The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  S: You still miss it, then?

  WAM: How can I describe the torture of knowing I did it once and not being able to do it again? The farts are still there, the longing grows like a cancer, but the music’s gone. Or rather, there it all is, neatly printed and bound. Done.

  S: And played, don’t forget. Very lovingly played.

  WAM: Oh yes, and played. And feasted on by parasites with research grants. More money for a monograph about Mozart and the String Quartet than all my quartets ever made me, but let’s not get into that.

  S: Every artist’s gripe.

  WAM: Speaking of which, I detect the approach of a fecal event.

  S: If you’ve just got time might you do what you did before and drop a little hint to keep the parasites in business?

  WAM: Why should I? Oh, of course, it helps your credibility. I was forgetting. Well, talk of plodding sacraments reminds me that people increasingly treat my Requiem as some kind of hallowed artefact. They might like to wonder why it’s so full of other people’s music. At least they’ve noticed the large debt I owed Haydn.* To take one example, I admit I lifted my Quam olim Abrahae straight from his own Requiem: a choral fugue like his, in the same key, with the same subject and even the same rhythm. But what about my Hostias? The one they call ‘singularly beautiful’?

  S: You mean that’s not original?

  WAM: Not the tune, no. At least, not to me. I’ll leave the parasites to do the tracking down, because it’s actually an interesting story which’ll throw some proverbial light on an unexpected area of scholarly interest. Still, here are some signposts … Ow.

  S: Backing up, is it?

  WAM: I give it another five minutes. Quickly, then: I got the tune from Joseph Haydn, an early quartet he must have written around ’Sixty-nine or ’Seventy because I remember playing it in the early Seventies. It’s his E flat, Op. 9 no. 2. Then he used it again around that time in his keyboard Arietta con variazioni – still in E flat, as was the first movement of a keyboard sonata of 1773. Then I borrowed it myself as the first movement of my own E flat sonata, K.282. (I don’t mind going along with the industrious Herr Köchel.) What else can I think of offhand? I used the same tune slightly disguised in both the Allegro and Finale of that contentious work, the Sinfonia Concertante for winds, K.297b, which half the parasites say is bogus and the other half genuine but imperfect. Genuinely imperfect or imperfectly genuine? I’m enjoying their demure dissonance so I’ll just say that if they can track the source of this tune down it’ll be greatly to the advantage of one side. Shan’t say which. What next? It crops up in the Trio of one of the numbers I wrote for that unfinished Singspiel, Zaïde, round about 1780, but in E major, I think? Maybe my memory’s not what it was. The Finale of my C major Symphony of that year – K. 338? – was loosely based on the same theme. I believe there’s a complete quotation of it in the first movement of the first of my five divertimentos for winds, K.439b. I used it yet again in 1784 in G major in a sprightly twelve-four for var. 3 of Unser dummer Pöbel meint and old Dittersdorf did much the same in the Finale of his E flat string quartet. You can see it cropped up all over the place before I finally dragged it out and dusted it off again for the Requiem. So one of the questions is, had I run out of ideas or did that tune have a special significance? Why would I keep using the same theme over and over again, especially if it wasn’t mine? Come to that, was it actually original to Haydn? There’s something excremental in all this ingesting and hoarding and re-dumping of a single tune, don’t you think? And … No. Excuse me if I leave you. Thanks for the beer –

  He got up hurriedly, snatching the rolled copy of the BMJ off the table with the words ‘Told you this would come in handy’, the last I heard him speak. He disappeared along the night-shrouded, sun-lotion tainted beach at a trot, his ebony skin invisible, an empty robe fluttering palely at the shoreline like wings unfurling. The next morning I tracked down the medical conference and learned, much to my surprise, that Dr Tom Abandanaya was indeed supposed to be one of the delegates but that he’d had to cancel his trip owing to a severe bout of malaria. In my previous encounters with him something had always inhibited me from sleuthing too intently in his wake. It seemed not to matter how solid his new incarnation was, how plausible his cover story. It was his presence I craved. Even though I could seldom get a word in edgeways I generally came away from his diatribes in a state of exhilaration, eager to get down to work – any work. Though that magnificent Nigerian was the last I saw of him that night in Malta it was not, I trust, the very last of him I shall ever see.

  * WAM is referring to his friend Michael Haydn, not to Michael’s older brother, Joseph.

  The Music (2)

  THE GRIEVING mother stood in tears by the scaffold. The sun beat down. The sounds she heard were those of an ordinary afternoon, the little city’s rural din filtering up through the olive trees: dogs tussling for scraps, tinsmiths at work, children playing. Tomorrow was the holiday; today’s importance was entirely that of preparations, audible as the steady domestic clatter of cooking pots and water jugs, the pounding of corn and the snapping of firewood, carried on the breeze and blunted by distance into the purposeful hum of lives being lived. A few yards away a huddle of foreign troops from the garrison was guffawing over a dice game. From overhead came the laboured breathing and groans of men dying. The occasional grumble of thunder in the surrounding dry hills was equally commonplace, a squall brewing as it did most afternoons at this time of year.

  These the sounds, timeless and without discernible echo. The mother heard scarcely any of them. Her ears were for her son, for the noises his body made as the life slowly left it. What else could a mother do but listen, gently stroking his feet? Maybe the sunlight itself was audible too, a parching subliminal hiss as it glittered on the liquids oozing from the victims. The men had been put up so as to face the sun and their relatives prevented from using panels of hastily woven palm fronds on poles to screen them. Earlier the soldiers had confiscated these shades and lit a small fire with them to grill some thrushes. After a while one of the guards had impaled a sizzling morsel on a stick and offered it to each of the victims in turn, waving it beneath the bowed and sweaty face.

  ‘Got no appetite, these guys,’ he had soon said in disgust, throwing down the stick and eating the titbit himself. ‘What can you expect? Useless bunch of goat-shaggers. Roll on my leave, that’s what I say.’ A bugle down in the distant garrison brassily crowed a summons or a command. His companions cocked a satirical ear. ‘Whoa! That’s the Eighth copping it. Spit ’n’ shine, inspection time.’

  The woman couldn’t understand their dialect. It represented just another of the parallel worlds going on about hers which could neither touch nor explain it. All the sounds in the hot, bright air were clear and elemental. They didn’t have to be interpreted but simply heard, witnessed as being evanescent, peculiar to that or any day.

  The sound which still lay unimagined seventeen, eighteen hundred years in the future was of a different order. It was designed to be memorable and of the greatest significance. With its rich accretions of centuries of art it was nothing if not resonant. As carefully rehearsed as it had been written, the music was performed in dim, cool interiors lit with a penitential scatter of candles and the stuffy light which fell through coloured glass. Aquamarines and rubies danced in downward-slanting lines of motes, but it was always the music which held the attention. Its choral splendour was a brocade in which certain figures were heraldically embroidered in silks and golden thread. Stabat mater. She was still there, the woman standing in tears by a gibbet, but now the sounds which surrounded her were of calculated beauty and gravity. Now it was the Cross she wept against, her son was the Son; scriptures had been fulfilled and everything made sense. Vivaldi, Pergolesi, but above all Haydn. Stabat, she stood, but not just any mother. Now she was the Queen of Heaven even though the soprano voice she had been given was entirely human. Her anguish, her grief and her weeping rose with oboes and ebbed in chro
matics until no-one present could doubt that this was a true representation of what had been. This was how pity and loss sounded when turned into high art. The theory (for everything here from coloured glass to organ loft was in response to theory) said she was unique but also universal. Only as the Mother could she ever adequately grieve for that Son; but as a mother she was one with all mothers everywhere who stand vigil beside their dying child. In practice, though, didn’t the sheer beauty of the music usurp her place? Didn’t it so expressively stand in for her that she was banished back to the brocade, a vague bowed figure in nun’s habit of no real consequence except as an adjunct to this magnificent heart-rending? She stood, but only for as long as her Son hung. Dum pendebat Filius. The theology of the absent.

  Such are the wonderings of the Belgian journalist as he drives about the killing fields of Central Africa. It is as if each time his jeep hits a rut on the endless laterite roads it jars loose his Catholic childhood, for Latin phrases keep coming back to him in the middle of the bush or as he shaves one morning in a ruined school. They plop into his mind like the first fat drops which herald the rains’ return after years of drought, full of an old familiarity but so unexpected as to bring tears to the eyes. And what man mightn’t weep? Quis est homo qui non fleret? In months he has seen nothing but death, smelt nothing but death, heard nothing but the loud silence of flies. Maybe, he thinks, dabbing at his face with a towel, that accomplished painter in sounds Joseph Haydn ought to have put the flies in? In The Seasons he brilliantly depicted a dog putting up a bird which the huntsman shoots down. We hear the gun’s flash and crack and the bird spiralling down through the orchestra. Why no flies in the Stabat mater? Sometimes the Belgian lies at night and tries to remember an aria, a chorus, a single tune. Only words come to mind.

  So what, here, is the music? Screams, really, and whimpers, and the wailing of jackals in the dark. Occasionally it is the tinny sound of a pocket radio playing for a group of rebel soldiers or government militiamen hunched around their barbecue. Often it is barely audible, like the tears of the woman who sat (sedebat rather than stabat) for three hours by her dying son – a youth, a boy, a child, an infant – hacked all over to the bone by a machete wielding nobody, a total stranger who drove away in a looted taxi. He remembered her tears falling into the boy’s wounds, a transfusion which made the two inseparable, her crying and his dying, not to be distinguished, a single figure. She represented no-one but herself; grief uniquely hers though multiplied by millions. To make of her a universal figure would have been a vulgarity. The journalist heard that her son died just in time because later the nobodies returned with a stolen truck. This was where the immemorial brocade went its melting, tragic way while the real music diverged sharply. For in this story the mater dolorosa, along with everyone else in her village, was packed into the lorry and driven away to the shooting pit.

  Quando corpus morietur, thought the journalist, lugging the morning’s jerrican of water out to the waiting jeep. When this body dies, let my soul receive the glory of heaven. Eia mater. And let it not lie bleeding in the tall grass listening to the ordinary sounds of day: the crickets’ chirp, the buzz of flies, the military vehicle bouncing and whining in the distance. What is this unexceptional music which nobody sings? The engine stopping, the tinny creak of battered doors opening, laconic shouts, the approaching swish of boots? The search for somebody’s son, daily, at any time. Long, long ago. Now, and for ever. Paradisi gloria.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © James Hamilton-Paterson, 1995

  The right of James Hamilton-Paterson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–32085–1