But before I continue, gracious reader, with my account of the fate of that poor unfortunate Nathaniel, those of you who took an interest in the masterful mechanic and maker of automata, Spallanzani, can rest assured that he completely recuperated from his wounds. He was forced to leave the university, as Nathaniel’s story had caused a public uproar, and it was commonly held to be an altogether fraudulent swindle to try to pass off a wooden doll for a living person in proper society (for Olympia had effectively pulled the wool over their eyes). Jurists went so far as to call it a refined, and therefore all the harder to punish, swindle, which he succeeded in pulling off so skillfully that everyone (except for a few sharp-eyed students) was taken in – although they now put on a smart façade and pointed to all sorts of things that seemed suspicious to them at the time. But such smart alecks ultimately brought no hard-and-fast evidence to the case. For instance, could it possibly have aroused anyone’s suspicion that, according to the testimony of one elegant invitee, Olympia more often sneezed than yawned? This, maintained said elegant invitee, was the automaton’s hidden rewind mechanism that noticeably creaked in the process— and so on and so forth.

  A professor of poetry and rhetoric took a pinch of snuff, snapped the tin shut, cleared his throat, and launched into his erudite discourse. “Most honored ladies and gentlemen, can’t you see where the shoe pinches? The whole thing is an allegory – a long, drawn-out metaphor – do you catch my drift? Sapienti sat!“

  But many honored gentlemen derived little consolation from this view; the story of the automaton had taken root, and a dreadful distrust of human figures seeped into their souls. In order to be completely convinced that they were not in love with a wooden doll, quite a few lovers demanded that their beloved sing something off key and dance out of step, that they embroider and knit while being read to, or play with the little pug; above all, they demanded that they not just listen, but also occasionally say something in such a way as to demonstrate that their words came from actual thought and feeling. As a result, the loving bond of many couples grew stronger than ever, while others quietly drifted apart. “One can hardly be certain about this,” was the common excuse. Yawning was all the rage at social teas, but people refrained from sneezing, so as to dispel any suspicions. Spallanzani was obliged to skip town, as has already been said, to escape the criminal investigation into his fraudulent introduction of an automaton into human society. Coppola also vanished.

  * * *

  —

  When Nathaniel awakened, as though from an oppressive and terrible dream, he batted his eyes open and felt himself infused with an indescribable sense of well-being and heavenly warmth. He lay in his bed in his room in his father’s house, and Clara was bent over him while his mother and Lothar stood close by. “At last, at last, oh, my dearly beloved Nathaniel, you’ve pulled through at last, and now you’re mine again!” Clara spoke the words with all her heart and took Nathaniel in her arms. Bright, burning tears of sadness and rapture poured from his eyes and he moaned deeply, “My Clara, my Clara!”

  Siegmund, who had faithfully stood by his friend in dire moments, then entered the room. Nathaniel held out his hand. “You, my faithful brother in need, you never abandoned me.”

  Every last trace of madness was gone, and soon Nathaniel got better in the painstaking care of his mother, his beloved, and his friends. Fortune had, in the meantime, returned to the house; a miserly old uncle, from whom no one hoped to inherit a red cent, had died and left Nathaniel’s mother a considerable fortune, as well as a small estate in a pleasant district not far from the city. There they intended to move together, Nathaniel with his Clara, whom he now planned to marry, and his mother and Lothar. Nathaniel had become gentler and more childlike than ever, and only now really recognized the heavenly purity of Clara’s radiant spirit. No one reminded him, not even breathing the slightest hint, of the recent past. It was only when Siegmund prepared to leave that Nathaniel remarked, “By God, my brother, I was headed down the path of no return, but in the nick of time an angel made me find the right way! It was my Clara, after all!” Siegmund cut him off, fearing that bitter memories might once again make him start raving.

  The time came when the four happy people planned to move out to the small country estate. As they went walking through the streets of the city at midday, after buying some things here and there, the tall town-hall tower cast a long shadow over the marketplace.

  “Hey,” said Clara, “let’s climb it one last time and gaze out at the distant mountains!” No sooner said than done. Nathaniel and Clara both climbed the steps, Mother went home with the maid, and Lothar, who was disinclined to mount the many steps, stayed down below. Now the two lovers stood arm in arm at the tower’s highest lookout gallery and peered at the sweet-scented ring of woods, and the blue mountains loomed beyond like a giant city.

  “Will you look at that strange little gray bush that seems to be slowly drawing near?” asked Clara. Nathaniel mechanically reached into his coat pocket, where he found Coppola’s spyglass, and looked to the side. There was Clara standing in the eye of the lens. A spasmodic quiver started up in his veins and arteries. Turning deathly pale, he peered at Clara. Soon sparks of fire flashed from his rolling eyes; he let out a horrible holler like a hunted animal, jumped high in the air, and with a curious cackle, shrieked “Turn, little wooden doll, turn!” With a great burst of strength, he grabbed hold of Clara and tried to hurl her off the tower, but Clara clung for dear life to the metal railing.

  Hearing the madman raving and Clara’s terrified screams, Lothar clambered up the stairs, gripped by a terrible foreboding. But the door to the second flight of steps was locked. Clara’s piteous screams sounded louder and louder. Consumed with anger and fear, Lothar hurled himself against the door, which finally gave way. Clara’s cries grew fainter and fainter. “Help! Save me! Save me!” till her voice faded into silence.

  “She’s done for – murdered by that madman,” Lothar screamed. The door to the lookout gallery was also locked, but desperation turned him into a lion and he broke down the door. God in heaven! Clara dangled in Nathaniel’s mad grip over the edge of the cast-iron railing, only holding on by one hand. Quick as lightning, Lothar grabbed his sister, pulled her to safety, and at the very same moment heaved a balled fist into the madman’s face, so that he tumbled backward and let go of his prey.

  Lothar raced back down the steps, his unconscious sister in his arms. She was saved. Meanwhile, Nathaniel kept flailing about on the lookout gallery, jumping high in the air and shouting, “Ring of fire, turn! Ring of fire, turn!”

  Stirred by the screams, a throng gathered below; in the midst of the crowd was the lawyer Coppelius, who had just come to town and gone straight to the marketplace. Some people wanted to climb the tower to capture the madman, but Coppelius laughed. “Ha ha, just be patient, he’ll be down shortly on his own!” he said, looking on as the others raced up the steps.

  Nathaniel suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, leaned down, spotted Coppelius below, and with a shrill shriek of “Ha! Eyes a pretty! Eyes a pretty!” leapt over the parapet. As Nathaniel landed, his skull smashed on the cobblestones. Coppelius disappeared into the crowd.

  Clara was said to have been spotted years later in some distant town, seated hand in hand with a friendly man on a bench before the door of a lovely little country house, two bouncing boys playing at her feet. It might, therefore, be fair to suppose that Clara finally found the quiet domestic bliss that suited her cheerful spirit, which Nathaniel in his torn and troubled state could never have given her.

  Skip Notes

  * A reference to characters in Die Räuber, a play by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).

  Intimations from the Realm of Musical Notes

  1816

  My father’s little garden bordered on a forest full of sound and song. Year in, year out, a nightingale nested there in a lovely old tree, at the foot of which lay a large, oddly shaped stone dappled with all manner of wondrous moss and reddish veined rock. All that my father told of this rock had a fabulous ring. Many years ago, my father said, an unknown but stately gentleman came riding up to the squire’s castle, a man of outlandish garb and arcane knowledge. Everyone found the stranger most peculiar; it was impossible to regard him for long without feeling a certain dread and, once having caught a glimpse of him, impossible to turn your bewitched eyes away again. In no time at all, the squire took a great liking to him – even though he confessed he always got a funny feeling in his presence – and broke out into cold chills when, over a heaping cup, the stranger got to speaking of the many distant, uncharted lands and the curious men and fauna he had become familiar with in his far-flung journeys. The gentleman then let his language dissolve into wondrous tones in which, without words, he made all manner of unknown mysterious things intelligible to his listener. But the squire could not break free of the stranger’s spell, indeed could not listen to his stories often enough – stories which, in an inconceivable manner and clearly recognizable terms, evoked a dark, amorphous sense of foreboding.

  Whenever the stranger sang all manner of wondrous sounding songs in some unknown language, accompanying himself on the lute, all who heard him were gripped as if by a supernatural force. “No mortal can play such music,” they insisted, “he must be an angel able to transport the notes of the heavenly concert of cherubim and seraphim down to us here below on earth.” The stranger ensnared the lovely young damsel of the castle with this indissoluble snare of sound. In the course of his instructing her in voice and lute, the two soon became intimate, and oftentimes the stranger made his way at midnight to the old tree, where the maiden was already waiting. Then, from a distance, one could hear her song and the entrancing plucked tones of his lute, but the melodies sounded so weird, so unearthly that no one dared draw near or betray the lovers’ tryst.

  One morning the stranger disappeared; although the maiden was sought out in every corner of the castle, she, too, could not be found. Riddled with fear, gripped by a sense of dread, her father swung himself onto a horse, and galloped toward the woods, crying out his child’s name in inconsolable grief. When he came to the rock where the stranger had so often sat kissing the girl at midnight, the horse bristled its mane, whinnying and snorting; as if gripped by an infernal spirit, it refused to budge from the spot. Believing that the horse felt antsy about the curiously formed rock, the squire climbed down from the saddle to lead it past, but his blood curdled in a cramp of terror, and he stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of bright drops of blood welling up out of the stone. As if aided by a higher power, the hunters and peasants who had accompanied the squire managed with great effort to shove the stone to the side, and found the poor girl lying under it, her dead body riddled with stab wounds made by a dagger, the stranger’s broken lute buried beside her. Ever since then, a nightingale nests on the tree where none had done so before, and sings at midnight in a mournful, soul-stirring manner; moss and weeds grew out of the blood, henceforth adorning the rock in a curious array of colors.

  Since I was still a very young boy, I was not allowed to enter the forest without my father’s permission; but the tree and especially the rock were an irresistible lure. Whenever the little rear gate in the garden wall was not locked, I slipped away to my beloved rock, my gaze transfixed by the wondrous mosses and herbs growing out of it, and the streaks of color in its surface. I often thought I could understand the figures and signs scratched into the stone, and it seemed to me as if I deciphered and grasped the arcane meaning of all manner of adventurous tales of the sort my mother had told me. Then gazing at the rock, I inevitably thought of the lovely song my father sang almost daily and which always so moved me that, forgetting my favorite games, I felt compelled to listen with tears in my eyes. And conversely, whenever I heard that song, my beloved mosses sprung to mind, so that both sometimes seemed entwined, and in my mind I was hardly able to tell the two apart.

  It was at that time that my fondness for music grew stronger day by day, and my father, himself an able musician, took it upon himself to give me meticulous instruction, convinced that he was not only training me to be a first-rate instrumentalist, but also a composer. He may well have deduced my ambitions from the diligence – indeed the avid desire – with which I applied myself to improvising my own melodies and chords on the piano. My efforts evinced more expressive strength and coherence than one might have expected of a child. But I oftentimes burst into bitter tears, in a desperate fit of despair, resolved never to touch the piano again, since it always turned out sounding different from what I had intended when my fingers fumbled on the keys. Unknown songs that I had never heard streamed through my mind, and then it seemed to me as if, like arcane and fantastical musical notations, the moss on the stone conjured up these songs that sounded in my ears like the melodic whisper of spirits, and I became convinced that if one gazed upon them with true heartfelt love, the stone would burst out singing the songs of the murdered girl in the vibrant tones of her angelic voice.

  And it did indeed come to pass that once, while peering at the rock, I managed to transport myself into a brooding, dreamlike state in which I was so moved by the sound of the girl’s splendid singing sweeping through my ears that my breast ached with an extraordinary sweet pain. But as soon as I tried to sing and play back on the piano what I had heard, everything sank into a dark muddled mess. That made me altogether despondent, and when I was to play my practice pieces (which, compared to these mysterious songs, sounded repugnant and insufferable), I lost all patience. Consequently, I neglected all the necessary practice that might have helped me become a finished musician and, losing faith in my musical talent, my father finally gave up on my instruction.

  When I later attended the high school in town, where music was also taught, my interest in it was reawakened in another way. The technical proficiency of many of my fellow students provoked my desire to emulate them. I made a great effort to match their prowess, but the more I mastered the mechanics of music, the less I succeeded in eliciting the tones of those exceptionally lovely melodies that once sounded in my mind. The music director of the high school – an old man who, it was said, was a master of counterpoint – taught me the basics of basso continuo and composition; he even attempted to introduce the principles of how to go about inventing a melody, and once having worked out a musical theme, I took great pains to make sure that all contrapuntal turns were in accord.

  So I believed myself to be an accomplished musician, when, after a couple of years, I returned to the village where my father lived. In his house I found the little old piano at which I’d once sat for half the night, shedding tears of chagrin, trying in vain to bring forth the tones I heard in my inner ear. I also saw the wondrous stone again; but having grown smart and savvy, I laughed at the childish foolishness of my once having wanted to draw melodies from the moss. And yet, I could not disavow the fact that the shadowy spot beneath the great tree still elicited incredible musical intimations. Lying in the grass, my head leaning against the stone, the wind whistling through the branches still sounded like ghostly voices; but the melodies they sang that had long since taken root in my mind came alive again, resounding in my ear. How insipid, how tasteless my compositions pounded out by my faulty fingers on that old keyboard sounded; it was no music at all; my entire effort amounted to discordant trifling of absolutely no value. But I found solace in my dreams that tapped that splendid shimmering realm. I saw the stone, its red veins opened like dark carnations, their scent emanating in bright ringing rays. In the long rising notes of the nightingale, the rays condensed into the figure of a wonderful woman – a fleeting image of the girl from the castle – but then the image faded, dissolving back into heavenly music!

  Our realm is not of this world, the musicians say, for where in nature can we find the prototypes of our art, as do the painters and the sculptors? Sound surrounds us, but musical notes, that is to say melodies conceived in the lofty tongue of the spirit world, live only in the hearts and minds of man. But is all of nature not infused with the spirit of notes in tandem with the spirit of music? Brought to life, the mechanically stroked sounding body bespeaks its being, or rather, its innermost essence bursts out into consciousness. It is as if the spirit of music stimulated by the sacred can only secretly express itself melodically and harmoniously by means of these audible echoes. The musician, that is to say he in whose innermost self music crystalizes into clear consciousness, is engulfed with melodies and harmonies every which way he turns. It is no empty image, no mere allegory when the maestro maintains that colors, scents, and beams of light appear to him as musical notes, and that he conceives a wonderful concert in their harmonic convolution. Just as, according to the dictum of a brilliant physicist, listening is a seeing from the inside, so for the musician seeing becomes a listening from the inside – that is to say, with what the eye captures, that most profound consciousness of the musical element, perceived by his spirit as vibrating in unison with it all; thus do the sudden incitements of the musician that spur on melodies spawned deep inside himself often give voice to the unconscious, or rather that which cannot be expressed in words, grasping the secret music of nature as the fundamental principle of life or the primum mobile of it all. The perceptible sounds of nature, the whispering of the wind, the welling up of mountain springs, and other murmurings first strike the musician’s ear as individual notes, then as chords, then as melodies with harmonic accompaniment. Along with a recognition comes a mounting desire. And might the musician not ultimately comport himself in relation to the surrounding sounds of nature as does the hypnotist in relation to the somnambulist state, both applying their conscious will, to which nature always responds? The livelier, the more penetrating that recognition, the more the musician evolves in his ability to compose; the capacity to grasp and capture those natural stimuli in a grid of written musical notations with the aid of a particular cognitive ability is the hallmark of the art of composition. And so the musical score becomes the conjuring book through which one taps those most secret murmurings of nature found in life, so as to make them resound at will in a perceptible manner.

 

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