For the love of music

[Vienna, early 1900s. Interior. A young male voice, naturally gentle, speaking sotto voce]

Is he asleep? Yes – finally. His breathing slow, rhythmic. One…two. One…two. He should rest like this for hours. I know the pattern. Long into the morning, long past my leaving for work. Good! Much as I love him, I need my sleep too.

But Great God above! What was that last evening we just went through? He’s exhausted – but me? I don’t even have the words. He, the painter, would write an opera. I, the musician, must be… what? His scribe, his amanuensis. He must sit at my piano – [corrects himself] our piano – and I must sit alongside and take notation, hour after hour, write down whatever tumbles from his fingers. And what, by all that’s holy, was that? I’m used to his ways, his strange and sudden effusions. But what can they have been hearing down the hallway? The boarders in their rooms, Frau Zakreys in her parlour? Can they have supposed them sounds made by human hand?

[Darkly] God forbid anyone thought it was me playing. Surely not: they all know me here for a trained musician, a student, at the Conservatoire, no less, and a part-time teacher, here in Vienna. They know my touch of the keyboard, they’ve heard it. It’s utterly unlike… much as I love my friend and share his passions, that was not music.

[Uncertain pause]

Was it? Can I be missing something? Am I too set in my understanding, too ‘bourgeois’, as he would say? It’s true, for him as well as for me, music is our secular God. But still… how can you worship, how can you truly love something you don’t understand? That onslaught of sounds, without meter or line, without the simplest shape that a musical learning can impose… I do know, my dear friend what it is you’re seeking, that ‘something’, that primal force within. But to go at it like this… it’s as if Wagner himself were still dressed in animal skins, and composed with rocks and broken clubs. Even The Ring Prelude has its progression of chords, its dominant key, its careful keeping of a time. Your Prelude, my friend, has nothing of these, nothing that can be called music.

[Uncertain pause]

Does it, though? Am I failing to recognize genius? Something you have, my friend, that I don’t? You were the bellows to my first, flickering love for the Bayreuth Master. It was you who persuaded my father – that sturdy brick of middle-class conformity – that I should pack in a steady life, family business and all – and hazard my whole future on music. Do you somehow know music– at another, deeper level – better than I do? And yet you know nothing of music. And yet without you, I would be nothing to music. My head’s spinning with it all, it’s late and I have to work all morning, while he sleeps into the afternoon, and this latest, craziest experiment has shaken me – shaken my whole sense of what’s sane and proper and right.

[Pause]

He’s reached too far into my domain, that’s the nub of it. He’s crossed into territory that’s supposed to be mine. It sounds petty of me, but that’s how it feels. He has so many passions, so many interests – why can’t he stick to them? This is mine, and I do know it. “Adolf,” I say, “there must be some kind of melodic line within each theme, something the listener can follow”. “What are you saying, Augustus?”, he yells back, “don’t you understand that music is purest feeling, emotion?” “Adolf,” I say, “the time must be consistent from bar to bar, or no-one will know how to play it”. “Rubbish, Augustus!”, he retorts, “musicians must learn to play to the scheme of the master”. “Adolf,” I say, “you are losing me again, your structure must observe the laws of harmony”. “Imbecile!”, he cries, “what do your school-book laws have to do with the outpourings of art?” Well, my friend, at least I have some school-book learning in these matters. You can be the artist on Monday, the architect on Tuesday, the playwright on Wednesday, the scene-designer on Thursday, the town planner Friday, the politician Saturday and Sunday, but leave the music to me! Are you really so greedy? Do you think I’m your wife, that you can bully me and order me about?

[Pause]

I’m being unfair, I know it. This making of an opera means so much to him. He’s barely eaten today, I can tell. The famine of genius has taken hold of him again. And who else is there but me to tell him when to eat, when to sleep, make sure he doesn’t pine away into vapour? My dear, dear friend: it’s such a strange love that we share. I honour Music; you command her. I live for her; you would die.