to read into things, unbelievable imagination, inhuman endurance, unparalleled patience, and I almost forgot, said the lecturer, that beyond all of this he needs an incredible amount of luck, in order to catch an occasion now and then where with all these gifts the Baroque might touch him once in a while; yet this concentration, this patience, this persistence is worth it, if at such a performance of Baroque music — as for example with Lorraine Hunt in the Stadthalle in Freiburg — a person may glimpse within himself at least the shadow, for nothing more is possible, of the essence of the Baroque; then that person will be taking part in such an experience, in such an encounter so as to grant one true strength, if I may say — the lecturer appeared to reflect for a moment — true strength to live, because then afterward life without the Baroque shall not be as torturous, after one or two encounters with the shadow of the essence of the Baroque, brought about through enormous luck — thanks to the inhuman strivings of Lorraine Hunt and the Freiburg Barockorchester — one staggers out of the theater, pinches his nose shut against the sticky reek of beer and tourists, he can be certain that the godly sphere at least existed, he may rest assured — with profound and sincere thanks to Lorraine Hunt and the Freiburg Barockorchester — that the Baroque did exist at least at one time as a living reality, written down for us and performed, but at the same time, it is a reality so frail that it proves too easy to perform, and we perform it at the first possible opportunity, as soon as we possibly can, and perpetually, we have played the whole thing as if the stakes were those in a poker game, and we can regard it as our greatest fortune if — this time too, with gratitude and thanks to Lorraine Hunt and the Freiburg Barockorchester! — we can stagger out of a concert hall and wander through the reek of beer and tourists with, however, the shadow of the Baroque in our hearts, about which I simply cannot repeat enough times that in it, in the Baroque, music made by humans attained its pinnacle, and if at the beginning I promised that I was not just going to keep lecturing to the air, not just keep gabbing on and on, but actually confirm that this is true, then now the time has come for me to do so, for you have heard enough now of the details, I’ve touched upon this and touched upon that, but the real confirmation awaits, for which of course you should not wait, said the guest, once again tugging at the suspender-clip on the left side to see if it was still holding, as just now he had felt that side to be a little uncertain, you should not wait, he repeated, for some kind of complicated heaven-and-earth-shattering demonstration of musical elements, I shall, if you permit me, pass over that and instead attempt to make my thoughts more concise, which then shall contain this confirmation, namely, it shall call your attention to what occurs in the very first moments of the sounding forth of a given work; I ask you then very kindly, please, to close your eyes, to allow yourselves to enter the spirit as, let us say, you hear the first measures of the Matthäus-Passion, the first thirty-two measure, when the two orchestras — as you know, there are two orchestras, two choirs, two sides, entering into a dark, swirling, tragedy, pain, finality — the first thirty-two measures, I ask you, the lecturer asked his public, raising both of his hands as if placing a benediction upon them, he held his head high, closed his eyes, and he waited, but in vain, because when he checked to see if they were doing what he had asked of them, just squinting between his eyelids so they wouldn’t notice, he looked at them and saw that in the meantime his listeners, comprised of eight persons, had become utterly exhausted, no longer even preoccupied with his suspenders, nothing interested them any longer and because of that they had refused his request, at least that is what he thought, that they had refused it, they simply were not paying attention, as for a long time now they had become incapable of any such thing, that is to say to act like people who were watching what was accumulating here, so that they failed to close their eyes, and because of that, they only did so when the guest speaker, halting his flow of speech for a moment, cast such a wild look at them that it immediately occurred to them what he wanted them to do, and everyone quickly closed their eyes; there sat the eight members of the audience and they had absolutely no idea as to why, but they waited with closed eyes to see what was coming next; after a long silence — because the lecturer also needed a bit of time to find his way back to his train of thought — he spoke anew and everyone was relieved, for the speaker picked up exactly where he had left off just a moment ago, asking: do you hear? do you hear this dark strength? this terrifying beauty? this threatening spiral, as the separate melodies whirling above each other strike across the entire orchestra like the tumultuous waves of the sea?! yes — he raised his voice — like the inconceivable, the fathomless, the mysterious sea with its waves striking upward, the whole is here, the beginning, it is evident immediately, a perfect, intricate, dazzling harmony, an intensity of musical resonance never reached until then and never again afterward, whoever hears it does not need any sort of proof whatsoever that this is music of the highest order, because the music itself is the proof, whoever hears it will hear the harmony of the voices as never before brought together in such richness, will hear in this harmony the enigmatic free beauty of the leading part, and so the heart speaks — the speaker struck his heart with his right hand — the so-called proof; the heart speaks it, for this is something never felt anywhere else, not before the Matthäus-Passion nor after the Matthäus-Passion, and you should understand this to mean, of course, not before the Baroque, nor after the Baroque, but if you wish, he said, and he raised his voice a little again, it can also be expressed like this: that in no other instance can we speak of such a virtuosic knowledge of the art of musical composition, of the virtuosity of this rainbow-spectrum-like versatility, of such an extraordinary virtuosic unity of musical language, of such clear melodic contours, of such an unparalleled art of counterpoint as the fulfillment of musical conciseness learned from Vivaldi, of the web woven in such an unrivaled fashion of the inner parts, and generally speaking of such refinement of the harmonies, not deduced from any predecessor, as in the case of Bach; just as we can never even speak of a finished work by him, only of a kind of continuously swelling music, to be amended, enriched, edited, built, ameliorated over and over again, a music that only indicates the way to perfection but is not identical with it, so that when it is a question of Bach — and so it shall be until the end of this lecture, he said — for if the essence of music is the Baroque, then the essence of the Baroque is Bach, in him there is embodied in one all that is present, in dispersed fashion, in Vivaldi, Zelenka, Rameau, Schütz, Handel, Purcell, but also present partially in Campara, Cimarosa, Albinoni, Porpora, Böhm, Reincken, but altogether and as a whole, o
nly and exclusively present in the singular genius of the Baroque, and thus of music, and in its entirety, Johann Sebastian Bach — it is inconceivable how all that Johann Sebastian Bach represents could have come about, inexplicable, if we hear these first measures from the Matthäus-Passion, as the chorus resounds with its broad tempestuous strength, sweeping all away as it rises, as it becomes ever more intricate, ever more richly woven, namely as the miracle — this Johann Sebastian Bach right before our eyes, in every single work and so in this case the Matthäus-Passion — resounds as well, is born and again is born, because we hear, we must believe, and that is what is so unbelievable, but we hear it, yes? we hear the heavenly weight of these voices falling in infinite density, falling below from there above, like snow, and there we are there in this landscape and we are amazed, and we have no words, and our hearts ache from the wondrous beauty of it all, for the Baroque is the artwork of pain, for deep down in the Baroque there is deep pain, more precisely, in every single chord of every single musical work created by the Baroque, every single aria, every single recitativo, every chorale and madrigal, every fugue and canon and motet and in every single voice of the violins, the violas, the bassoons and the cellos, the oboes and the horns, this pain is there, and it is there too if on the surface a kind of triumph, serenity, sublimity, joy, or praise is being offered, each individual voice speaks of pain, of that pain that separates him, Johann Sebastian Bach, from perfection, from God, from the divine, and that separates us from him; namely, the Baroque is the art form of death, the art form that tells us that we must die; and how must we die: it must be in that very moment when the Baroque resounds in music, because we should have ended there, at the pinnacle, and not have allowed everything to happen just as it might, and then to lie, to blurt out these morbid lies and learn how to enthuse over such music as this Mozart or that Beethoven or over whatever it was all those ever more modest talents, those ever more commonplace figures, were able to conjure up out of their hats, to give our enthusiastic acclaim to the composition of The Magic Flute, or to that dreadful Fifth or Ninth, or to be amazed that the horrific Faust can be heard, that tawdry Fantastique, not even to mention the most repulsive of all, this imperial criminal named Wagner and his zealous supporters, let’s not even mention it, because if I even just think about it — the lecturer shook his head, giving expression to his disbelief — it is not shame that overcomes me, not the consciousness of degradation, but rather a dark desire for murder, because this sick megalomaniac of unprecedented incompetence impoverished music exactly in that land where the Baroque and the great figure of the Baroque, Bach, was active; a dark desire, if I think about it, he repeated, and he looked at his audience, and it was obvious that for quite a while now he had not been engaged with them, and hadn’t looked at them because, it seemed, he was appalled by this public: the public, that is to say, that just sat slumped in the room, completely drained, not daring to escape, their hopes that at one point there might be a normal end to this lecture long since extinguished, and moreover these eight people — six old ladies and two old men — had reached such a state of sheer exhaustion and renunciation, like those who have given up, who no longer even propound, no longer even conjecture any kind of possible ending, they just awaited what must come, because after that would come hope as well — and this was inscribed upon their faces — the hope that the moment would arrive when everyone in the village Cultural Center would receive the signal that their guest, this guest from the capital city, was finished with his lecture about music; and when a good ten minutes later, which, to put it mildly, was as if two hours had gone by, that moment ensued, no one budged, because no one could believe it, for hope, being useless, awakens only slowly, yet what could have given them cause for hope is already here, if only in the last ten minutes they had paid closer attention: for the lecturer is, just now, threatening to return to an analysis of the individual works, namely, now it would be the time to evoke, choosing rapidly but a little haphazardly from the most sublime of the sublime: the aria for alto, beginning “Bereite dich, Zion,” from the Christmas Oratorio; the aria for soprano from the Magnificat, “Quia respexit humilitatem,” BWV 243; as well as, from the much-mentioned Matthäus-Passion, the aria, similarly for alto, “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” but then he purses his lips, he could do it but he isn’t going to, so accordingly he renounces the evocation of the “Bereite dich, Zion” and the “Quia respexit humilitatem” as well as the “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” and, seeing and perceiving that he has gone a little over the time, and exhorting his audience to listen only to the music of the Baroque, he now bids them farewell with the most fitting words for this time and place, that is he now cites the very greatest masterpiece of the cathedral of pain closest to his heart, saying thus: