1636- the Flight of the Nightingale

by David Carrico

  Johann frowned and crossed his arms, considering what he had been told. This could be a real complication to his plans. After a moment, he unfolded his arms and leaned forward. “First, buy up as much ore as you can get—if that nudges the prices up a little, we will just have to live with that. I would rather make sure we have the ore than worry about paying a bit more for it. If you do not have room to store it all, I think we can find a place in the opera house grounds to store it. We may have to throw up a shed or get some barrels or something, but we will find a way.

  “Second, try to get one of the others to commit to my project. If it takes money, as long as what they want is not totally outside of reason, pay it or promise it, and I will have it covered by the opera house project.”

  “You can do that?” Luder’s eyebrows rose.

  “I think I can,” Johann said. “I need to talk to Frau Haygood soon, though.”

  Luder shrugged. “I will do my best. How well I succeed will depend a lot on how quickly Master Compenius is moving, and how much silver he is willing to lay out right now.”

  “Understood,” Johann said. “Do your best, though. And let me know immediately if anything else changes.”

  “That I can do.” Luder picked up his flagon and finished off his beer, setting the empty flagon down with a definite thump. “And now, I must get back to the forge. Regardless of what else happens, I still have a lot of work to do.”

  The whitesmith strode off, whistling tunelessly enough that Johann was wincing until he was out of earshot. Johann remained at the table staring at a half-full flagon of beer, thoughts awhirl. He really didn’t need this complication right now. He had hoped that the rebuilding of the Dom organ would be delayed by some kind of bureaucratic issue or some kind of disagreement among the pastors. After all, that kind of thing happened with fairly great regularity. But of course, something like that would never happen when he would derive some benefit from it.

  “God,” Johann muttered with a quick upward look, “it would be nice if You would at least slow them down a little bit.”

  There was no answer—not that Johann was expecting one.

  He finished off his flagon of beer and headed out the door himself.

  * * *

  Driven by a sudden urge, Johann walked to the cathedral, which lay in the very southern end of Old Magdeburg facing Hans Richter Plaza and just inside the southern walls of the Altstadt, the old city. He could have hired a cab to take him, but the early afternoon was nice with a cloudless sky and a very light breeze, and there was enough traffic that a cab wouldn’t have saved him a lot of time. Besides, it gave him some time to think.

  One of the western doors into the nave of the cathedral was open when he approached, so he walked on in. It was his first time in the cathedral, the Dom as everyone referred to it, although the formal name was Dom zu Magdeburg St. Mauritius und Katharina. Once inside, he had to stop and gaze around.

  The Dom was the largest cathedral in the eastern Germanies. From where Johann stood, he could see down the length of the building over three hundred fifty feet to the presbytery at the eastern end of the building. Looking up, he could see the vaulted ceilings which rose over one hundred feet above the floor. He drank in the sight. It was an impressive building, despite the damage that he could see in various locations where some of Tilly’s soldiers had made off with some type of valuable.

  As Johann stood and absorbed the experience of the cathedral, he gradually became aware of others talking.

  “…Gustav appointed Fürst Ludwig von Anhalt-Cöthen to be the administrator of the archbishopric’s properties. The Swede now claims to own the Erzstift of Magdeburg, and of course we are in no position to gainsay him.” The speaker’s voice was nasal and penetrating, even at low volume.

  “Does the Fürst not provide for Magdeburg’s needs, then?” The second speaker’s voice was a bit rough.

  “He does,” the first speaker replied, “but he keeps the purse strings tight and only allows one project at a time. The churches of St. Nikolai and St. Katherina were destroyed totally, and the church of St. Sebastian was badly damaged in the fire set by Tilly’s vandals. The Fürst has placed a higher priority on getting at least the major repairs done to St. Sebastian before it collapses.”

  “One perhaps cannot blame him for that.”

  “In other circumstances, I would agree,” the first speaker said stiffly. “But to put that ahead of restoring the cathedral was a mistake, I believe.”

  “Regardless, those repairs must be mostly done if he is advancing the funds for the organ restoration.”

  At that, Johann turned and faced toward where two men were standing together staring up at where the organ had previously stood in the western end of the cathedral. It was obvious where it had been, as there was this hideous gap in the wall where the pipe ranks should have stood. There was no screen, no grill, no facade of false pipes, only a huge opening in the plasterwork that had been laid over the stone. Johann could dimly see what appeared to be some wooden pipes back in the darkness of the recess of the pipe chamber, but he couldn’t see clearly. It did look like many of those were leaning or had even been knocked off their fittings.

  A sudden flare of rage shot through Johann. Now he understood the Magdeburgers’ hatred for Tilly, and even more for Pappenheim, who had been left to command the garrison of the city after Tilly’s troops had sacked it. It was Pappenheim who had ordered the sale of the metal from the cathedral, which had resulted in the gutting of the organ. Johann now understood that hatred at a very visceral level.

  One of the men was dressed in rather fine black clothing and was holding a large Bible in one hand. Obviously that was the minister.

  The other was a stocky man dressed in sober clothing. He was facing slightly toward Johann, which allowed Johann to view his profile and recognize him as Ludwig Compenius, the youngest of the current generation of the organ-building Compenius family. He was also the only one of the family that Johann had met; having had the opportunity to speak with Ludwig when he had left his position in Naumburg and relocated to Erfurt, at least temporarily.

  Compenius must have caught sight of Johann out of the corner of his eye, for he turned his head to face him, which in turn caused the pastor to turn and see who the organ builder was looking at.

  “Herr…Bach, is it not?” Compenius’ brow wrinkled a bit as he strove for recall.

  “Yes, Master Compenius. Johann Bach.”

  “We had a pleasant conversation over a bottle of wine a couple of years ago, I believe.”

  “I am flattered that you remember me,” Johann said. And that was the truth. Master Compenius, for all that he was only a bit older than Johann himself, had an enviable reputation and was renowned throughout Germany as being “one of those Compeniuses.” The fact that he recalled a conversation from almost two years ago provided a bit of encouragement and ego lift to Johann.

  The organ builder chuckled. “Of course, if Heinz and I had realized that you were going to become a competitor, we might not have been so freely spoken in our conversation.”

  “Competitor?” the pastor interjected, looking confused.

  “Ah, Herr Bach, have you met Magister Matthias Decennius, the Caplan im Dom?” Compenius said.

  The pastor was the head pastor for the cathedral, then, which in essence made him the head pastor in Magdeburg. This was not an unimportant man in the city, Johann thought. Even Mayor Gericke walked with some care around Decennius, word of whose uncertain temper had reached even Johann.

  “I am honored to meet you, Magister Decennius,” Johann said with a slight bow.

  “And this is Herr Johann Bach,” Compenius concluded, “a member of the widespread clan of Bach musicians, a performer of some skill, I believe, and now a designer and builder of organs.”

  Decennius said nothing, simply nodded. Johann decided that was acceptable to him. He had no desire to get crosswise with the pastor.

  “At that time I had no idea mys
elf that I would,” Johann confessed. “Become a competitor, I mean. But after I came to Magdeburg, and the Arts League sent out the proposal for the new organ, I thought there was nothing to be lost by making an offer. I was very surprised to find out that I had been awarded the contract.”

  Compenius chuckled again. “Herr Bach, you should never be surprised to find you’ve won a contract. You should be gratified.”

  “I shall endeavor to do so, Master Compenius.”

  The two men shared a grin before Compenius looked back up at the ravaged pipe loft. “The vandals were thorough, I will give them that,” the master builder said.

  “Unfortunately,” Johann agreed.

  “Well, the scale of the theft actually does help in one respect,” Compenius said. “Since they took everything down to bare wood, it will actually make it easier to design and build new ranks.” He shrugged. “It will still be an awful lot of work, and rerunning the air feed pipes will be almost as large a challenge.”

  “They took those as well?” Johann said, astounded.

  Compenius nodded. “At least part of them, the parts that were easiest to reach.”

  “I begin to understand why Pappenheim’s name drives people in Magdeburg to blasphemy.”

  “Indeed.”

  Decennius had frowned at the mention of blasphemy, but forbore speaking at the moment.

  Compenius continued to stare up at the organ loft, fingering the beard on his chin as he did so. “Herr Bach,” he said as he moved his head slowly from side to side, obviously scanning the entire structure, “I have heard tell that there is music from the future in Grantville by a Bach.”

  “Correct,” Johann said. “Actually, there is music by three or four Bachs, but most of it is by one Bach, the greatest of them, one Johann Sebastian Bach.”

  “The greatest of Bachs?” Compenius said.

  Johann shrugged. “He would have been born fifty years from now, in 1685, and would have lived a very full life, dying in 1750. And he wrote…would have written…some of the greatest music ever composed.”

  “Greater than our best?” Decennius said. “Greater than Praetorius or Schütz? I doubt that.”

  “Magister, a few weeks ago I told someone that if music was a religion, Johann Sebastian Bach would have been its chief apostle, Peter and Paul together.” The caplan seemed to swell up. “I have reconsidered the notion. I now think the man would be the chief saint…or better yet, the archangel.”

  “He was that good?” Compenius said.

  “Master Compenius, he was so good I weep at the beauty of his music, and I despair of ever approaching his skill and craft and art.”

  “You hear that, Magister Decennius?” Compenius said. “That is the judgment of a Bach, and one who is not the least among them.”

  “His judgment verges on blasphemy,” the caplan muttered, turning his head away.

  “Of course it does,” Compenius said after a snort. “He is a musician. That goes without saying.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Compenius looked up at the pipe loft again and heaved his shoulders in a big sigh. “Well, there is no help for it but that I must climb up there and examine what little remains. I cannot assess the damage from down here. Good day to you, Herr Bach. We will meet again, I am certain.” The organ builder nodded at Johann, then looked to the pastor. “Magister Decennius, the door to the loft, if you would.”

  Johann watched as the two men crossed to a door barely visible in the side wall of the end of the nave and disappeared through it. He shook his head, looked around the nave once more and up toward the vaulted ceiling, then made his way out the doors he had entered through.

  Well, he thought, that hadn’t gone as poorly as it could have. But it was clear that while Master Compenius respected the Bach family as a whole, he had no reason to be accommodating to them or to Johann in particular. And Johann doubted that he would be. So his instructions to Master Luder would stand. But he needed to have a conversation with Lady Beth Haygood now. And at this hour of the day—he glanced at the position of the sun—she was probably at the school, so that was where he headed.

  * * *

  It was nearing six o’clock when Johann made his way to the Duchess Elisabeth Sofie Secondary School for Girls for the second time that day. He felt his neck and face where the barber had trimmed his beard and shaved his neck and cheeks to give a somewhat cleaner appearance. It all felt good. He checked his fingers. No traces of blood, so he hadn’t been cut or scraped by the razor, which was a good thing.

  Johann’s earlier conversation with Frau Lady Beth had gone well. She understood the implications of having yet another project in town competing for scarce resources, especially one that competed for the same things needed for the organ. At the end of their conversation, Johann had the approval for what he had already told Master Luder to do.

  That conversation had been relatively short, and he had left the school without seeing anyone else. The remainder of the afternoon had been divided between checking on the carpentry work at the construction site and working on learning the pieces he would need for the inaugural performance on the organ. He hadn’t determined the final selection of works yet, much less the sequence in which they would be performed, but he already knew the piece that would open the concert, and the piece that would conclude it: the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to open, and the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor to close. Those would not be quick pieces to learn, so he had begun the process already, working with the small clavier in his room. That would at least let him get the manual parts ingrained in his hands and arms.

  Learning the pedal parts would require having access to an organ. Obviously the Dom was out of the question, but maybe one of the daughter churches still standing had a small organ that he could at least begin the learning on.

  In any event, other than the pedals, Johann about had the Prelude portion of the D minor ready, and the Fugue was beginning to take shape. The Passacaglia, on the other hand, was still very rough. Johann chuckled. It could be worse. He could have decided on doing the entire Art of Fugue—all eighteen fugues and canons of it.

  Even though he had thoroughly brushed off his jacket and pants before he left the rooming house, Johann still brushed off the front of his jacket with his hands, and took his hat off to make sure that it was clean before he opened the door and stepped into the school.

  A young girl stuck her head out of the door of Lady Beth’s office for a moment, only to retract it immediately. This was followed by both Lady Beth and Staci stepping out of the office a moment later, both pulling on coats. For a moment, Johann was afraid that Lady Beth planned to come along, but then his common sense asserted itself when he remembered that she did not live in the school building as Staci and some of the other teachers did. She and her husband had a small town home of their own in the northern quarters of the Neustadt in the Old City not far from the school.

  “Good night, Herr Bach,” Lady Beth said as she brushed by him. “Y’all have fun.”

  Johann looked at Staci, who gave him her gamine grin. “No, she wasn’t being a chaperone,” she said. “We were just talking about an idea I had for teaching a unit on economics. I think we’re going to bring the Monopoly game into the class.”

  “Shall we leave, then?” Johann said, gesturing toward the door.

  Staci walked by him, and he followed her out the door and closed it behind them. “Is there someone still in the office?” he inquired as he moved up alongside her.

  “Oh, yes,” Staci replied. “Whenever anyone is out, there will be one of the staff or the night porter waiting to let them back in and make sure they get home.”

  “You do not let the girls out at night, do you?”

  “Only for a reason approved by Frau Haygood, and only when accompanied by an adult member of the immediate family or by one of the teachers.” She sidestepped something in the roadway. “We do take the safety of the students pretty seriously.”

  “That is good
,” Johann said. “So, Monopoly?”

  They made the turn onto the Gustavstrasse, which ran along the inside of the city wall in the Neustadt, and progressed south.

  “It’s an up-timer board game,” Staci said. “There were several sets in Grantville when the Ring of Fire happened. It used to be very popular. I played it a lot with the family when I was a kid. Anyway, it can be used to teach some basic principles about owning property and handling money.”

  “In school?” Johann hoped he didn’t sound too incredulous.

  “Yes, even in a girls’ school,” Staci replied. “These girls are mostly from well-off families—major merchants, guildsmen, patricians, even some of the Niederadel. They will need to be grounded in the practical aspects of their families’ businesses or properties, if for no other reason than to keep someone from taking advantage of them.”

  Johann nodded. He could see that. He remembered some of the things his mother had had to take control of after his father had died.

  “So how is the organ building going?”

  “Progressing well,” Johann said. He gave her the high points of where they were; the cabinetry progressing, the main wind-chest completed. The air pipes between the main wind-chest and the main console completed, and some of the pipes actually being produced.

  By the time he completed that recital, they were stepping through the southwest gate of the Neustadt onto the ring road that circled the outside of Old Magdeburg. The road angled to the southwest for several yards, then intersected a major east/west street in front of Magdeburg Memorial Hospital, the up-time designed hospital that was being expanded. The two of them turned onto that street and headed west.

  “And how is Frau Marla?” Johann asked. “I mean, as far as being…”

  “Pregnant?” Staci responded. “She says she feels as big as a house, but that’s ridiculous, because she’s not that far along, and she hasn’t gained that much weight yet. Plus she’s been lucky enough that she hasn’t had much trouble with morning sickness. So all things considered, she’s a typical first-time mom, somewhat nervous, but seems to be doing okay. She’s still putting in her regular schedule as a teacher, anyway.”