BEING GUSTAV MAHLER

BEING

GUSTAV

MAHLER

FREDERIC CHASLIN

BEING GUSTAV MAHLER

English translation by David Baker

New York, 2018

​I cannot conceive how a truly happy man can ever think of “art”... ​Is our “art” anything more than a confession of our impotence? ​

​Richard Wagner, Letter to Theodor Uhlig, 1852

Chapter 1 “You, sir, are a lucky man: I am your wife’s lover.”

I imagine Walter Gropius speaking those words every time I look in his shifty eyes.

Evasive Walter Gropius – but not just him: I feel taunted by every man I’ve encountered in Vienna for the past eight months.

It started with a letter, mistakenly addressed to “The Director, Mr. Mahler”…Quite a coup, that letter meant for Alma: By addressing it, “by error,” to her husband, he makes his pitch to her, knowing the husband will kick up a scandal, and at the same time Gropius finishes me off, with a knife to a heart that’s already sick.

What a grotesque name, Gropius. The high-society architect Gropius. It sounds like the start of a tuba concerto. But, still, an ideal name for this young idiot. Look at his arrogant manner, like a predator in formal attire: in winter, an urban hunter on the trail of married women; in summer, a little wolf chasing his prey all the way into their holiday retreats. I am not exaggerating: I caught Gropius hiding in the trees, within earshot of our house, stalking Alma and salivating.

But also there is ridiculous Gropius, Gropius the refined soul who shamelessly claims to be saving our marriage, the ambitious Gropius who would like to help restore my happiness. Yes, I believe he admires me more than he loves Alma. That’s it! Why else would he have “mistakenly” written my name on the envelope? I should have asked Dr. Freud about it last summer during our long conversation – just to see what he would have made of it.

But none of this makes any difference now. I’m dying.

The ship taking us back to Europe pushes on across the ocean, and even when it seems motionless, I’m wracked with a fever that hasn’t let up for weeks now. It reduces my body to infection, and rot. I have no idea how my heart manages to keep beating, like a deaf-mute playing drums all alone, at the back of the orchestra, long after everyone else has left the hall.

Sigmund Freud… Could he have save me, if I’d met him sooner? I didn’t quite believe in his way of reducing a human being to a system… Putting people into small prearranged compartments… Diagnosing the soul the way you diagnose a sick body… I did the talking while he, snap, he instantly labeled me, Diled me away. Trouble getting an erection? The mother! Creative impotence? The father! I decided to try him, as my last chance at a cure. And yes, I have to admit that he did me some good, but only temporarily. He spoke to me as if addressing a big child who had misbehaved, he showed me the right path, like a strict, benevolent teacher would have done. But I reject his Oedipus complex, his way of explaining my creative talent by a need to save my mother, to protect her from my father’s Dits of rage. Why can’t he simply admit that it’s in fact God speaking with my voice? Why doesn’t he understand that a creative artist is something like a man receiving a telegraph: all he does, most of the time, is copy a message from eternity?

Freud’s inventions, to my mind, are a staging of his own obsessions.

Haven’t I been told the same thing about my symphonies? Never mind symphonies, since they are an art form, they can lead anywhere they like. But the mechanism of the mind, still… Freud constructed a system around himself and for himself. Oedipus, which

save my mother, to protect her from my father’s Dits of rage. Why can’t he simply admit that it’s in fact God speaking with my voice? Why doesn’t he understand that a creative artist is something like a man receiving a telegraph: all he does, most of the time, is copy a message from eternity?

Freud’s inventions, to my mind, are a staging of his own obsessions.

Haven’t I been told the same thing about my symphonies? Never mind symphonies, since they are an art form, they can lead anywhere they like. But the mechanism of the mind, still… Freud constructed a system around himself and for himself. Oedipus, which etymologically means “swollen foot,” suits Dr. Freud quite well.

I laugh, causing myself horrible pain. But I need to laugh, at everything and nothing, to drive out the pain when it invades, or else to greet it when it’s just passing through. I need to explode in a cataclysmic laugh as I watch the book of my own life closing. I can read its huge cover, heavy and menacing, suspended above me like a terrifying theater curtain that is about to fall and crush me before the final bow.

My life… What has my life been? I’d call it an island of pain on a sea of incomprehension. I feel myself battered by waves of hostility, constant and relentless. I know pain in all its forms, I can distinguish and dissect every exquisite nuance – and not just physical. I could have been a “painologist,” maybe set up an office like Freud and grown famous, been taken seriously; given lectures on pain throughout the centuries, among all races, in men, women, children. Instead, I’ve written symphonies, I lived only on paper…Only on paper! And many people still consider me insane.

But you have to grant me one thing: I’ve suffered in my flesh and in my soul, but I never gave in to self-pity. Today I lower my arms and draw the last line across the last page of my last symphony, but it’s different. Today I’m dying, I’ve won the right to be a little depressed…

I suffered among men, an exile, wandering, a stranger everywhere, undesirable, myself and the children of my mind. My symphonies, one after the other, have been misunderstood, mocked, thrown to the public -- a lynch mob -- and especially to the almost unanimous hatred of the critics. Above all, the Viennese critics…

My work as an orchestra conductor pleased them, or rather impressed them, but especially when I revealed the works in the way that these men thought they knew them.

On the other hand, the moment I did more than just beat time, as soon as I dared to poke my big Jewish nose into those German scores! When I had the arrogance to understand what a composer really intended, but hadn’t been able to achieve completely… At that point, it was all over…

For reasons of deafness, for example. Poor Beethoven, who never got to hear his greatest symphony.

But poor Mahler as well, yes, poor Mahler, who will never hear his Ninth Symphony, nor his “Song of the Earth.” And my Tenth? The last of my children, lying unfinished in the trunk just beside my bed of pain. I’ll never finish it, and who could complete an enigma?

Alma, among your base deeds and your lasciviousness, in the arms of Gropius, you won’t forget your promise, will you? You will destroy the manuscript, if I lack the strength to complete it?

Yes, poor, poor Mahler… We weep at the fate of a father killed in combat, the father who will never see his children who were born back home while he was fighting. But can anyone imagine the pain of a father who begets a child, dresses it sumptuously, gives it beauty, intelligence, charm, the greatest stature… And this child sets out to make its way in the world, suddenly adult, but still clumsy from never having walked before, blinded from never having opened his eyes, stunned from hearing for the first time… I won’t be there, like Spalanzani addressing Hoffmann in his Italian junkdealer’s accent, announcing: “I’d like you to meet my daughter Olympia!” Oh my God, I have to laugh again, and I prefer these fiery jabs in my chest, better that than to let Fate think it can destroy my love of life … Why can’t I just laugh myself to death?

The huge ship has been swaying slowly from one side to the other, like an old rabbi in prayer, for days now; I don’t know how many days, sick time is not the same as ordinary time. Is it fever, or just my innate talent for hallucination? I see Freud shake his head skeptically in a corner of his office, I see Gropius smile with an idiotic benevolence and even my old piano, my constant friend, smile at me horribly with its eighty-eight blackand-yellow teeth.

I see pain sizing me up expertly… Pain knows me so well, and I’ve set it to music so

destroy my love of life … Why can’t I just laugh myself to death?

The huge ship has been swaying slowly from one side to the other, like an old rabbi in prayer, for days now; I don’t know how many days, sick time is not the same as ordinary time. Is it fever, or just my innate talent for hallucination? I see Freud shake his head skeptically in a corner of his office, I see Gropius smile with an idiotic benevolence and even my old piano, my constant friend, smile at me horribly with its eighty-eight blackand-yellow teeth.

I see pain sizing me up expertly… Pain knows me so well, and I’ve set it to music so often…

But pain has a thousand faces, with two thousand hands hitting me in the face. What killed me isn’t the memory of my father screaming, not the sight of my mother in tears, it’s not watching my little brothers die in front of me one after the other; it’s the letter from Gropius, it’s Alma’s betrayal, it’s my whole world crumbling, leaving me standing over the abyss. Three times, in my Sixth Symphony, I wrote the hammer of fate beating the hero to death. And how I’ve been vilified for those three hammer blows, the new, noisy madness of Mahler! And three times that hammer has fallen on my own head. And you had warned me, Alma. We never listen enough to women. The new score was no sooner shoved back in its drawer than those poundings of fate were heard on the door of my home. The death of Puzi, my cherished daughter. The end of my reign over the Vienna State Opera. And the news of my heart disease, all in less than a month… But none of these blows killed me. It took a fourth hit to strike me down, a blow right at the roots of the tree, the foundations of the house.

Alma, it was you who lifted me up, three times, and it’s you, now, who strike me down. ​ Notes on the consultation….

Saw Gustav Mahler today, at the hotel and then during a walk lasting four hours. I’ve never encountered a mind that was so quick, that understood so instantly everything I said… Clearly a “Holy Mary complex,” maternal fixation, and in fact that was his mother’s name. Sacrifice by the wife, Alma MARIA. A power relationship, with Alma, at Mahler’s request, giving up her own artistic vocation; total domination, then suddenly the power relation is reversed and the wife gets the upper hand, unleashing a selfdestructive drive on Mahler’s part leading no doubt to his illness. On top of that, suspicions of impotence. Of course, like so many impotent men, he adores Wagner, the music of power, of which he appears to be a major interpreter. (Mustn’t forget, however, that I am “ganz amusikalisch.”)* It would have taken a long period of therapy to free him from the fatal spiral in which he’s caught, but the best I could do was dig a tunnel into a mysterious fortress….”

Sigmund F., Vienna, … 19-Footnote: •Completely amusical (translator’s note).

Chapter 2 Cornélius Franz ran through the drill: crossed himself discreetly, checked that aspirin and beta blocker were stashed in the most accessible pocket of his formal jacket. Did bowtie fit on the long, thin neck? Fly zipped up? Trousers secured by the grace of two independent pairs of suspenders? Then he signaled the Viennese opera house attendant: he’s ready to enter the pit.

The aged servant of the State Opera had been right here to open the door to this sanctum sanctorum for Richard Strauss himself, and he’d done the same for Karajan, Kleiber, Abbado and the rest. He treated each of them, whether a superstar or a novice, with he same perfumed, unctuous respect. But their reactions varied. His obsequious hunched posture, the grinding of his decrepit teeth, designed to show stupefied devotion to the Maestro, usually grated on the nerves of the old guard and terrorized the newcomers. For some the routine was antiquated, pure artifice; it struck others as an intimidating rite, like some divine messenger flinging wide the gates of Olympus.

Cornelius Franz merely took it in. He’d reached a point in his conducting career halfway between the youngster fresh out of the Mozarteum twenty years ago and the idols he had longed to replace someday. He was recognized, not just known, although a reputation could be acquired at the Vienna State Opera faster than elsewhere and took somewhat more time to undo. Belonging to the Staatsoper gave you a level of prestige that was unique in the world. Just spend a few months plowing your way through the repertoire, and you were recognized on the street, even if your photo wasn’t plastered all over the magazines. For Franz this was more than enough, since he didn’t envy any of his batonwaving colleagues; he was happy to be able to conduct with some frequency, and to perform the music he loved.

Franz was primarily a composer. For him, music started as a potential force concealed in the blank page, and his mission was to fill that page, to reveal it. The great thing for him was to bring notes to life, rows and rows of notes, and nothing made him happier than hearing his children, his friends and family, whistle a tune he had just invented. And that, for Franz, was the true challenge of being a musician, to cite words of Mahler himselfThe rest, interpreting works of the past, was something he took for granted. He sometimes found it hard to fathom the public’s worship of those overexcited interpreters who rubbed themselves, like dogs in heat, against the marble limbs of Mozart, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and the others. Franz could easily have grown his hair long, could have waved it excitedly like his baton, in the fashion of the day, and jumped up onto the podium, then stepped down at the end a bloody wreck, bathed in sweat, wrapped heroically in a towel… But what was the point? Which of these monkeyshines could have won him a scintilla of the happiness he got from composing?

The world in which Franz moved was cruelly short of creators on the order of Beethoven, Verdi and especially of his beloved Mahler.

Gustav Mahler, for Franz, was the epitome of artistic integrity, total commitment, devotion to the point of martyrdom, and even to death. But Mahler belonged to a category of genius far beyond Cornelius’ capacities: the explosive genius, the magic tree that required nothing but some fertile soil to grow to great heights and, at the age of twenty, to yield fabulous fruit, as in the case of Mozart. The alchemists called it the “dry

twenty, to yield fabulous fruit, as in the case of Mozart. The alchemists called it the “dry path,” the philosopher’s stone achieved in the shortest interval of time, almost spontaneously. The only path open to Franz was the “wet way,” to borrow again from the alchemists’ jargon, which follows a much longer route, starting from a cruder kind of raw material, requiring a really long, hazardous maturation. If, then, the moral idol and model for Franz was Mahler, his practical model had to be Wagner. At twenty, the age at which Mahler produced his first masterpiece, the future ruler of Bayreuth had written a fantasy for piano, but nothing in any case that seemed to foreshadow Tristan or Parsifal.

So there was some hope for Franz, provided he could muster the will to make progress and create his own genius, as Wagner had done in his day.

Yes, the world needed creators, more creators. What did we get instead? A cohort, growing all the time, of interpreters who weren’t even capable of improvising a waltz for an accordion band, a frantic mob in all sizes who preened and danced around their “conception” of Mozart or Wagner, even just a “sound concept.” Ridiculous, vain, pointless!

Composers, improvisers, true creators – that’s what the world needed.

He would be like Mahler, but powerful and victorious like Wagner, a Richard Redux, but better, generous. After all, there was also a “Wagner problem” for Franz, just as there had been a “Wagner case” for Nietzsche.

Cornelius Franz was conducting Tannhäuser tonight, but it was the only Wagner opera he still agreed to lead. He had once been what’s called a “Wagner apostle,” that is, someone dangerously bogged down in Wagneromania, to quote Nietzsche.* So tonight he would conduct while thinking with all his might of Mahler, the way you think of a woman you idolize who’s sitting in the first row, a muse watching and inspiring your slightest gesture.

Even if his beloved happened to be a man dead for a century, Cornelius Franz was absolutely in love. *Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom. Quotations elsewhere are from his The Case of Wagner.

Chapter 3 They were all there: the near and dear, the faithful friends, disciples, admirers. And then the crowd drawn by rumor, as well as the critics, the two or three who had never seen any point in defacing the wall that was Mahler’s growing fame – and finally the ones who had never failed to piss on it.

They were there, in the warm breath of Vienna’s “Fönn,” the wind that blew especially heavy and stormy in May, amplified by steam locomotives and also, quite simply, by the tragic force of the event.

The great musician’s agony-train stopped, the curtains still drawn, and nothing moved.

An attractive woman was seen emerging, her features blurred by a mixture of thoughts, sad and practical too; she went straight to the station master’s office, and then Mahler’s car was disconnected and drawn to a freight sidetrack forbidden to the public. His descent from the train was particularly painful; the composer’s condition had been deteriorating by the hour ever since he left New York and the decision to return to Vienna to die.

Mahler was carried from stretcher to chair, literally by hand, among dozens of suitcases, enough to fill up several hotel rooms for a period of months.

Paris had been especially trying. After arriving in agony, being taken to a clinic on the Avenue du Roule in Neuilly, Mahler had experienced a few hours of revival after a serum injection, had risen in excellent spirits, shaved and then ordered a coach for a ride in the Bois de Boulogne, during which he hatched countless projects for stagings and compositions, until relapsing, brutally, into the final agony.

Then, on reaching Vienna, he was taken immediately to an excellent sanatorium, a room already filled with flowers, letters and cards overflowing with the most sincere good wishes for his recovery – in short, the Viennese machine for celebrating dead geniuses took off at full speed, now that the other machine, the slow killer, had finished its job. In the gauzy atmosphere before the storm that typified the season, Vienna emitted a deep sigh, voluptuous in its sincere sorrow – mixed with relief: the place was finally getting rid of Gustav Mahler, just as it had devoured Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and the others.

Now they could get to the most interesting part of the story of a Viennese genius: they could start selling him. They had created Mozartskugel, that industrialized spherical candy product that could be translated literally as “Mozart’s balls,” so now it was time to invent some way of selling Mahler. The man himself was not a product of marketing, even if that notion had been common at the time. Austere, hostile to all useless publicity, averse to interviews and especially scandals, in a word he was anything but a celebrity.

He evoked the mathematician or clergyman, in fact both of those images at once. Turning him into a tourist product like “Mozart’s balls” would take some effort on the part of the merchants in Vienna’s temple. The approaching wars, in any case, were going to make a Jew a bit hard to sell to the Aryan population. Better to wait; there’d be an opportunity some day no doubt.

But for the moment Mahler lay dying and Vienna waited, watched, lost patience, burning with a fever for life, sending in the journalists several times a day, calling the dying man’s room every few hours, while the composer was being consumed by a simple case of blood poisoning, probably traceable to the teeth or heart and unfortunately uncurable at that time.

They were all gathered around the bed, his nearest and dearest: Alma, prepared to play

They were all gathered around the bed, his nearest and dearest: Alma, prepared to play her role as inconsolable widow, having just dropped her latest passionate letter to Walter Gropius in the letterbox. Soon I’ll be back in your arms. Bruno Walter, the perennial disciple, deformed by grief. Karl Moll, devoted and devastated father-in-law, a painter of considerable talent, standing by to make the death mask of his genius of a son-in-law.

Waiting hopefully in the corridor, after being refused admission, stood an admirer, frozen in the hope of a miraculous cure.

Several days passed, and the agony seemed endless while Mahler scribbled vague sketches on a notepad from time to time, having used it a few days ago, in Paris, to jot down some final musical ideas… Then there was nothing except a huge stare, which then turned inward, leaving only a death rattle. Like in one of his symphonies, an immense crescendo began, like a storm spreading over Vienna, accompanying the increasing struggle of his breathing. In a brief pause between two clashes of heavenly cymbals, Mahler was seen moving his fingers as if conducting, while his lips, parched from fever, opened to emit a murmur, fragile but precise: “Mozart, my little Mozart.”

The hand stopped beating time and made a downward gesture, like a body bowing in a curtain call, as if the conductor signaled to the storm that it could resume its solo and end the concert alone. An hour later, when the thunderclaps had receded far enough, it became clear that Mahler had stopped breathing and it was all over. Alma collapsed, and Vienna could start the consolation ball.

Chapter 4 “Maé’streu, bit’teuh”… In his Viennese dialect, thick as a Hungarian goulash, the opera attendant signaled to him that the hall was now pitch dark, the orchestra tuned up, and in short it was time to enter the pit.

“The pit…” Cornelius Franz always wondered why this deplorable word had been chosen. A latrine pit, a common burial pit, an orchestra pit… The word had lousy connotations in English: “What a pit,” “It’s the pits.” In French, “fosse” also meant ditch.

But German won hands down: “Graben,” a grave.

Opera had its birth in the Europe of royalty, and like a bastard in a good family, they had consigned the orchestra to a hole, a stable. What, then, had all the revolutions accomplished? The heads that rolled, the regime changes? The dust of the old world still clung to the corners of the realm. Franz told himself that, if someday he were to succeed the present director, an over-hormonal Romanian, he would change this name for something more flattering. He thought of “euphonium,” for instance, or “accompaniorium,” anything but the humiliating “pit.”

“Maéstreu, wenn i’ bitten dorf,” the philharmonic goblin was insisting in a patois made thicker by indignation. The very idea that a conductor would delay his entrance under the Viennese institution’s glorious lights was insulting to him, beyond all understanding, and he wanted Franz to know it.

Damned Viennese, he thought. This guy will never say it to my face, but as soon as I start the overture, he’ll go get a beer, venting his bile against me, with his long yellow nose twisted in scorn, his vicious little eyes peering upward, his whole being concentrated in an ejaculation of hatred. Poor Mahler, what he must have had to swallow here…

Franz plowed his way through the musicians of the prestigious Staatsoper orchestra. No pathway is ever cleared in advance, the labyrinths are reconfigured every evening, scrambling the pathways between the music stands, and the Philharmoniker sometimes enjoy watching poor conductors who get lost and end up facing the wall or squeezed between two bass violins, forced to turn back, losing part of their panache even before the first note. This was especially true in the orchestras of northern Europe, which had a number of potbellied musicians blocking the way, but the Vienna Philharmonic was an elegant ensemble, which prized external appearances. You had to slide between the musicians the way you struggle through a thicket of young beeches. Also, Franz always reconnoitered a route before the audience arrived. The height of the podium, of the music stand, the width left open between the rows of chairs – he checked everything, with the precision of a true neurotic.

The audience that night gave him an especially warm welcome: it was his thousandth performance at the State Opera and word had gotten out to the newspapers, even the celebrity press, since in Vienna a classical musician, if he had the Philharmoniker or State Opera imprimatur, was a celebrity. That didn’t add anything to his artistic worth, but at least he was recognized by his concierge. And then, of course, he was conducting Wagner, for the reason that everyone wanted to conduct Wagner: the sense of power, and the applause that was often easy to get. Wagner was difficult to put together from a dramatic viewpoint, but not hard to conduct. This was a jealously guarded secret among conductors, a potentially dangerous secret for anyone who had based his success on the

conductors, a potentially dangerous secret for anyone who had based his success on the Bayreuth master. His music was often composed in two beats to the measure, “one” down, “two” up, sometimes in triple meter (you just needed to add a jab toward your right). You had the comfort – like in driving on an expressway – of settling into a fixed tempo for a long haul. Italian operas, in contrast, were more like smaller back roads with their many hazards. Basically, you didn’t have to work very hard at conducting Wagner, other than mustering the necessary endurance for several hours, with arms tensed. But playing tennis or frequent swimming allowed you to train for that, and you reaped a triumph beyond any comparison with the bel canto operas. Those Italian works were especially difficult to accompany, leaving the hirsute conductors at the end bathed in sweat and barely applauded. But Franz liked risk, the narrow back roads, and never perspired excessively, so he conducted Italian opera with a pleasure that never got old.

Cornelius therefore took a brief bow, trying to force a smile, impatient to turn back and get started. For once, since it was a special occasion, he had made the orchestra stand.

That was not common here; the conductor’s first entry wasn’t supposed to launch an “homage” for the musicians, who stood up only for major occasions. Cornelius was not a major occasion. But a thousandth performance constituted a symbol, and the Viennese were fond of celebrations. Still, that was no reason to prolong the thing unduly, and when the maestro turned back to conduct, the musicians were already seated, ready to start the overture.

“And now, “ Franz asked, “where is he?” It was the same question each time he conducted here. He meant Mahler, his god, the director of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907. At that time the podium was reportedly placed just before the stage, as close as possible to the singers, with the musicians behind. Or else it stood at the center of the pit, until Mahler invented the modern arrangement, with the chief’s podium backed up to the first row of spectators.

“Am I actually standing where he stood? Of course, the opera house had been identically restored after the bombings, but aren’t I a few inches away? Is his ghost floating right here, or maybe a bit farther to the right or left?” Such thoughts haunted him throughout the performances, and the audience had never understood the reasons for this St. Vitus’ dance that kept him hopping from one end of the narrow podium to the other; they assumed it was merely an excess of temperament. In fact, like a man hunting butterflies with a net, he was simply trying to seize something of Mahler’s essence, a trace of ectoplasm that he might have shed here or there as he conducted…

Franz gave the signal to start, the “upbeat.” This was the moment where the magic was supposed to start working. Something special had to happen, in the first gesture.

The first motion of the baton could be so inspired, so full of music, that the orchestra would be unable to resist, as long as the conductor could maintain that tension, that willpower. But it was a lot more than the baton alone; it was the entire body, especially the look, that had to express a paroxysm of energy and will. And beyond energy and will, it had to transmit total devotion in the service of the art. The musicians of the Vienna State Opera were the best in the world, no need to cue them that it was time to play; you had to show them how to play “identically, but with a difference.” Otherwise it was routine and everything would go fine, but no better than that. It would be merely “Servus, bis morgen” – or “Quitting time, see you tomorrow.” A conductor like Cornelius knew how to create special moments, but not always.

And yet he knew that Mahler repeated the miracle each time he took up the baton. It was a question of will and energy. Some evenings, Franz could not muster those forces. He lacked just about nothing: only the willpower of his desire.

Why did he have that urgency, and not me? Was it the pain, the infinite pain of Mahler’s, or rather all the things that had been written about his suppressions, his mother, the dead

or rather all the things that had been written about his suppressions, his mother, the dead brothers… Franz had transformed mediocre orchestras; in composing he had known moments of intense inspiration that gave birth to superb melodies that no one could hear with indifference. But it was still too sporadic, and he had yet to compose, finally, the miraculous symphony he’d been dreaming of since earliest childhood, the one he heard on his way to school at a time when he couldn’t transcribe these complex tunes into notes. The inner voice had been stifled by his apprenticeship at the Conservatory, but the discovery of Gustav had rescued him. He wrote a lot, still pretty poorly but a little better every day. Mahler had become his obsession, his goal; but he mustn’t imitate him, he had to possess him.

Franz had succeeded tonight in making an inspired start, winning double vigilance from the musicians. In the sublime countermelody of the opening, he was maintaining strong tension among the cellos, merely by sustaining the idea that his arms were singing.

Once he attained a certain level of technique, a musician got the best results from his muscles by using images, not by giving them orders. For instance, Cornélius, who was an excellent pianist, liked to imagine his hands as agile dancers when he approached an especially virtuoso passage, such as in a Beethoven sonata or a Rachmaninoff prelude. In the same way, when he was a student, his old Russian professor had got him accustomed to listening more than playing. “Listen to your left hand, have you listened to it enough?

No! That’s why you aren’t getting this passage right. Listen, listen more all the time!”

Cornélius did the same when he conducted; he visualized his arms as the arm of a great phonograph transmitting to the members of the orchestra the music in his head.

But Mahler’s image took over. He knew everything that had been written about his way of conducting. Immediately his gestures became smaller, more incisive, and he tried to summon the energy he had put into his arms and transpose it into a look that he hoped was like that of an eagle.

That seemed to work; musicians picked up the slightest fluctuation in conductors’ thought, even if they were surprised at first by this switch in tactic by a maestro they thought they knew completely. Cornélius did not wear glasses, having opted for contact lenses after a violent gesture once propelled a brand-new frame right into the face of a flutist. This little drama, unfortunately, had occurred in Paris, where it triggered a weeklong strike.

Mahler, however, had worn glasses with an extremely slender frame. Apparently they had helped increase the magnetism of his piercing stare. Maybe that was something to consider.

For the moment, in any case, he was inhabited by his god as he started to agitate his legs nervously and to sketch some sudden “sword thrusts” to accompany the apotheosis of the great theme. It worked wonders; the crescendo became irresistible, the musicians became aware of it and were intoxicated with the collective sensation.

The Tannhäuser overture was Franz’s favorite Wagner work. For a long time he had loved Tristan best, until the crisis. Now he could only tolerate the scores Wagner had composed before the many revolting prose works. Judaism in Music, in particular, a nauseating essay, which might have been spewed by Goebbels in the late 1930s…The policies of Wagner’s widow, Cosima, during the rise of Nazism, then the positions taken by some of the composer’s descendants… It was thoughts like this that had considerably distanced him from his early Wagnerian affections.

What chaos, that first half of the twentieth century. The penniless student Adolf Hitler, ardent fan of the Wagner performances conducted by Mahler around 1906, 1907. The future Führer, even then, expressed a real admiration for Jewish musicians; he hadn’t yet

future Führer, even then, expressed a real admiration for Jewish musicians; he hadn’t yet found room in his heart for the hate Wagner would inject him with, like a poison. For a few more years yet, Wagner would remain a world of marvels, a fairy tale, in which young Adolf would see himself as Siegfried, as Tristan, as a lovesick hero, long before he would reduce Wagnerian dramaturgy to Aryans versus inferior beings, and a justification for his most frightful theories.

An uproar by the trombones reminded Cornélius Franz that he had reached the end of the overture, and that, at least for his “thousandth” performance, he really ought to put on some kind of show for the audience. So he threw his head forcefully backward, then forward, waving his hair – which he’d deliberately let grow for the occasion like the mane of a purebred – executed a graceful jump, and cut the air with his baton to skewer the final chord. The orchestra, totally oblivious to the caper, played exactly as usual, but the public shouted with joy. Disgusted, not turning around, Franz motioned to the orchestra to rise and relish, for once, a triumph that was theirs alone. And then, even before the applause had ended, he attacked the first act.

Chapter 5 “Mozart, my little Mozart”….

I just uttered those words, and they keep resounding in my head. It feels as if they’re bouncing from one temple to the other, hurtling into a bottomless pit, and I’m falling with them, making no effort to catch them, simply following them as my guide through the growing darkness.

Is my mind going dark, as soon as the body has given up? How long will the feeble light of my soul keep shining inside my body? And that doctor, a friend, one evening in Paris, at the Clemenceaus’, didn’t I hear him claim that a guillotined head went right on thinking for more than half an hour after the fatal blow?

I’m dying far too early, condemned by an unjust decree.

And now, all those shadows that I captured in my musical works, in my funeral marches, they’re busy drowning me… Here I am, in the dark, looking like an embalmer, walking like a disjointed elf. I’ve heard it said a thousand times: everything about me is macabre.

It wasn’t my intention, I never choose the mask of tragedy; it was stamped right on my still-tender waxen face at birth. Can’t I erupt in one of those extraordinary laughing fits that used to shake me, driving away all those sordid thoughts, keeping them at bay, along with all the tiresome people?

“Mozart”… A final echo of my last word, there, somewhere, but far off, so far off.

Time passes at a strange pace. Did I just stop breathing this minute, or was it yesterday or maybe years ago? Am I already a ghost, a phantom wandering lost among other shadows? Have they really buried me beside my daughter, as I requested? Have they put a stake through my heart, as I demanded? Who am I now? Who am I, damn it?

MAHLER! A voice! A frightful voice… But so present! It’s not a thought, or a hallucination, it’s truly a voice…I’m returning to life, I hear the doctor call me, unless it’s the impresario who’s come to collect his commission, the critic out to get me with one final, murderous review.

MAHLER! No! It’s not outside of me, but here, deep within this pit where the little Mozarts have tumbled. There’s something at the bottom of this pit, something that calls me by name.

There’s an infinite presence that approaches, that has come for me. How could I have mistaken it? There’s nothing left now but me, and I’m nothing now but an abstraction, a thought, I’d like to flee or to throw myself on that voice, I’d like at least to be able to shake with fear, but I’m nothing now; nothing!

MAHLER, look at me, and see yourself!

Look? But with what eyes? Look at what, in what direction? I am blind, I’m mute;

Look? But with what eyes? Look at what, in what direction? I am blind, I’m mute; nothing now but an outline, I’m a rough draft that the composer will toss in the fire, after filling a page with sketches that leave him dissatisfied.

And yet, wait—yes, there’s something taking shape, it’s all abstract, it’s the idea of a shape, it’s nothing. And yet, out of this nothing, something is emerging. Something completely new, an image, the image of an immense personage, in a cape as vast as a ship’s sail, with a long beard, and moving like the ocean mist, the idea of a gigantic man, wielding a cane as thick and tall as a ship’s mast… The idea that this man is not God, of course, but that he travels at hurricane speed, that he keeps traveling without rest, never stopping, day or night. This man is fleeing and pursuing, he’s the prey and the hunter too.

Now that his idea is so close to me, I recognize this man with an infinite terror.

Ahasuerus! The eternal Jew, the wandering Jew! The fears from early childhood rise in our throat like food we can’t swallow, its mere odor nauseating us… Ahasuerus has always haunted my worst nightmares, those of my earliest youth and those of my second childhood, my childhood with Alma. He’s my greatest fear, because he’s my most faithful mirror image. What am I but the eternal exile, Austrian to the Germans, Bohemian to the Austrians, Jewish to everyone? Haven’t I crisscrossed Europe and America to defend my music, and found myself rejected on every side? Yet there’s something else in this figure of the eternal patriarch, something that terrorizes me, even if I was never able to understand what it was about…

“Yes, Mahler, here I am, the wandering exile, the man you named in your music ‘the wandering companion.’ That must have been an attempt to make you less afraid of me, to tame me, I’m sure. Yet I never meant you the slightest harm, Mahler. I always turned up to put you on your guard, or to get you back on track. Rather than listen to me, you took refuge in fear, and now you’re dying of all those fears. Too often we think we’re afraid to make a bad decision. But what misleads us worst of all is the fear of making good ones. A man in torment knows full well that a certain path is the right one, but the tortured soul doesn’t want to succeed, or to be happy. To make the right decision, or having made it, to stick to it—that is his challenge, that’s what he fears. What you fear, Mahler.

“Nevertheless, I’m back, and this time, once again, you mustn’t tremble, because I’m here to inform you that Providence has chosen you.”

“Providence? Chosen?”

“Yes, Mahler, your whole life has been nothing but one long sacrifice, a real martyrdom.

That is why Providence sends me. It is giving you one last choice, the fulfillment of a desire very dear to you…”

“Ahasuerus, I’m dead, I can’t desire anything now. And you—you no longer have the right to torment me, or to put me back on the right path. You’ve come too late, that’s all.”

“No, Mahler, you’re not quite dead yet. Your body has stopped moving, but there’s still a glimmer of life, your mortal coil has about an hour of life left. And yet, Providence has taken pity on all your suffering, and above all, Providence wants to reward your infinite devotion to nature and to your Creator.”

“Ahasuerus, I’m not what you could call a religious man—” “But you are a believer, a man of great spirituality. You’ve devoted your entire life to your work, and you’ve dedicated that work to celebrating the spirit and creation. And Providence knows that. Therefore it has granted you the power to use this hour of consciousness, before your soul returns to its source. You, who have always striven to

consciousness, before your soul returns to its source. You, who have always striven to know and to learn, you’ve been granted time, and therefore this one hour will become years, centuries if necessary. Time, for us, no longer exists.”

“Very well, Wandering Jew, then let me open my eyes again, to take leave of my loved ones, especially my little Anna. That’s all I ask.”

“Mahler, I have no power to return you to the river of life. You’ve reached the shore and I can keep you there, above the tide, in the time frame of the soul, which is Eternity. Isn’t there anything, then, that you’d like to know? You’ve always had such thirst for knowledge.”

“To know?... Well… I just want to know one thing: if my life of suffering has served some purpose, if people are going to hear my music and understand it. Otherwise, there’s nothing you can do for me, you’re just a shadow, a bad dream, you’re no god, not even an angel… You are the image of a whole people’s gratuitous suffering, the image of the curse of a jealous god.”

“Look, Mahler…”

From deep in the pit where my last words had sunk, all at once there arose the clamoring of an entire universe, like a crowd pouring through a doorway that has at last given way.

My mind, deprived of its five senses, is now struck by a frightening explosion of new insights, sounds and images that are merely ideas, and despite everything these ideas are stronger, more precise, than any sound or image I ever perceived when alive. There are thoughts of tasting, touching, I am swamped by crowds dressed in a profusion of new colors, I’m swept away by a torrent of notes never heard before, I seem to be inhaling the new aromas of an impossible orchard…

“Watch, Mahler, watch...”

I see millions of human beings moving in all directions, running, shoving one another, descending, on foot, on bicycle, in horseless carriages and peculiar flying vehicles… I see an immense concert hall, filled to overflowing, and immobile crowds, listening devoutly to one of my symphonies. My symphonies! I see them all, printed, in scores, but also on records, much smaller than those I’ve seen in New York. I see music lovers listening to my works in their homes, their eyes closed, I see newspaper articles celebrating me as the greatest symphonic composer of the modern age. I’m played everywhere, I’ve become inescapable, famous, monumental. I’m a success! My music has transformed humanity, so people don’t go to concerts as they once did. From now on, as if in a city surmounted by a defining monument, like Paris with Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower, like New York with the Statue of Liberty, the symphonic world now has this “Mahler Tower” that no one can ignore. People can avoid listening to my symphonies, but no one can avoid dealing with them…

And yet, something’s wrong.

“Ahasuerus, you’re making time move at dizzying speed. I don’t recognize anything in the world you are showing me. My music is everywhere in it, but it seems to be happening in a very distant future; I’d like to see the world just after my death and then, perhaps, a bit later. I’d like to see how people have begun to understand the value of the treasure I’ve bequeathed to them. To see my little Anna grow up, not to see her die. I don’t need to go to the end of the world. The few brief years left to me are enough.”

“No, Mahler, I don’t want to show you the years to come. It’s better for you just to know that you’ve become a great man for humanity. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“That’s an enormous comfort, and I could depart in peace if everything just didn’t have that dramatic twist that I’ve always applied to it. But I’d like to know how the world learned; how those who survived me have continued their journey… Do I have my friends to thank for my glory? Show me everything, everything that happened after me…”

“After you, but before what I’ve shown you, there’s going to be a great deal of darkness, awful things done by human beings, things it’s not good for you to see.”

“You promised to show me everything, old man, and I command you to keep your word.”

“All right then… look, Mahler, look.”

The arrogance, this urge to see and know everything! What vanity, to claim to express suffering in my music, even to claim to know it! Marching across my soul are the masks of true pain, unspeakable, fire that falls from the sky, herds of steel, wheels and tracks busily giving birth to the vacuum, endlessly cultivating people, things and the earth. And that’s not all, I see soldiers in black, proudly wearing the symbols of death. Really ordinary men, who are made to believe they are gods or demons. Men so content with all the bounty that they can’t understand they’re only men, never more…

And I see what man does when he forgets he is human, forgets that being human imposes the duty to be better, or even just to be good. I see the stars, yellow and red, the roundups, the tracks, the trains, the smoking chimneys. Gypsies, my Jewish brothers, political enemies, homosexuals, poor deformed creatures, dark chambers, gas conduits, showers, and then more smoking chimneys And then a sound, regular, powerful.

A sound I know well, the sound of timpani, kettledrums. The way I’ve used, martyred, abused that poor instrument. And how vilified I’ve been for having them played more than civilized society allows, in my symphonies and in those by other composers. I must have exhausted armies of percussionists, perforated the skins of entire herds of animals.

Now, the sound disturbs me, horrifies me. A musician from hell seizes upon a demented instrument. It’s the eternal drum of armies on the march, beating at Alexander and Napoleon’s command to drive the troops forward, the drum that gives no command but “right, left, right, left,” and no longer commands the foot or the brain: it commands the heart to beat in unison, and to move the feet.

I see dark legions march by, sowing and reaping death, I see man abdicate his dignity and grovel in the mud of his own negation, in the erotic lust for a suicide that’s been so long premeditated and desired. And I detect the man who is beating time for this march to the abyss.

A small being, large-bellied, hairy, with a hydrocephalic head, crazed bulging eyes that roll in every direction, wearing animal skins like the barbarian from a bad engraving in a history book.

This odious creature, whose insane head conjures up this morbid beating, is someone I know all too well. And I refuse to recognize him, with all my strength…

“Ahasuerus, no, not that, not HIM!!!!”

Notes on the consultation:

Notes on the consultation: Mahler seems to have a tendency to daydream, even to hallucinate. I’ve noted quite frequent apparitions of his own corpse, especially while composing the Second and Sixth Symphonies, according to his own statements. Which seems consistent, since these two works have a program that’s downright tragic (I’ve mentioned that the Second Symphony was originally a “dance of death,” a “funeral ceremony”). On another occasion, Mahler, emerging from a deep meditation on the forces of nature, perceived the god Pan staring at him in the forest; he was seized with a deep terror and returned, trembling, to his wife.

At the time he was more than forty years old…

Finally, there are numerous nightmares about the wandering Jew. The key element, of course, is the father. Particularly because Ahasuerus’s walking stick is always the object that seems to frighten Mahler.

A great deal remains to be explored on this subject: the wandering Jew as representation of the authoritarian father, but also the abandonment of his family religion in order to convert to Catholicism.

Moreover, it is worth asking why the anti-Semitic Wagner depicted Wotan, the “God of the gods,” with certain features of the wandering Jew, the eternal voyager with the long beard, armed with walking stick, one-eyed… The same relationship to the father? What would Mahler have made of it, being such a great Wagnerite?

Once again, I can only deplore that brevity of my meeting with this remarkable mind.

S.F

Chapter 6 Somewhere near the end of Tannhäuser, when the tenor reaches the terrifying scene of his audience with the pope, who rejects and curses him, Franz begins to feel a slight prickling in his fingers, then a headache that makes him feel as if his skull is expanding, while his eyes are popping from their sockets. “Mein Gott, hypertension, when I’ve nearly reached the end,” his hand feverishly groping for the Propanolol tablet, which he swallows whole, though fully aware that the dose is too strong and, in any case, it won’t start to act or an hour, after the opera is long over. Cornelius is a typical hypochondriac, in excellent health but convinced he lives permanently under the threat of a cardiovascular attack.

At the rear of the pit, there’s the trumpet player who had been eyeballing Franz from the first day of his tenure at the State Opera twenty years earlier—so much so that the conductor no longer wondered if it was a case of homosexual desire but instead suspected permanent hatred, such as only the Germans were capable of cultivating with such fervor (he was from Kronach). The trumpeter missed not a second of the hand digging into the pocket, the small white pill concealed between two fingers, the quick ingestion and the act of swallowing. For the first time a fine, pleasurable smile loosened the lips of the musician, which usually formed a perfect monkey’s ass when he was blowing into his copper tube. The smile vanished as soon as Franz decided to reciprocate it, giving way to the habitual glare, fixed, enigmatic, cold and sadistic. “He’d like to see me croak on the podium. He’s been expecting it since day one, he’s a medium, he knows I’ll keel over, and he’s just waiting. He may in fact be the angel of death.” Cornelius thought immediately of Mahler: “Would he have entertained this kind of thought? Mahler saw things, he saw himself laid out in a coffin, he perceived demons in the forest, he may even have seen me die just now, and would have felt my death, at a distance, like a prediction, which would have given him anxieties about his own health.”

Franz doesn’t give a second’s thought to his score until the final note. He conducts on autopilot, without putting the slightest intention into his gestures, concentrating only on the will to survive.

“Conducting, conducting, yes, there’s nothing easier, it’s easer than playing the piano, and so much easier than composing, as everyone knows, even HE knew that!” he thinks, dashing toward the left-hand door of the stage entrance, still in formal attire, not bothering to change in his dressing room. Everyone exits through the right-hand door, where the fans wait to get autographs, and where a few young girls also stand, smitten with some musician or other.

It’s a gross insult to the public, especially for a thousandth performance gala, to select the other door, where no one stands waiting. Most of the admirers of Cornelius Franz gathered around the entrance, the chillier ones pushed their way inside. He is going to disappoint his innermost circle and jeopardize a major part of his public support.

But Franz couldn’t care less about his public: he feels poorly, the medication did nothing, he is shaking from head to toe and his head is filled with an uncontrollable pandemonium. Sounds, voices, fragments of memories that he can no longer connect to anything at all. He rushes into the lobby of the Hotel Sacher, just behind the opera house, seized with a horrible panic: whereas he always turned to the right to reach the corridor

seized with a horrible panic: whereas he always turned to the right to reach the corridor leading to his room, now there’s nothing but a wall. The concierge, accustomed to bibulous clients, takes him in hand with the extreme courtesy of the Viennese tourism professionals.

“Maestro, are you looking for the restaurant? It’s to your left, and… the blue bar is at the far end.”

“No, no, thank you, I…I just want to get back to my room… The…the corridor, isn’t it here, usually?”

“Ah ah! No, Maestro, the corridor is no longer here, not for a good half a century. But you’re right, if you were Oscar Wilde or Richard Strauss, you would have had to turn to the right, and go through the weight-bearing wall, as if by magic, as in Harry—“ “And Mahler?”

“Pardon, Maestro?”

“MAHLER, the great composer, the director of the Vienna opera for more than ten years, the—“ “Ah, yes, of course, Gustav Mahler, but he rarely stayed here, at most for one night. He liked the Bristol, alas, and then he had his own home. True, he sometimes came to dine or have a coffee, though for that he preferred the Imperial, twice alas—“ “Yes, so he knew the place, and he certainly must have turned to the right here, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely! Maestro Mahler would have turned to the right, but Maestro Franz, on the other hand, will go to the left for a hot chocolate, or, if he wants to get some rest, he’ll proceed further on, straight ahead and then to the right!”

The concierge finished off his speech with the wide-eyed look and the distended smile of a puppet ending his number, and poked his nose back into his computer.

Cornelius Franz heads to his room unsteadily, seized by the most awful sensation: everyday reality is starting to dissolve, nothing he sees is permanent, nothing is sure, none of it exists; everything is changing, moving. It was too soon to make a diagnosis, but a cerebral stroke seemed most likely. All right, then, no aspirin, he needs an ambulance on the double, if only it can get here in the three minutes that will decide his fate.

Cornelius Franz collapsed, with his hand on the doorknob as he was shutting the door of his hotel room, with this final thought: “Too late for my first symphony.”

Chapter 7 I’ve got to find a way of escaping from this abomination. You can awaken from a nightmare, you just need to be really frightened. I’m very afraid, I’m terrified as never before, but I can’t manage to wake up. I may be in a really deep coma, likely to last for months. Thus I have to stop being afraid. I must, I must…

And above all, don’t let yourself see him, beating the drums of death…

Wagner! The man I most admire in this world, along with Beethoven. Wagner, the greatest musician that opera has ever known, one of the foremost creators in all of humanity. What kind of distasteful joke could make me see Wagner pounding out the end of the world on kettledrums? And the insane joy he takes in striking these percussion instruments in the shape of gigantic skulls, singing the Twilight of the Gods at the top of his voice!

It’s grotesque.

His misshapen arms seem immune to fatigue. Like a gigantic leech, his body feeds on the blood and the suffering generated by the rhythmic beating that’s unleashed in an endless trance. Percussion beats muffle the horrible moaning of tortured humanity. And yet, above the tumult, at the crest of the aural specter, a voice somehow succeeds in cutting through and then covering everything. The rapturous squealing comes from a gnome crawling near the timpani, busy behind the back of the musician, trying to approach, like a thief or a perverse waif, for the simple pleasure of caressing for a second those ivory barrels, or even to bite at the timpanist’s calves or to pull the hair of the woman seated near him, then to rush off screaming, without a backward glance, “I told you, I told you!”

Nietzsche! Why, in this pandemonium, am I forced to recognize my musical father and my philosophical teacher? Is it to prove that, raised by monsters, I couldn’t help but be a monster myself? Nietzsche, whose ideas nourished the formative years of my adolescence, who taught me to break my chains, raise myself off the ground, wave my arms toward the sky to grasp its dome and drag it down to the world of mortals. There I am, face to face with two geniuses who, for a brief moment, complemented one another.

Two men, one admiring the other with no thought of reciprocity. Then, one day, without warning, Nietzsche, the love-mad suitor, is transformed into a hysterical enemy. Mad with love, then mad with hate, then just mad.

“What are you showing me, Ahasuerus? This nightmare is absurd. You’re lying!”

“No, Mahler, I’m not lying. I’ve shown you images of the future, which were quite real, and what you’re perceiving now is no longer reality. These are the thick, slimy surfaces of the countless neuroses of the world that generate reality. The frustrations, phantasms, phobias. It’s something like what’s called Purgatory. Others may call it the collective unconscious. Concentrated here are the residues of earthly ideas, and from here they ferment into a gigantic mental compost, they proceed to create other ideas, other forms.

It’s a psychic distillery. Humans, animals, every living thing possessing a soul sends its emanations to this place. Everything here is mere theater, but the actors are performing a play composed by human madness.”

“You tell me Wagner is the cause of this abomination? Wagner died without ever having

“You tell me Wagner is the cause of this abomination? Wagner died without ever having caused or desired the death of anyone. He was an artist, the most gentle and fragile man imaginable.”

Nietzsche and the wandering Jew start from the same ritual, like two comrades.

Ahasuerus opens his cape, which spreads like a huge parchment. In a furious torrent, there’s a downpouring of characters, whom I remember from my childhood reading. “For the Jews there is only one solution: disappearance by assimilation.”

“Admitting the Jew into the world of the arts can have nothing but pernicious consequences.” Nietzsche is hopping on one foot before me, manipulating a few small books on a string, like a schoolboy, making them dance before my eyes. I decipher their titles with great difficulty: Judaism in Music, German Art and German Politics.

“All of them are Wagner’s children, ah, ah! I told you so, I told you so.”

Nietzsche seems filled with joy, pulls from his pocket a small stuffed horse, which he kisses before murmuring, “You’re the only one who understands me, you…” and then stuffs it hastily under his rags, with his mad eyes and bushy mustache, escaping by leaps and bounds, like the way he’d arrived.

Cosima Wagner, sitting hear the kettledrums, is sewing yellow stars, which she attaches to the lapels of musicians parading by like phantoms, whom she sends off with a brief tap on the back. “One more that won’t be seen at Bayreuth!” Then she stares at me before breaking out in a hyena’s laugh: “Isn’t it true, Gustav, we never allowed your big nose to poke around at Bayreuth! And that’s how it’s going to be until the end of time!”

At those words, Wagner the ogre emits a congested laugh, or maybe it was stupor that triggered a cough, and then he yells, without turning toward his wife: “But it’s the end of the world, Cosima, it’s the end of the world!”

Suddenly, re-emerging from between the legs of the great composer where he’d been hiding, the philosopher of The Gay Science charges toward me again and takes me aside: “The Eternal Return, Mahler, remember the Eternal Return! What we’re showing you here will repeat itself, it has repeated itself already and will keep on unto infinity. Your life, Wagner’s life, mine. Yours isn’t over yet, so use this time granted you by the wandering Jew, take advantage of it to change everything. Create music that’s stronger than Wagner’s, because the Eternal Return will invest your final work with the weight of infinity. Create a symphony that will alert people to the approaching danger, frighten them, drive them away from Wagner. He’s taken all of us for idiots, as I wrote word for word, but no one would listen. It’s your turn to try, Gustav! But if you do nothing, you’ll fall back forever into the depths of remorse. And the world will start all over again from the beginning, and we’ll find ourselves here forever, grimacing, playing the timpani, sewing on stars and vilifying you for not taking action. Remember my teaching on Parmenides, weight and lightness. The Eternal Return gives you the power to cancel Wagner’s weight. Oppose it with the lightness of your own spirit, Mahler! His weight is nefarious, your lightness will be salvation. Your Tenth Symphony! Complete your Tenth Symphony and deal him the killing blow, the coup de grâce!”

Nietzsche pulls out the stuffed horse, waves it in my direction and begins spinning about like a dervish, faster and faster. “Eternally, eternally!”

“Ahasuerus, for pity’s sake stop this torture, I don’t want to see any more, or know any more of a future that has no meaning.”

The old man marching raises his baton and then everything stops. There’s nothing left in my soul but the void of the beginning. The pain of these visions, now deprived of any flesh in which to inject itself, fades quickly, and the pure mind which I’ve become perceives only shadows, even denser now than before.

I’ve got to do something. I can see only one solution. I don’t know if I’ll be up to it, or if I’ll even have the time, but I’ve got to try.

“Wandering Jew, Nietzsche spoke to me of my final symphony, the one I haven’t had the time to complete. I would like to see what Alma will do with the score. If she’ll actually destroy it, as I asked. Show me that, Ahasuerus.”

“Then look, Mahler...”

I see a concert hall, I hear unknown sounds, I see a score in which I recognize neither the handwriting nor the signs that fill it. The result is dreadful, it has nothing to do with what I set out to compose.

“Wandering Jew, what is this latest madness? I asked you to show me the fate of my Tenth Symphony!”

“Well here it is! Alma didn’t destroy the score; near the end of her life, she was persuaded by an English musician to let him complete the work. That’s what you’re hearing. I assure you, Mahler, this symphony is almost never played complete. Most of the time, we hear just the first part, which you had almost completed.”

“But this is an abomination! This symphony is a farce! It’s nothing like what I intended. I wanted to express my despair after Alma abandoned me. I made use of the entire world to cry with me, I summoned the planets, the gods, all of nature to say this: come back, my love, come back, my light, return. Life. That’s what I wanted to express, to Alma and to the whole universe. My cry was the opposite of Wagner’s, my cry was the lament of the suicide who leaps into the abyss opening his arms to the ground as it comes near. It was the call of the lovelorn, the prayer to the sources of life. That’s what I have to finish.

“Wandering Jew, you promised me you would extend the hours left to me, for as long as I wanted. So I’m asking you to let me complete my work. I want it to open people’s eyes and give them the desire to reconquer the world, the way you win back a woman you love, whom you’ve lost. Ahasuerus, give me the time to write this work. I need a year, maybe less…

“Mahler, I can give you time, but I can’t give you back your body. You’ll have to act in the world of the mind. Here, you can do whatever you like. There, you’re reduced to nothing but a man who’s whining.”

“But I can’t composer a symphony without my body, my emotions, my eyes, my hands, my ears. Ahasuerus, I need a body!”

“A body, yes. Your body, no, Mahler. I’m sorry.”

I don’t understand anything—what’s he talking about? A body? A different body? Does he mean a body like in those theosophy volumes I read in New York? By telepathy, like those works dictated to the famous Madame Blavatsky by higher spirits who’ve come straight from India through limbo? If I could still laugh, I’d fall on the ground and I’d throw an apple right in the face of this old ape.

“Do I understand you right, Ahasuerus? You are proposing that I should use a different

“Do I understand you right, Ahasuerus? You are proposing that I should use a different body? What other body?”

“That’s up to you, Mahler. But I would advise you to select a man who knows music as well as you, in particular your music. And somebody with the gift of composition, because you won’t gain a thing if the mind that you inhabit is unable to summon some inspiration. Imagine that I have the soul of an eagle in the body of a lion. I doubt that you would succeed in making it fly.”

The thought of a laughing fit floats across the shadows and shakes the idea of a body that I no longer possess. I even indulge myself in the thought that I could breathe again, painfully. But it’s time to get serious…

“I can’t see anyone but Bruno Walter, my devoted assistant, but he’s such a poor composer… I can’t think of anyone else, really no one. You couldn’t possibly expect me to pay a visit to Richard Strauss?”

“No, Mahler, that’s almost a comical thought, and Strauss is too powerful to be available to another musician and compose in his style. The mere thought of making your two minds cohabitate in the same skull—it’s absurd. You require a musician who lacks your genius, because he’ll have to serve you and efface himself.”

“Then it’s simple; there’s no one! I’ve never met a musician of the kind you’re describing.”

“In your era, Mahler, in your era. But nothing is stopping you from going and choosing a musician in the future, if you find no one to satisfy you today. Let me help you one more time, will you? I think I’ve found someone who would suit you perfectly.”

Notes on the consultation: Mahler, it seems, has transposed a good portion of his Oedipus complex into his work. It would take someone who’s a far better musician than I to analyze these transpositions precisely, but I was struck by his almost fanatical passion for Wagner and Nietzsche. Those two men, after a time of mutual admiration, separated and became fierce enemies. Mahler’s fascination was possibly duplicated by an identification between Wagner and the father, brutal and domineering, and between Nietzsche and the mother, martyred, sickened by the presence and social superiority of the other.

In addition, as noted above, Mahler consulted me about chronic problems of impotence, or at the very least a weak capacity to stimulate his libido, something commonly found among fervent Wagnerites, who experience this music’s feeling of power as a compensation that can sometimes be quite harmful.

S.F.

Chapter 8 Recovering consciousness, Cornelius Franz found himself in a state he liked to call “a skewed compass”: the syndrome of an itinerant musician who wakes up in a hotel room without the slightest idea of his whereabouts. Franz decided to savor a few moments of this peaceful sensation. As long as the uncertainty lasted, there were no obligations, no rehearsals, nothing… Opening one eye, he recognized a bonbon that was blue and Dlat, indicating an American sweet with a chocolate-and-peanut base, under a small cabinet, a kind of mini-bar judiciously concealed behind Victorianstyle paneling. ”OK, then, by process of elimination… I’m in old Europe, since the wallpaper is antique, the furniture authentic and the carpet has an odor you can’t miss. Clean, but trampled by several generations. Like an old book, whose pages release the aroma of the past. So, neither America nor Japan.”

Then, suddenly, he remembered: “I’ve had an attack, at least I believe… I fell. Don’t move, breathe slowly and check that everything is all right.” He drew a long breah and was forced to face the evidence: he was in a completely normal state. So it was time to start the day.

Franz, lying Dlat on his belly, tried to turn over. He immediately felt an extraordinary force weighing on his back. At the same instant something completely new happened in his head: the feeling of being thrown backward by himself, while the pressure on his body prevented him from making the slightest movement. And yet, he didn’t feel any serious symptoms. He wasn’t even experiencing the panic often caused by the slightest migraine.

He felt a presence that was inDinitely benevolent, observing him from inside.

“Cornelius, my friend, wherever you are, you are in the process of losing it!”

“Aha, so I’m called Cornelius now? Just Cornelius, or do I also have a family name?”

The voice inside his head was deep, heavy and rich like a bronze bell. The stupor invading Cornelius kept him from reacting, jumping or even fainting. For a moment his body and mind were incapable of functioning. Then he shut his eyes and forced himself not to think, trying to stay this way, immobile as a Dield mouse face to face with a huge cat.

“Is there someone in the room? I… I have the wrong room, is that it? I’m going to leave, excuse me…”

“Cornelius, there’s no one in the room. I am inside you, that’s all.”

“Inside me! Well, of course! Yes, obviously, what was I thinking, it’s normal, you can walk into the wrong room, so why not into the head of someone or other? I, I’m Cornelius Franz and you, you are…?”

“Apparently this is going to be more complicated than I imagined. Excuse me, Cornelius, but I’m going to have to take charge. Look, just let me get on with it, and stop interrupting, will you?”

Franz, prostrate in the center of himself, began to see.

He saw the presence, so dear, so familiar, so often contemplated in photos, imagined, dreamed of, spreading inside his body, his head—Dilling him, until it occupied the entire space. The stranger opened his mind and released his memories, all the information that made up his most intimate identity, freeing it inside Cornelius’s head the way they open a canal lock, abruptly, in great waves.

“But look here, this is impossible! You can’t possibly be…at least, I mean…”

“I can’t be alive, and I can’t be inside you. You’re absolutely right, and I wouldn’t see things at all differently if I were you. And yet, my friend Cornelius Franz, this is what’s happening to the two of us, so you’re just going to have to get used to it. I’m here on a mission and we have no time to lose. But, Dirst of all, put my mind at rest: you actually are a musician? Don’t try to deceive me, I need to know, since it’s the most important thing: are you in fact a composer? Have you ever written a symphony?”

“A symphony? No, not yet. But operas, of course, one or two, a few, some of them nothing but sketches. And that’s all I write, I only love the voice, and putting music to a text…”

“Well, we’re going to Dill that gap, because that’s exactly what I’m here to do with you, Cornelius: write a symphony. We’re going to write a monumental work, more universal and more grandiose that my Eighth. I haven’t come here as a tourist to see the future, I’m here to accomplish a mission, to compose the work that can restore the soul of this world. And that’s no mean feat, as you can imagine!”

“The world is sick, in fact, but for such a long time, and—“ “After my death, the world fell more gravely ill than ever before. And, where our little world is concerned, the world of the opera, through the fault of Wagner. So I’ve got to undo all that, shine an irresistible light over this world, blind it and oppose the shadow of Wagner!”

“How can I believe for one second that you could be who you say you are? Mahler was a great Wagnerian, the greatest, no doubt, and—“ “Well, Mahler has learned, and Mahler has changed. Cornelius, I implore you, for the moment stop asking questions, I’ll explain all of it a bit later. For the moment I’ve got to try something impossible, unthinkable… And I have no one to help me but you.”

“Very well, master, assuming I haven’t gone completely gaga and that you are who I think you are, tell me what I have to do.”

“Hmm, to be precise, you won’t have to do anything, just lend me your body and watch. And we’ll start immediately.”

“But it’s late, master, and tomorrow I have—“ “There will be time tomorrow to think of tomorrow. I want to start right away, see what I can accomplish with you. You’ve got nothing to do but observe. Stay calm and,

what I can accomplish with you. You’ve got nothing to do but observe. Stay calm and, from here, you’ll be able to see and understand everything.”

That’s Dine, that’s good, Franz told himself, it makes sense, basically—you can’t harbor a morbid fascination for a great man, dead for a century, without it leading to psychosis. And, besides, I shouldn’t have abused the sleeping pills. He’d been warned about possible cases of schizophrenia, which is what was happening to him. A complete doubling of the personality, but in a really new way: not one or the other alternating, as in just about all cases of schizophrenia, but one and the other at the same time. With one important shade of difference: it was the great man conducting the music. Franz was no longer anything but an accessory, one that you could certainly do without.

So he felt himself extend his arms, Dlex his knees, turn over and, with a quick bound, land on his feet.

“I, uh…I’ve read that you were quite athletic, and I see it’s true!”

“Cornelius, you’re Viennese, but you aren’t good at Dlattery. Just tell me where you keep your music paper. I’ve got to get started without delay.”

“Start? Without delay? Yes, of course, start and, of course, paper, paper… In the upper pocket of the small black valise, there…”

The Other seized the paper, rushed to the desk, grabbed a ballpoint pen, rummaged through his host’s memory to Digure out how to use that odd instrument, then stared intently at the blank sheet of paper.

My God, thought Franz, Mahler’s extraordinary power of concentration, so that’s it!

Through his own eyes, which he’d never kept open so intensely, he felt the lines of the musical staves opening up like magic curtains, and behind them, unimagined vortices of sound combinations swirled about like galaxies, an inDinitude of possibilities. Mahler’s gaze shot like a comet among these curling shapes, seizing one, rejecting the other, picking a fruit that he tasted and then set aside, weighing one idea, then another. And above all, the combinations, what combinations!

Composing is actually two things: Dinding ideas, usually melodic, and then developing them. The greater the composer’s genius, the more his ideas, his melodies, are captivating, universal, unifying. And, in the second phase, the more his developments themselves are works of genius. With Mahler, the science of development was pushed to extremes. Cornelius saw a Dirst idea split into its basic elements, like a cell division, creating a new object, which in turn gave birth to a third. Franz didn’t even have time to see the process before the musical newborns were there, noisy, gesticulating. To inDinity. Mahler seemed impervious to fatigue, just as his inspiration knew no exhaustion.

Time no longer existed, but the alarm clock on the bedside table went off. Painfully raising his head, the Other put down the pen and said with a sigh: “It won’t work, Cornelius, you’re not alive enough.”

“I beg your pardon? Maestro, what I’ve just seen is extraordinary, and I can assure you that I’m actually quite alive!”

“SEEN! Yes, you’ve seen. You’ve seen what I can do, but all I could do is contemplate from afar what my next work will be. To make it come to me, to hear it, I need emotions, emotions of yours, and you don’t have enough. I’ve entered into you with

emotions, emotions of yours, and you don’t have enough. I’ve entered into you with my soul, but the body alone produces emotions. They’re the fuel of inspiration, so I depend entirely on you. You don’t live strongly enough, you’re like all the others, small, lukewarm. I need a detonation of feelings that leaves me in tears, trembling, half-conscious, on my sheet of paper. You didn’t experience any Direworks. All you saw were wet Direcrackers.”

“I know, master, I know you were one of the most passionate individuals ever. I’m doing my best. I’ve always tried to protect myself from emotions that were too violent. You never know, an attack can come on so quickly… And then, opera general managers and impresarios today dislike artists who are too intense. A too powerful talent frightens them, they’re so unsure of themselves… You are quickly disqualiDied for any eccentricity, so everything has to be smooth, causing no problems.”

“Ah yes, little Cornelius, tiny Cornelius! You’ve always been afraid of your talent, of your feelings, your body and of other people’s reaction or rejection. You are something of an artist, but you don’t dare to be! Well, then, we’ll just have to make do with what we’ve got.”

“But I don’t understand… When you took off… I mean, we did… To the other side, over there, wherever it was, the place I caught a glimpse of. You conjured up that place, you were striding around in it at your ease… Musical ideas were sprouting all over, like weeds… Why were you satisDied just to look, why not start composing or at least do a sketch?”

“No, you really don’t understand, in fact. How do you go about composing, Cornelius?

Are you satisDied just to combine sounds at random, or do those sounds have to express something more profound, something really necessary in you, propelled by an absolute urgency?”

Franz was unable to give any answer but the start of a pathetic gurgling.

“Because, don’t you see, Cornelius, at the start of any piece of music there’s a felling.

To create that feeling, there’s an idea. When I wrote my ‘Blumenstück,’ I had the notion of Dlowers in mind, but to get from the idea to the music, I had to feel the inDinite love of the Dlowers, the affection I feel at the sight of them, the gratitude for their fragrance, I have to call up all the feelings that Dlowers evoke in my mind and body, and those feelings—I have to bring them to a paroxysm, until the musical idea erupts in my head. And only the body can work that alchemy. What you saw, Cornelius, is the world of musical ideas, not of Music… Those fruits aren’t yet ripe, I can’t pluck them yet. I need emotions. I generate the ideas, but your body, your hormones, your blood—they have to produce the feeling.”

“Yes, master, I understand.”

The alarm on Cornelius Franz’s telephone gave a discreet signal indicating the time for the orchestra rehearsal.

“I have to—I mean we have to go to the opera house, master… I’ve got a rehearsal with the orchestra for Les Contes d’Hoffmann in Difteen minutes.”

“Les Contes d’Hoffmann?”

Franz felt the presence, inside his chest and his head, sending out waves of pure jubilation.

“What a great idea! I was the one who revealed that opera to the Viennese when I was director of the opera. And then, I’m eager to conduct again, my little Cornelius. I feel as if we’re going to have a good time. What’s the date, the year?”

“Well, it’s 2011, master.”

“One hundred years after my death… Ahasuerus has a sense of humor. Well, then, that means four years since I last conducted the Philharmoniker, and I have to say that I’m starting to miss them. Let’s go, let’s run, Cornelius!”

“Do you mean to say… You’re not going to let me conduct? You’re going to do everything instead of me?”

“Little Cornelius, I’m the world’s greatest conductor. I was that in my time, and I don’t see how I wouldn’t still be the greatest in your time. No one can conduct with the insanity that I put into it. Wherever there’s art, there’s the devil, and on that terrain I’m unbeatable. Come on, let’s not be late. We’ve got two hours to win back glory!”

Chapter 9 To the toilet, Mahler!

If my contemporaries had known about the special bond between me and that small hiding place, just think how they’d have exploited such a potent weapon to discredit my work by way of my person.

Genius is difDicult to cultivate, and even when it happens to blossom, it takes extreme efforts to protect it from ridicule. Remember Brahms, the ever so serious, respectably bearded Brahms, who went to such lengths to intercept an order, which Wagner had placed with a seamstress, for yards and yards of pink fabric and silken Dlowers? And Brahms sending this note to every newspaper in Vienna, overjoyed to mock the great composer? Poor Wagner just wanted to surround himself with softness and make a cocoon in which to create his next masterwork.

So, Mahler in the toilet, Mahler who composed whole passages of his symphonies in that foul setting, what a feast for journalists, historians and psychoanalysts! Mahler, composing “Revelge” (Reveille), one of his most celebrated lieder, in the latrine, Mahler asking his wife to place a sign over the defecatorium near the cottage where he composed his greatest symphonies, indicating that, even there, Mahler found inspiration. Dear Alma, so shocked at that idea, this new fantasy on the part of her lovesick schoolboy (the nickname I gave myself during our Dinal months).

And yet, it’s only too true, my little Alma, I spent such long, cherished long hours in that hole, on that seat, where I was never in danger of any interruption. Why should that disturb people? Why should that place be ignoble, unworthy of mental activity?

Only I suffered the consequences of this peculiar habit, since that sitting posture aggravated my subterranean ailments, as I used to call them.

I became such an expert on the subject, if I say so myself, that Pauline, wife of Richard Strauss, appealed to me as arbiter, one day when I witnessed, in their home, one of their famous disputes. Throwing a bottle of ink at her husband’s head, the household dragon yelled, “Far too much paper is getting used in the toilets of this house. Gustav, tell him how many rolls of paper one ought to use.” Mahler, an adviser on domestic budgets!

Dr. Freud didn’t speak to me on the subject. I’ve read a little about his theories on the anal personality. Mozart’s Dixation on his cousin’s bum, his love of the word “dung,” scattered all through his letters, all those things. Is it really important?

In any case, my life has been nothing but a series of pains in that regard. Not really any pleasure or satisfaction. Hemorrhoids and chronic constipation, that’s all I remember when I try to recall my body and its oriDices.

Memories of a frightful operation, shortly after my appointment to head the Vienna opera. A hemorrhage in the intestines, a surgeon summoned in haste, who sticks a long stem down my throat with an enormous wad of cotton on it, the feeling of dying by suffocation, the liters of blood Dlowing somewhere, and then the return to life.

Intestinal blockage, matter that refuses to exit. The trip to Budapest in search of a

Hungarian masseur to manipulate my rectum in order to empty it, but yet I can’t have a household “extractor” of my own, permanently on site. Hemorrhoids, which also require surgery and cause suffering. Alma, whom I keep informed in my postcards of the state of my appetite, of my digestion, of my Dlatulence, of my stools.

That too is part of being a great composer. A being using the compost of his weaknesses, who sometimes develops them, raising them to the scale of a symphonic neurosis.

Perhaps I wanted to die like Wagner, after all? From an internal explosion? Post mortem, the doctor performing the autopsy in Vienna was unequivocal about the cause of death: heart compression due to intestines ascending into thorax as a result of swelling with aerophagia (Dlatulence). In other words, poor Wagner, like me, had to employ a masseur for long hours each day, at home in his palazzo, to try to expel the fatal gases that were poisoning him. Wagner was a vegetarian, in theory, as I had been for a few years thanks to his inspiration. Like Napoleon, or that sinister little mustachioed creature I observed through Ahasuerus’s visions, he seemed to have trouble tolerating a diet imposed by eccentric theories. The great composer, so adept at orchestrating for wind instruments, would thus die, his heart crushed by the reDlux of those same winds, in the arms of his dear Cosima, while preparing to embark on his gondola after having played some excerpts of Siegfried and having started a treatise on “the feminine in art.” Wagner, victim of one too many repressed farts, which he ought better to have discharged right in the nose of his beloved sorceress.

Because Cosima, in the same way as Nietzsche’s sister, was Wagner’s evil genius, his dark side. What if he had spent his entire life with his Dirst wife? A different Wagner, no less a genius but more human, would no doubt have been the result. Would a different world perhaps have emerged?

Cosima… He was clearly devoting himself to some strange regressive séances with this wife, while she, no doubt dressed up like a schoolmistress, gave her brilliant pupil, in short pants for the ritual, some improbable lessons in musical harmony each time the Master prepared to sketch a masterpiece.

Cosima cultivated in her husband the hatred for the Jew, whom she detested nearly as much as her father, Franz Liszt, because Cosima was very generous with her hatred… Liszt himself was a joyous anti-Semite, probably haunted by suspicions of Jewish lineage himself, since who was really safe from an accident in the genealogical tree?

Cosima lived out the apogee of her reign in the role of Wagner’s widow. There, in the velvet splendor of their great Bayreuth home, “Wahnfried” (“the peace of madness,” which Wagner might just as well have baptized “the madness of the fart”), she distributed demerits and signs of approval, banished forever certain blasphemous artists (the Metropolitan Opera of New York in its entirety, after it had dared to play Parsifal without her approval) and organized with grand pomp the visit by the small guy with the mustache and his accomplices.

What I’ve seen, thanks to the sorcery of the wandering Jew, is Cosima’s sinister undermining role, more than Richard’s inDluence itself. The slow, pernicious sabotage of the legal assignee of the original works. The roots of Cosima’s hatred run long and deep, hatred of her father, hatred of the Jew, which she and her husband tossed back and forth like a ball, hatred of the world… Yes, decidedly, Cosima was all prepared to open her arms to the great annihilator. If only Richard had smothered

prepared to open her arms to the great annihilator. If only Richard had smothered her under the nocturnal waves of Dlatulence, relieving with that same thrust the artistic world and his own intestines!

Notes on consultation : It seems obvious that, with Mahler, the anal stage played a major role in the entirety of his affective and physiological lives alike. The few pathological episodes he reported to me demonstrate a persistence into adult age of the phases of retention and expulsion, with the former predominant.

Without any doubt, the symptoms of constipation (going as far as obstruction), or retention, appeared to resolve themselves in the few extraordinarily fertile weeks in which expulsion occurred. The refusal of physical pleasure, once again linked to love of the mother traumatized by an abusive father, must account for these extended periods of resistance to expulsion. In any case, as with numerous other musicians, and I am thinking particularly of Mozart, Mahler’s case is an example of the anal stage that was not resolved but was sublimated in the work to an extreme degree.

S.F

Chapter 10 “Who’s conducting today?”

The violinist asking this question of his seat mate never tired of his wisecrack.

Cornelius Franz was on the podium and had begun the rehearsal several minutes before, but the facetious musician liked to boast of having looked at an orchestra conductor just one time in his life, the day when Herbert von Karajan had personally called him out by name; he never raised his head from the score. “Nose to the grindstone,” as he put it.

“Don’t know, we’ll Dind out at the break,” said his colleague, no fan of Franz, upping the ante.

Les Contes d’Hoffmann poses no technical difDiculty to an orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic, which accompanied the Staatsoper, but it’s a delicate work from the stylistic viewpoint, like all French operas, and requires great suppleness by all participants. Constantly alternating between grand opera and operetta, its tempi were always shifting abruptly, while fragments of recitative were interspersed between mini-arias that had to be emphasized without ever slipping into pathos.

Cornelius was comfortable with the work, after more than two hundred performances, which had hardened him into a specialist, although he found that term too reductive. Nevertheless, the orchestra considered this rehearsal superDluous and submitted to the exercise with ill humor, though maintaining an exceptional level of playing: contrary to other ensembles, the Vienna players had a love for music and for work well done. Self-respect and dignity, in short.

And yet, after a few minutes, the musicians’ collective unconscious began to sense a kind of tickling, an irrepressible urge to look at their leader, even it that was contrary to their habit, at least where Franz was concerned.

And there, what they saw exceeded their comprehension: he, the all-too-familiar Cornelius, the no-surprise-Cornelius, the bandleader they knew all too well, of whom no one expected anything new, Cornelius Franz was not recognizable. His gaze, above all, had become a blinding spotlight, a hypnotist’s stare, a look both mad and irresistible. Teeth clenched, chin thrust forward, suggesting Herculean power, his gestures had become both more compressed and more forceful, his hands were manipulating the players from a distance with an expertise that frightened some of them; the tubist forgot to take a breath and missed his entrance, the timpanist dropped a stick, which fell heavily on the instrument, creating an ungodly sound, and several bass players were seized with a trembling on a long fermata.

“Come, gentlemen, pull yourself together, by god! Anyone would think you’d seen a ghost.”

Franz had just spoken in an unfamiliar tone of voice. And what a voice! A deep baritone, powerful, metallic, a voice made for controlling. A commander’s voice, a voice that permitted no reply.

“Mr. Concertmaster, please, I’ve never liked this way of articulating in long phrases, without breaks, no breaths between the melodic elements. Each measure has to push into the measure that follows. I’ve told you that a thousand times!”

“Excuse me, Mr. Conductor, but you’ve never said anything of the kind in the past ten years, and—“ “Silence! I know what I’ve said, and above all I know what I want. Two bow strokes per measure, here, and you violas, don’t crush those poor notes that have never done you any harm.”

The true Cornelius, or at least what remained of him, prostrate in a corner of his own head, witnessed this spectacle with indescribable terror.

“Master, please, you’re going to make them angry with me! They’ll rebel against me, throw me out the theater door! No one can speak that way to the Philharmonic!”

“Little Cornelius, let me work, I know my orchestra, and I know exactly how to deal with them.”

“But that was a century ago! They’re not the same players, this orchestra has become a marvel, perfection, I—“ “There is no perfection in music! You can and you must always aim higher when it’s a matter of the Beautiful. Now, silence. Listen, watch and learn!”

The orchestra, subjugated by the supernatural aura of this new conductor channeled through the customary leader, complied without a word. At the repeat, the result was so good that the musicians, always ready to recognize any progress in the sound obtained, began to play with all the passion of which they were capable. Franz, the actual conductor, could not believe his ears. The other one, the new one, smiled with satisfaction.

At the break, gathered around the tables in the canteen, the players could speak of nothing else.

“So what’s with Franz? Is he in love? Did he take Viagra? Coke?”

“I must say, I don’t like his manners, but look at the result!”

“Best rehearsal I’ve done in years!”

“My best ever! And I’ve seen some… Kleiber, Karajan, Klemperer, the KKK,” a horn player joked.

The concertmaster—the general in the orchestra, a conductor’s ally or worst enemy, it all depends—seemed to be ruminating deep thoughts.

“It’s odd… I’ve known Franz a long time, and this isn’t him at all, this spectacular change. You might as well expect a deux-chevaux to win a Formula 1 race.”

“He looks totally possessed, like a genius pretending to be Franz!”

“Right, that’s it! Toscanini, for example, trying to pass for Cornelius. Ha ha! Prosit!”

“No, I’d say more like Mahler,” the concertmaster replied with an even more pensive

“No, I’d say more like Mahler,” the concertmaster replied with an even more pensive expression. “The nerves completely under control, that gaze, that voice, and even the expressions he used… My grandfather played under Mahler, and he described him to me countless times when I was still a kid. It matches perfectly.”

“Hold it, Ulrich, you’re not going to spin some fantasy about a dual identity? Not with Franz! He hasn’t even got half an identity. How do you expect him to split it in two?”

The musicians guffawed roughly, raising their beer glasses and clinking noisily.

When the rehearsal resumed, an impressive silence reigned up and down the ranks of the orchestra, as every player watched Franz take his podium again, the way tamed tigers observe the trainer entering the cage.

“Cornelius,” said the voice in the conductor’s head, “this rehearsal is going to do us a world of good! I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but by using your body to conduct, with an intensity that you’ve never dared, I’m waking it up. I just may manage to forge the instrument I need.”

“Or else we’re going down, both of us, victims of a fatal stroke!”

“Well, all the better! I’m already dead, in case you’d forgotten, and if you’re not worthy of the honor I’m doing you, you may as well die too.”

“Too kind of you, Master… “ “Gentlemen, rehearsing demands force and vigor. Would you please start Act III, the Antonia act, the most tragic, the most richly composed by Offenbach and the one where his entire genius is expressed. Each note here, as if you were playing for the last time. Deep, grandiose!”

Cornelius felt his arms rising to a height he had never imagined, even when he rose on tiptoe to reach a valise at the top of a closer… His muscles seemed to stretch to inDinity, then to plunge down as if to chop a baobab tree in half. The sound that responded to this gesture was simply deafening, a shock wave in which the players seemed to convey the son of the Demiurge, the creative “Om!” of the universe. That was it, then, the Mahler effect. Not a note was routine, a forte wasn’t only forte, it was a thundering of nature; a piano wasn’t simply piano, it was the murmur of a spirit on a sleeping water, the caress of a spring breeze. In words, but even more in gestures Dilled with life, Mahler carved an invisible material just as Rodin, starting with vigorous kneading gestures in the clay, had sculpted the great composer’s face in Paris more than a century ago. The prestigious bust now stands in the grand foyer of the Vienna State Opera.

At this point in his intimate adventure, Cornelius was beyond any questions of madness, or even of his physical health. His instinct as a musician had the upper hand now and he was all admiration. And as for the question of whether he had gone completely schizophrenic, well... When a musician had the opportunity to experience his own transDiguration, without having to make the least effort, or to take a drop of any illegal substance, why worry, basically, about the reason? The result was clear: he was another person, and what a person! The dream of an entire lifetime, to be Mahler for a few minutes, to see, know and, better yet, live completely like his favorite composer! Who wouldn’t have given half the lifetime of his worst enemy to experience that?

“Gentlemen!” the voice of bronze resounded again.

“Maestro, if you please….”

A graceful silhouette stood out against the phalanx of the Viennese musicians What the devil? There’s a woman now in the Vienna Philharmonic!

“There are in fact eight of us, Maestro, and we’ve been playing with you for more than Dive years. Thank you for noticing…”

With a delighted, forceful laugh, Franz/Mahler rocked quickly back and forth in his lofty conductor’s chair.

“Well, then, you see, rehearsals serve some useful purpose after all! If not to learn to play the notes, at least then to take the time to get to know one another. And so, ladies and gentlemen, all this has put me in the best mood and thus I will see you tomorrow evening at the performance.”

Vigorous applause greeted this statement. As fascinating as this working session may have been, the announcement that a rehearsal is over, for any musician, has the same magical power as a corporal’s words “At ease!” on a lowly soldier.

“Fine, and now, my little Cornelius, back to the hotel. I’m in a hurry to try out my instrument, now that I’ve brought it to a white heat.”

“But Master, I’m hungry, I… It’s lunch time; aren’t you hungry? The opera canteen is excellent, and today’s menu is Wiener Schnitzel…”

“Hungry? Absolutely, I’m hungry—to write, to compose, to remake my symphony. A few stomach cramps? The music will be all the more urgent! Hungry? The “scherzo” will be all the more voracious for that. Let’s go, coachman Cornelius—to the Sacher!”

Chapter 11

I’m starting to understand the huge job I’ve taken on.

Cornelius is a nice guy, but he hasn’t the slightest idea of the distance that separates us. That is, I believe he had a vague sense of it the other day. But actually, no, in fact, it’s not a question of distance. It’s a matter of intensity. The gift, right from the start, the gift of music of course, but especially of wanting. The desire to go from gift to talent, and from talent to genius.

For me, that took no effort, because I was born with the gift of concentration.

To make genius grow, it’s simple: it takes a seed of talent, in the right kind of soil; but genius isn’t especially demanding. It just requires total devotion. What I mean by suitable soil is mainly a quiet spot for meditating. I my case, I climbed up onto the roof of our building, and the whole family searched for me for several hours while I submerged myself in deep reveries in which, blindly I guess, I would shape the little world of Mahler. This meant that, by age twenty, I had Difteen years’ practice, I was an athlete of creative thought, who just needed to start getting all of it down on paper; I had created an organ that needed to produce something daily. Then, while a normal composer will have to expend immense efforts to advance and reDine his tools, and even just to desire, in my case, on the contrary, it all took place automatically and naturally, because I had converted my mind and body into a composing machine.

The function had created the organ, and to maintain and perfect it—that required just one thing: regular production of music.

Poor Franz. He really struggles at the job. He got a late start, in fact he never really started. He’s indecisive, a dreamer in the bad sense of the term. He daydreams.

I can sense how scared you are, little Cornelius, shrinking like a Dield mouse in a corner, on the alert for the big overfed cat: when is he going to get hungry again, return to the hunt, pounce on me, when does he eat me? O my God, it feels so great to be able to laugh without feeling the pain of a body that’s dissolving from the inside. Come on, you’re a good sport, little Franz, you’ll Dinally allow me to laugh my Dill, won’t you? I really used to love to laugh, me, macabre Mahler!

But what gives me the right to mock him, this poor Cornelius? He wasn’t born in an easy time. To write music today, after everything’s already been attempted… I’ve had time to listen to one or two pieces, and to observe quite a few others, in my host’s memory. How do you win a place as composer in his era? I think everyone I’ve admired would have failed at it. Verdi? He would compose jingles. Wagner? Movie music. Bach, Beethoven? They’d be out of place anywhere but in a “rock” group, as people call it. Beethoven, especially, would do well there, with his love of repeated chords, “gross” effects, thunderbolts and incantations. All those geniuses would excel at inspiration, the genius for inventing melodies. Everything that music today has no use for. Today it all sounds like music made by engineers. It’s awash in technical inventions, sophisticated façades but with nothing inside. Not one of today’s composers would be capable of writing a little tune that people would love and remember. And on top of that, they have the nerve to look down on melody,

and remember. And on top of that, they have the nerve to look down on melody, whereas melody, from the simplest to the most complex, is the seed of all music, ensuring its depth, especially if it is well developed. Yes, the seed. A little tune, well invented, you plant it at the start of the symphony and it grows rapidly to give you a Dine tree full of savory fruits. You can’t point to one great symphony of the past that can’t be associated with its opening melody. The seed. Take some of that seed, all of you today…

I had a close call, actually; I lived just barely in the right period. I even have to wonder if I didn’t die just in time.

Schönberg, my beloved disciple, showed me his Dinal quartet, shortly before he fell ill, and I thought I’d go crazy, as I told Alma. I just can’t hear that music. I who am such a good reader, who can decipher any recent work the way you read a book, I Dind myself gazing at those four staves, seeing the notes but not hearing a thing. But of course, Schönberg is no fool, he’s even a true genius. His TransOigured Night is a true masterpiece, as are some other works he showed me. So? Look, what he’s writing now isn’t music anymore, or maybe I just don’t get it? Mahler, back to the toilet?

Oddly, in Cornelius’s world, the twenty-Dirst century, I’m considered a modernist, a precursor. And yet in my time, the harshest critics spoke only of déjà-vu, pastiche, collage. I was, by turns, a weak offspring of Bruckner, a failed avatar of Brahms, and above all I was accused of precisely the thing that, it seems, won me the esteem of musicians long after my death: a variegated display of all the sounds in the world, which fundamentally were nothing but my interior noises, and I kept applying the same method to the point of paroxysm, symphony after symphony.

That’s the whole problem of my Tenth: I pushed my music in its retrenchments, to the limits of its rupture, I’m trying to Dind Mahler beyond the small world of Mahler…

Like builders today, I construct and I think only afterward of the urban planning, or I don’t even think of it at all, and too bad if the whole thing makes no sense, once it’s assembled.

But no, that’s not true, my Tenth is in fact truly music of Mahler. I am going to ensure that it is.

Aha! Cornelius is Dinally waking. I must have gotten too agitated with this Dight about modernism.

Come on, my friend, let’s get to work while you’re still in this sleepy daze. This is where the ideas ripen just enough, where the fruit yields to the hand that plucks it.

Yes, you’ll get breakfast. But afterward; just give me one brief hour.

So now, let’s have a look at a bit of score. It’s a—what? Photocopy? Interesting. It would have taken a bit of time to copy all that with a daguerreotype, wouldn’t it?

Excuse me? Under an hour? You’re really funny. In my day you posed for a photo, which the artist brought to you a week later. An hour… Cornelius, let’s not lose any time. I’ll grant you one thing, at least: you know your era, and on this terrain I won’t even try to beat you.

So let’s have a look… The pages are all mixed up, here there’s one missing, and— What, Franz? You ask if I’m sure? You’re joking, I hope. I would remind you that just a few hours ago, in Vienna and on my deathbed, I took a look, as my hand shook, at the original of these pages.

Right, let me explain: more or less the entire symphony is contained on these pages, and some even include the orchestration, but for the last three movements there’s often nothing but the upper part and the lower part. So we’re not just going to have to dress it up with orchestration here. Here’s the roof and the foundation, what’s missing is the house!

And that’s not all. I have to give my symphony a whole new direction. It had been a song of despair, an appeal to liberating madness, but now the wandering Jew is showing me that I have to write a hymn to love and to the harmony of the world.

That’s all.

What you played for me on your funny little machine, the reconstruction of the symphony by that English dilettante, it’s not even good orchestration. You can only believe that he never heard a single one of my symphonies. But the worst is that he’s added almost nothing, in the places where I’d just jotted down a few notes as a guide to the later work, a sort of memo for the future. All the middle voices are missing, the small lines, my little ballerinas as I call them. And it’s awful to listen to. Without the counterpoint, that is, the intermediate parts that crisscross and weave in and out of my melodies, Mahler doesn’t sound like Mahler.

The tiny lines, my little dancers, they’re crucial! Just as in a ballet, they surround the star dancer, respond to him, sustain him in his leaps, follow him when he Dlees upstage. They do more than that: they hand him his costumes, dress him, embellish him, perfume him and cover him in jewels.

There, you see? Wait, let me show you…

Take this song… And the bass line, underneath… In itself, it’s just a placeholder… The melody is pleasant, but for the moment it doesn’t express anything really extraordinary, wouldn’t you agree? And now, just add this… And that… Hear the difference? Can you see how, all at once, it becomes more real, becomes true Mahler?

You couldn’t have imagined that this small curlicue, once we’ve orchestrated it for oboe, plus this counter-tune in the violins and this brief plaint by the horn, could trigger such nostalgia, a painful pleasure, but wait! In the repeat, I add something more, this call from a trumpet, far off, like a suitor mourning his beloved, lost forever. Aha, I see your eyes tearing up too, my good Franz. Good, that’s a good start.

But you’ll never cry as much as Mahler.

Laughter, tears, for me, that too was a gift.

Chapitre 12

Cornelius took a deep breath and tried to squeeze his guest into a small corner of his mind, feeling that the invasive presence was even beginning to weigh on his chest.

Already a week they’d been working on the symphony, and Mahler’s legendary speed stupeDied him even though he had expected it. Two movements were completed, leaving only the immense Dinale. Mahler was meditating, so Franz had to wait—what choice was there?

In fact, Mahler couldn't continue, because Mahle was thinking about History, the period that separated his own era from that of Franz.

“Cornelius, what the wandering Jew showed me, the horrors that have occurred after my time, the madness of the modern world, a little less than thirty years after my death: I don’t understand. Austrian and Germany were anti-Semitic and warlike, just like everyone, but not to the point of going totally mad. What really happened, then, after me?”

“Well, Master, you see—“ “’Gustav’ will do, in view of our forced intimacy…”

“All right, Gustav then, the problem started well before your birth, as you must realize, after all.”

“What do you mean, little Franz?”

“Well, at the time when you left the world, this world, for its part, began to throw off the restraints of reason and plunged into the spiral of nihilism. You must have experienced some of that, surely.”

“I have to say that this world, especially toward the end, I must at least have dreamed about it, outside the bounds of my work. But I had read a lot of Schopenhauer—“ “Exactly, the boomerang thrown by Schopenhauer Dlew back in Europe’s face, with a force a hundred times greater. Undeniably, it kept falling into many hands that threw it again, more forcefully each time. And Wagner didn’t hesitate to join in the game.”

“How so?”

“Just as in all upheavals on a grand scale, there’s the epicenter, the countercurrents, even the devastating tsunami (right, I’ll explain in a moment). It’s difDicult to assign a single cause to the very worst that happened in the twentieth century, just as it takes some contortionist logic to try to accuse Wagner, or Schopenhauer, of being the root cause of Germany’s slide into Nazism. But they can’t quite be exonerated either.”

“And yet Wagner and Schopenhauer believed in mankind, and now you talk to me of

“And yet Wagner and Schopenhauer believed in mankind, and now you talk to me of absolute nihilism—“ “I know, Schopenhauer, to put it in really simple terms, started from universal compassion (men are all brothers, of other humans, of animal, plants, minerals) and then, from observations of human cruelty, and from the absurdity of the human condition, he ends up in total pessimism.”

“No so total…”

“Indeed. This pessimism, no doubt, if you follow its logic all the way, led to a denial of free will, a denial of life. But, once again, and this is what everyone forgets—I mean, everyone who reduces the ‘Sage of Frankfurt’ exclusively to his negative conclusion—all of Schopenhauer’s thought is based on compassion. But it’s a compassion that leads to pessimism and pain. Altogether, a Buddhism whose conclusion would be contested, since Eastern philosophy, on the contrary, is based on the search for happiness through equilibrium and dissolution of the self.”

“Then who threw the boomerang back in the world’s face?”

Cornelius had a moment’s hesitation while he sifted through memories of his reading. What made it harder was the great musician’s excitement, intellectually of course, but also all too obviously, as he gestured, jumped in all directions, seized by the most violent agitation that Franz had ever felt inside his own head.

“It was another German philosopher, Edouard von Hartmann, who picked up and expanded on the ‘dark side’ of Schopenhauer, and took it to its extreme. He imprinted the more cultivated German class of the 1870s with a subliminal message with a familiar nauseating foretaste: Hartmann simply proposed that humanity should commit collective suicide in the name of absolute pessimism.”

A sudden jolt, like the leap of a Dish in his insides, knocked Franz’s hand sideways, with the glass of water he was about to drink, Dlooding the desktop and a few sheets of manuscript paper that hadn’t been touched.

“Cornelius, I remember that idiot, but we used to laugh at him at the time, my vegetarian friends and myself. That idea of collective suicide seemed to us so absurd, since we students wanted only to earn ‘our living’… Can you remind me, what was his reasoning?”

“Well, Hartmann assumed that the universe was conscious by means of humanity and, moreover, that every human being lived only in the suffering of the aberration of his condition. From which he concluded, logically, that the extinction of humanity would thus relieve the sufferings of the Cosmos in their entirety, by extinguishing its consciousness. This delirium was a delight to the ‘philosophers’ of the Third Reich, who put it into practice.”

“And if I remember correctly, Hartmann enjoyed a huge success with his theses.”

“Exactly. This aberrant concept of collective suicide would have been inconsequential if its author hadn’t caused such excitement, certainly forgotten by now, but which resulted in seven new editions of his book in less than ten years.

Among the educated circles, the work sold like pancakes. And of course, Hartmann inspired disciples, including several members of the sinister ‘Thule’ group.”

"Il était un Roi de Thulé," Mahler intoned softly inside Cornelius’s brain, the aria from Gounod’s Faust.

from Gounod’s Faust.

“Ah, yes, the Thule,” Corenlius repeated with a growl imitating the exhausted gears of an ageing car, “the German secret society, whose role in the genesis of Nazi ideology is clear enough—like all the logistical and Dinancial support it provided to the founders, and even, some believe, in the selection and manipulation of those members.”

“You mean the other idiots who came after my death?”

“Right, those you saw at work in the Second World War, in your delirium.”

“Second…World…War?” Mahler recited, stupeDied.

Cornelius, paying no attention, went on: “Nietzsche, for his part, subscribed to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, but he rechanneled the origins of his thought, producing a surprising offspring: The Gay Science, inspired by Provençal chivalry. For Nietzsche (who switched horses several times), sentimental Christianity was the root of all evil, since it kept mankind submerged in the permanent feeling of guilt, evil, sin. But a man who believes he is evil can’t love himself, and a man who can’t love himself isn’t prepared to love his fellow-man.”

“You’re quite the philosopher, little Franz,” Mahler’s deep voice sneered without malice. “Yes, I remember, in Nietzsche’s eyes Wagner, once his master, became a traitor to the cause.”

“And what’s more the subject of the dispute, and of the break between the two men, was nothing other than Parsifal, Wagner’s Dinal music-drama. The Grail, the opera’s symbolic center, can in fact symbolize twothings, depending on the myth you’ve selected. According to Chrétien de Troyes, it stands for the chalice that held the blood of Christ.”

“That’s the Grail of the man-in-the-street!” the great composer burst out.

“Or, according to Persian tradition, as echoed by Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Grail is a magic gemstone from the Orient. ‘Parzi-fal’ is a Persian name said to mean ‘the chaste fool,’ or else, more indulgently, the ‘pure innocent.’” “’Der reine Tor,’ as Wagner put it. The name suits you perfectly, my little pocket Parsifal!”

“May I continue? Thus, for the Mazdian or Zoroastrian tradition, long before Christianity, the idea of a ‘philosopher’s stone’ capable of defying death, was reported to Eschenbach by way of the Provençal Troubadors, in the service of masters, knights returned from the Orient who possessed the Gay Science, or Gaza Sapienza, reported by Stendhal. It’s a philosophy of life based on joy, the absence of any feeling of guilt, self-hatred, the polar opposite of Christian thinking, vale of tears, inhabited y the Devil, sin, shame and the quest for penance, even redemption.”

“As for me, I quite like those vales of tears, the Devil, shame… I’m the dreadful Mahler!”

“Gustav!”

Cornelius couldn’t take any more, he’d have to Dinish no matter what, to Dinally have peace with his guest.

“The Gay Science, Dinally, was a philosophy that went underground when Louis XI ‘the Sinister’ annexed Provence to the Kingdom of France and demolished the ‘mad optimism’ of its knights. But back to Nietzsche… For him, Wagner’s choice, that is, the Christian Grail, Christ’s chalice of blood, was therefore a betrayal of the German legend, a surrender and a cowardly devotion to the priests, in the period when Germany was experiencing its ‘century of Enlightenment.’ The path chosen by Nietzsche was meant to lead to human freedom—“ “After he announced, ‘God is dead.’”

“That’s right. Man seeking to win back his Destiny, the strength, the will power, to attain to the superman or the man-God, the self-redeemer, the unique bringer of happiness on earth, here and now. Wagner’s path, on the contrary, was that of penance, self-Dlagellation, the cries of Amfortas agonizing on his stretcher, incapable of tolerating the stigmata of Christ, which he bears in himself. Those are cries that would resonate throughout Germany, making it question the meaning of life, interrogate itself about the reasons for its misfortunes, pushing it to a liberating suicide, euthanasia.”

“And what path do you think Mahler would have taken, if he’d had the time to compose an opera? The path of Nietzsche—or of Wagner?”

“Well, I hope it would have been a third way, Master, because the two men, each in his own way, were steeped in a kind of madness that could lead to nothing good, nothing very realistic. The man-God isn’t going to arrive tomorrow… The twilight of the gods took place in its way, a quasi-apocalypse. I hope that you would have opted for—“ “Write an opera? Why not? When we’ve Dinished this symphony, which has taken its time, we could get to work on my opera… Any idea of a subject, perhaps?”

“I should give you an idea? Me—to you?”

Cornelius felt ashamed, both at the arrogance of a refusal and at the admission of his powerlessness.

“You’re right, no one could write my opera but me. But on what subject? What subject?”

“Well, I may be onto something, after all…”

“Excellent! In the jungle of ideas, any pathway is welcome! Take your machete and carve out a trail, bold Cornelius…”

“Well, then, after the Ring, in which Wagner burns down the castle of the gods, he built his cathedral in Parsifal. Nietzsche himself often accused him of constructing his own cult temple.”

Despite everything, he must have still felt some lack, or else he was aware that the ‘Grail’ hadn’t always opened up the gates of heaven to him, or at least the gates of Illumination.

So he conceived and, it seems, began to write the libretto for an opera on Buddha.

So he conceived and, it seems, began to write the libretto for an opera on Buddha.

Wagner started studying Eastern philosophies. And, in the Dinal analysis, serenity was in fact the most important thing that he had always lacked.

“On Buddha! How fascinating. Cornelius, do you realize that we’ll never know the music he would have written on the subject? Yet I imagine the primordial “Om,” after the low E-Dlat that opens Das Rheingold.”

“So Is it actually a subject that you could adopt?”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, my friend. The symphony Dirst. Then… Then, I don’t know.”

And then, after all, my only afDinity with Buddhism is the vegetarian diet I imposed on myself when I was a student. The entire circle of young Wagnerians to which I belonged followed the Master’s written orders religiously, which led us inevitably to concertos for latrine and toilet after a few days, all that to discover that Wagner himself didn’t apply the dietary principles that he wanted to impose on others!

“But, basically, an opera on the philosophy of serenity, of peace, of the body aligned with the mind, that’s exactly what we need for your project to save the world!”

Mahler gave an interior grimace at this expression, which made him feel like an illuminated fanatic.

“Perhaps. But fundamentally I am a symphonist. To each his profession. I’ve only ever done that, and Wagner wrote only operas.

_ Peut-être. Mais au fond je suis un symphoniste, à chacun son métier. Je n'ai fait que cela, et Wagner n'a écrit que des opéras. Après tout, il serait assez farce de reprendre ses travaux, corriger l'inDluence de ses deniers ouvrages. Que savons-nous de ce que le monde aurait pensé de son héritage, s'il n'y avait pas eu les "fous" qu'Ahasvérus m'a montrés? Et puis, crois-tu que Wagner soit responsable de quoi que ce soit, au fond? _ Absolument! Il est impensable de vouloir séparer Wagner de l’Allemagne du IIIème Reich, et de ses atrocités. Il est simplement exact d’afDirmer que Wagner n’était pas nazi, mais l’un des prophètes du monde à venir, l'un des modèles du monstre qui naquit une génération après lui. _Prophète? Wagner? De ces chiens enragés qu'on m'a fait voir? Comme tu y vas! _ Oui, prophète, car ses dévots traitent son œuvre comme une sorte de religion, et d'autre part la « révélation » de Wagner inclue le mythe du surhomme, non pas celui de Nietzsche mais celui des nazis, le surhomme de la race des seigneurs, Siegfried qui écrase Mime, un peuple de héros blonds qui anéantit la racaille basanée.

Prophète malgré lui, oui, car tout ce qui a été accompli de plus affreux pendant ces années noires avait été pensé, théorisé, voulu par des admirateurs de Wagner, qui trouvaient dans ses œuvres une justiDication de leurs actes, au niveau le plus viscéral, c’est à dire au niveau des émotions. La haine du Juif... _ Cornelius, je suis Juif moi-même, et je peux t'assurer que j'ai toujours passé outre le dédain de Wagner pour... _ Dédain? Maître, enDin, souvenez-vous! Ce n'est pas une simple pose, un "tic" de l'époque, comme Chopin, ou Liszt, ce sont des mots très durs.

Cornelius manipula rapidement son téléphone et lu: _" Malgré toutes nos paroles et nos écrits en faveur de l'émancipation des Juifs, nous ne pouvions, à l'approche de ceux-ci, nous empêcher de témoigner une involontaire

aversion.

Nous touchons ici le point capital de notre sujet. Il nous faut expliquer le pourquoi de cette répulsion involontaire que provoquent en nous les Juifs, et tenter de justiOier cette antipathie qui reste, en Oin de compte, plus forte en notre esprit que la tentation que nous avons de nous en libérer"... Et le mot Dinal, surtout: " Mais songez bien qu'une seule chose peut vous conjurer de la malédiction qui pèse sur vous : la rédemption d'Ahasvérus: l'anéantissement". Alors, Maître? _ Je ne sais que dire...Le pire sans doute est ce qualiDicatif d'"involontaire".

Involontaire aversion... Comme si Wagner voulait se disculper. Ce n'est pas une libre décision, qui le rendrait fautif, c'est la réaction à une tare de nature, c'est la faute du Juif en somme... _ Pour moi, le pire est que ces mots ont servi de modèle aux "penseurs" du 3ème Reich. Savez-vous que Hitler -le petit moustachu de votre vision- a déclaré un jour: "Le national-socialisme n'a qu'un seul prédécesseur légitime : Richard Wagner". Par cette seule phrase, Wagner est coupable rétro-activement !

- Coupable ! Je ne peux entendre cela.

- Mais si, coupable ! Croyez-vous que Wagner écrivait ses essais pour lui seul ? Il voulait être lu, convaincre, propager ses idées musicales mais aussi ses idées philosophiques et politiques. Quand il explique durant plus de 20 pages les multiples raisons pour lesquelles le Juif est répugnant, qu’il doit disparaître, il doit assumer la responsabilité de ce que ses paroles pourront devenir, lui une fois disparu. Ou bien a-t-il écrit cela parce que ça le grattait davantage, ce jour-là ? Il se savait écouté par l’élite culturelle. Il a planté les graines d'une plante monstrueuse, il en était le terreau idéal.

Le culte de la race supérieure, et même la destruction globale à la Hartmann, celle des victimes désignées, comme celle des surhommes, tout le monde disparaissant dans un gigantesque incendie universel, tout cela a été mis en musique et en scène par Wagner, repris par la « Thulé », et Dinalement appliqué point par point par le régime nazi, y compris le suicide de Hitler au son de "Rienzi" dont il avait mis le disque pour accompagner ses derniers instants! _ Mais la musique de Wagner n'est pas "nazie"! _ Evidemment que non. Sauf si on applique la logique de Wagner lui-même.

- Comment cela?

- Et bien, toujours dans le même essai, Wagner “explique” pourquoi il ne peut y avoir de compositeur juif allemand, ni même de poète juif: parce qu’il parlent la langue allemande avec un accent juif, et qu’ils parlent avec cet accent parce que leur pensée est profondément juive, et donc étrangère à toute autre culture. Si l’on suit ce raisonnement, Wagner ayant une pensée profondément antisémite, son langage et par extension sa musique sont antisémites.

- Mais tout cela n’a aucun fondement! C’est de la pure paranoïa!

- Sans doute mais un créateur est un créateur. Parce qu’il crée cette théorie, Wagner lui donne une certaine réalité, en ce qui le concerne du moins. Et donc, pour sa musique, elle se trouve comme par magie être la plus parfaite musique de Dilm pour ce documentaire de l’horreur absolue. Crescendos hallucinatoires, marches des héros à la mort, chevauchées infernales, tout était là pour accompagner l’histoire. La preuve déDinitive de tout ceci, c'est qu’une autre musique, de Mozart ou de Schubert par exemple, aurait anéanti le charme, rompu le sortilège. Les armées noires, marchant au pas de l’oie, avaient besoin de Wagner. Avec une symphonie de Wolfgang Amadeus, elles se seraient écroulées comme un pantin à qui l’on eut ôté son ressort. _ Au fait, ce que tu dis, c'est que la seule raison pour laquelle la musique de Wagner était la plus parfaitement adaptée, la plus idéalement synchrone, était tout simplement que son géniteur avait rêvé cette démence collective… _ Pas celle-là précisément, mais une démence, cela, sans aucun doute.

_ Pas celle-là précisément, mais une démence, cela, sans aucun doute. _ Et bien mon petit Cornelius, je commence à croire que nous avons trouvé plus affreux que moi.

Chapter 13 Gustav Mahler, composer and orchestra conductor, 1860–1911.

Name, Gustav Mahler, 1860–1911.

Name, brief form, Gustav Mahler.

Here is what I’d like inscribed on my gravestone.

Persons who know who I am will know where to Dind me. The others can just keep walking.

A blank stone, like my face, the smooth face often mocked in my era of beards and mustaches. The reason is that I never wanted a hair, a single hair, to hide the emotions I communicated to the orchestra, sometimes with a simple contraction of my muscles. It’s as simple as that: I dispensed with the obligatory ornaments because of professional obligations.

So I shaved every morning, and I shaved by heart. That is, without a mirror, just by closing my eyes and letting the razor slowly, prudently discover the thin and thick strokes of my face. There’s no better way to get to know your face that by shaving from memory, just as a blind man passes his hands over the head of a stranger to obtain a perfect interior image of him. A blind man would be able to describe my face better than the porter at the Opera House, even though the latter has seen me enter and leave the building twenty times a day for then long years. Better than a police ofDicer. As well as a painter or sculptor.

And thus, I recall word for word the description made of my face by my friend and favorite set designer, Alfred Roller: “What strikes you right off is the particular shape of the skull, unusually short, the rapid slide from the back of the head. The powerful cupola of the forehead, which, with age, dominates the face more and more and conveys the impetuosity of his nature. The energetic lower jaw and the curly hair that stands above the forehead, black, with strands that look like snakes, giving his head the appearance of an ancient mask of tragedy. The teeth, strong, healthy, even and white. Between the vigorous muscles of the jaw and the mouth, there are three vertical lines on each side. One zigzags all the way to the juncture of the mouth, with a rounded exterior border, and the second, the wrinkle of suffering, descends from the nostril and comes to an end above the corner of the mouth. The third, starting from the protrusion of the dimple, goes straight to the horizontal line of the lower jaw. It is the distinctive sign of all men endowed with exceptional force of will. With Mahler, it is clear and deep, as if carved with a knife in a hard stone.

“The ears are small, not protruding, with a detached lobe and a particularly rich, delicate shape. The lips have an especially noble form, thin, indicating a habit of articulating carefully while speaking. Their most frequent expression indicates Oirmness. They remain half-open only when he is listening attentively.

“The entire face betrays the torments of a passionate soul, for Mahler has had to struggle a great deal and to suffer terribly. His music confesses what his chaste lips keep silent.

“In a bad mood, he draws his mouth sideways, bites his upper lip and draws the nose

“In a bad mood, he draws his mouth sideways, bites his upper lip and draws the nose down along with the forehead wrinkles. Deformed in this way, Mahler’s face becomes like a caricature, deserving the nickname ‘Horrid Mahler’ that was often applied to him.”

Horrid Mahler, how well it suits me. As a child, well-behaved in school, because constantly sunk in deep meditations that disturbed no one, but as an adult, uncontrollable, undisciplined, defying any authority at all. Can anyone imagine a conductor whose name is reported just about every week on the theater’s disciplinary report, as mine was during my Dirst years in Kassel? Can anyone imagine a music director who was constantly called down by the management, as occurred with me in Hamburg? A general manager regularly sermonized by the Prince who was honorary supervisor, as in Vienna? Horrid Mahler!

In this, I was like my father, Bernhard Mahler, whom the authorities in our small town often sanctioned for behavior injurious toward the police authorities. Or like my grandmother, Marie Mahler, who didn’t shrink from demanding an audience with Emperor Franz-Joseph in person, so that she could request amnesty for a severe Dine.

And she got it.

Horrid Mahler!

I never wanted to submit to any orders, because I was entirely devoted to the cause of music. I was its voluptuously subjected slave, its fanatical servant and its faithful swain. Nothing, no one had the right, ever, to interfere between music and me. But I’m wrong to speak only of music. For I might also be passionately lost in philosophic meditation which would decide the fate of my next symphony. I am fond of saying that reading brought me more than all my years of conservatory. But it’s true. If there’s a pinnacle and a depth to my symphonies, I owe them to my frequent reading more than to the hours spent dirtying exercise books with counterpoint.

When I was concentrating, I was more than ever the horrid Mahler. A dinner bored me? I would rise in the middle of the meal and wander through the hosts’ apartment until I found the library, where I settled down with a good book. I was rarely invited back. My little composing hut, in the woods? Neither Alma nor any of the children could disturb me there. One day an American piano merchant had the misguided idea of intruding as I was composing my Lied von der Erde, with a vibrant “Hello, Mr. Mahler, you absolutely must try out our new instruments!” I chased him, pelting him with small stones, all the way to the lake, and I broke down in tears, incapable of doing any composing for the rest of the day.

In earlier years, I frightened children, especially those at the boarding school I attended in Prague. Dressed in black, agitated by all kinds of nervous tics, uttering unheard-of groans whenever a piece of music was being massacred within earshot, slamming the lid of my piano on the Dingers of the unfortunate person who was mistreating the music placed on the stand, I was a bogeyman, a terror, something out of a nightmare.

In Kassel many years earlier, I had even proposed that a friend should join me in a plot against one of my competitors. After all, I had written an anonymous letter about Mr. Treiber (the man who dared to conduct in the same theater as myself) …”It’s not at all impossible that something truly disagreeable may befall him.” An anonymous letter, an ambush…

Horrid, truly horrid Mahler!

And now here I am, inside the body of this brave soul whom I’m trying to transform

And now here I am, inside the body of this brave soul whom I’m trying to transform into something of another me. To make him the horrid Cornelius, because to be me you need to be dreadful, unbearable, because you’re too demanding.

Thus the work to be accomplished depends on just one thing: can my guest possibly be as horrid as myself?

Notes on consultation: To what can we attribute my patient’s genius? By that I mean what are the mysterious mechanisms of talent, of the greatest talent, of Genius? Of course, somewhat like electricity, there’s a difference in intensity, notably at the level of concentration. Richer connections in the brain. But can we Oind an innate origin for these differences? I tend to believe that Mahler, who told me he had found refuge very early in deep meditations, created himself in order to escape the violent quarrels between his parents. These childhood interiorizing séances, repeated almost daily for many hours, were a remarkable form of training in creativity. No other child, lacking this practice, would be capable of rivaling the power of concentration and of creativity that Gustav Mahler developed.

S.F

Chapter 14 “Mahler, I’m hungry!”

For nearly twenty-four hours, Cornelius Franz had been living with the sense of being isolated from his own body. It was like the way you eventually stop feeling a foreign element, like a dental prosthesis or even some cumbersome article of clothing. But now he could no longer use that “presence” to distract himself from the urgent need for nourishment.

“In any case, Cornelius, you’re proving useless to me. Compressing myself into your skull already requires a superhuman effort, and I end up struggling just to accomplish half of what I used to produce while alive. It’s just about impossible to get any emotions out of this half-sleeping body, ruled only by animal appetites.

Besides, in any case we need someone who can provide a semblance of security, or expertise, to what we’re going to do. After all, I can’t just Dinish my Tenth Symphony and then go see my publisher—‘Hi, I’m Mahler, and here’s the work I forgot to give you before I died.’ Let alone the truth: ‘Hello, Mahler here, and I wrote this symphony after returning from the kingdom of the dead… Besides, I’m not quite dead exactly, I’m still in my death agony in 1911…’ You see, Cornelius, we need someone who is an authority on my work, someone people will listen to and believe.

And of course, who do I know today?”

“Well I know someone, master! Your most famous biographer, Charles-Henri De l'Etable. He devoted his entire life to writing three huge volumes, which I’ve read many times.”

“Well, then, let’s Dind him and call him the ‘expert on myself.’” Mahler gave a hearty laugh, throwing himself on the bed, his arms crossed.

“Come on, I’m waiting, Cornelius, Mr. De l’Etable, my Expert!”

“I need— you have to pick up the telephone. I know the number by heart.”

Cornelius had communicated several times with the French-American musicologist, and his conductor’s memory had kept the number in a safe place.

Dialing the number caused Mahler considerable entertainment, with the digital keys, the exceptional length of the number, and no need to use the services of a switchboard operator.

“Cornelius, such a long number! Where does Mr. My Expert live, anyway? On the moon? I can already hear the beginning of a song: “An expert lived on the moon, Perched on top of a dune.

With a telescope this scholar Spied on Gustav Mahler.”

A second burst of laughter threw the body of Gustav/Franz against the bed’s thick velvet-upholstered headboard.

“No, he merely lives in Marrakech, or Paris. We’ll try all his numbers.”

“My expert lives in Morocco? How odd. If I were an expert on myself, I would refuse to live anywhere but in Vienna.”

“Well you see, master, even if he devotes his life to yours, he can still appreciate having a private life of his own.”

Cornelius felt himself giving out another of those violent laughs, which could start and stop so suddenly. He was going to have to get used to them.

“It was really necessary for me to be dead so that a man devoted to me could have a life of his own? I’m still horrid Mahler, am I not?”

A lilting, friendly voice could be heard on the line.

“Who’s calling? Hello? What ‘horrid Mahler’ are you talking about? Hello?”

Cornelius/Mahler had to bite his lip to suppress a new outbreak of the giggles. Then, with composure, he articulated with his new bass voice: “Mr. De l'Etable, I’m sorry to disturb you when you’re no doubt busy working. And I have to admit that the reason for my call is one of the oddest—“ The famous biographer was an elegant octogenarian, still quite handsome, tall, slender, who had a certain taste for eccentricity when alone. Thus, he was standing by the telephone dressed in a djellaba and a square mortarboard hat with tassel, which he’d received with one of his many honorary doctoral degrees. To top it all off, he was standing in a copper bathtub Dilled with warm cinnamon-Dlavored milk.

“With whom am I speaking?”

“I can’t tell you just yet who I am, since otherwise you’d call me a crazy person and hang up in my face… Let me just say, for the moment, that it’s a matter of life or death. Really, Mr. De l’Etable, you have my life in your hands, and our conversation will determine not just my fate, but the fate of something that’s very dear to you… and which has a direct connection with Gustav Mahler.”

The musicologist was struck by hearing the name of his favorite composer at the end of this brief monologue during which he had especially noted the speaker’s Austrian accent, as well as the extraordinary resonance, warmth and authority of the voice…

All qualities that he himself had associated, in his writings, with the voice of Mahler.

“I don’t know how to respond, my dear sir, but I’m listening. If you say your life is in my hands, I can’t do less than listen to your request.”

“Right, I’ll need to identify myself to you. It won’t be easy. I beg you to give me the beneDit, for a few moments, of believing in my sanity”—this last word being pronounced by Cornelius with a perfect American accent, in homage to the double nationality of his listener, and to the great astonishment of Mahler, who indulged in a brief mental leap. “Ask me—ask me three questions intimately associated with Mahler, to which you alone know the response.”

De l’Etable was Dlooded with a crowd of contradictory thoughts, including his awareness of the work waiting for him on his desk. With a sidelong glance, he noted the impressive pile of documents he would need to reread before tomorrow’s lecture. Tempted to hang up, leaving this overexcited caller to his game of riddles, he had the professional reDlex of wondering if he had kept back for himself anything at all, besides the gigantic mass of information on the composer that he had started collecting in the 1950s.

“I can ask you certain questions to which Mahler’s daughter gave me the answers, but which I had seen no point in publishing, because—“ “My daughter! You’ve spoken with my daughter! Where is she, and—“ Cornelius had just felt an internal shock of extraordinary violence, an impetus similar to the one he always gave to the opening bars of Elektra and to the huge chord in Zarathustra.

“That is… You’ve spoken with Anna? When was that, did you see her recently, I mean is she—“ With all his strength, Cornelius sent Mahler mental thoughts of Anna, his daughter, who had died in 1988, his daughter with Alma, his wife, who had died in 1964… But his entire body was shaking. The great composer was not given to moderate emotions.

“Sir, I don’t know who you are, but you obviously don’t know your subject well. I advise you to re-read my books.”

Cornelius seized the initiative.

“I’ve read them, down to the Dinest details, I’ve re-read them, I’ve even started reading the American edition, and I beg your pardon, but as I told you I’m in a state of extreme agitation just now. Let’s try again—ask me something that isn’t answered in your biography.”

De l’Etable was astonished at this new tone, at the alteration in the famous “voice of bronze” that had intrigued him. Softly, he suggested: “What was the Dirst name of the mother of Gustav Mahler?”

It was such a simple question, for anyone who had leafed through the slightest biographical notes, and yet Cornelius, or rather his guest, answered forcefully: “Marie!”

The musicologist remained silent. Well, this person had really read his work very closely, because he hadn’t fallen into the trap. Mahler had a slight speech impediment, a problem pronouncing the letter “r,” but only in the case of his mother’s name. And the voice on the telephone had pronounced the name Marie by gliding over the harsh letter, the letter synonymous with the father. But what did that prove?

“Could we stop this little game of questions… Get to the point. Just what are you trying to prove to me? That you’re a secret descendant? Some people like to believe that it had a son with the Mildenburg, his favorite soprano. Is that it? You are claiming to be Mahler’s bastard son?”

Cornelius was starting to be slightly irritated by the over-reDined tone of the speaker, notably the exaggerated pomposity of his “a” in the name Mahler, like some snobbish woman who was swooning.

“Once again, if I tell you who I am, you’ll end the conversation at once. And I’d have no choice but to die for good, along with the Gustav Mahler symphony I carry inside me.”

De l’Etable exhaled deeply. He was starting to get an inkling of the reality of the situation. A manuscript hunter, that must be it. A mole that’s dug up an unpublished work in some attic. Maybe even the very advanced sketch of “Rübezahl,” the opera had started to compose just before he turned twenty, which he’d lost by entrusting it to a careless friend. This could be really interesting. But the man was clearly unstable, a hyperactive type, in fact very likely a charlatan or forger.

“All right, then, I’ll ask you a question I’ve been unable to answer until quite recently.

What circumstance in the life of Gustav Mahler led him to write massive symphonies? The really huge works, monumental, rather than tone poems like those of Strauss, for instance?”

Cornelius Franz and his guest began thinking back, one of them over his readings, the other reviewing his own memories, just as someone digs his hands into both pockets at the same time looking for God knows what… Cornelius came up emptyhanded, while Mahler was panicking. Yes, why, why have I always wanted to write symphonies that were more and more gigantic? Is there even a reason?

Megalomania, inferiority complex, my small height, my Jewishness, my need to assert myself, to be seductive?

Cornelius was Dirst to take the plunge.

“No doubt, after the failure of his successive attempts to write an opera, Mahler needed to prove to himself that he could take on a big form after all… But then, this circumstance ought to have occurred between the First Symphony, which is of normal length, and the Second, which is already very long. So, something that would have occurred around the time of his twenty-seventh year?”

“That’s not quite the correct answer,” the musicologist grumbled, rather annoyed at wasting precious time that he had intended to devote to the new edition of his famous biography.

“Obviously it’s not the right answer! This idiot Cornelius doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ll tell you myself, Mr. My Expert: I wrote monumental symphonies quite simply because I needed to make a living, to make myself known, to impose myself. A little Jewish Bohemian doesn’t get much attention writing sonatas. Nor by producing fantasias for recorder. He needs a gigantic orchestra, and works of titanic proportions.”

“You’re close,” said De L’Etable, amused. “But how many of you are speaking here? I think I hear at least two persons on the phone.”

“Mr. Specialist in Me, we won’t get anywhere this way. Instead I’m going to propose a test that will show you once and for all just who I am. I’m going to sing to you— something by Gustav Mahler that you’ve never heard, something invented at this very instant—“ All right, my manuscript hunter who is also a singer, the biographer was thinking.

All right, my manuscript hunter who is also a singer, the biographer was thinking.

Let’s just hope he can sing in tune. At the other end, the baritone voice struck up a gentle melody, with long sustained notes. Probably an adagio for string instruments.

The introduction to a song? The melody broke off suddenly, followed by a disjointed scherzo, so typical of Mahler, but totally new.

Some Mahler from the Dinal period. It’s totally astounding, De l’Etable thought. But where could this unknown mercenary have found it? A sketch from the composer’s Dinal months?

The singing continued, like an inexhaustible brook. The melodies followed one another, not like a collage but rather in perfect continuity, an organic work, completely original, and so Mahlerian!

“All right, I’m convinced. You’ve found something extraordinary. How many pages of sketches have you got there?”

“Just what are you talking about? I have no pages, no sketches—I’m improvising, inventing for you, exactly the way I compose. Don’t you like it?”

“Listen, Mister… I don’t even know your name! Please give me credit for some intelligence, along with a certain expertise. No one can so perfectly invent a work by Mahler that doesn’t exist. Imitate, do a pastiche, write a few lines in the style of— yes, no doubt. But that’s not what I’ve just heard. Only Mahler could have written those melodies, my good man… Hello?”

“Gustav Mahler speaking, precisely.”

The expert in the djellaba took a deep breath, unable to formulate any thought except a great sadness, the kind that took hold of him each time he thought of his hero’s tragic destiny, or even the mere fact that Mahler had died before his own birth. The bittersweet melancholy of never having managed to meet him, to approach him, to catch sight of him even from a great distance, even on Dilm, of which none existed, or to attend one of his concerts and hear him interpret, even on a disk, but of course no recording existed except a take from a sophisticated mechanical piano. Sad, he thought, that idiots, like those Napoleon admirers, could walk the streets believing themselves to be Mahler, pushing their madness far enough to develop a trace of musical talent, if only enough to outsmart a musician who lacked the famous expert’s sophistication.

The silence was broken by a new burst of melody, as the delirious singer launched a dance movement alternating among several meters, triple time, quintuple, then minor, major, the most dizzying melody he had ever heard. And so typical of Mahler!

For De L’Etable, that was the last straw. After devoting his entire life to his hero, he had come to see himself as Mahler’s steward, not just his heir or beneDiciary: the man who, by his perfect knowledge of his subject, could claim to be his spokesman, his alter ego. But now, something as monstrous as an avatar of Mahler, in the body of a total unknown, looming as a personal insult, but also a threat to the temple so patiently constructed, this unmatchable masterwork of musicology. It was impossible to conceive of any “other” Mahler running around free, and so De L’Etable slammed down the phone, immediately regretting the gesture.

The telephone rang again. He answered it, reproaching himself for his eagerness.

“I beg your pardon, that was accidental, I didn’t want to be rude. Listen, sir, whoever

“I beg your pardon, that was accidental, I didn’t want to be rude. Listen, sir, whoever you are, I propose that we study your sources—“ “My sources? But there’s only one, my brain. You surely aren’t going to perform an autopsy while I’m still alive?”

A new Dit of laughter forced De l’Etable to hold the receiver away from his ear with an expression of disgust.

“No, of course not. I was thinking of a more humane method. One of my dear friends happens to be in Vienna in fact, the prominent attorney Sullivan K. You must know that he’s devoted his life to the Second Symphony, and has even acquired the autograph score. I would trust him, as if he were myself, to authenticate your discoveries. Get in touch with him on my behalf, and show him what you have. Then we’ll speak again. In the meantime, my dear Mr. …”

De l’Etable ended the call, torn between rage and stupor, and mumbling over and over: “Mr. Who, in fact?”

Chapter 15 People often wonder about the meaning of life. I myself, just now, am wondering about the meaning of my death.

Because I am dead, am I not? I am both here, meaning back there, dying in Vienna, and here, in someone else’s body, in a period that no longer makes any sense whatsoever.

When I converted to Catholicism, I refused to accept the ofDicial dogma on Purgatory and Hell, even if the latter does have a certain dramatic power over people’s minds that I quite like. But leaving aside artistic considerations, it’s a ridiculous invention after all.

And yet, Dinding myself in the head of this kindly bandleader is a punishment of a particularly reDined cruelty, one that leads me to believe that I must in fact be in Purgatory… For the moment. The worst, no doubt, is yet to come.

Beyond the fact that I have to submit to the mediocrity of this drudge, after giving my life to become what I have become, I Dind it unbearable to undergo this semblance of rebirth, entirely in an era that’s not my own. It’s an era when all those I love have long since returned to dust, where music is the only thing that can keep my head above water. Of course, I haven’t come back for my own amusement; I wanted this to happen. Nevertheless, my death is as appalling as the life that preceded it.

I could take this as a resurrection, after all. Quite a joke, waking up in the wrong place and at the wrong time. I’m the composer of the “Resurrection,” my Second Symphony. And didn’t I tell Natalie, my conDidant, “I can say for my part that, even if I die, I’ll rise again in three days.” Well, it’s happened! That’s what’s called being a braggart. It’s up to me, now, to play that role.

After all, I’ve always been in transit. I’ve always been haunted by others, and now I’m the one doing the haunting…

Do I have to repeat the litany of the dead brothers? Starting with Isidor, who perished just before my birth. There’s nothing worse for a human being: to know you were preceded by a rough draft of yourself. That you’re the result of a failed experiment. That you’re a consolation prize. But also, perhaps, there’s no greater spur to creativity.

Haunted…

Then there was that other brother, Ernst, two years my junior. His death was the greatest pain in my whole life. He succumbed at the age of thirteen to the same heart ailment that Dinished me, a while ago.

The same illness, thirty-Dive years later.

Haunted…

And then Marie, my mother. Marie walked with a slight limp, but, in a kind of

And then Marie, my mother. Marie walked with a slight limp, but, in a kind of crescendo of her disability, I was affected all my life by a gait like a disjointed marionette, asymmetrical, St. Vitus’ dance, which became well known in Vienna.

Marie died at the age of Difty-two, and I at Difty-one.

Haunted…

Then there was my artistic twin… Hans Rott, a twenty-year-old genius who composed a symphony in which I saw the model for the future. Like all geniuses, Hans could not tolerate rejection, Hans died insane, in an asylum. He used to wipe himself in public with the manuscripts of his works, supposedly, while crying, “Look, then, at what human works are worth.” And, Dinally, I was the one who composed the symphonies, partly in the toilet, without using them as toilet paper at least. But for my twin.

Haunted!

I re-created myself in my works; I re-created others in my life and in my body. It’s so odd, this fear of the “double,” of our lost twin… I had read in some story by Théophile Gautier, Avatar, I believe, that one of the heroes, a Polish aristocrat, subscribed to the family tradition according to which the appearance of your own double was the sign of impending death. I was forever seeing myself appear, in all kinds of frightening forms, when I was composing. That, at least, never caused my death.

And now, I’m doing the haunting!

Schopenhauer considered music as the only direct incarnation of the world will.

Cornelius, my friend, from now on you are the only direct incarnation of the will of Gustav M!

Note on consultation: This patient is showing all sorts of other psychological curiosities, a doppelgänger or doubling phenomenon that could be characterized as manic-depressive if it weren’t the very characterization of turn-of-the-century German Romanticism. I noted Mahler’s words: “the supreme joy of living and the most heart-rending desire for death rule my heart by turns, sometimes from one hour to the next.”

But in the Oinal analysis, this bipolarity of Mahler’s, just like that of the German Romantics, is just the reOlection of nature, both man’s friend and his enemy, giver of life and of death, joy and sorrow. Like so many great Viennese musicians, Mahler is a man of nature, a true man of the woods.

S.F

Chapter 16 “Master, we have three months, then, to compose this symphony. It’s not much time…”

“It’s enough. Three months is all the time I had available for composing each summer, when the opera closed for its summer break. In any case, we’re not composing a four-hour opus. It’ll be ninety minutes at most. An hour and a half.

More is just hubris, pretentiousness.

“I must ask you nevertheless what your intentions are. Are you going to go on…ah… living here, inside me? And also, what do you expect to do with this symphony?”

“It’s really quite simple: I’ll write it using the meager resources that you offer me, even if it means killing you with the job.”

“Charming.”

“And then I’ll go back to my own era, but not until I’ve memorized every detail of my new work. Once there, I still have to convince the Wandering Jew to allow me to enter the body of a simple ‘copyist’ to whom I’ll dictate everything I’ve composed with you. While hoping that the return hasn’t affected my memory. What will happen after that escapes me completely: the copyist will have the mission of handing the work on to my assistant Bruno Walter for identiDication, and Walter has to take it to my publisher. Because, in any case, his work of salvation has to occur at the start of the twentieth century, correct?

“If my symphony is going to change the face of the world, if it will eradicate the sinister inDluence of Wagner on Germany, if the course of history will be reversed by it, that I can’t say. If my work fails in its mission, if something goes wrong in this plan, you’ll still be here and I shall see that the score reaches you in one way or another. You’ll call De l’Etable, begging him to excuse you for the trick you’ve played on him, and you’ll offer him the privilege of making the discovery! The two of you will simply resurrect from the past ‘the lost symphony of Gustav Mahler!’ That will still be something, and you’ll at least have the glory of conducting the world premiere.”

“I’m not a specialist in space-time paradoxes, but… If your symphony had appeared shortly after your death, then we would know it today… Or, if it’s necessary for you to return there to try to change everything, and if you succeed… There’s a very strong likelihood that the world in which I’m living would be extremely different. It’s certain, in fact, that I wouldn’t exist, for my parents met during the war, I daresay thanks to the war. My mother was a nurse at the front and she had my father as a patient—” “Cornelius, your paradoxes are of no interest to me!”

“Well they’re exciting to me, all right. Listen, with all the almost fanatical admiration I have for you, I want to go on living, and I won’t help you accomplish something that wipes me off the face of the earth.”

Mahler caused a deep sigh to be exhaled from Franz’s chest.

“There’s the problem! ‘Almost’ fanatical! Almost a great composer. You are almost yourself, Cornelius. What am I going to do?”

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do: you are going to stay with me. Basically, if we write this symphony, you return to your era long enough to dictate it to someone else, and then what? You give notice to the Wandering Jew and to whatever is keeping you in some semblance of life. Whereas, here you can live with me, if I dare say so, as long as you like. I’m sure we’ll grow accustomed to one another very quickly… You, to my weaknesses; me, to your madness. But as for having a new life, living the years you’ve missed…”

“That’s charming, Cornelius! You propose that I explore old age in the skin of a man half-alive. I died at Difty, which is still quite young. In fact, that’s just about your age, isn’t it?”

“Almost…”

“Almost, always almost! And so, I’m to grow old in the body of almost Cornelius Franz, without being one hundred percent myself, and to have a roommate, to watch him collapse little by little without being able to go on composing, or conducting with the Dire and passion of which I was once capable…”

“We’ll work, we’ll make progress!”

“That’s right. And in Difty more years, we’ll be almost as good as Gustav Mahler!”

Wild laughter again convulsed the body of the musician, who rolled on the Dloor, shaking all over. Once the Dit subsided, an absolute calm reigned in Cornelius’s head.

“Master? Are you still here?”

No answer, no sign of the presence. Thoughts collided against one another in Franz’s mind. Had the great man left, or had this schizophrenic crisis simply run its course?

Relief gave way to great sadness. To be Gustav Mahler for twenty-four hours, and then once again nothing but himself… Finally to be himself again!

Chapter 17

I am a hero.

What is a hero?

A hero is someone who cannot be stopped, ever, by anything.

Nothing stops Figaro from cutting hair or beards, nothing stops Count Almaviva from courting Rosina, nothing stops Basilio from spreading slander. No windmill ever discourages Don Quixote from attacking invisible enemies, no jealous husband ever prevents Don Juan from eternal seduction.

Those are heroes of Diction, endowed by their creator to embody a virtue, a function or vice, and the scenario requires them to play their role with exemplary regularity.

They’re not characters who evolve, except in terms of quantity. Don Juan will woo more women, or fewer; Figaro will trim a few more beards; Don Quixote will never be too tired to storm one more mill.

I seem close to that type of hero: a symphony-maker, in his modest shop, who can’t be stopped from composing: neither by the indifference of his contemporaries, nor by the hostility of his peers. That in itself is enough to inspire plenty of anecdotes about me.

There’s a second category of hero: the hero of myth. Most of them have actually existed, and they keep evolving in terms of quality. They don’t score lots of victories; they struggle to climb higher. The mythological hero is one who attacks targets greater than himself, like a summit inaccessible to ordinary mortals—and therefore a myth—a height from which he can only fall, inexorably, for otherwise he wouldn’t deserve the title of hero. The mythological hero is fated to be a martyr. He must start out conquering everything, only to lose it all. His myth is, in fact, constructed on this dual motion: the ascent, and the fall.

Thus I’m among the second type of hero; through my symphonic characters, I attack powers far stronger than myself, much stronger than man: I defy fate, I sneer at it, I depict Death—the opening of my Third Symphony—a spectre that is by turns gargantuan, devouring hordes of humans whom he hurls into the void, and skeletal, defying life and taunting it by revealing its fate: after the sins of the Dlesh, the rattling of bones. Death is omnipresent, in fact, in my music—except in my pastoral Fourth— and culminates in the Sixth, where I strike those hammer blows of fate, the blows I unconsciously call down on my chest, where they will end up destroying me.

So I myself am a small hero, in the sense that nothing can stop me from writing one symphony after the other, but in my symphonies I bring great heroes to life, and by the Calvary of my Dinal years, the exiling of my compositions for many years, I have become a mythological hero myself.

I have always liked to speak of my musical themes as “symphonic heroes,”

I have always liked to speak of my musical themes as “symphonic heroes,” summoned to ascend to the heights, only to come crashing down once their mission is done. Quite often my works suggest stumbling, even if my heroes pick themselves up and triumph, but of course always in the hereafter, always by way of resurrection.

It takes no particular effort to be a Dictional hero. My own Diction—as the composer who resumes his chain of symphonies each summer—was born spontaneously, from this habit of composing one symphony per year. Nothing could stop me. The hardest thing for me would have been not writing music. Nor did it take unusual struggle to become, as I did, a mythological hero. All I did was follow my inclination, which impelled me to climb a mountain and then suffer my brutal, crushing fall.

In fact, all you need to be a hero is the willpower, the constancy and concentration that are required for any self-fulDillment.

Everyday life, unfortunately, is always ready to interrupt our heroic whims. I’m not even thinking of the people of that bizarre era in which I landed. Those people seem to experience only the small unDinished fragments of several lives. They could be possessed a thousand times by the desire to be a hero, and still they wouldn’t Dind the time, or the will, or even the energy—three conditions essential for heroism.

I’ve never encountered the slightest difDiculty in composing my symphonic works— except the Fifth, which I spent my whole life revising. That’s not what makes me a hero. They merely killed me a bit more, one after the other, until the Dinal blow. The reason is simple: I fed them with my own suffering, grieving and anguish that staked out my path, ever since my most distant childhood. And, since music is an ampliDier of emotions, giving them hurricane force, this suffering was thrown right back in my face, but magniDied, multiplied. This acceptance of the boomerang blow is what makes me a hero, along with my will to start again each time, year after year. How can you expect to live a long life under such conditions?

All that is just my way of saying this: all my life, I’ve done nothing but put myself into music.

To speak of a hero, of several heroes, who would not be myself, of a story as far removed from my own as possible—that, I’ never could have done. Especially in a symphony, which you always write in the Dirst person singular. What about writing what my friend Richard Strauss called a “tone poem”? He knew how to do it better than anyone, my friend Richard, the one composer of my generation whom I esteemed. His symphonic poems, like a geographic map, described emotions, all the possible states of mind of famous heroes of Diction: Don Juan, Don Quixote, Zarathustra, A Hero’s Life, and so many others with whom Richard must no doubt have identiDied during the time he wrote each, although he’d never have followed their example. He dreamed in secret of being a hero, but he lived by proxy, on paper.

Richard, however, was above all the man who never accepted suffering, debonair Richard, the man of waltzes, husband to Pauline, glittering in her diamonds…

Richard, painter of appearances, the perfect portraitist, never impolite, never vulgar, never grimacing. The complete opposite to me, horrid Mahler. And yet, his Salome!

That’s one opera I would love to have begotten…

But was he a hero? Richard never knew how to suffer, he had refused pain, once and for all. He knew, no doubt, that Romanticism, of which he was the Dinal avatar, devoured its children much like the god Baal. No doubt he wanted to have his cake and eat it too: to be a great Romantic and not to suffer. But why? For a very simple reason: to live longer. Not to die too young like me. Richard clung to life, wanting more time for composing. Richard was chasing Wagner, hoping to catch up with him, equal him. He confessed as much, in fact, when he admitted that he lacked the

equal him. He confessed as much, in fact, when he admitted that he lacked the symphonic genius of Beethoven or even the dramatic model of a Wagner. And in any case he was a hedonist, who refused to suffer. Suffering, the real suffering, the kind that gnaws at you but also inspires, as a drug that opens the doors of Genius to you, also stabs you in the back and throws you in the common grave. Nevertheless, Richard had Genius; not always, but enough to win a lasting place in the musical Pantheon.

How did he solve this unlikely equation, to become a genius without getting burned by this Dire from heaven? I believe he transferred this burden of creative pain to his domestic dragon, Pauline. Don’t forget that he made that statement, so enigmatic and yet so crystal-clear now that we know the nature of the problem, speaking to a visitor amazed at Pauline’s utterly rude treatment of him. What did he respond? “Ich brauche es”: I need it! Pauline, in this sense, was the perfect wife for Richard.

Unstable, high-strung, always in a bad mood, foul-mouthed, always blaming him for something, constantly criticizing, apparently unaware of his genius, since her genius was to catch the peccadillo, the tiny detail that infuriated her; while he was composing masterpieces, she composed the domestic nightmare that she would make him live through, day after day. And yet, they were a close couple, devoted, inseparable. Richard needed this more than anything else. She was the perfect muse, and perfectly incomprehensible to any outsider who wasn’t familiar with this couple’s code. He needed it.

But what did he need? Was it the need for a minor household pain that could maintain that uncomfortable climate necessary to the composer, but, all things considered, was preferable to the deep pain, that of mourning, of true misfortunes… of a Mahler!

And so Richard did nothing more than that: depict heroism; his work is a museum of heroism, with a curator who was no hero himself. Because, fundamentally, he lived entirely as a good provincial bourgeois.

The complete opposite of me.

And now, here I am, in quite a dilemma, trapped in someone else’s body, with a mission that’s such a heroic challenge that it sounds ridiculous: to Dinish my symphony and thereby save the world from Wagner’s operas. And yet, I’ve seen what I’ve seen! Cornelius has conDirmed it to me! Nietzsche has whispered it to me: undo what’s been done. Write a different music for the monstrous Dilm that’s been made since my death, so that, through music, the scenario is forced to change (is that right, Franz? Scenario? The correct word for the “libretto” of a Dilm?).

What kind of hero would be capable of such an exploit?

Chapter 18 1.

“Run, Cornelius, run!”

In the middle of the Viennese woods, he’s trotting like a tired old nag, spurred on by an invisible rider.

“I need to run! To swim, to climb mountains. I’m not some immobile paperscratching composer, a monument on a chair or stuck to his piano stool. I must have climbed half of the passes in Austria between every two symphonies. Armed with my walking stick, I was tireless, jumping from rock to rock, leaving far behind any friends who tried their luck at following me. Swimming the crawl or the breaststroke, I crossed the ponds and lakes between Vienna and Salzburg in every direction, more times than I can calculate.

“From these athletic excursions I brought back musical treasures that I used to sort out on my table like a farmer separating wheat from chaff. So come on, Cornelius, let your body go a little, let it outdo itself, and may it bring me back a rich harvest.”

Franz had never practiced any sport except conducting, and all of Mahler’s mental energy inside him was not enough to push the few horsepower of his paunchy, clumsy physique.

“Gustav, wouldn’t we be more useful running over some music paper? That’s one sport that never wears me out.”

“Nonsense, little Franz! Because there too, you run about as fast as a plow stuck in the mud of your own mind. As soon as I drive your brain at my own power, your hand goes slack, Dingers shake and you wrist stiffens. When I am composing, my body quickly produces an overDlow of energy. I have to get it to ascend to my mind, like a fountain under pressure. It’s the fuel of my inspiration; I have to sublimate it like in a distillery, transformer it into music, then get it to descend again and spread through my body in the form of a tornado of emotions, which I’ve got to work off again by doing sports. It’s a perpetual cycle, but at the start of this cycle, Franz, I need lots of perspiration! It’s alchemy, little Cornelius! Solve Et Coagula!

“Don’t tell me you look for music by running! At least, not your famous Adagios!

I can understand walking through the Vienna Woods like Beethoven or Brahms, but running or strenuous exercises are not conducive to conceiving a slow, solemn musical theme.

“Wrong, Cornelius, and you’re a thousand times wrong about my Adagios. Do you know that the very beginning of my Seventh Symphony, that almost funereal introduction with its nearly lugubrious solo, is something I searched and searched for, in my little cabin on the lake shore. Well, giving up the struggle, I ran and ran,

for, in my little cabin on the lake shore. Well, giving up the struggle, I ran and ran, circling the pond twelve times, until that slow, majestic music, which is always played too lazily, suddenly erupted in my head.

“The only piece of music I ever composed at the real speed of the body was the funeral march from the Dinal movement of my Lied von der Erde.”

“Funeral march? I’ve never noticed—“ “You’re not the only one, little Franz. That march is certainly the most authentically funereal, much more so than those with drums and trumpets that Dill my Dirst symphonies. That’s one of my most intimate compositions, and I’ve never seen the point of explaining it. Well, it comes about Difteen minutes after the start of the ‘Farewell.’ The title alone ought to give you a clue. First come the mufDled, hollow cries from the lowest register of the orchestra, the call of Destiny that had just struck me to the quick.”

“Your daughter?”

“Shut up, Franz. So, a melody starts to take shape. Preceded by a deep, dark-toned bell. It’s a series of interior cries, an absolute revolt against the injustice of fate. The poor child, why her, why not me? And at that very moment, the march rhythm is hinted at. The procession will set off. The horses whinny. The coachman gently pushes the cart; the small crowd of friends follows the father overcome by pain. This march lasts, lasts for the time needed to make the ascent, from the bottom of the village of Grinzing, all the way to the gate to the cemetery, and then turns left, then to the right, the rise, and immediately to the left. And so, precisely, if you move at the speed of the music, you’ll have to get to the bare, simple stone and the small strip of lawn, just as the march, as I call it, is ending on the ‘C’ hammered out by the full force of the orchestra. So this is truly my march. It’s the one I wrote for myself, the one with which I’ll soon go to meet Puzi, under the grass where I’ll sleep alone with her, for eternity.

“But the rest, that I wrote at the speed of an athlete in motion.

“So run, Cornelius, run…”

2.

“What are you thinking, Gustav?”

“About fate, Cornelius. I’ve had a magniDicent fate: I’m one of the great geniuses of humanity. The richest men of all time will never have what I’ve become; all the gold in the world won’t do a thing: the tycoon will have to spend his money to grab a bit of glory. He’ll manage to obtain some in his lifetime, but the wealthy are quickly forgotten, even if they attach their name to whatever made them powerful. Even if they’ve built a museum, a park, an entire city. Look at Rothschild… There are so many of them, you can’t tell which one is meant any more. Rockefeller, one tower. On the other hand, Eiffel got one tour as well, but he was its creator, and it’s his work that named it. The creator is gloriDied by his work.

“In short, I’m a world genius.

“And yet, I’ve had the most difDicult life imaginable, the greatest collection of

“And yet, I’ve had the most difDicult life imaginable, the greatest collection of suffering, both mental and physical. I’ve known everything that can be known of misery and pain. And do you know, what counts in the Dinal analysis is that I never gave up! Never gave up believing in myself, never stopped believing in my Destiny. In this sense, my conversion to Christianity never managed to eradicate that deep Jewish faith in Providence, in Destiny, whichever you like. The Christian gets on his knees and prays to God to grant him a favor or forgiveness, appealing to God periodically, sometimes opportunistically. The Jew doesn’t believe in forgiveness, at least not the forgiveness of sins one after another. Nor does he believe in a god who rewards you like giving out alms. On the other hand, he believes in a path traced out for him, not a path that’s determined immutably, but rather one possible route, provided he believes in it, a route that will reveal itself gradually as he moves along it. If he fails to believe in it, the path will erase itself little by little, and the walker will get lost in the fog and swamps. If he has faith in Providence, in Destiny, the path will lead him where he must go. Well, there you have it, the story of my life. Does anyone remember today, now that my music is played everywhere and I’m admired, that I never received the slightest commission? My ten symphonies—I commissioned them myself, from myself. One after the other, they were born of the necessity of composing, of building my house room by room. And not even the critics who were unanimously hostile, nor the resistance of musicians—nothing could have stopped me or discouraged me…”

“So it’s not Destiny then, which drove you to compose, but instead the desire to create—” “No, Cornelius, the desire to compose can’t sufDice to accomplish a life’s work like mine. There has to be a superior force, which whispers to you day and night: ‘Write, for it’s not your selDish pleasure, it’s your Destiny. That’s why you came into the world. You’re a machine for composing, you don’t exist for yourself.’ Yes, little Franz, none of the great composers in history existed for himself. I lived for the score, and so did the others; our personal life is of no importance. That, moreover, is why a composer has no ego. He has to give up being himself. He has to be ‘the other,’ that is, the work he is giving birth to. It’s something like a mother while she’s carrying her child. She lives entirely for and through the growing presence. She has no choice; sooner or later the child will reclaim her attention and will end up monopolizing her entirely. That’s what happens to me every summer, when I isolate myself to compose. I start by descending into myself, in search of the symphonic seed that will fertilize my brain. When I’ve found it, I’m gone for two or three months of gestation during which the musical child will occupy every second of my mind. And here too, Destiny leads the dance. The work will go where it pleases, and I’ll run after it; it will grow up according to what the germ contains, and as a function of what the Divine plan has in store for it. So you see, each work carries its destiny within it, and the entirety of my life is only the plan of Providence, a plan that is my identity, a plan that doesn’t wait for me, which unwinds at the speed of the Universe. So there’s no time to lose! Run, Cornelius, run…”

3.

“Are you religious, Cornelius?”

“Let’s say I believe in a Principle, a kind of—“ “I’m not asking if you’re a believer. I want to know if you’re religious, in other words if you put your faith in a doctrine, in a book.”

“I was raised to respect the Bible. I’ve read it a bit, but forgotten almost everything.”

“I was raised to respect the Bible. I’ve read it a bit, but forgotten almost everything.”

“Good. Then you’re not religious. Neither am I, I assure you. But I’ve read the Bible with attention, especially the Old Testament. What struck me very quickly was the number of keys that lie hidden in that book. To understand the world, the meaning of life. How often, in reading a verse, I’ve put down the Bible and felt the power of a revelation. But only the revelation of part of the secret. And then of another part, and still another. Thus, I understood that to have the ultimate revelation, it takes two things: Dirst, you have to have found all the mysteries hidden in the text, which is impossible when you’ve got just one life ahead of you. Unless you’ve been touched by grace, of course.”

“Is it something like seeking the ‘perfect language,’ which would be the sum of all existing languages? It’s impossible to learn them all, and thus impossible to reconstruct the absolute language.”

“Yes, no doubt… Don’t interrupt, do you mind? Second, it would require knowledge of the Principle that allows you to put each of this secrets in the correct order, and to unite them like a key ring on which each key would be placed in the sequence of the doors that are to be opened; the ring provides the indispensable union of the keys.

I’ve also felt this presence of revelation in Goethe. But I think he was missing a few keys from his ring. Nietzsche, yes, I think he had found them all, but just couldn’t produce the ring to hold them together. In his case, order was scrambled by the insanity that awaited him… Well, to sum it up, the Bible, no doubt written by a series of men of genius, truly is the religious text par excellence, since it serves to connect the keys to one another, besides offering all of them. But coded so completely—“ “Do you mean the Kabbalah?”

“Among other things. So, you see, I believe I wanted to do something fairly similar with my symphonies. And only today do I understand what the world’s greatest genius of a composer could accomplish: reveal that series of insights, make them felt deeply by the power of sounds. When it comes to presenting them in the necessary sequence for true illumination, that’s the job of music and its progression in time."

“Could Beethoven be that genius?”

“Beethoven, undoubtedly, had the power of inspiration. But he wasn’t mystical enough, and besides, secrets can only be revealed by the text. Music has the task of saying what exists behind the words, but the words are indispensable.”

“What about his Ninth?”

“Well, it’s the Dirst of the symphonies of the Beethoven revelation, but unfortunately he stopped there. Yes, Cornelius, you might say he gives us the revelation of what can be accomplished with joy. ‘All men become brothers, wherever your kindly wing extends.’ Joy gives birth to Peace, thus unifying mankind. But you see, as I mentioned, it’s a different domain, it’s humanism. Beethoven had no true interest in anything but mankind, its destiny, its tragedy, not very much in his Principle.”

“Yes, but the Missa Solemnis?”

“Mankind, going and coming, always mankind. Think of the epigraph of the Missa: ‘from the heart, may it reach the heart.’ God has precious little to do with the Missa Solemnis. Or with any other religious musical work, in fact. Even in Bach. True mysticism is the voluptuous contemplation of the emotion you experience when you are face to face with creation. Take a toccata by Bach, without any religious aims,

are face to face with creation. Take a toccata by Bach, without any religious aims, even in its title. Or a Beethoven sonata that’s without pathos. One of Mozart’s Dinal symphonies. There you’ll Dind God, or at least emotion at the idea of contemplating God.” “And what about you, Gustav? In your Eighth Symphony, were you religious or humanist?”

“Neither. In my Eighth, the Dirst part celebrates mankind on his knees before the cathedral, calling the creator. Veni creator, those are the words. Freud, no doubt, would say I was calling on my father for help! And he’d say it was no coincidence that I died eight months precisely after creating the Eighth.

“And, in the second part of that symphony, I make use of a scene from Faust. There, we seem to see mankind wandering outside the earthly paradise. I could have interested myself somewhat more in God himself, and less in nature. In another life, perhaps…”

“Do you mean now? Inside me, in fact...”

“Ha! You make me laugh, it’s so funny. No, little Franz, no within you, not now. For that, I would need elbow room, and time. I’d have to have the experience of my entire past life, and a body as robust and resistant as mine once was.

“So, run, Cornelius, run…”

Chapter 19 “Cornelius, are you fond of mushrooms?”

I hesitate, uncertain whether my strolling companion is asking about the menu for our next meal, or setting me off on a new metaphysical riddle.

“Some of them, yes. Why do you ask?”

“Well, you see, Cornelius, composing music is like going mushroom-hunting.”

I answer that I’ve never gone hunting mushrooms in the woods, that I always shop for them at “Julius Meinl,” the best food shop in Vienna and thus in the whole world.

“Obviously, little Franz, you’ve never spent entire days speaking to Dlowers, listening to the trees, questioning shrubs and conversing with birds. I could sense that immediately. You’re a city guy, a man of little faith. But let me explain it to you. We’ve now composed almost all of the missing music, and you’ve seen how I go about it.

Have you noticed the moment when I go in search of a new idea, and especially of a new theme? Have you felt that tension of the hunter on the prowl, the quest of the mythical unicorn that has to be driven out of the woods? And all of a sudden, just as with a mushroom, because the conditions are right and I’ve searched in the right spot and at the right moment, voilà! And we’ve found big ones, full of Dlavor!"

The same laugh that shakes us and crushes us. Then Mahler freezes. I feel him stiffening, becoming like a statue.

“So, you see, what torments me is Schubert.”

“Yes, master? Schubert torments you on account of the mushrooms?”

I can’t tell what he’s getting at.

“Exactly, Schubert’s mushroom. Just think, Cornelius, Schubert lived thirty-one years.

He started writing remarkable works at about age Difteen. Before that, nothing good.

Altogether, that left him Difteen years of real productivity. Just Difteen years. And now, think of Beethoven, for instance.”

“Beethoven? How many mushrooms for Beethoven?”

“Stop it, Cornelius. I’m serious.”

Then a new outbreak of laughter. “No, you’re right. Thanks to you, I see Ludwig now surrounded by boletus satanas, ‘Satan’s bolets,’ and ‘trumpets of death’!

“Well, then, Beethoven himself lived a little less than sixty years. And to raise the

“Well, then, Beethoven himself lived a little less than sixty years. And to raise the average a bit, Bach lived to sixty-Dive. Altogether, those two geniuses of music, who also began composing their Dirst important works at the age of Difteen, had a productive period exactly three times greater than poor Schubert. His Difteen years, plus two other periods of Difteen years. And yet he composed hundreds of masterpieces. You see, Cornelius, if you ask me who was the greatest composer in all of human history, I would answer Schubert—not for the work he composed but for what he could have written if he’d lived sixty years.”

“I’m not sure I follow, master.”

“But it’s simple: Schubert wrote the way a cow produces milk, to speak like my old friend Richard Strauss. He never stopped for one day. And what ideas, what inventions, knockout hits, as they say in your era, melodies known to the whole world, ‘The Trout,’ the ‘UnDinished Symphony,’ ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,’ the ‘Erl-king”… Among hundreds of others.

“Thus, Schubert obviously wouldn’t have stopped the day after the day of his death if he had lived. He would have composed, perhaps with periods more or less brilliant, but in the end he’d no doubt have written more than a thousand new themes, Dlavorful, original new melodies, which everyone would be singing today… But no one will ever know them. And that’s what torments me, Franz. Because those melodies, I tell you, they exist somewhere and they’re waiting.”

I try to picture to myself what Mahler is saying. I try to imagine that place, that marvelous land where orphan melodies grow up in silence, mature and await the hand that will come and harvest them. I attempt to argue: “Perhaps Schubert died precisely because he had written the Dinal song possible for Schubert. And suppose your own material had dried up?”

“Absurd, Cornelius. Even if Schubert had written in the same style for thirty years more, he would have been capable of Dinding new ideas, again and again. But in any case, his style was evolving rapidly. He was discovering dark Romanticism, and he’d have continued to change eras and seize upon all styles, in fact even to create them.

Therefore I repeat: his music is Dloating out there somewhere, hundreds of scores, and no one but Schubert could succeed in Dinding them. Or else someone who had the same mental conDiguration as Schubert, which is impossible. And what you’ve been experiencing here with me is the proof of what I’m saying. You’ve watched themes emerge, along with counter-themes, ideas that are pure Mahler and were awaiting my return to free them from the world where they were waiting. And during the hundred years of my “absence,” no one has found those themes. I returned, and I had only to extend my hand to catch them, for there they were, in my marvelous land where they grow in profusion, and where only I have access.

“In fact, you know, a composer creates a universe. He is a demi-urge. First he creates a space, quite small. He constructs a cabinet next to his piano, in which he stores a few ideas picked up by chance from his improvisations, ideas he’s liked, and he puts them away there for later. Then, one day, with everything he has accumulated, he builds a bigger room, decorates it, gives it a style. On the basis of that style, he deduces the rest of his house, of his palace or city… The only limit is his imagination.

And each time he composes, he enters this space, enriches it, draws from it the elements that will end up growing there on their own.”

“Are you saying that the composer does nothing else?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. Think of the mushrooms again. The composer is at the

“That’s not what I’m saying. Think of the mushrooms again. The composer is at the same time the gatherer and the compost. But, after a certain period of time, the mushroom is going to grow wherever it likes. And, no matter what, it’s going to need soil, rain and someone to go Dind it.”

“Therefore,” I ventured, “Schubert couldn’t be re-created because, even if there were someone to go searching for his mushrooms, no one can serve as ‘the soil’ in which they grow.”

“That’s just what I’m wondering, Cornelius. Because my forest metaphor has its limits. You see, I believe that no matter what, those melodies, those musical ideas are somehow present somewhere. Those of Schubert, or Mozart, but unimaginable themes by composers who died in the cradle, or even of composers who have never existed. Those works are somewhere, maybe in another dimension. After all, those composers who write for Dilms, sometimes in a neoclassical style, aren’t they cultivating the fruit of a tree that no longer grows in their era? And please note, I don’t believe in anachronisms, or rather, I love them, and I’ve certainly been scolded enough for that! A new melody has its place, even today, provided it’s beautiful and well constructed. Thus those musical works, that inDinity of musical ideas, dozens of new symphonies, by Beethoven or Brahms, operas by Mozart, and probably even my operas, they’re all there somewhere. Moreover, where my own operas are concerned, there is no doubt about it: if the Wandering Jew grants me another thirty years, I’ll write at least ten, like Wagner.”

I could feel that Mahler was at a fever pitch now, inside me… I experienced the surge of adrenalin triggered by a spirit possessed by the most formidable exaltation… A spirit so concentrated that it can travel across space, brieDly discovering dizzying vistas, hallucinatory truths that had to be seized on the Dly before they vanished forever…

“And another thing, little Cornelius: this idea seems to me applicable to all of forms of creativity. In fact, I’d even call it the proof of the creator’s existence… At the least, of one creator, or even several.”

“How so?”

“Aha, so you understand after all? Each composer creates a world, clearly identiDiable, very personal and yet made from the same elements as all the others: twelve notes, about twenty different instruments, a set of chords used by everyone.

And yet, he invents his little universe that’s all his. Now, take creation… Birds, for instance. So many different species; all made from the same molecules, the same scheme pattern, differing in their colors, the chants, a few details. And then the species all together… Countries, planets, galaxies… All of that, from the tiniest to the biggest, bears the mark of its creator, no doubt of several creators. Imagine God as millions of gods, each creating a bird, a Dish, a solar system…”

Mahler fell silent.

“So you’re saying that the proof of a creator’s existence lies in the fact that we ourselves are creators?”

“Yes, that’s it. Everything in the universe is mere analogy. It’s very logical. Look at the smallest thing if you want to understand the biggest. We were created with the aim of creating in turn. And why? No doubt because God was sick and tired of creating everything himself. He’s passing us the torch…”

Mahler’s words were beginning to submerge me in the darkest and most confused

Mahler’s words were beginning to submerge me in the darkest and most confused mishmash of ideas. I was starting to understand his reasoning. After all, I had always wanted to be a composer. The works of Cornelius Franz are thus dangling somewhere, atop a “Franz tree,” hanging there waiting. But not just the works of one Franz alone. There are the mediocre efforts of the beginner Franz, the more successful ones of evolving Franz and perhaps the astounding symphonies of a genius Franz, the one who would have had the strength and the will to surpass himself.

I was reminded of Sartre and his existential theory. Mankind exists purely through his acts. One sentence of his, in particular, came to me: “the genius of some Racine (for instance) is the total of his tragedies; why attribute to Racine the possibility of writing a new tragedy, since as a matter of fact he hasn’t written it?” And yet Mahler’s reasoning seemed to me so convincing. It reassured me, gave me hope. There was certainly the possibility of a Cornelius Franz as a genius awaiting only the willpower of little Cornelius in order to develop into a great, radiant France.

My head was spinning. My mind, already strained by months of cohabitation with Mahler, was sending me disturbing signals, making me no longer sure of anything. In the manner of musical ideas lost in another dimension, I felt myself whirling between two possible lives, or was I simply being swept along the dark, frightening shores of madness? My consciousness and Mahler’s were no longer distinctly separated, and for months I’d lost the sense of whether a thought or a word was coming from myself or from him, the interior voice was no longer really distinct from my voice.

It was time to go see someone, whether Mahler liked it or not.

Chapter 20

”Excuse-me, my dear Maestro, I’m not quite sure I understand what you want from me…”

Professor Rauball was the most famous psychiatrist in Vienna and resembled a robo-portrait of an Austro-Hungarian emperor: face broad and square like a medical dictionary, white mustache stretched out to great length, sideburns busily competing vertically (with their impressive descending line) with the triumphant hair of the practitioner’s Dlowing mane.

All those attributes were mobilized by the problem presented to him, embodied in a musician whose talents the doctor had often had occasion to appreciate; his facial muscles, seized one after the other by a quick tensing, betrayed his mental effort, the search for similar cases in the maze of his memory; the mustache stood up like antennae, assigned the task of detecting the degree of dementia of his patient, while the sideburns kept themselves as straight as possible to indicate the professor’s strict discipline, leaving Cornelius no hope of outwitting him.

“Am I to understand that you are consulting me so that I can examine your case of split personality, which basically is a rather simple problem and, I would even say, rather banal; or are you expecting me to ‘relieve’ you of your intrusive guest?

Because, in the latter case, I would beg to remind you that I am neither a healer nor an exorcist. I am not even acquainted with such types of person in Vienna, so I’d know of no magician to whom I might refer you.”

Cornelius slouched low on the hard wooden armchair that the psychiatrist provided for his patients, and tried to empty his mind for a few seconds to prepare his response. But of course, such an emptying exercise, with his “guest” present, was as impossible as trying to prevent outbursts of applause at the opera house after a successful high C… “Thanks, Cornelius, for bringing us to the crazies just when we have so much work to do. Now get up, right away, and let’s leave this good infantry general to his next patient!”

“SHUT UP, MAHLER!” Franz yelled, realizing he was only damaging his case in the eyes of Herr Professor Rauball. With a furtive glance, he assured himself that the good doctor wasn’t pushing any hidden alarm buttons to alert an armed guard with a strait jacket, and then he continued, as "mezza-voce" as possible: “I beg your pardon, yes, of course, what I mean to say is that, Dirst, I obviously need to understand what’s happening to me, yes, in fact ... I suppose... Well, I think, don’t you see, that if we can Dind the reason... Then, of course.. the remedy...or cure... I believe ... Do—don’t you agree?”

“I believe you need to calm down, for a start. Dear Maestro, think of the self-control that you demonstrated, just last night.... Ah, your Contes d'Hoffmann, the best evening at the Opera in my memory, for quite some years. You were transported, transDigured—” “Possessed!”

believe ... Do—don’t you agree?”

“I believe you need to calm down, for a start. Dear Maestro, think of the self-control that you demonstrated, just last night.... Ah, your Contes d'Hoffmann, the best evening at the Opera in my memory, for quite some years. You were transported, transDigured—” “Possessed!”

“Let’s put that particular term aside for the moment, shall we? It would serve only to accentuate your problem, an effect we don’t need. Very well, then, we have several possibilities. In the worst case, I have to warn you, it could be schizophrenia although I don’t think you’re at that point. Moreover, you’re feeling this presence permanently, is that correct?”

“Yes, professor, except for a brief break in which he was ‘sulking,’ I—he hasn’t left me alone, ever.

“In fact, what I’m going to tell you will probably reduce me, in your eyes, from the rank of ‘neurotic’ to that of a true madman, but—“ “No, my dear Maestro, if I’d had the slightest suspicion of insanity, I’d already have had you committed—“ So I was right, Cornelius thought to himself. The “hidden button” wasn’t just a fantasy in my overheated mind, so all right, better keep my eyes on the professor’s hands and, at the slightest suspicious move, make a run for it…

“Very well then, I’ll tell you precisely what I’m feeling: I am inhabited by Mahler, who is the hero of my whole life, so you might almost say that it’s a dream come true…

I’m conducting better than ever, and I see him composing music in my head, music I’ve never dared to imagine. In fact, I don’t want to be cured from what’s happening, I only want to be certain that it’s really true. I’m not here for you to tell me I’m insane.

On the contrary, I hope to hear you say I’m perfectly normal, and that Gustav Mahler is alive inside me. In other words, I’m not yet quite sure whether I’m dreaming or awake, and I need you to give me a pinch to settle the matter.”

The mustache shook like the wings of a great bird preparing to Dly away… His facial contractions indicated an intense struggle to review the practitioner’s mental Diles, while the sideburns stiffened, to deny Cornelius any illusion of sympathy.

“You know, the problem of reality versus illusion is basically what we have in common: I’m living in the midst of the dreams and dementias of my patients, and you, when you’re composing, aren’t you dreaming up a world of sound that doesn’t exist, or at least not yet? When you prepare to conduct, don’t you conjure up an acoustical universe, and when you’re lost in the heart of that universe, do you feel that you’re on Earth or rather in an ideal world? What I’m telling you is that your creative imagination, which is necessarily superior to the average, may be in the process of creating a ‘doubling’ of your self, rather than concentrating on a mass of abstract notes.

“It’s no cause for concern. I think that a bit of rest, and some tranquilizers—“ The professor suddenly stopped speaking, since the transformation of Cornelius’s facial features was so abrupt and complete. The jaw had doubled in thickness, deep wrinkles stood out in the cheeks, the nose seemed to bend, the lips to harden, the forehead to swell. And a voice—what a voice—emerged from this mouth twisted by an unknown force: “My good professor, I think I’ve heard enough stupidities. Mr. Franz is neither mad nor possessed by a walking dream. He has simply been kind enough to give me lodging for a certain time, and I can assure you that, as soon as my work is completed, I’ll give him back to you just as I found him, no doubt with the addition of a few memories and a bit more talent, along with a precise idea of the gulf that separates skill from Genius. So I will ask you to let go of the small apparatus you’ve just grabbed ahold of in your pocket, and which terrorizes my friend so much, and I

forehead to swell. And a voice—what a voice—emerged from this mouth twisted by an unknown force: “My good professor, I think I’ve heard enough stupidities. Mr. Franz is neither mad nor possessed by a walking dream. He has simply been kind enough to give me lodging for a certain time, and I can assure you that, as soon as my work is completed, I’ll give him back to you just as I found him, no doubt with the addition of a few memories and a bit more talent, along with a precise idea of the gulf that separates skill from Genius. So I will ask you to let go of the small apparatus you’ve just grabbed ahold of in your pocket, and which terrorizes my friend so much, and I urge you to reassure him about his condition and let us take our leave.”

All right, acute double-personality pathology, with the whole panoply of extreme cases.

The practitioner even recalled having studied examples of patients who began perfectly speaking languages that had been completely unknown to them an hour earlier.

“Cornelius, calm yourself! I have to say, I’ve never seen such a case of facial tetany, no doubt of hysterical origin… Would you care to… Uh, would you mind if I were to make a video of it? It’s an example of a variety that’s unique—excuse me a second.”

The psychiatrist touched a small video camera that stood on the corner of his desk, then continued: “So then, proceed, tell me about those works, Mr. Franz... Or would you rather I call you Mr. Mahler?” "’Dear Maestro’ will cover both,” Mahler replied, laughing heartily. “What do you know about my life, or about my work, in fact, because if you want me to tell you something of what I’m about to undertake now, it’s essential that you know what I did… Before!”

“I’m Viennese, dear Maestro, and thus I know my Mahler. I prefer opera, because there you see more cases that interest me; in fact that’s about all you see. But the symphony, as a matter of fact, offers me a change of scene. Thus I’ve already heard your nine symphonies several times.”

“Nine,” Mahler said sadly with a sigh. “My poor Tenth, abandoned back there…”

“I’ve never heard the reconstruction of the other movements of the Tenth, aside from the Dirst one, I believe, which is apparently complete.”

Mahler leaped up onto the desk and seized the psychiatrist by the mustache, pinning him against a wall cabinet full of books.

“What’s that? What reconstruction? Nothing has been completed! Not even the Dirst movement. Until I’ve had the chance to conduct and hear one of my works, to revise it, correct a thousand things, nothing, absolutely nothing, is Dinished! Don’t you understand? I rewrote my Fifth more than a dozen times. No one but myself can write my music. That’s precisely why I’ve come back to complete my symphony.

That’s why I’m haunting this poor bandleader, and why I allow him no freedom to think, to act, nor even to want anything at all. No one else is Mahler, no one but me!

Me, me, ME!” The psychiatrist looked steadily at his patient, his steel-blue eyes, like those of a hypnotist, glued to the visitor, while he weighed the words he was about to speak.

“My dear Maestro,” he began, as gently as a musician who knows he’s preparing to deliver a huge crescendo, who is carefully plotting every move, “allow me to tell you something important.”

Then, gently pushing Cornelius back, the practitioner raised his voice little by little: “It’s not very professional on my part, I know, but I am starting to believe your story of metempsychosis. Don’t ask me why—my reasons are as irrational as the case itself. I believe you. When I say ‘I,’ it’s not the doctor of psychiatry speaking, it’s only

“My dear Maestro,” he began, as gently as a musician who knows he’s preparing to deliver a huge crescendo, who is carefully plotting every move, “allow me to tell you something important.”

Then, gently pushing Cornelius back, the practitioner raised his voice little by little: “It’s not very professional on my part, I know, but I am starting to believe your story of metempsychosis. Don’t ask me why—my reasons are as irrational as the case itself. I believe you. When I say ‘I,’ it’s not the doctor of psychiatry speaking, it’s only the man. I believe you. And because I believe you, I must tell you something. First of all, I as a music lover have never quite understood your music, which I Dind a bit disorganized—even though, on the clinical level, I have to admit that it has a certain fascination. All those mood swings, that grotesque carnival, those grimacing masks, those fanfares preceded by funeral marches, lullabies, Tyrolean song, all of that thrown together helter-skelter, like in some Oriental march… I prefer our solid German music, clean, precise, clear. You know where you are, you’re not knocked about like in one of those trains I once took across India, from north to south, full of noise, people, inexplicable stops, and takeoffs that are just as mysterious, trains in which you wonder at times if the workers who built the track aren’t directly in front of you, still at work, laying down the rails or displacing them. In short, I’ve often made an effort to understand you, but never succeeded. But what I’ve heard about your Tenth convinced me that you’d reached the end of your rope. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste my time completing that work. It’s a kind of music that’s lost all meaning, it’s the music of a madman. Moreover, I’ve seen reproductions of the manuscript on which you covered the pages with your appeals to madness. And madness has heard you. You know, when someone is wrestling with Providence, like you and a few other great men, it’s essential to be careful with your appeals to the gods that rule us. When someone like you sets out to summon madness, temptation, death, well, it’s pretty sure that they will appear, that they’ll even come storming in.

But that’s not what I was getting at. You see, my dear Maestro, what’s always disturbed me about you, more than your music, it what I’ve read about your private life, and especially your marriage. You went through hell that summer of 1910, and you wrote the sketch for that Dinal symphony, in the worst mental confusion, because your universe was collapsing. And it collapsed because your wife was deceiving you, escaping you. And your wife escaped you because you were a terrible husband. Oh, not because you cheated on her, no, you were a man of great probity. You never struck her either, or came home drunk, shamed her in public by your idiocy. She would have found all of that easier to forgive. In all those ways, you were above reproach. But you smothered her by making her sense your absolute superiority, in what was most precious to her: the feeling of being an artist herself. By preventing her from composing music, or rather by making her see that it was absolutely pointless. By cutting her off from worldly pleasures by your mental demands at every moment. ‘I married an abstraction’—isn’t that what she said? Those long summers waiting till the dear great man had Dinished his full day of composing. And during the year, until he Dinished his work at the opera house. And those letters!

Those postcards in which the dear great man felt compelled to relate his travels, his Dlatulence, his bowel movements. To imagine you can marry a woman twenty years your junior, abolish her dreams, imprison her in the house and smother her with your bathroom aromas! Mr. Mahler, I have no pity for you at all. You brought your problems on yourself, and when they arrived, you called down Heaven against you, so it would crush you. And that’s what it has done!”

Rauball stopped for a deep breath before screaming his Dinal coda: “And so, my dear sir, don’t come here asking me for help. Heaven helps those who help themselves!

I’m going to give you a prescription that’s simple and free of charge: Digure out your own shit, literally and Diguratively!”

The Mahler/Franz duo had listened to the professor’s tirade with mouth half open.

That mouth opened fully now, stretched monstrously, as if to utter a visually depicted scream, as Rauball braced himself for a supernatural thundering. But the throat, tightened to its limit, let nothing through but feeble squeak, like the grating of poorly oiled machinery, a door grinding shut. Then, it was like a wild animal Dinally let loose, as the body threw itself backward and seemed to pierce the doorway rather than walk through it, and the odd personage and his yell, inseparable, were dispersed through the corridors with their fortress-like walls.

The Mahler/Franz duo had listened to the professor’s tirade with mouth half open.

That mouth opened fully now, stretched monstrously, as if to utter a visually depicted scream, as Rauball braced himself for a supernatural thundering. But the throat, tightened to its limit, let nothing through but feeble squeak, like the grating of poorly oiled machinery, a door grinding shut. Then, it was like a wild animal Dinally let loose, as the body threw itself backward and seemed to pierce the doorway rather than walk through it, and the odd personage and his yell, inseparable, were dispersed through the corridors with their fortress-like walls.

Once past the shock, the professor could only mentally close the treatise on hallucinatory hysteria he’d been consulting, and tell himself with a sigh: “My mother was right: go for medicine instead, Karl!”

EPILOGUE in four movements ​

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​1.

He’s gone. Or else I’m cured, it depends.

And yet I only feel as if I’m in remission, or about to sink into a different state, worse than the one before.

My mind, tortured so long by the conDlict of an unnatural cohabitation, is now prey to a new feeling, uncontrollable, unbearable: the sensation of the void left by being abandoned.

I try to remember similar situations: mourning, unrequited love.

I sense that what’s happening to me will surpass anything I’ve experienced before, both in impact and in duration.

One thing is clear: the fact that I’ve fallen victim to a psychic disorder or that all of this has been completely true, none of that alters the fact that I can’t tolerate the void left by Mahler.

I was living as a couple, do you see? First I felt violated by the sudden, violent intrusion of that presence, and then I was hypnotized by the brilliance of his genius, and I ended up loving him like a person quite distinct from myself; the fact that he was living in my head became a pleasant habit, then a state of grace, until doubt crept in, and the spectre of schizophrenia cast its shadow over everything else.

It was easy to let go of my small ego, so mediocre in comparison with his giant personality.

Like a being who gives up his aspirations and dreams to someone who brings him the comfort of an easy material life, as with a couple at times, someone joyously merges with the aura of a more talented partner, I surrendered my ego to Mahler’s, I was like his dutiful little wife in his household, happy and docile. I no longer thought, I left everything to him: he looked after everything!

And now, nothing.

The break is still new, the shockwave hasn’t hit me yet.

That’s how it happens in break-ups. It’s like a tsunami. There’s the quick, abrupt instant of the announcement, and then nothing for a while. Then, in waves, comes the awareness, the

the aura of a more talented partner, I surrendered my ego to Mahler’s, I was like his dutiful little wife in his household, happy and docile. I no longer thought, I left everything to him: he looked after everything!

And now, nothing.

The break is still new, the shockwave hasn’t hit me yet.

That’s how it happens in break-ups. It’s like a tsunami. There’s the quick, abrupt instant of the announcement, and then nothing for a while. Then, in waves, comes the awareness, the gap, the awful absence that nothing can Dill and no one can compensate. And that keeps occurring, again, again, it maddens you.

There it is; I’ll really go mad this time. I know it without needing to go see Dr. Rauball.

Mahler has left me at the moment when I Dinally, truly started to have faith in his presence.

And you never truly suffer from losing someone until you’ve started believing in him.

I’m headed to the little cemetery of Grinzing, on the border between Vienna and Heiligenstadt.

It’s been Mahler’s resting place for a century.

If there’s one place where I can hope to feel his presence, it’s there.

What’s left below ground, under this little plot of grass guarded by a cold, hard stone bearing just the name “Gustav Mahler”? Two cartons no doubt already dissolved and dispersed in the ground: his and his daughter’s, below, little Putzi, who died just four year before her father.

And so? What can I expect from a few bones, after I’ve had his mind in its entirety? What is a body, once the soul is departed? A statue of Dlesh, as unlikely to answer my prayers as the marble faces adorning the tombs on every side.

And yet this is where I’m headed. I have no other choice; my madness is taking a fetishistic turn, and the Dirst object demanded of my fetishism is the body of Mahler. It’s to know that he’s there. For, if there’s the least trace of Mahler’s mortal coil remaining, it can only be here and nowhere else.

I’ve approached, touched, caressed everything that can be grasped of Mahler: his manuscripts, his glasses, his batons, a suit. None of that contained him, or satisDied me. But down there, under the earth, there is still the receptacle of what was once HIM: if there’s the slightest chance that his soul is wandering somewhere, it’s got to be near this grass zone.

And then, I was joined to him in spirit for six months, to his most intimate self, to his slightest thoughts, even those uttered to himself alone, surely never imagining I could hear them: it’s normal that I should try to approach his remains. I must, I have no choice.

Arriving at the cemetery gate, I notice at once, on the door to the “chancery” as they call it here, a sign announcing that there’s an opening for a new chancellor. In short, a caretaker.

Me—chancellor? I see myself for an instant with a cowlick and a small mustache, my arm raised, yelling in front of the gravestones, haranguing the departed. No, Franz, no tasteless humor. Not here.

The house is small, squat, the roof seems too low to accommodate the upper story, which nevertheless exists; it seems like a miniature house, a house for a Christmas market. I push the door open, as various aged odors recall mixed memories of cinnamon, cold tea, roast meats reheated several times by the bachelor who doesn’t always remember to empty the rubbish bins or wash the dishes stacked in the sink, slightly anxious odors when combined, the anguish of negligence, of renunciation, of bad weather. I give a slight cough to indicate my presence, and the chancellor about to leave hardly notices my intrusion.

“Please, mein Herr… Excuse me for interrupting… I saw the sign on the door… Is the position still vacant?”

“Mein Herr, as you can imagine, if it had been Dilled, I’d have taken down the sign. I know my job, I’ll have you know. Around here, anything not needed has to be removed immediately: concessions that have expired, Dlowers now faded, visitors lingering when closing time

the anguish of negligence, of renunciation, of bad weather. I give a slight cough to indicate my presence, and the chancellor about to leave hardly notices my intrusion.

“Please, mein Herr… Excuse me for interrupting… I saw the sign on the door… Is the position still vacant?”

“Mein Herr, as you can imagine, if it had been Dilled, I’d have taken down the sign. I know my job, I’ll have you know. Around here, anything not needed has to be removed immediately: concessions that have expired, Dlowers now faded, visitors lingering when closing time occurs: WEG, alles WEG, out of here, raus!”

“Well, then… I wondered… um, the position, then… it could interest me.”

This time the little gnome, the guardian of ephemera, sizes me up with a look of sadistic pleasure, his eyes squeezed nearly shut with malice.

“And what experience can you claim to qualify you for the title of cemetery chancellor? You know this is a major tourist site: we’ve got famous men here. Visitors from all over the world. It requires a certain worthiness.”

“That is… I am experienced, in fact, in cultural tourism… It’s… more or less my profession, in sum, I’m a conductor at the opera house.”

I knew that the Vienna State Opera was an institution that commanded the respect of any Viennese worthy of the name, but my interviewer’s reaction to the name was truly exaggerated.

First, he jumped up from his chair, executed three complete rotations around his desk and then froze in front of me, this time with eyes open and popping from their sockets: “I knew it! I knew I recognized your face. Kappelmeister Franz, isn’t it? I have a subscription to the opera. I always see you from the rear, but all the same, at the curtain calls you show your face. You’re joking, of course? You’re here to make fun of a poor man whose occupation is well below your own world.”

“No one can be more ‘below,’ in fact,” I said with a serious tone that ruled out any contempt or condescension. “But, you see, my workplace too is called the ‘pit.’ So that makes me a colleague, to some extent…”

“Herr Franz, stop it at once, you’re pulling my leg! Next you’ll tell me you want to give up opera for my, my…”

“Well you see, Mr. … Mr. …”

“Hoffstetter.”

“Well, then, Herr Hoffstetter, I’ll be entirely frank with you: I have had enough of the pressure, the routine, the stress, the fear of being torn to pieces one day, idolized the next.

I’m not getting any younger, I yearn for peace and quiet, and above all, let me tell you a secret: I’m a composer. I need a quiet job that leaves me free to meditate by day and to composer at night. I can see from this little house you live in: everything speaks to me of serenity. I look outside—“ “Outside, I’m afraid nothing speaks any more, Herr Franz…”

“But that’s exactly what I’m looking for. I don’t want any noise, or the least noise possible, around me, no cars passing by, nor the agitation of a crowd, of an audience. Not even the song of a rooster or the chirping of a bird! I need a little cabin in the woods, like—“ “Like Mahler, who lives here, as you surely know!”

“So I’ve heard…”

I begin to wonder if my friend here has the least suspicion of my intentions. He’s a shrewd guy, who knows people, at least those whose nerves are frayed by sorrow and loss. I wouldn’t want him to be suspicious… that my interest in his job conceals shady motives…

song of a rooster or the chirping of a bird! I need a little cabin in the woods, like—“ “Like Mahler, who lives here, as you surely know!”

“So I’ve heard…”

I begin to wonder if my friend here has the least suspicion of my intentions. He’s a shrewd guy, who knows people, at least those whose nerves are frayed by sorrow and loss. I wouldn’t want him to be suspicious… that my interest in his job conceals shady motives…

“Although, Herr Franz, you don’t conduct works by Mahler, since you’re an opera conductor, aren’t you?”

“Only of necessity, believe me. I love all of music, and I play Schubert trios at home, which I love more than anything.”

“So you know Mahler well?”

I suppress a grimace of pain and the urge to laugh…

“Somewhat. It’s not my cup of tea. But about the job… How do I go about it?”

“Well, as you can imagine, I’m not the one to decide, although I get to put a word in of course. You have to write to the town of Grinzing, which will respond in due course. But I’ve been chancellor for thirty-eight years, and that’s not to be sneezed at. In fact, I get the last word, Mr. Franz…”

The “chancellor” emitted those last words from lips drawn together like a Chinese Dlute, as if projecting a frothy jet across the narrow space between us. I understand that, after the years spent applauding me at the opera house, the hour of my submission has arrived. I’m going to have to repay him in kind…

“Herr Hoffstetter, I’ll be submitting my application as you say, but, above all, pending a reply, and whatever form that may take, I would like very much to spend some time with you, regularly, to learn from you so that—well, yes, that’s it: to be, in a sense, your assistant.

“Would you accept me?”

And voila, I’ve won. Flattery, even the most abject, always succeeds miraculously with a true Viennese. Even when he sees through it. It may even succeed precisely because he knows what you’re up to. It’s all part of a game inscribed in the genes for many generations, a sort of tradition. And God knows that traditions are rock solid in Vienna.

“Herr Franz, you as my apprentice, it’s unthinkable. You, the reDined Wagnerian, the grand Strauss specialist (I mean Richard, the great Richard, of course, the waltzer)!”

“You can always learn, right up to your Dinal day, and what I want to learn now is to look after this little corner of earth in the right way, according to the rules… Herr Hoffstetter, please!”

“Well then, come back any day you like, right when we open up, since that’s when I perform the most important tasks, because funerals or site transfers occur in the morning. Perhaps tomorrow, Herr Franz?”

I realize I’m being dismissed. I take my leave all the quicker since I’m impatient to visit Mahler’s tomb. It’s not far off, to the left, then to the right going uphill and there, just after the somewhat kitschy stone lions, there he is on the left, Dirst one in that lane with his strict, very “Bauhaus” stone marker, the name alone engraved in the stone like something obvious.

And with lots of pebbles on top, testimony to the passage of Jewish visitors.

No tombstone, just a rectangle of grass with miniature boxwood hedges on either side. I approach reverentially, kneel down and caress the lawn with the tips of my Dingers…

“Maestro... “

very “Bauhaus” stone marker, the name alone engraved in the stone like something obvious.

And with lots of pebbles on top, testimony to the passage of Jewish visitors.

No tombstone, just a rectangle of grass with miniature boxwood hedges on either side. I approach reverentially, kneel down and caress the lawn with the tips of my Dingers…

“Maestro... “ I’m whispering, I can barely hear my words.

“Maestro, are you there?”

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​2.

It’s been more than a month now since I became the new “chancellor.”

It didn’t take long. The papers arrived shortly after my visit, and my “master,” being satisDied with his disciple, recommended me warmly to the municipal council.

I believe he was in a hurry to retire to his native Tyrol; he had barely had time to recommend me on his way out, almost like someone afraid he’ll miss his train. “Don’t forget: the Dlowers must be removed as soon as the Dirst petal wilts. We are a his-to-ric site! People come from all over the world, and I don’t want to pick up a local newspaper and learn that the Grinzing cemetery is going down the drain!”

“Don’t you worry, dear professor, I’ve retained every one of your lessons!”

The only response I heard was a grumble, followed by an “Auf Wiedersehen” while he was already bound for the taxi that had come to fetch him.

And here I am, then, inspecting the bouquets placed here and there.

But there’s no further need now to play at glibness with my teacher. I can drop the smile of an eager pupil, slightly quizzical, and stroll the lanes here with the anxiety of the fanatic in search of his prey. I watch for a shadow, a silhouette, something that could indicate that he’s on the prowl, that he has returned to haunt his tomb, as any respectable phantom feels compelled to do.

I even monitor the comings and goings of “cultural” visitors, as Herr Hoffstetter put it. Who knows? Mahler may have slipped into the skin of one of them.

Perhaps he hasn’t quite completed his task, perhaps he can’t locate the pathway to my body.

Or worse, Dinding me unsatisfactory, he may have simply dropped me for “another.” He is no doubt still in Vienna today, busy correcting and completing the work “we” started together.

Did this mean that the Tenth remained unDinished, despite the hundred pages we Dilled in together, and the “OK to print” order almost stamped on the Dirst page?

The thought is unbearable. Good grief, it’s actually like a love story. I’m lamenting the desertion, and now I’m jealous of a possible “rival.”

The major talents whom we admire, especially the geniuses, but today also the pop stars— in short, the personalities with whom we identify, before surrendering ourselves to them wholeheartedly—usually inspire hordes of fans, recognizable by the deDining trait of jealousy and its twin, possessiveness. Even I, Kappelmeister (“Master Conductor”) Franz, had my two or three fans, always the same two or three throughout my thirty years of service, who used to wait for me at the stage door clutching their eternal photo for me to sign. For twenty years it was the same shot, the one from the ofDicial program book, of which copies were available at the opera house bookshop. For this kind of thing, Vienna proves extremely well organized. Then came the era of digital cameras, and I began to sign and dedicate candid photos, most often rather unDlattering ones, the kind of image I wouldn’t have “approved.” Still bathed in perspiration, with tailcoat unbuttoned, facial features distorted by several hours’ sustained exertions, the least clumsy ones had simply been shot while I left the theater after a performance. There were images taken from the Internet, just

had my two or three fans, always the same two or three throughout my thirty years of service, who used to wait for me at the stage door clutching their eternal photo for me to sign. For twenty years it was the same shot, the one from the ofDicial program book, of which copies were available at the opera house bookshop. For this kind of thing, Vienna proves extremely well organized. Then came the era of digital cameras, and I began to sign and dedicate candid photos, most often rather unDlattering ones, the kind of image I wouldn’t have “approved.” Still bathed in perspiration, with tailcoat unbuttoned, facial features distorted by several hours’ sustained exertions, the least clumsy ones had simply been shot while I left the theater after a performance. There were images taken from the Internet, just about everywhere. In general, fans never erred where their addiction was concerned, although I did happen once to sign the photo of a woman who had a vague resemblance to me—but I said nothing, since the fan was nearly blind.

Yet I was never the subject of a monomaniacal obsession. That fate was reserved to the superstars. Those who have their dedicated fan clubs, with an exclusive, lifelong commitment. You can count with both hands the artists who attract this kind of “pilot Dish.”

Their fans have no other idol; they devote everything, time, money, night and day to their hero. Such zealots are jealous, possessive because they are possessed. Once I asked a woman, whose main activity seemed to consist in awaiting her hero at the stage door, whether in Vienna or anywhere else in the world: “But what do you do once you’re back home?”

“I think of him,” she answered.

All of which is just to say that I had become one of that breed. Ever since Mahler had taken up residence in me, and even more since he had departed, whatever life and energy were left to me were devoted to him, unconditionally, without speaking a word.

While processing such thoughts, just as I had raked the pile of dead Dlowers accumulated near the compost a bit earlier, I notice a man who looks familiar.

Bent over before Mahler’s tomb, he seems in a trance, lost in prayer. And as a matter of fact, for reasons that escape me, his general posture reminds me of a fan wrapped up in his or her complete, devout vigil.

His nervous way of casting furtive glances in every direction to be certain that no one was approaching “his” tomb ended up intriguing me. I am, after all, the new chancellor, performing my job here… Which consists, among other things, in ensuring that no misdeed is being perpetrated by a mental case, a deDiler or a grave robber.

This man, no longer young but still rather striking in appearance, is mumbling something, on the order of a hundred and one years… not forgotten…thanks to me…the greatest of his admirers…devoted my life to his work…

Then he turns toward me, aware of and irritated by my presence, and I recognize Sullivan K, the famous attorney who was converted late in life to orchestra conducting, specialized in Mahler. Sullivan had been recommended to me by De L’Etable, Mahler’s biographer, and I’d no doubt been mentioned to Sullivan.

“I beg your pardon, sir, I know the cemetery is open to everyone, but I need to meditate in solitude. Today is a special day, and this is the tomb of a relative…”

“Of course, Mr. Sullivan, I had forgotten that today is May 18 and, since Mahler has no descendants, you are basically his closest relative. I’ll leave you…”

The visitor made a little jump, peering at me like a prairie dog with a dramatic look “You recognize me then, and I thank you, Mr. …?”

“Cornelius Franz, the new Cemetery Chancellor of Grinzing.”

“Isn’t that odd. It seems to me there was a conductor of that name in—“ “The same, in fact. I gave it all up to come here, where it’s quiet, to keep our friend company.”

“You recognize me then, and I thank you, Mr. …?”

“Cornelius Franz, the new Cemetery Chancellor of Grinzing.”

“Isn’t that odd. It seems to me there was a conductor of that name in—“ “The same, in fact. I gave it all up to come here, where it’s quiet, to keep our friend company.”

“FRIEND? By what right, sir, to you claim to be Mahler’s friend? No one, not even I myself, could have the temerity…”

And there we are… Sullivan K. had just donned, in a split second, the complete costume of the fan, or what I’d even call the fanatic, as the two words share the same origin. He was just about as obsessed by Mahler as De L’Etable. Where De L’Etable was concerned, the man known in this world as “Mahler’s Widow,” I was starting to understand why. This biographer, surely the best of the breed and the only one who had devoted his entire life to his subject—thanks to his family fortune—he had quickly moved on to the rank of personality transfer, identiDication. On the other hand, Sullivan was consumed by a more carnal, less erudite passion, although it was equally invasive. He conducted Mahler, even if his legitimacy was a matter of some debate in “the Dield.” So altogether, he was another Mahler with whom I was going to have to deal… For at least as long as he remained on “my territory.”

“Don’t you think that there are one-sided friendships? Especially today, when the word has lost its depth, when you need only to push a button to declare yourself a ‘friend’ of a person you know nothing about… After all, you and I have devoted sufDicient time to Mahler to believe we could easily win his friendship if he returned among us?”

The attorney laughed somewhat maniacally.

“I can tell you, my young ‘friend,’ that Mahler wouldn’t have paid you the slightest attention.

You’ve never been more than a drudge at the opera house, without inspiration, without ‘sacred Dire.’ There was nothing Mahler hated more than the ‘lukewarm.’”

I was torn between wanting to laugh aloud and to slam him in the face with my rake.

“You are too kind. You will be so good as to pay homage to my modesty. After all, I’ve given up the baton to come work here, to devote the rest of my life to meditating about our great man, to keeping watch over him, to—“ “Ridiculous! What a waste of time and energy. Mahler has nothing to say to you, and you’ll derive nothing from cogitating near his grave. It’s a lost cause.”

“What makes you so sure? Are you in my head?”

“No, but HE—“ I give a start, thinking he may have suddenly guessed my little secret. He continues, suddenly calm, his face bathed in the light of a peaceful epiphany.

“Listen, Mr. Franz, let’s go into your ofDice and, since you’re no longer ‘in the game,’ I will share an important revelation with you.”

Without a word we cross the few lanes to reach the chancellery, and then we sit down in the minuscule salon where, just a short time before, I had met my predecessor for that job interview…

“A beer, Mr. Sullivan? Coffee, schnapps?”

“You don't’ have something more reDined? Like a mint tea? I’ve just arrived from New York and I have no real taste for the strong impact of the Teutonic proletarian.”

“I can make you a Darjeeling.”

interview…

“A beer, Mr. Sullivan? Coffee, schnapps?”

“You don't’ have something more reDined? Like a mint tea? I’ve just arrived from New York and I have no real taste for the strong impact of the Teutonic proletarian.”

“I can make you a Darjeeling.”

“You have it loose? Fresh? From Mariage Frères?”

“Teabags, I’m afraid, from the local supermarket.”

“Ein Glas Wasser, denn,” the delicate zealot said with a sigh “Mit oder ohne?”

“Either. And thus, my friend Franz, I’m going to share something with you, since you are the new guardian of the earthly temple. I, for my part, am the guardian of the celestial temple.”

“Sure, I know. You’ve been that for more than thirty years. Where one of the symphonies is concerned, at least. Which you have learned, studied, revised, and of which you’ve even acquired the precious manuscript.”

“That’s not what I want to speak about, Cornelius. HE has Dinally entered into me, HE wandered for a century before Dinding me, me, his only friend, his only refuge. He is in me. I am Mahler, Cornelius.”

Obviously, I’m speechless. The chaotic thoughts invading me seem like the mass of an orchestra tuning up. A hundred voices that mix without uniting, with no consensus emerging. I end up saying, in a sort of death rattle: “And… That’s interesting, really, I think I believe you…”

“No, you couldn’t. You couldn’t believe such a thing, even if you were the gullible village idiot. I’m telling you nevertheless, since I just had to tell someone… Someone sufDiciently aware of things, and at the same time who represented no danger for me. You’re something of a miracle: you know Mahler and you’re no longer in the profession. I know my Gustav well, and—“ Sullivan stopped suddenly to listen to something, a distant sound or perhaps a deep physical sensation. He’s not going to throw a Dit here, I hope…

“Of course… No, Gustav, I won’t tell him… Yes, Gustav, you’re absolutely right…”

It takes all my strength of will to avoid showing my agitation. I can’t believe what I’m seeing and hearing, and yet I know precisely what’s going on in the head of my companion. I have to say something, I have to ask him…

“Well then, let’s say I believe you, or at least that I’m not taking you for a madman… Can you tell me when this started? How it manifests itself?”

“I’m getting to that. It began soon after the centenary of his death, to be precise. I thought at one point that I was suffering a seizure of schizophrenia, or precocious senility. But I have to face the obvious: it is in fact he who has entered into me. In fact, it started with a telephone call. De l’Etable was telling me a story of possession, about Mahler’s music supposedly returning in a strange way, by the voice of a hallucination. “I assure you, Sullivan, he was on the line, singing something to me that he had composed. He wanted to meet with me. When I rang off, his voice was still inside me, chanting, faster and faster, louder and louder.’ De l’Etable was so shaken that his drunken state somehow contaminated me. About an hour after that phone call, I fainted and when I came to my sense he was inside my head, all of him, his soul, his genius, his voice in particular. And since then he hasn’t left me for a second.”

call. De l’Etable was telling me a story of possession, about Mahler’s music supposedly returning in a strange way, by the voice of a hallucination. “I assure you, Sullivan, he was on the line, singing something to me that he had composed. He wanted to meet with me. When I rang off, his voice was still inside me, chanting, faster and faster, louder and louder.’ De l’Etable was so shaken that his drunken state somehow contaminated me. About an hour after that phone call, I fainted and when I came to my sense he was inside my head, all of him, his soul, his genius, his voice in particular. And since then he hasn’t left me for a second.”

“But… Has he told you why he returned?”

“Because, like all phantoms, he can’t leave so long as he still has ‘unDinished business,’ as we call it in my country.”

“And that ‘business’ is…?”

Sullivan paused for theatrical effect, staring at me with the intensity of one possessed.

“Mahler has assigned me to locate the libretto of his lost opera. Called Rübezahl. Ever heard of it?”

“Of course I have. He had written the libretto and part of the music, soon after he turned twenty, and it was his friend, the philosopher Siegfried Lipiner, who lost the famous document.”

“What an imbecile, what a pretentious pompous fool, that Lipiner. De l’Etable certainly did him a favor by naming him in his biography. Thus, his name has survived, in the absence of his work. He lost Mahler’s opera for us. Mahler’s opera!” He was close to screaming, while his eyes seemed to be playing the cymbals. “In short, to Dind the libretto. A job for Sherlock Holmes. It would take a detective of genius, or else, like Mahler, you’d have to have some complicity with the afterlife to discover where it’s to be found. So Mahler told me, the libretto is in a safe place, squeezed between two volumes on the shelves of a library, somewhere in the Tyrol.”

I haven’t made much progress toward understanding the meaning of this dramatic performance, but all I can do is wait, and listen…

“Then, once the libretto is found, plus the sketches of a score, Mahler is supposed to dictate to me all the music left to be written. So there it is, Franz. Now you know everything.”

Such silence reigned between us that I hear the inDinitesimal whisper of the tea infusing inside the bag, in the boiling water in my cup, as well as the crystalline crackling of mineral water in the glass of this monomaniacal lawyer. I imagine an ant playing a miniature piano to accompany a ladybug singing Schubert.

“One detail bugs me, if you don't mind. Mahler took possession of your mind, so why are you visiting his tomb?”

“Well, because sometimes I lose him, he leaves or is called away somewhere, I don’t know.

Here, for instance. He spoke to me a few minutes ago, but since then, nothing. He never explains himself concerning these unbearable fugues, those moments when I no longer feel him in my head. You have no idea what it’s like, being him and myself at the same time…”

“On the contrary, I believe I can imagine it very well.”

Sullivan seems to be seeking the particular sneer most likely to convey the disdain he feels for my words. He gives it up, Dinding even such contempt deplorable, a waste of his intelligence. A pleasant idea appears to banish those last thoughts, and he addresses me, smiling: “But, Herr Franz, there is one thing I can’t ask anyone but you… I had given up on trying, with your touchy predecessor… But you, at least, understand me.”

“Anything I can help you with, dear sir.”

Sullivan bites his lip in a haughty reDlex, communicating to me that, for him, everything that I

intelligence. A pleasant idea appears to banish those last thoughts, and he addresses me, smiling: “But, Herr Franz, there is one thing I can’t ask anyone but you… I had given up on trying, with your touchy predecessor… But you, at least, understand me.”

“Anything I can help you with, dear sir.”

Sullivan bites his lip in a haughty reDlex, communicating to me that, for him, everything that I can will never be more than too little, compared with this everything that he wants.

“Well, all right… When I come here, I’d like to be perfectly peaceful and, what’s more, I’d like to come here in the evening, at nightfall… To catch the very essence of this place, which is the heart of shadows.”

“You want me to admit you here for a… private, nocturnal visit, is that it?”

“Absolutely! What a pleasure to be understood by someone of the same stamp as oneself.”

This time he pinches his nostrils so that I can’t miss the Dlattery of his last words. “And I don’t like to impose on your kindness, but I’d love to be completely alone, I mean, you…”

“I understand perfectly. I’ll let you in, and then I’ll take off, no doubt to have dinner in town, and I’ll let you out when I return.”

“It’s possible that… I may need longer. In fact, staying overnight would suit me perfectly.

What’s more, I would be bringing some material with me, if that’s not going too far.”

“What kind of material?”

The American visitor seemed possessed of an almost hysterical excitement, which became more intense with each new sentence he uttered.

“You see, well, I’m somewhat practiced in spiritualism, occult phenomena. So I’d like to bring along a few measuring devices, a video camera, projectors, to capture a possible ectoplasm.”

Well, well, so there’s someone at least as insane as me in this Dine town of Vienna. I can always hang onto that comfort if I happen to go back to Dr. Rauball…

We agreed to meet that very evening. Sullivan seemed eager not to lose any time, and showed conDidence. I watched him walk away from the cemetery, hurrying, hopping more than walking, like some maritime bird rushing to join his equals on a sandbank.

At nightfall, here he is, punctual, waiting stifDly like a soldier on a stake-out by the entry to a palace, his intense glance shooting far past me in the direction of Mahler’s grave. Obviously, for him, I am just a cog in the mechanics involved in displacing the heavy mass of the gate to let him in. I let him through, along with his heavy carton wheeled in by two assistants.

“And who said they could enter?”

“They’re leaving again, immediately! I told you, Mr. Franz, alone! I must be absolutely alone.”

I wait nevertheless until I see the “assistants” drive off, till the sound of their motor mixes in the whispers of the neighboring woods.

“All right, everything seems to be in order. If you promise me—“ “Thank you, my friend! Go, take advantage of your evening, your night, I won’t need a thing except absolute quiet, and not to be disturbed or even observed, on any pretext.”

I don’t reply, I just close the gate, not bolting it, and dress in haste for the concert I plan to attend. I leave the place, not without feeling I’ve admitted a thief and given him free reign.

He can say what he likes, Mahler doesn’t belong to him and, barring any proof to the contrary, I’m the one the genius chose to spend an entire year with, in our era, and to Dinish his symphony. I don’t believe for a second that Gustav could have doubled himself to inhabit

“Thank you, my friend! Go, take advantage of your evening, your night, I won’t need a thing except absolute quiet, and not to be disturbed or even observed, on any pretext.”

I don’t reply, I just close the gate, not bolting it, and dress in haste for the concert I plan to attend. I leave the place, not without feeling I’ve admitted a thief and given him free reign.

He can say what he likes, Mahler doesn’t belong to him and, barring any proof to the contrary, I’m the one the genius chose to spend an entire year with, in our era, and to Dinish his symphony. I don’t believe for a second that Gustav could have doubled himself to inhabit Sullivan at the same time as he resided in me. That makes no sense.

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​3.

I hate going to concerts, or to the opera. Especially the opera, since it’s longer.

I’m restless. I like to conduct because I get to move, if only on the square meter assigned to me. Even at the piano, I at least have a pretext for leaning and swaying on my stool from the beginning to the end of the recital.

I like museums, I like being able to spend as much time as I like with a work of art. A whole afternoon, if necessary, or just a simple glance in passing. At concerts, or even in the cinema, I’m barely seated before I am desperate to get up, to leave at once, even before things begin.

If it’s an opera, I start perspiring, and I sometimes panic if I’m jammed into the middle of a row. I can just barely tolerate premieres of new works, because I don’t know when they’re going to end; in an opera, each scene might be the last, and the hope of deliverance is always present. But one thing of which I’m entirely incapable is to sit through a Götterdämmerung, of which the Dirst act, as I know in advance, will last more than two hours. For the Nozze di Figaro, I can hold out until the intermission if the singers are good. If not, I get up, and I don’t give a damn if a furious baritone recognizes me. In cases like that, I’m reminded of a scene in the Lubitsch Dilm To Be or Not To Be, and cross the auditorium with a wide smile.

Except that I don’t go to meet the singer’s wife backstage.

All the same, tonight I force myself. It’s a Vienna Philharmonic concert, a symphony by Sibelius that I adore, his Seventh, short—twenty minutes—and other new pieces, led by a conductor I like rather well. Thus, there shouldn’t be too many problems.

It’s a hall on a human scale, and I’m sitting at the end of a row, so there’s no great risk of agoraphobia or claustrophobia. My neighbor is already seated and I’m the last to arrive, sparing me from having to stand, a relief from the rule of maximum annoyance whereby you’re always Dirst to arrive and constantly displaced. I notice that a man seated near me has a resemblance to Sibelius, with an enormous bald head, somewhat bulbous nose and severe facial expression. I am passionate about the Seventh Symphony, with its alternating despair and luminosity. Especially the very end, those fused chords that seem to be grinding up the whole universe, following a struggle of the elements and emotions, as the composer tells us of his anxiety on seeing the world go mad, then the rebirth of hope, a mad race, a desperate dance, and that Dinale, my God what a Dinale! Violins striking the threads of the bow against basic chords to suggest the hero who Dlinches, surrenders, a wounded horseman falling to the ground, the end of combat, of striving, a cosmic renunciation, a star born and then dying, a pile-up of all the notes to reach, despite everything, some stability and a new start, something that emerges and takes shape, but will it be light or shadows, at the very crest of the Dinal, taut harmony because of a wrenching “B” that resists resolution into a C-major chord that would be such a relief. Then, ascending like a sunrise rather than the expected twilight, the “B” that seemed inescapable now blends into a “C,” the chord asserts itself, light bursts with this harmony, Dinally perfected, as the tone continues to build in intensity; that extraordinary pure, clear chord of C major rises like a pillar supporting the world. Is this the hero prostrate on the ground who raises an arm in deDiance, or rather the eternal renunciation of everything? That “B” emerging from the magma, but then insinuates itself into the “C” chord like Mephisto worming his way into Faust’s studio, which promises of course the redeeming “C”—but will it happen? If so, under what dreadful conditions? That harmonic resolution that will resolve everything, although you don’t know if it’s the end or the beginning of something else, is the Dinal great, genial invention in symphonic history.

After this, Sibelius in fact wrote an Eighth Symphony, but he destroyed it. What do you think you can compose when you’ve painted the world throwing itself into the abyss and then, as

extraordinary pure, clear chord of C major rises like a pillar supporting the world. Is this the hero prostrate on the ground who raises an arm in deDiance, or rather the eternal renunciation of everything? That “B” emerging from the magma, but then insinuates itself into the “C” chord like Mephisto worming his way into Faust’s studio, which promises of course the redeeming “C”—but will it happen? If so, under what dreadful conditions? That harmonic resolution that will resolve everything, although you don’t know if it’s the end or the beginning of something else, is the Dinal great, genial invention in symphonic history.

After this, Sibelius in fact wrote an Eighth Symphony, but he destroyed it. What do you think you can compose when you’ve painted the world throwing itself into the abyss and then, as in the Michelangelo fresco, the creator’s hand stretched out toward his condemned creature?

My neighbor seems much more agitated than I am; the music is driving him to actual nervous explosions. He’s not one of those unbearable kinds of music fans who beat time, or even tap on the seat in rhythm; he reacts against the rhythm, often in fact anticipating a new idea, preparing himself for the arrival of a melody or a chord. Obviously, in the Dinal moments, he goes into a trance; he destroys my own enjoyment, Dinding myself monopolized by the spectacle of hi musical orgasm. It seems to me that the screaming note in the orchestra is going to perforate his skull, as occurs in certain horror movies, and I’ll see wells of light spurt from his eyes and mouth.

Then, as soon as silence returns, he seems to fall into total indifference, as if the concert had not yet begun. Yet the audience is giving the musicians an ovation. I feel obliged to say something to relieve the embarrassment caused me by this sudden languor.

“I experience the same emotion every time. It’s that harmonic resolution at the very Dinal moment, when it seemed everything was lost.”

“It’s frightful, I ought to redo the whole bit. It’s thanks to this ending that I’ve been unable to go on composing. You understand, I thrust the world into the throes of the mystery and then I pull it out immediately; I offer the solution in the Dinal measure. Result: my Eighth did nothing but mill around like an old lady rambling on about the tunes of the ‘good old days.’

I’ll have to revise the end of the Seventh, and return to my Eighth.”

“But Sibelius burned his manuscript, as everyone knows!”

“It’s still there, complete,” my strange neighbor replies, rising and tapping his forehead with his index Dinger. Gute Nacht, mein Herr.”

I start to think of Sullivan, alone in the cemetery. What’s he up to? And that odd man, a Sibelius look-alike, who believes he is Sibelius. It almost makes me forget that just a month ago I— “Kappelmeister Franz?”

A man I’d often met outside the stage door was smiling at me, with an odd gleam in his eye.

“Ex-Kappelmeister. I’ve retired to do some composing.”

“I’m happy to hear that. Your absence from the opera house has worried some of us. Why didn’t you make a press announcement about the reasons for your departure? In any case…

Since you’re writing music, maybe you’d be interested in something a bit… sensitive, let’s say, which I don’t dare mention to anyone. And yet it’s making my life impossible.”

“Have you decided to be a composer, too?” “ No—or yes, well… But it’s not me. It’s ‘him.’”

“Him? Who?” The man seemed to hesitate, while my own intuition about his problem sent waves of panic through my body.

“Have you decided to be a composer, too?” “ No—or yes, well… But it’s not me. It’s ‘him.’”

“Him? Who?” The man seemed to hesitate, while my own intuition about his problem sent waves of panic through my body.

“Uh, it’s… Schubert. The ‘UnDinished Symphony.’ He’s come back. I mean, he speaks to me, he’s inside my head, telling me to complete the ‘UnDinished Symphony’—” I stop him right there. In fact, I’m rushing for the exit from the hall, hearing him behind me, growling a whiny “But wait, Herr Kappelmeister!”

I throw myself down the stairs, but gripping the rail with all my strength to avoid a fall.

Surprise and horror hit me like a Dist punch in the back. At mezzanine level, as if waiting for me with a rolled-up score under his arm, Richard Wagner’s twin stares at me sharply, like an inquisitor. His soundless lips shape the words “Herr Kappelmeister,” slow and odious.

Turning to reach the other stairway, I behold, climbing the steps, a Schumann and a Liszt with crazed eyes. I rush to the small emergency staircase and bump into Lully, Bizet and Brahms, all trying to block my way. At the bottom of the stairs, Goethe and Beethoven are too busy arguing and notice me only at the last minute. Outside, the square is crammed with people, the public is there, they’re all present: from Cicero to Shakespeare, from Dante to Victor Hugo, Botticelli to Van Gogh, Bach to Stravinsky. They all turn my way, yelling “Herr Kappelmeister!”

Rushing toward the Hotel Imperial and the “Ring,” I happen to notice a tram preparing to take off; I jump aboard. The door closes just behind me, as if to cut off the crowd that was following me like an army of zombies. The tram is completely empty, Dilled only with the yellow light of its aged light bulbs. In the conductor’s seat, the control levers Dirmly in hand, Stefan Zweig points me toward a seat, smiling: “Grinzing, isn’t it? Don’t worry: I gave up writing anything more at all while I was alive. So I won’t be plaguing you with my unDinished manuscripts. Take a seat and relax, Cornelius Franz.”​ ​

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​4.

Got to relax, got to relax… It took me about ten tram stops before I could resume normal breathing. Five more before I realized that the conductor was just an ordinary guy, that I wasn’t the sole passenger and that this whole experience was no more than one more eruption of that insanity that, so casually, is gradually limiting my territory to the Grinzing cemetery and the nearby grocery store. There, and only there, I feel calm, not expecting anything, just waiting for him, “him,” if he chooses to return. I suppose that the arrival of Sullivan K and his pretentious whim have upset the well-established plan for my retirement: Dine, Mahler came, completed his symphony and will perhaps show up again, but if he doesn’t, I’m in the best possible place to “go into mourning.” On the other hand, if some crank pokes in his powdered nose to claim that Mahler is deceiving me with him, well in that case it’s all over.

There it is; it’s really simple. I’ve had an attack of jealousy, which transformed itself hallucinations, hysteria. Everything’s Dine.

I breathe deeply of the night air, while the breeze murmurs from the Vienna Wood, the forest in which all the great musical geniuses wandered in search of inspiration. It’s quite near… Just draw a deep breath, and you can almost catch echoes of faint wisps of melody.

This evening the scent of humus suggests an almost inaudible fragment of Schubert.

Perhaps Mahler was right, perhaps music resides in some parallel dimension.

Mahler… It’s not the echo of the Vienna Woods that evokes that name… The closer I come to the gates of the cemetery, the more frequently the name keeps sounding, amplifying, not just some interior voice, no—someone is crying out, screaming bloody murder—this is the site for… “Maaaahler,” like someone being tortured. I race to the gate, just taking the time to lock it after me, and head straight for Gustav’s tomb, source of the screams.

near… Just draw a deep breath, and you can almost catch echoes of faint wisps of melody.

This evening the scent of humus suggests an almost inaudible fragment of Schubert.

Perhaps Mahler was right, perhaps music resides in some parallel dimension.

Mahler… It’s not the echo of the Vienna Woods that evokes that name… The closer I come to the gates of the cemetery, the more frequently the name keeps sounding, amplifying, not just some interior voice, no—someone is crying out, screaming bloody murder—this is the site for… “Maaaahler,” like someone being tortured. I race to the gate, just taking the time to lock it after me, and head straight for Gustav’s tomb, source of the screams.

The sight I behold is both grotesque and horrifying. First I assume it’s a set-up for a nighttime Dilm shoot. Two powerful projectors illuminate a plot of ground set off by oilcloth fabric stretched tight around the grave. To one side I see a pile of freshly dug earth, and in the midst of it, Sullivan K., bent over the cofDin, which he has so strenuously pulled out of the new hole in the ground.

Looking as pale as Christopher Lee in Dracula, with eyes equally popping and an insane stare, he is pawing through the contents of the casket, surprisingly intact, its wood seeming freshly carved. He probes, seems to be kneading something, hoping to extract something that’s not there.

Mahler, Mahler, where are you, what’s the meaning of this joke. Mahler! Mahler!!!!

I draw near, but he’s too preoccupied to notice. I expect to Dind a skeleton, or at least some scraps of clothing, evidence of the presence of a corpse for the past century. Instead, here are piles of music paper covered with notes.

“Paper, paper, nothing but paper! Where are you? They buried you here, I know, and you even conDirmed it to me yesterday. So where are you? And what are all these scores?”

I make bold to interrupt his monologue.

“He said it himself, didn’t he, Mr. Sullivan: ‘I’ve lived for nothing but paper.’ Dust to dust. Well then, Mahler has returned to paper.”

The pillar of the tomb turns, with murderous thoughts Dilling his eyes.

“You! You here, why the hell are you intruding? I told you to come back tomorrow, to leave me alone. Get out of here, you failure, you fuck-up, you podium jockey in retirement! Leave me with Mahler! He left me a few hours ago, but he’ll return. He’ll explain to me why his casket is empty, and the meaning of all those scores.”

I feel uncontrollable rage rising in me. His systematic insults get the best of me…

“Well, Mr. Mahler-fan fancy pants, can’t you read? It’s written right there on top!”

I snatch up a few sheets at random and declaim: “Symphony number 11, dedicated to my daughter Anna, Symphony number12, ‘the twelvetone,’ dedicated to Schönberg, Symphony number 13 for wind instruments. Numbers 14, 15, 16,” and so it continues.

“NO!” Sullivan screams, “no, it’s not possible! He died before he could Dinish the Tenth! What you’re saying is an abomination!”

“Oh yeah? And what about this? Rübezahl, opera in two acts. And this, ‘Concerto number one for piano,’ and here, Faust, opera in two acts.”

Sullivan has grabbed me by the hair, pulling with all his might.

“You lie! Liar! That’s impossible. Mahler is me, do you hear? ME! And none of this stuff exists at all, it’s just your delirium, you poor slob of a routine music drone. You’re consumed with frustration, you’re delusional, I know it, I, Mahler! But where is he? Where is he, for the love of God?” I’m Dilled with a wave of adrenalin. I grab the shovel, giving him a crushing blow on the back

for piano,’ and here, Faust, opera in two acts.”

Sullivan has grabbed me by the hair, pulling with all his might.

“You lie! Liar! That’s impossible. Mahler is me, do you hear? ME! And none of this stuff exists at all, it’s just your delirium, you poor slob of a routine music drone. You’re consumed with frustration, you’re delusional, I know it, I, Mahler! But where is he? Where is he, for the love of God?” I’m Dilled with a wave of adrenalin. I grab the shovel, giving him a crushing blow on the back of the neck, hard enough to slay a bull.

“Where is he? OK, I’ll tell you, since you’re the poor rotting corpse here. Mahler wasn’t in his grave? Well here he is! You wanted to be Mahler, so be him, right to the end!”

I seize him like a sack of dead Dlowers, and throw him into the pile of manuscripts. Then I slam the cofDin shut and push the box into the grave. It takes me just a minute to restore the dug-up earth, the clumps of ripped-out grass, and to give the whole thing the appearance of a little job of maintenance around the tomb. When I’m done, rain is falling gently, which will further Dix everything just Dine, and it’s not even midnight yet.

I return to my little cottage, hands trembling, obsessing every second about my conscience, watching for new signs of madness. All right, so now I’m a criminal, right? Or, having killed a man who’s been dead or a century, and having restored him to his grave, maybe all I’ve done is restore order around here?

I pick up the phone and dial Dr. Rauball’s number. At this hour, the doctor must still be up, and he won’t be sorry to hear from me, since I’d skipped out without paying him.

“Rauball speaking.”

“Good evening, Herr Doktor. It’s me, Kapellmeister Franz. Sorry to disturb you so late. First of all, rest assured that I haven’t forgotten my little unpaid bill. “ “Good evening, Herr Kappelmeister. I wasn’t sleeping, and don’t worry about a few euros. I’d already forgotten all about it. But I must tell you at once: I’m no longer practicing. I retired so that I could concentrate on a task of quite extraordinary importance.”

“Are you writing a thesis, Herr Doktor?”

“Better yet! I’m with Him, busy completing His Dinal treatise on psychoanalysis.”

“Him? Him who?” I ask, dizzy in anticipation.

“Freud! You were right, my friend, and I’m kicking myself for having treated you with the condescension of a somewhat arrogant professional. He showed up no more than a week ago, and he’s here, sheltered in the warmth of my head, explaining to me everything that was missing in his theory. Well, believe me: nearly a hundred years later, it’s revolutionary, it’s going to turn everything topsy turvy! So, good night, Herr Kappelmeister, and my warm regards to Maestro Mahler!”

He rang off, and I remained for quite some time, holding the receiver, my mind a complete blank.

I bend down slightly to replace the telephone, and I notice a sheet of paper stuck to my leg, carried back from… I contemplate it for some time, still in this delicious drifting state, as if waiting for something. On the handwritten page, festering with hundreds of tiny notes under the title in huge letters, “18th Symphony,” and under that, “Macabre tango in Argentine style,” I see the horizontal lines gradually looking more vacant. The notes are behaving like birds when a whole Dlock leaps off the electric wires where they had seemed frozen, turned to stone forever; it’s as if the musical signs were written in invisible ink, evaporating and dilating, as if the music were returning to that strange world where everything exists, even Mahler’s 18th Symphony, or hundreds of his symphonies, an inDinite number, who knows?

Then, nothing, the musical paper reverting to its pristine state, the empty lines awaiting the creator’s hand to Dill them once again.

under the title in huge letters, “18th Symphony,” and under that, “Macabre tango in Argentine style,” I see the horizontal lines gradually looking more vacant. The notes are behaving like birds when a whole Dlock leaps off the electric wires where they had seemed frozen, turned to stone forever; it’s as if the musical signs were written in invisible ink, evaporating and dilating, as if the music were returning to that strange world where everything exists, even Mahler’s 18th Symphony, or hundreds of his symphonies, an inDinite number, who knows?

Then, nothing, the musical paper reverting to its pristine state, the empty lines awaiting the creator’s hand to Dill them once again.

And then, calmly, I pick up my pencil and write, with an imperceptible smile hovering on my lips: ​

​

​

​Cornelius Franz, Symphony No. 1.

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​ THE END

Final note on consultation : Received word of death of Gustav M. A few weeks later, sent my bill for the honorarium to his widow (should I have added some Olowers and a condolence letter?). No news on my emoluments for more than a month now…

One more mystery concerning a Oigure who eluded me almost entirely…

S.F (Author’s note: Freud’s celebrated bill to Mahler’s widow for consultative services was recently sold at auction …)