The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  How could it be real? At the end of a trail winding for months into the heart of Indochina how could there be a piano? Two soldiers manhandled him to his feet and pushed him through the trees, stumbling over roots. Steadier lights appeared among the fireflies: the white rectangles of the windows lit by electricity. The music grew louder. At the steps of a neat bungalow the soldiers halted. The Major sat down, strength gone, and leaned his head against the cement balustrade. Somebody inside the house or else inside his head was playing the First Partita. The music rolled over him and flooded out into the orchard. As it did so all incongruity vanished. The swept and beaten earth around the bungalow, the rusting Milo tins with flowering shrubs in them, the unseen military men patrolling the shadows, the flicker of fruit bats around a palm tree’s head: all fell beneath the spell and were tamed into normality. He felt his fragments start to congeal around this forgotten sound. Time rewound itself. Somewhere in the distance a generator softly thudded.

  After a while the weeping Major looked up. In the silence a trim European with white hair was watching from the veranda.

  ‘Won’t you come up?’ asked this man in accented English. ‘I’m sure you’d like to wash before dinner.’

  Incredulously, the Major found himself helped beneath a shower, fumbling with freed hands a bar of soap whose scent pierced him nearly as much as Bach had. Then he was sitting at a table wearing a silk dressing-gown, blinking in the unaccustomed light, while a girl in an ao dai served him food such as he had dreamed about obsessively. The weight of cutlery in his hands slowed them to a semblance of table manners. Instead of scooping the fluffy rice up with a hand and plastering it into the hole in his beard the Major managed to restrain himself though he ate with terrible concentration, glaring at the food as it disappeared. At length his host asked:

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Oh God.’ Then, warily, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Darius Fauchon.’

  ‘They’re keeping you here? Where in hell are we?’

  The European smiled. ‘I was born here. I’m a simple planter. This place is called Can Tau. And who are you?’

  The Major blinked and his mouth stumbled on his name, rank and number without its usual fluency. He had to think. ‘You’re French, right?’

  ‘My parents were French,’ his host told him. ‘Naturally, since I was born here, I am Vietnamese.’

  ‘I didn’t know the Vietnamese played Bach.’

  ‘You recognised it?’

  ‘I used to play it myself, years ago.’

  The Major felt himself expand as the unaccustomed food and wine took hold.

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Fauchon with pleasure. ‘You’re a pianist too? I’m only an amateur, of course, but you’re like a dream come true. At last I’ve someone to play duets with. You really must stay now that you’re here. Do you by any chance know Schubert’s four-hand music?’

  The Major, who felt gorged, had in fact eaten little. He allowed himself to be helped to a couch, whereupon another girl in an ao dai appeared with a bowl and some towels and began bathing his cracked feet with herbal tinctures. She patted them carefully dry and put dressings on his wounds. The knight lay back, bemused, not able to speak, hypnotised by the slowly revolving blades of the ceiling fan. His host meanwhile kept up a steady conversation with a middle-aged man in peasant clothes who had wandered in. They might have been discussing the ground-nut harvest for all the Major knew or cared. The war had vanished. His captors were presumably lurking in the groves around the house, ready to come in and pinion his arms and wander him off again as soon as this bizarre interlude was over. At length, though, he and the Frenchman were left alone.

  ‘Where’s the war?’ he asked bitterly. The last year’s sufferings seemed after all to have been unnecessary.

  ‘Oh, dragging on, you know.’ The Frenchman made a dismissive gesture. ‘You’re probably a bit behind with the news. Your countrymen are none too happy about things. Opposition seems to be growing back home: student protests, draft dodging, riots, all that. As you’ve no doubt deduced by now, the war doesn’t after all seem to be about what you were told it was about. Little is, when you come to think of it.’

  Without warning the man went to seat himself at the piano and began to play one of the ‘Forty-Eight’ preludes. Bemused, the Major once again found himself reduced to tears. This was a way stage on a lethal trek, a short break like an unexpected split in a heavy overcast allowing a glimpse of the eternal bright blue wrapping the planet. Where fighter pilots flew and Bach lived there was no weather. Suddenly the possibility of staying alive was hugely precious. Yokes, privations, leeches and beatings could be survived or even – if one played one’s hand as smartly as this French planter appeared to have – avoided entirely. Being a knight was not the only way of spending a life. Evidently this man’s own father had had entirely different expectations for his son. What was considered an honourable way to live varied greatly according to something as flimsy as local fashion … Meanwhile the music filled him, each note falling like a drop of rain into his parched soul. His weakened mind became crowded with banalities and ravishment; with the banality of ravishment.

  Some time later he heard his mouth talking. It seemed to have been doing it for a long time. The Frenchman was sitting turned to face him on the piano stool, nodding now and then as an analyst might, encouraging the weight to leave the mind without improper eliciting. The Major told of the horrors he’d seen, the Montagnard villages burnt out, the shredded bodies of mountain folk who had no more to do with this foreigners’ war than ants have with the descending boot heel. He told of jungle fastnesses full of strange and beautiful creatures erased to vapour and craters. A year’s unexpressed pain leached out of him. He spoke on and on in a sad monotone in that bright and civilised room to his bright and civilised host who from time to time simply turned round and played the piano for a few minutes by way of punctuation. Whenever he did the Major’s eyes filled hopelessly with tears, though the former knight of so many months ago would have known there would probably be a film camera turning silently behind an aperture at the back of the bookshelves which directly faced him.

  The Last of the Habsburgs

  DISASTER LOOMED in the stricken, war-torn and disputed Enclave. Its territorial waters, sadly unoiled and hence troubled, were further marred by violence as negotiations got under way, towing a raft of new measures. In the distance a large question-mark hung over blocks of stumble which in turn were themselves hanging in the balance above a key crossroads. Underneath them, a concrete aid package was on the table. At grassroots level allegations were mushrooming, among which rebel factions held pea-stalks, while in a race against time hard-pressed surgeons performed delicate face-saving and fence-mending operations.

  ‘Well, if the BBC says so it must be true,’ Pikel Tarza thought to himself, sitting up in bed and turning off his short-wave radio. ‘They’re listened to the world over. I must admit they paint a gloomy picture. I hadn’t realised things were so bad in the provinces.’

  In the Enclave’s capital, all unbeknownst to the BBC, it was the eve of a week’s festivities commemorating the bicentenary of the death of the National Composer, Lugo Pirbit (1729–1795). Excitement was considerable, to a large degree taking its cue from the King himself. Vazimil III was an enthusiastic amateur musician in the tradition of Frederick the Great and Archduke Rudolph and he had ordered no expense spared to do justice to Pirbit’s sublime legacy. It had fallen to Pikel Tarza as Kapellmeister to organise the various concerts and recitals which would take place all over town throughout the week, culminating in Sunday evening’s grand programme in the cathedral. On that night everyone of any consequence in the Enclave would be there; and for as long as the concert lasted the nation would (with the exception of the surreal goings-on in the provinces) come to a festive halt.

  Kapellmeister Tarza’s task had not been easy and preparations had begun almost a year ago. The logistics of arranging who went when to which hall to pl
ay what music had been bad enough, but devising the final night’s programme had been tricky indeed. The great Pirbit’s famous recalcitrance had easily survived two centuries. Ahead of his times in many things, he had been a devout satanist and had written a series of black masses of which the last, Missa nigra solennissima in D, was reckoned his masterpiece in the genre. It had been the King’s own preference for this climactic concert, but the Patriarch had been quite firm. Pirbit or not, it was a most improper choice for any part of the ceremonies and absolutely out of the question in the cathedral. At first the King had been taken aback. An entirely secular man, he hadn’t until that moment made any connection between the piece and the place. To him it was simply a marvellous composition displaying to the full the thrilling blending of two musical traditions, the Austrian Catholicism of Haydn’s day with Eastern Orthodoxy. (‘I can’t help that,’ the Patriarch had said. ‘There’ll be no anathemas in my cathedral.’)

  So that was no good. After much negotiation the King and Tarza had agreed on a programme whose innocuous first half consisted of an overture, a couple of symphonies and Pirbit’s ever-popular balalaika concerto. The King was disposed to be a little snobbish about the last item but Tarza had insisted it was a necessary sop to the public in view of the programme’s second half. For this the King had decided on something very special indeed: the first-ever performance of Pirbit’s unfinished opera Habszabrugye Khust (The Last of the Habsburgs) in which he himself proposed to sing the role of Othmar the King. On first learning of this audacious plan Tarza’s dismay, loyally concealed, had been acute. It was no accident that the piece had never been staged: it was a mere torso with only a few numbers completed and the rest barely sketched out by the dying composer. Some of the sketches were in short score but most were on single staves interspersed with his own illegible reminders to himself. There was more than enough music to show that Pirbit was still at the height of his powers, however, which but added to the already poignant aura that always hung about a great artist’s last work. The problem of the text was one thing, Pikel Tarza thought ruefully; the King as singer was something else. It was not that the Vazimil voice was particularly bad. He had a pleasant bass whose once-shaky upper register had been worked on and much improved by a series of foreigners. What he lacked was a sense of rhythm. He simply couldn’t count. Tarza had once read a description of Frederick the Great’s flute-playing by one of his Court musicians – Quantz or C.P.E. Bach or someone – who said that it was fine so long as the music was slow, but in fast movements accompanying him was an art in itself. This was all too true of King Vazimil, who would cheerfully shave off or add the odd bar as the fervour took him. One forgave him much, Tarza thought, because he was a genuinely nice man and he really tried, as well as being a generous employer. But to choose Habszabrugye Khust, of all things …! Mercifully the role of King Othmar, such of it as had been written, was not large. It was confined to a single aria and several grave Sarastro-like utterances pregnant with wisdom, dignity and so forth. There were a couple of excuses for hitting a basso profondo bottom C which Vazimil could do with relish and ease. It sounded like a squeezed ox.

  The foremost Pirbit scholar had been coerced into producing a performable version of the opera from the sketches. He and Tarza had worked on the orchestration together and the result, when they’d played the whole thing through as a piano duet with their own falsetto accompaniment, was really not bad at all. It wasn’t Deryck Cooke’s Mahler Ten, and Pirbit might be turning in his grave, but at least his final work would be getting an airing. Besides, it was an interesting piece in its own right. One would have been hard pushed to describe Pirbit’s eclectic and highly individual musical style other than to say it suggested a J. M. Kraus brought up on the wrong side of the Carpathians. As for the opera’s libretto, the composer had written it himself and it was full of his own cross-grained radicalism.

  The plot was simple enough. It is the day of Othmar’s Coronation in 1795. A sensitive man, he is conscious of the waves of republicanism eddying around Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, and even more acutely aware that Louis XVI has not long since been guillotined in Paris. Not entirely for reasons of cowardice he wishes to make it clear to the people that though he is about to become their monarch he intends to rule them with humility and enlightenment. Meanwhile Konrad, a popular demagogue, is threatening to raise a mob to disrupt the Coronation. In a dramatic scene the future king sternly forbids his chief-of-staff to arrest Konrad and generally break heads in the customary fashion. To the contrary, argues Othmar in a lengthy recitativo secco, he and his mob must be invited to the cathedral to witness the ceremony for themselves. It is only right that the governed should see their governor pledge allegiance equally to God and their welfare. The chief-of-staff retires, shaking his head at this early and ominous sign of weakness. The Coronation service goes ahead and Konrad duly interrupts the proceedings before Othmar can be crowned. The guards of honour are hopelessly outnumbered and the mob surges into the cathedral unhindered. Othmar faces them alone in his regalia before the high altar and, in a coup de théâtre, raises his jewelled hand. They fall silent, overawed. He tells them they are right, all this panoply of majesty is just theatre. Beneath the ermine and velvet and brocade is a human being like themselves, a naked mortal. There is no divine right of kings: royal blood guarantees nothing more than a certain kind of training, and even this counts for little if the man is unworthy of the throne. Then comes the opera’s most audacious moment, when Othmar invites Konrad to take his place and be crowned in his stead. In the incredulous hush which falls his cronies push the reluctant Konrad in his jerkin and stout breeches slowly forward to the vacant throne. Suddenly a laugh rings out, followed by others; the laughter spreads until the entire cathedral is rocking with mirth. Again Othmar raises his hand for silence and then lets it fall gently on to the trembling Konrad’s shoulder. ‘Spradi burot y’min’, Stay, my friend, he sings in his great aria and Konrad sinks to his knees. When Othmar is crowned at last the demagogue becomes the first to swear the oath of allegiance to his sovereign, which is the signal for a flourish on the organ and a final chorus of thanksgiving and rejoicing.

  It was just as well Pirbit had never finished this seditious extravaganza. In 1795 there would have been precious little chance of his seeing it staged and every likelihood of his disappearing into one of the many Janissary dungeons which then dotted the Enclave. But in 1995 Pikel Tarza and King Vazimil thought it struck just the right note: loweringly democratic and then reassuringly traditional, with mystical hints and some jolly good tunes.

  And now the great commemorative Pirbit Week was about to start, with everything rehearsed to perfection and the King gargling six times a day with a solution of myrrh in arak. On the eve of the opening concerts Pikel Tarza went to track down some instrumental parts in the Imperial Music Library and had found the copies he was looking for, somewhat war-torn but quite legible, when he ran into the King, empty glass in hand, in the Royal Music Schools. Vazimil gave the scores a keen glance.

  ‘All set, eh, Tarza?’

  ‘Absolutely, Highness. I trust your throat is giving no cause for alarm?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s fine. Just following doctor’s orders. Tell me, Tarza,’ said the King earnestly, ‘you understand political things. What exactly is an enclave? I gathered from the BBC this morning that we’re one.’

  ‘According to the dictionary in the British Council library, Highness, it’s somewhere that’s completely enclosed within a foreign territory. It’s from the Latin in and clavis, a key.’

  ‘You mean we’re cut off? My field marshals have said nothing about it. How peculiar. You’d think they would have mentioned it.’

  ‘Still, Highness, the BBC. Its accuracy is widely held to be unimpeachable.’

  ‘So we’re isolated, are we? What with all this wonderful music I can’t say I’ve been paying too much attention to external affairs. Some very odd things do seem to be happening, though. Appa
rently there’s a table out there somewhere with a package of new measures on it. I distinctly heard it. I can’t imagine why the BBC should think it worth mentioning. One assumes the Metrication Board ordered them, or the Department of Surveys. Well, well, in and clavis, eh? I suppose one could say the second movement of that symphony you’re holding’s an enclave in A flat. Entirely surrounded by E flat, I mean.’

  ‘That’s extremely witty, Highness.’

  ‘Oh and Tarza, do you happen to know the name of the dialect the BBC is using nowadays? Is it the King’s or the Queen’s English?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say, Sire. I think it may be European English since they joined the Union.’

  ‘It’s very colourful. Most picturesque and graphic. Far more so than the old style they used to have which was plain and dull. I hope little Prince Tassil is taught it when he goes to Harro next year. Harro Academy,’ said the King wistfully. ‘I wonder if they still beat boys as hard as they did when I was there? Some people grow to like it, I understand,’ he added disingenuously. ‘They find it quite a tonic to be in the subdominant, as it were.’

  As it were indeed, thought Pikel Tarza as he hurried off with the scores under his arm. Obviously the old boy was in fine form: his musical puns were a reliable barometer of his spirits. With any luck he wouldn’t go to pieces on Sunday and Habszabrugye would be a grand success. It was a significant musical occasion, after all: the première of a 200-year-old opera and staged in a real cathedral. Theatre in the round, with Konrad and the mob extras pouring in from the west door and the orchestra crowded into the organ loft. It would knock spots off anything ever done at Eszterháza. As Kapellmeister, Tarza had taken it upon himself to invite H. C. Robbins Landon to this historic performance and was still hoping for a reply.