Infinity: The Story of a Moment

by Gabriel Josipovici

  He was silent.

  — Go on, I said.

  — Yes sir, he said.

  Since he still seemed disinclined to do so I asked him: Did he often speak to you like that?

  — Like what, sir?

  — About such… intimate things.

  — Not at the beginning, of course, he said, but later on, when he understood how reliable I was and how much I admired and respected him. Then he would talk to me about everything under the sun. Especially when we went out driving into the Campagna. Even about music, though he knew I was quite ignorant on the subject.

  — What did he say?

  — About what?

  — About music.

  — He talked. You know how it is, sir.

  — But I am asking you.

  — About music?

  — Yes.

  — Each sound is a sphere, he said. It is a sphere, Massimo, and every sphere has a centre. The centre of the sound is the heart of the sound. One must always strive to reach the heart of the sound, he said. If one can reach that one is a true musician. Otherwise one is an artisan. To be an artisan is perfectly respectable, Massimo, he said. Even to be an artisan of music is respectable. But it must not be confused with being a musician. A musician is not an artisan, he said. He is an intermediary. That is a completely different thing. It entails a completely different way of understanding music and a completely different way of understanding ourselves. A completely different way. If you do not know the difference between a craft and a calling, he said, you do not know what it means to be an artist. Today, he said, very few people know what it means to be an artist. Very few artists know what it means to be an artist. They want to have their photographs taken in order to show off their noses. But we all have noses, he said, and few people are artists. True artists. They want to show off their profiles and tell the newspapers how wonderful they are. But they are not wonderful, they are only human beings and they are worse than most human beings because they are prostituting their gifts. That’s what he said. Prostituting their gifts. If they had any gifts in the first place, he said. Most of the time they have no gifts at all but only the desire to show off their profiles and to talk to the newspapers. The art is incidental, he said, what is important is to show off your nose and talk to the papers. To tell them what your ideas are and why you are so special. That is what the newspapers want, he said. They want to take photographs of their profiles and to hear how special they are. They want to hear about how much you feel and what happened to you in your childhood. They want to hear about your political views and your views of the Church. If your nose is not the right sort of nose you can forget the newspapers, he said. You can forget the festivals. You can forget the commissions. You can forget the recording companies. I have never wanted to have my nose photographed, he said. My nose is handsomer and more distinguished than most of theirs, he said. It is a Sicilian nose. An aristocratic nose. But it is not for the papers, he said. It is not for the publicity brochures. It is solely for me, so as to enable me to breathe and to work. A musician is primarily a worker, he said. He is not a clothes horse. He is not a politician. He is not a philosopher. He is not a lover. He is a worker. I have hired you, Massimo, he said, to get my travel tickets when I want to go somewhere or to drive me out into the countryside when I need to escape the town. But above all I need someone to keep the newspaper reporters and the photographers from my door. You cannot imagine, he said, the degree of laziness, venality and mendacity of these journalists. Not so long ago, he said, when I attended the premiere of a work of mine in Paris, all the journalists could say was: ‘Mr Pavone does not do things by halves, not only does he write an entire work on one note, but he sleeps not in a bed but in a cupboard.’ Can you imagine, Massimo? he said, not in a bed but in a cupboard. What had happened, he said, was this. He was installed in one of the best hotels in Paris, the Raphael. Unfortunately his room was situated not far from the lifts, so that the first night he hardly got any sleep at all. The next day, after he had complained, they gave him another room. Not just another room, he said to me, but the best room, nothing less than the royal suite. The bed alone, he said, was the size of most hotel rooms, and had a pair of steps next to it so as to help you climb into it. After a long day of rehearsals and seeing friends, he retired to his room, utterly exhausted. But no sooner had I climbed the steps and crawled into the bed and put out the light, he said, than I became aware of a humming noise filling the room. At first I tried to ignore it, he said, but it grew so insistent that I had no option but to turn on the light and descend the steps and see if I could locate the source of the noise. And indeed I did, he said, it emanated from a pipe which was located about a metre beneath my window. I shut the window tight, he said, and drew the curtains, and tried to go to sleep, but though for a while I thought I had managed to shut out the noise it was soon filling my ears again. I got up and went into the bathroom, where I found some cotton wool, which I stuffed into my ears. Once again I climbed the steps and snuggled down deep under my eiderdown, hoping that at last I would be able to sleep. But even there the noise found me out, and soon I was wide awake, my heart pounding dangerously in my chest. I determined not to panic, however, he said, so I put on the light again and surveyed my surroundings. Against the wall opposite the window stood an enormous cupboard, the kind used for storing bedsheets and blankets. I opened it and indeed it was full of sheets and blankets. I took some of them out and lay down on the rest. I found I could stretch out, so I returned to the bed, collected my pillow and eiderdown and settled down in the cupboard for the night. However, though with the cupboard door shut I could no longer hear the offending hum, it was also unbearably stuffy, so that I had to keep opening the door to let in some air and then closing it again to shut out the noise. You can imagine what kind of a night I had, he said. However, buoyed up by the thought of the performance, the next day I leapt out of my improvised bed and hurried down to breakfast. The chambermaid must have come in, discovered my pillow and eiderdown in the cupboard, guessed that my bed had not been slept in and alerted the papers. The only thing they could find to say about me was that I wrote music on one note and slept in cupboards. These people are monsters, Massimo, he said. They must be kept out at all costs. That is why I hired someone like you, he said, someone who has no trouble lifting the rear ends of cars to look underneath them, to inspect their rear parts, so to speak. What a musician needs is peace and time, he said, peace and time, inner peace and inner time. He needs quiet and he needs to be alone. If someone does not like to be alone he should not become an artist, he said. Today writing music is incidental to the life of a musician. Writing music is a necessary evil, undertaken solely in order to generate the photographs and the interviews and the dinners and the invitations to festivals. Every musician will tell you, Massimo, he said, that he lives only for his music, but that is not true. If he believes that, he is only fooling himself. He lives to get his nose in the newspapers and to be applauded and worshipped wherever he goes. That is worse than cleaning the gutters, he said. A real musician, Massimo, he said, should be able to clean the gutters, he should be able to fight in the trenches, he should be able to work in an office or a hospital, because he has made a space for solitude inside himself where the music will be written.

  — What did he mean, I asked him, by a space for solitude inside himself?

  — I don’t know, he said.

  — He did not explain?

  — You know how it is, sir. Mr Pavone talked and I listened. Especially when I was driving.

  — Of course. Go on.

  — Especially in later years, sir, he said, he would ask me to drive him out into the Campagna. Then he would talk. I think he felt the need to talk. Drive, Massimo, drive, he would say. If we are hungry we will stop somewhere for a bite to eat. Sometimes he was completely silent, he was thinking about his music. He would close his eyes and sit back in his seat. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes he would make a littl
e noise, a hum or a bark or something like la-la-la. Sometimes he would pass his hand in front of his face or make a movement of his hand as if he was trying to hold something. Then he would be still again for a long time. Perhaps he had fallen asleep. It was difficult to tell. When he walked all night he would have a long siesta during the day. Sometimes he would not get up till six or seven in the evening. At other times he liked to talk as I drove. He talked about everything. In his slow hypnotic voice. The voice of an aristocrat, if you know what I mean, sir. But also the voice of someone who is not so much talking to you as talking to himself. When we die, Massimo, he said, we should make sure we do not leave chaos behind us. That would not be fair on those who come after us. No, he said, we should leave this life with everything in order. Everything should be labelled and classified. We will turn into dust, he said, but the music will live on. Music that is genuine will always live on, he said, just as music that is not genuine will soon wither and die, even if it brought fame and wealth to its composer in his lifetime. A true musician has a duty to his music, he said. If he believes in his music then he should believe that it will live on after his death.

  — Was he happy that at the end of his life his works were at last being performed? I asked him.

  — He did not say, he said.

  — But you must have formed an impression.

  — Since you ask me, sir, I have the impression that he was happy, he said. But also that he resented the time it took up that kept him away from his music. Monsieur Balise came to see me, he said. He was a waste of time, talking to me about Marmy and about mathematics. I had had enough of that sort of talk when I studied with Scheler in Vienna, he said. Scheler made me think, he said, and thinking is the worst thing a musician can do. It took me ten years to stop thinking after I left Vienna, he said. It was only Nepal that saved me from Vienna, he said. Scheler had studied with Schoenberg, he said, that is why I went to study with him. I have always wanted nothing but the best for my music, so I picked as a teacher a pupil of Schoenberg. What I had not grasped at the time was that Schoenberg, far from advancing the cause of music, as he claimed, had set music back a hundred years with his ideas and his theories and above all with his excessive Jewish anxiety. A composer cannot be anxious, Massimo, he said. To be anxious is to live in time, he said, and the composer does not live in time, he lives in eternity. When the composer understands that eternity and the moment are one and the same thing he is on his way to becoming a real composer, he said. Without that understanding he is nothing, He can be the most intelligent man in the world and the most profound, but he is not a composer. Schoenberg and Monsieur Balise were both highly intelligent, in some ways they were geniuses, he said. Their human ears were among the best the world has ever known, but they were merely human ears and for music you need an inner ear, une oreille intérieure, he said. Have you seen photographs of Stravinsky and Schoenberg Massimo, he said. Have you noticed the size of their ears? Do you think that is merely a coincidence? It is not a coincidence, he said, the size of their ears reflects their ability to discern human sounds. But the true composer does not listen to human sounds but to the sounds of the universe. Have you seen portraits of Bach and Mozart? he said. Have you noticed their ears? I doubt if you have, he said, because the point about their ears is that they are unobtrusive ears. In other words they are normal human ears, a great deal smaller than yours, Massimo, though yours have no doubt been altered a little in the course of time by the blows life has inflicted on you. The ears of Bach and Mozart, on the other hand, he said, did not change much from their childhood to their death. They remained small, delicate, quite ordinary small and delicate ears. That is because they listened to inner and not to outer sounds. The inner ear, Massimo, that is what must be cultivated, the inner ear and the inner eye. Signor Berio came to see me, he said. He is a peasant. A man of the people. He has all the charm of the Italian peasant and all the limitations of that species. He is both innocent and cunning, he said, like the Italian peasant, who is incomparably superior to the French and the Spanish peasant, an incomparably superior human being and an incomparably superior tiller of the soil. But, he said, like the Italian peasant, Signor Berio is both lazy and self-satisfied. If he makes a beautiful sound and is paid a lot of money for doing so and the audience cheer and clap when the piece is performed he is satisfied. The curse of the age, Massimo, he said, is that people are too easily satisfied. They have forgotten how to listen with their inner ear, to listen to silence and to listen to the moment. Signor Berio justifies his large output by saying that he has to provide alimony for all his past wives, he said. Of course he says this as a joke, but there is a grain of truth in it. It never crosses his mind that he should not have married so many wives because, like the Italian peasant, he is at heart a sensualist. He feels that it is his right to sleep with a woman and to take his pleasure with her, it is his right that she should darn his socks and cook his meals. But it is not a right, Massimo, he said. That is why I have hired you, so that you can make sure I have a sufficient number of socks and that my shirts and ties and suits are always clean and freshly ironed. I pay you a great deal of money, Massimo, he said, and I pay Annamaria a great deal of money, but even so I pay less than Signor Berio spends on alimony to all his past wives. Monsieur Balise at least is not a sensualist, he said, but he is in the end what amounts to the same thing, he is an ascetic. He prides himself on living in hotels and out of a suitcase. He prides himself on having nothing to do with the bourgeois comforts of a family and a home. But he is in fact a living exemplar of what Ni Che described as the priestly spirit, the spirit of ressentiment. For he uses his asceticism as an instrument of power and he is not satisfied unless he has absolute power in the world of music. Signor Berio came to see me and drink wine with me in a spirit of peasant comradeliness, he said, and Monsieur Balise came to see me to exert his power over me. It all amounts to the same thing, he said. It all amounts to the negation of the spirit of music. Now I am famous, he said, and the world runs to my door, it expects me to throw that door wide open. But why should I do that? Why should I talk to these people and let them photograph my nose?

  — Did he feel, I asked him, that hearing his own works played at last made a difference to his conception of them?

  — No, sir, it made no difference, he said. He was very clear on that point. He said to me: When you are a real musician, Massimo, a real musician and hear with your inner and not your outer ear, then it makes no difference whether the works are performed or not. Of course, he said, it is of interest to hear with your outer ear what you have heard so far only with your inner ear. When I wrote my early work Sparagmos, for organ and two orchestras, I was curious to hear how it would sound in the concert hall, for many years I was only able to imagine it. But when I became famous I heard it at last for the first time at the Donaueschingen Festival. And I have to say I was disappointed. The organist did not know what he was doing and the two conductors did not know what they were doing and the players knew only how to do what players are trained to do, that is to play the notes put in front of them. After that I forbade anyone to play Sparagmos and contented myself with listening to it as I have always done, with my inner ear. In Venice in 1973, he said, after I had been, as they say, ‘rediscovered’, they gave a performance of my large orchestral work, Shi. Mazzini was to conduct it, a man I had known since the 30s, a real musician. Then I learned that he had broken his leg and that Milan Barras was to conduct it. He was in Cleveland, but we spoke on the telephone and it seemed to me that he had a clear idea of what needed to be done. But the next thing I heard was that he had picked up an ear infection and that he had handed over responsibility to a younger colleague, Sandor Balint. I did not hear a word from this man who was after all going to conduct a long and difficult new work, but the people in Venice assured me that he was the right person and that we would have ample chance to discuss matters in the two days he would be in Venice before the performance. However, when I got to Venice ther
e was no sign of him and no one knew where he was. On the evening before the concert he contacted me at my hotel and said that he was on his way and that all would be well, he had worked with this orchestra before and he would give them three hours of rehearsal time, which would be ample. I got to the rehearsal at the time he had given me but there was no sign of him or of the orchestra. One hour later they began to drift in and half an hour after that Balint himself appeared, smiling and cheerful. It was too late to remonstrate with him, so I sat in the back and listened. It soon became clear that neither the conductor nor the orchestra had any idea of what the music was about. You can imagine how I felt, he said. It was all I could do to drag myself to my hotel and lie down to try and recover a bit of calm. I had already decided to pack my suitcase and head for home when Cassini, who had organised the whole thing in the first place, turned up and set about reassuring me. Like a fool I listened to him and, with a heavy heart, got myself ready. But when I reached the hall I could not go in. I left Cassini and rushed out into the street. I walked through the streets and up and down the canals for a long time, and eventually I began to calm down. At that moment I found myself walking past one of my favourite restaurants. I entered and was greeted with great warmth by the proprietor. Here at last, Massimo, he said, was an environment in which I could thrive. Needless to say, I was given a most excellent meal, so that I was able almost to forget the horrors of the performance of my work. Now I call the work Chie, not Shi, he said, because after Balint and his musicians had shat on it I had no wish ever to hear it again. But it is always the same, he said, unless you have a really dedicated musician prepared to work with you they will shit on your work and make shit of your work. That is one of the iron laws of performance, Massimo, he said. When I was in Nepal, he said, I heard some of the music they play in their religious ceremonies. To become a performer in a temple in Nepal and Tibet, he said, you have to undergo a rigorous training, not just a training in musicianship but a training in spirituality. The ears of the West cannot tell the difference between a trumpet blown by a spiritual person and a trumpet blown by a non-spiritual person, but the difference is everything, Massimo, he said, the difference is everything.