Infinity: The Story of a Moment

by Gabriel Josipovici

  — But he went on composing at the piano?

  — At the piano?

  — Yes.

  — I do not understand the question.

  — He had the piano by him when he was writing his music?

  — There was always a piano in his study. But these are questions you will have to put to Mr Testoro. Only Mr Testoro was allowed into his study.

  — Did Annamaria not go in to clean it?

  — Nobody was allowed inside except Mr Testoro. Nobody is to go inside his study, Annamaria said to me. If you go inside his study that will be the end of you.

  — So how was it cleaned?

  — You will have to ask Annamaria.

  — What were your relations with Mr Testoro?

  — I do not think he ever had cause to complain about me.

  — And the other secretaries?

  — You will have to ask them.

  — Is it true that Miss Mauss asked for you to be dismissed?

  — You will have to ask her.

  — That is what she has told me.

  — That is her prerogative.

  — You do not deny it?

  — What would be the point of denying?

  — But Mr Pavone did not dismiss you.

  — That is correct.

  — Instead, it was Miss Mauss herself who left?

  — That is correct.

  — Why did she leave?

  — You will have to ask her yourself.

  — Tell me about the house. How was it divided?

  — It is a big house, as you know. The studio alone takes up two floors at the top and is the size of many fine flats here in Rome.

  — Did you live on the premises?

  — Yes. In the basement there were two flats. One for Annamaria and one for the help. And then, at the very top, above the studio, there is another flat, which Mr Pavone let to various people. Often to musicians who worked with him on his music. To performers.

  — Who lived there in your time?

  — For several years, when I first came, there was a quartet living there, who worked with Mr Pavone to perform his works for string quartet. He said to me: Anyone who performs my work, Massimo, must be like an extension of myself. They must become so used to playing my work that they can perform it in their sleep.

  — They only played his work?

  — They were hired by Mr Pavone to play his work. That was before many people were interested in his music. Before the Arditti Quartet took it up. It is fortunate, Massimo, he said, that I have money. My cousins want me to save my money so as to leave it to them and to their children when I die, but it is my money and I will do with it what I wish. If I had no money, he said, it would not be a tragedy. I would get by perfectly well. I have many skills, Massimo, he said, and I am not too proud to do any kind of work. But since I have money I will use it to further the cause of music and of civilisation.

  — He said of music and civilisation?

  — Those were his words, sir. To further the cause of music and of civilisation.

  — Very good. Go on.

  — In what direction, sir?

  — In any direction you wish.

  — I have forgotten what I was saying.

  — Never mind. Tell me about the quartet. The performers.

  — There was Mr Stankevitch. The quartet was named after him. The Stankevitch Quartet. And Mr Halliday. And Mr Silone. And Mr van Buren.

  — Did you have much to do with them?

  — No. They had the flat and they were quite independent.

  — They spoke Italian?

  — Yes. They all spoke Italian. Except Mr Halliday. Mr Pavone spoke to them in French. Sometimes Mr Stankevitch and Mr van Buren spoke to each other in German. Or perhaps it was Czech or Dutch. And when they were all together they spoke in English.

  — Did you ever hear them practising?

  — No. As you know, sir, all the walls are soundproofed. Mr Pavone said to me: Massimo, there is nothing more exciting than the sounds of the street, but they should not enter the house. I have enough money, he said, to ensure that what goes on in one room of my house is not overheard in another room. There is nothing worse, he said, than hearing your neighbour playing his piano in what he thinks is a stylish way. It is worse even than hearing a radio or the senseless beat of a rock band on a record. Nothing worse, he said, than hearing the murmur of voices in a neighbouring room when you are trying to read or to think, let alone compose. Every room in this house is soundproofed, Massimo, he said. You could strangle your wife or your lover in your flat downstairs, Massimo, he said, and no one would be any the wiser. The Italians do not know what it means to be quiet, Massimo, he said. They are terrified of silence. I am not terrified of silence, he said. I crave silence as others crave drink. Of course, he said, scientists have shown us that there is no such thing as perfect silence. In the best soundproofed room in the world you will hear the blood roaring in your veins and your heart beating against your ribs. But it is your blood, Massimo, he said, and your heart. That is the difference, he said.

  He was silent.

  I waited.

  After a while I said: Go on.

  — Yes, sir, he said.

  — Did Mr Pavone say anything more about silence? I asked him.

  — I can’t remember, he said.

  — All right, I said. Tell me: were the quartet already there when you arrived?

  — Yes, sir.

  — And they never talked to you?

  — Sometimes Mr Silone would stop on the stairs and we would have a chat.

  — What about?

  — Many things.

  — Like what?

  — Many things.

  — What sort of things?

  — Often about football. We were both supporters of Lazio.

  — I see. And why did they eventually leave?

  — I think Mr Pavone no longer required them.

  — It is not that they quarrelled?

  — I could not say, sir. He said to me: One day there will be a quartet that will be able to play my music for string quartet. By then I will be long dead. Je serai mort depuis longtemps, Massimo, he said.

  — He often spoke to you in French?

  — When there was something he had been thinking about for a long time he often said it in Italian first and then in French. French was once the language of the aristocracy, he said to me. From Moscow to Paris the aristocracy of Europe spoke in French. It was the lingua franca, Massimo, he said to me. Now that there is no longer an aristocracy everybody speaks in English, the language of money. English is not a language, Massimo, he said to me, it is a hybrid. It is made up of a bit of Latin and a bit of Celtic and a bit of German and a little bit of Norse and some French and a little bit of Hindi and Arabic and Dutch and much else besides.

  — Who else occupied the flat in your time with Mr Pavone?

  — After the quartet, a cellist. A lady. Very correct.

  — Did Mr Pavone entertain at all?

  — No. He said to me: When I was young, Massimo, I thought music and social life could mix, but after a certain age you realise that music is music and life is life.

  — So he lived a solitary existence?

  — Occasionally he would go out to dinner with friends. I would order a taxi for him and give the driver the address. Mr Pavone had many friends among the aristocracy and in the film and theatre world. I would rather speak to a landowner who wishes to talk only about his pigs and his olive trees, or even to a self-satisfied and pompous actor, than to a musician, he said. I do not need musicians, Massimo, he said to me. I have quite enough of them in my bathroom when I look in the mirror. When I go out, he said, it is to escape from music and musicians, not to subject myself to their vanity and paranoia. The vanity and paranoia of musicians, Massimo, he said to me, is beyond belief. Each of them thinks he is the centre of the universe, he said, each of them thinks that if only the world was prepared to listen to his music all its prob
lems would be solved. Each of them thinks his colleagues and rivals are worth nothing and less than nothing and take up space which he would better fill himself. My wife, he said, thought of herself as a generous person, she thought of herself as an understanding person, but she was neither generous nor understanding. The only person she understood was herself and her needs.

  — He was in love with his wife?

  — I do not know. He said to me once: When you are young you meet a beautiful woman and want to sleep with her and so you persuade yourself that you are in love with her. But you are not in love with her. You are in love with yourself and your possibilities. And she is in love with herself and her own possibilities. The two are quite different, Massimo, he said. If my wife had not left me in 1945, he said, I would still be married to her today and I would have done absolutely nothing with my life. When she left me, he said, I wanted to kill myself. I had lost my way in music and I had lost my way in love. When she left me I had to start all over again from the beginning.

  — And what became of her?

  — He did not say. He only talked of her leaving him. When a woman you love leaves you, Massimo, he said, it is as though the world itself had left you. For a while you feel as though there is no world left for you to live in. When she left me, he said, I couldn’t go into my study, I couldn’t look at my scores. I was afraid to go out and I was afraid to stay at home. Afraid of what? Of my thoughts. Of the intensity of my feelings for her. Everything I did and everything I had done disgusted me. If I had not gone to Nepal in 1949 I would have been dead within a year, he said. Instead, I was reborn.

  — He said that? Instead, I was reborn?

  — I think so, yes.

  — You cannot remember exactly?

  — Yes. He said that.

  — What did he say about that time?

  — He said he was afraid to go out.

  — Yes. You told me that.

  — Yes, sir.

  — How did they meet?

  — It was when he was in England, as a young man, at the Court of St James, he said.

  — What is the Court of St James?

  — I do not know, sir.

  — All right. Go on.

  — When I had had enough of Monte Carlo, he said, I decided to go to England, to spend a little time in London, he said. I had an introduction to the English composer Lord Berners, he said, and through him I met the cream of the English aristocracy.

  — What did he mean, the cream of the English aristocracy?

  — I do not know.

  — All right. Go on.

  — I met the cream of the English aristocracy, he said. You must understand, Massimo, he said, that the European aristocracy is all interrelated, but that a German aristocrat is very different from a French aristocrat and a French aristocrat is very different from an English aristocrat. The French aristocracy was largely destroyed by the French Revolution, he said, and in its place a new aristocracy was created which is not an aristocracy at all but a jumped-up bourgeoisie which gives itself airs. Lord Berners, he said, could trace his family back to the Norman Conquest. He was a man after my own heart. He was a man who did not give a fig for what other people thought. It is a pity, he said, that he was not a serious composer, but then the English have never been serious about anything. That is their charm but also their weakness. There is only one thing the English care about, and that is money, he said. But not the aristocracy. Since they have money they are not interested in it. Lord Berners was an accomplished comic writer, he said, a better writer than Ronald Firbank, in my view, but as a composer he was a lightweight. The English have not had a major composer since Purcell, he said, and to think they once led the way in the art of composition. To think that they once produced the likes of Dunstable and Byrd and Tallis, to say nothing of Dowland and of the anonymous composers of the Eton Choirbook and the Old Hall Manuscript. They have been ruined by the Industrial Revolution, he said, and by the spirit of Protestantism. Also by the Germanic cast of their minds. They have an indigestible cake, he said, called a lardy cake, and their leading modern composers, so-called, Sir Edward Elgar and Sir Ralph Vaughan Williams, are the musical equivalents of this cake. Even when you get a refined musician like Benjamin Britten, he said, he cannot escape the terrible English sentimentality when he composes, though that is blessedly absent when he plays the piano, which he does to very good effect. He is not a gorilla of the piano, but he is, let us say, a gazelle of the piano, and that is no mean thing.

  He stopped.

  I waited for him to go on. When he showed no sign of doing so I said: Go on.

  — Yes, sir, he said.

  — What did he say about his years in Vienna? I asked him.

  — He said: After I had been in England for several years I decided to pursue my musical interests in a more rigorous fashion. So I went to Vienna to study with Schoenberg and his pupils and I was taken on by Walter Scheler. My friends were amazed that I had been able to attach myself to Scheler, he said, but I was only interested in the best. However, he said, although I studied with Scheler for barely two years, it took me at least ten years to get over it.

  — What did he mean by that?

  — There must be a reason for every note, Scheler said, Mr Pavone told me, but he never asked himself what a note was. Like all the musicians of Vienna he thought of himself as a radical but he would never let you question the fundamentals of composition. For them a note was a part of a structure, what a note was in itself, what a sound was in itself, that was never questioned.

  — Was he living alone in Vienna?

  — Yes. He said to me: London was where I experimented with women and Vienna was where I experimented with notes.

  — Did he not meet his wife in London?

  — Yes.

  — But he did not take her to Vienna with him?

  — She did not want him in London. She ran away from him and when he followed her and brought her back she ran away again. He said to me: When you are young you think that when a woman refuses you she is simply being coy. It never strikes you that she might not like you or be interested in you. When you are young, he said, your narcissism is so great you imagine you are irresistible. I had had enough of women in London, he said, I had had enough of them in Italy and in Monte Carlo and in London, and I went to Vienna to get to the root of my musical impulses. But in Vienna they almost killed me with thought. Thought, he said, is the great enemy of the artist, but in Vienna they wanted you to think your way through every difficulty. One cannot think one’s way through artistic problems, he said, one has to go about it in a different way. Bach did not think, he said, he danced. Mozart did not think, he sang. Stravinsky did not think, he prayed. But in Vienna they had forgotten how to dance, they had forgotten how to sing, they were all secular Jews and they had forgotten how to pray. Schoenberg was a real musician, he said, but he was a disaster for music. Schoenberg, he said, set Western music back by fifty years, if not a hundred. He terrified his pupils and stopped them thinking for themselves. Had they thought for themselves they would have understood that thought is a disaster for music. It took me ten years to recover from Scheler, he said, and there were times when I thought I would never do so. Had I not gone to Nepal when I did, he said, I doubt if I would ever have recovered from Scheler and Schoenberg and Vienna. In Vienna, he said, I couldn’t look at a score without thinking. I couldn’t strike a note on the piano without thinking. I had ceased to listen and I had ceased to want to make, the two essential prerequisites for the composer. I knew only one thing, that I had to think and account for every note. But why should the sequence of notes be the essence of music? I had known that it was not from the age of three, from the time when I began to attack the piano with my hands and feet. I had known it every time I saw a lovely woman or passed my hand over her breast or buttock. I had known it, you could say, from the moment I was born. But that wretched Scheler almost made me forget it. That is what education does for you, he said, it draws y
ou along paths you know are not real paths until you forget that they are not real paths and think they are the only paths. When I went to Nepal, he said, and I first heard the temple bells and the temple gongs and the temple trumpets, it brought back to me what I had known from the day I was born, but which Schoenberg and Scheler and Vienna had made me forget, that it is not a question of notes, it is a question of attitude. The church bells of Europe have long ceased to make music, he said, they jingle like a music box but they do not make music. But the bells and gongs and trumpets of the Buddhist temples of Nepal and Tibet bring you back to the roots of music. Each sound I heard, Massimo, he said, had taken a lifetime to produce, what do I say, many lifetimes, many generations, to produce, and I realised that each sound is a world, an infinite world, Massimo, it is like a huge cavern which can take a lifetime to explore and yet which is over in no time at all, it is almost as if you could say that it does not exist in time at all. That was the mystery and the paradox I had to grapple with when I returned to Rome, he said, when I returned to my empty house here on the Foro, that was the paradox I began to explore in the first works I would truly claim as my own, Hun dun for solo oboe, Only by Bending for bass clarinet, and, above all Écluse for chamber ensemble. That was the first phase of my career, he said, eight magical years in which single-handedly I rethought the possibilities of music. The climax of that period, he said, was the imaginary puppet opera, Can You Be a Baby Boy? which was performed here in the house by the very best singers and musicians that money can buy, which I had performed for myself and a few friends. Michaux came from Paris, he said. And so did Leiris. Pasolini came. Maraini, who had been to Nepal with me. A few others. After that I stopped composing for two years, I thought my task in the world was done.