The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

  Now back to the fateful hammering of the first theme. Here he re-created the sounds of the big guns of the last war. He had fought in that war and heard each kind of gun innumerable times, sometimes in the very rhythms Beethoven now required, sometimes for hours on end. Fifty kilometers of Big Berthas, going off all night long: useful knowledge in this moment. Happily he pounded as hard as he could get away with, or harder. Every person in the hall surely recognized what he was doing.

  Of course outside the music they rarely discussed the war, you couldn't. The timpanist was as careful as anyone when he was in the building, and never said anything around Rammelt or Kleber in the cellos, or Bucholz, Schuldes, Woywoth—these five were the really obnoxious party members. Just five of them, and yet that was enough to poison the whole ensemble. Once he had seen Woywoth tell Hans Bastiaan, a mild little violinist, "You have to say Heil Hitler when you greet someone now," and Bastiaan had replied, "Ah but it's also nice to simply wish a good morning, isn't it?" and Woywoth had glared at him until Bastiaan had scurried away like a mouse.

  But very few of them were like that. They were like children when it came to politics, they didn't know what to say about it and didn't want to know. Most of them hadn't fought in the first war; most lived their whole lives inside music. Although sometimes a few of them gathered in a rehearsal room, and someone would look over someone's shoulder at a newspaper and mutter things, Oh dear this latest victory in Russia seems to be only half as far along as the one before, it's a Zeno's paradox of a front. Or tough talk under the breath, ha ha ja sure, a mode common to everyone since the Twenties at least. The latest word was that hundreds of British bombers had destroyed Hamburg in a single night, burned it to the ground. Berlin was sure to follow, no one could doubt it. And yet no one could say it, not with Nazis in their midst, sanctimonious petty assholes that they were. The Berlin Philharmonic used to belong to its players, they had owned it, each player a share, but Goebbels had forced them to sell, had seized them. They were birds in a cage now, and had to be fearful of traitors. Around the midnight tables a few of the most disgusted had even discussed the situation and what they would do the moment the war was over: they would immediately dismiss Rammelt, Kleber, Bucholz, Schuldes, and Woywoth, and then they would open their first postwar concert with an overture by Mendelssohn. That was the plan, that was what they would do, they told each other drunkenly, when it was all over—at which point they could only wince and nod when Erich Hartmann added his usual coda to any such talk: When we're all dead.

  Now, glancing helplessly through the glare of the lights at the audience, the timpanist could see in the little faces out there that they had all heard a Hartmann, one way or another. The knowledge filled them like an iron bell in the chest: in a year or two, only a few here would be alive. Less than half? A tenth? None at all? None could tell, and yet all knew; indeed the music insisted that they know, and the timpanist's mallets drove it into their skulls. That repetitive little dirge in the basses that announced the coda, the phrase that had given Berlioz the shivers, convinced him that the old man had known madness full well: it filled them now, vibrated their guts, they could not escape it. Six notes down, two notes up, over and over and over. Never had they played the first movement like this before, it was their knowledge playing it. The final massive D-minor falling fourths, implacable, unavoidable, dragging them down, pushing them off the cliff into the abyss—hit every note:

  Bah bum! bah bum, bah bum, bah bummmmmm,

  bah bum bum bah! bah! bah! bah! bum.

  Second movement: Scherzo molto vivace

  The scherzo is best regarded as a concerto for timpani and orchestra, especially if you are the timpanist. The solo timpani notes called for in the fifth bar are part of the tune, simply an octave apart, Ds both, repeating and thereafter anchoring the syncopated dactylic theme, and often banging it solo in the resonant pause of all the others. Soloist and orchestra. You had to love Beethoven for thinking of it.

  The timpanist thumped his great three notes home and then off they went, rollicking inside a juggernaut that stopped for nothing. Molto vivace, sure, but alive with some kind of thoughtless life, something insectile or germlike which shrugged off all obstruction. A life manic and onrushing, a life that killed. The mad blind energy of the universe.

  Furtwängler conducted this relentless engine in his usual spastic style, urging the group along by mysterious movements. Jerky, uncoordinated, enigmatic: the timpanist like all the rest of them had long since learned that the actual beat Furtwängler wanted could be best read in the movements of his upper arms, or in his shoulders more generally. Nothing else about him was reliable as to tempo; his other shudderings meant God knew what. One could only conclude they referred to some qualities beyond physical expression which he nevertheless tried to convey, qualities which Furtwängler himself was at a loss to define, even in rehearsal. He was a little bit crazy. He spoke in bursts, after pauses, and could be amazingly inarticulate when talking about what he wanted in a piece. He would pause at questions, tap the score, cluck in exasperation: Just look at the music, he would say in the end. Just play what's there.

  And so they would. Ultimately it became a matter of group telepathy. This was always partly true, but under Furtwängler's baton, completely the case. There was nothing else for it; they had to make it up themselves. The sudden responsibility of this, the imposed task, was startling, worrisome, sometimes electrifying. And it was in keeping with Furtwängler's slippery resistance to the Nazis. Just as he would not let them dictate to him, he would not dictate to his players, even though as conductor this could be said to be his job. The surprising thing was how often he made it work—how watching him flail up there, seeing him out of tempo and yet believing in him, they so often played as one organism, one mind. It was the best feeling in the world.

  Naturally they would have loved him just for that alone. Some of the other conductors were martinets, like Knappertsbusch, or idiots, like Krauss, and of course there was always the icy ugliness of the maestro's great enemy von Karajan. No—a good conductor was always appreciated, a great conductor often loved.

  But with Furtwängler it was so much more. The timpanist had felt like that for more than half his life; he had been a bass player as a young man, won his place in the Berlin Philharmonic right beside Erich Hartmann himself, but had gone to the front in the first war and fallen in no-man's land during an attack, broken his left arm and leg and for the following eleven days been caught there under fire from both sides, eating dead men's provisions and trying to hide or crawl back to the German side, which seemed to retreat before him. A night patrol had finally brought him in, but he had never afterward been the same, not in mind nor body, and often could not suppress a small quiver in his left hand. It had looked to be the end of his musical career, but Furtwängler had watched him play, then suggested to him that his tremor would go away if he hit the drums, that it would only make him "quicker." It made a way to go forward.

  That was big; but now scattered among the orchestra there were many other men who were only there, and perhaps only alive, because of Furtwängler. Bottermund, Zimolong, Leuschner, and Bruno Stenzel were half-Jews; several others, including their concertmaster Hugo Kolberg, were married to Jewish women. She's always been that way, Kolberg would explain plaintively, I regret it but there it is, what can I do. Nothing; but Furtwängler did something. The full Jews in the orchestra had been driven into exile in the Thirties, to the maestro's great distress and over his objections; but after that he insisted he had to have his people, that they and their wives were to be left alone. Naturally this made Goebbels intent to break him, and the maestro had had to sacrifice his career to hold the line; had quit as the musical director of the Philharmonic, and of the Staat Opere, quit all his official positions until now he conducted only as a guest, accepting invitations on an individual basis, and never in the conquered countries. And he never gave the Nazi salute, not even when Hitler was there, always marching to the
podium baton in hand and beginning the moment he got there, in a way he never had in the past. Everyone knew it was a defiance.

  Now he was far away, deep in Beethoven, the greatest German of all. Light on his feet. It was easy to think of Beethoven as a kind of god, his music as natural as sunlight or the ocean, but he had been a deaf old man too, scribbling day after day, a hard worker. Furtwängler somehow made that clear, made the music new again, an improvisation only written down by chance and will. The players saw him struggling to convey this to them. Fighting for them, in so many ways: talking about it in empty cafés, late at night among the most trusted friends, the ones who were also in trouble, they had figured there were about a hundred people the maestro was protecting from the Nazis. Not counting the hundred in the orchestra itself, all balanced precariously on his jerky shoulders.

  So of course they loved him. The timpanist would have died for him, and he was not alone in this. And in performance they were forced by his indirection to follow him into that mysterious other land, and do what they could to bring it back into the hall. The timpani part in the second movement allowed the timpanist many little solos reiterating its syncopated theme, a theme so mechanically regular that its effect was ultimately terrible, as if the wild finale of the Seventh had somehow been punched onto the roll of a player piano: blind energy, relentless, remorseless. Again the kettle drums sounded like artillery, even a brief return of the bombers overhead. Furtwängler nodded grimly as he heard this. He had been hauled back from Vienna for this one, Hitler's birthday again, a predictable occasion and so he had been out of town as usual, in Vienna where the city's Gauleiter would have to give permission for him to leave, and von Schirach hated Hitler and presumably would refuse any such permission, making it a safe haven. But the word going round was that Goebbels had gotten von Schirach on the telephone and threatened him so effectively that Furtwängler had been sent back. Now here they were between the swastikas, playing for the Führer's birthday with the cameras rolling and the tapes recording, so that the performance would be seen by all the world, saved for all eternity. So all the maestro's efforts to keep his distance had come to naught, and now his body was clenched, his baton flew about spasmodically, the abstracted but pained set of his face twisted often into something like rage. Everything about him made it clear to his men that this was a bad occasion, a disaster, a defeat to be suffered. People in times to come would hear the tapes and see the film, and judge them. They would not understand. Only if the orchestra played well enough might people take pause, feel confused—recall the crimes of their own countries, recall how they had turned their heads and hoped it was just a bad time that would go away—recall how they too had failed to resist. Then they might hear the pain of being caught when the bad time didn't go away, when the thugs took over and there was nothing you could do. Or nothing you did. And if they imagined they would do something different, he thought with a sudden forte smash, they lied! They lied!

  But if they heard they would understand. So there was nothing for it but to play as if possessed, to live inside Beethoven and throw it in the teeth of their captors, inhabit their music like a fortress and defy the Nazis from inside it. The whole band understood this, their traitors notwithstanding; these first two movements showed it, they were playing in a fury, never had they ridden these old warhorses as hard as this! Feeling the effort all through his body, striking as if his mallets were clubs, the timpanist hit the final notes of the scherzo so hard that the head of his D drum split right across.

  Third movement: Adagio molto e cantabile

  Normally when the third movement began, he would sit on his stool with about eight minutes of rest, and there were other rests later; he rested more than played. So he would listen to the sweet flow of the strings, and think over his life in a particular order, as if fingering a rosary: first his mother, then his father, then his childhood and youth, lastly his music.

  This time however he had to sit on the floor behind the drums and as quietly as possible pull a new head from the head folder, then unscrew the broken drumhead, unhoop it, and get the new one on, all in time for the drum to make its appearance. Possibly he could play the adagio's first timpani part on the other drums, then continue the repair between his first and second entries. It would take almost twenty minutes for the maestro to traverse this longest of adagios. At the worst he should be ready in time for the finale. But it would be better if he could do it right, so he went to work as fast as he could, given the requirement of utter silence and invisibility. Jürgen, one of the percussionists, noticed his predicament and crawled over to help him. "Günther!" he whispered in his ear. "What have you done!"

  "Never mind that," the timpanist replied. "Just help me."

  They went to it, sitting on the floor and reaching up to the rims of the copper kettle. As they worked, a part of his mind still took in the music. The adagio was one of his favorite parts. People had a tendency to dismiss the Ninth's adagio a little bit, he had noticed, at least in comparison to the other three movements, each in their different ways so monumental. But that was a mistake; the adagio too was a marvel. Indeed if any one movement of the Ninth were to be singled out as being less astonishing than the rest, it would probably have to be the second, much though a timpanist should never say so, of course. Really it was best just to listen and accept: the whole symphony was great. The adagio was a blessing from God.

  Furtwängler routinely played it as if pouring syrup, and on this night he took it slower than ever. The stately melody wound through its series of variations, meandering more each time, with a richness of elaboration reminiscent of Bruckner. Simply put, a very beautiful song. It steadied his hand as he untightened the screws, ignoring the anxious face staring up from inside the copper.

  Then there was a shift, a second theme that interrupted the song, coming as if from far away: trumpets speaking briefly. It might have been a call, a rally to return to town; but it was for others; and the song resumed, carried them downstream and away. Furtwängler's dreamy pace never lost a nice line; they flowed in a way that revealed the deep currents beneath. This was what the maestro was listening for in his own world, it was obvious. All around the timpanist the strings were following that line.

  It was a hopeless task to change the drumhead in complete silence, and at one point there was a metallic clank as the loosened hoop hit the edge of a music stand. The maestro's sound technician, Friedrich Schnapp, glared up from his cockpit to the side; he had heard it. Now he saw their situation and grimaced at them fiercely. His gaze darted back and forth between his monitors and them. He looked desperate for a cigarette, he always was, but the Führer didn't like smoking and the maestro neither, so there was no chance of that until the whole thing was over. Schnapp chewed his moustache instead, and Günther and Jürgen pulled the new head over the drum, then placed the hoop over it, after which they screwed it down in careful half turns, moving around the drum opposite each other. He would have to tune the new head while playing, alas, unless he could risk tapping away sotto voce before his part began. He had done that before once or twice when the piece itself called him to do it. The maestro had heard these little additions to the score and tipped his head to the side as if considering whether such a thing was permissible; and then more than once had conducted the transgression, the tip of his baton making little gestures as if to say, If you are going to be so bold, I am not necessarily opposed in theory; but you must be conducted. So he could tune the drum that way on this misbegotten Walpurgisnacht, and the maestro would understand—or not, in which case he could explain the situation to him later.

  Despite his focus on their silent handiwork, some inner part of him was also persisting with his rosary; apparently this music now triggered it in him no matter what else was happening. So, his mother. How he missed her. How hard she had worked. A baker who had raised her son in her bakery, while her husband was out on the road or in the bars. The main impression of her that remained with him was how hard she h
ad worked. Even as a child he had been impressed by that; even now, remembering it, awe filled him. No one he had ever known since had worked as hard. Now she had been dead twenty-eight years.

  Then his father, his crazy father, who had been too old even for the first war, and yet nevertheless was now working as a truck mechanic on the eastern front. Recently he had been in Berlin on a leave and taken his son out drinking, and regaled him with stories of what it was like to be the only mechanic on truck convoys numbering in the scores of vehicles, with just him and a road engineer named Matthias to keep things moving. Every trip is the fucking Iliad and Odyssey combined, boy, the roads have been destroyed and we're always axle deep, and last time out Matthias wasn't along and trucks were sliding into ditches and canals, jack-knifing, you name it, and we'd drive up and get out and they would look at me! And I would look at the mess and think, Please, Matthias, speak to me now, be with me now, what would you do with this ridiculous mess—and I swear to you, Günther, I swear to God, I swear by your mother, that Matthias would speak to me! And I would tell everyone what he was saying, tell them to do things I had never seen or heard of! It was Matthias inside me, speaking through me. We would fix the mess and on we would go. We're all inside each other, boy. We can call mind to mind, you can hear it if you listen.

  I know, the timpanist had said. It's like that when we play.

  But he could see that his father believed it literally. It was funny to think that the fate of the entire Russian campaign, in other words of the war itself, rested on the shoulders of a sixty-year-old mechanic who heard voices in his head.

  Furtwängler flowed on. He was indeed taking the adagio slower than usual, no doubt as a rebuke to Goebbels and his gang. You people are here for the fire and glory of the other movements, Furtwängler's tempo said, but I'm not going to hurry for you. Now you're the captives, caught by Beethoven, and the music that we bathe in is precisely the world that you have taken away from us. This is the meadow in the forest, this is Sunday at dawn in the clean washed street. This is the flow of slow time, the empty hour, contemplation itself. These are the things you have taken from us with your vicious stupidity. Listen and remember, if you can. If you ever knew.