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The Great Melody
It is the evening of the 10th of December, 1795, in the small, snow-bound, Bavarian town of Jenzburg, where a local musician by the name of Franz Kraft has just kneeled down at his own fireside to pray. Apart from the wavering, red glow sent out by the fire, he is in complete darkness. His eyes are closed. He savours the warmth from the fire on his face for a moment before he starts, whilst behind him, unseen, monstrous, shifting shadows are projected onto the walls of his room. Outside, only the bright, frosty stars light the world. The bell of a nearby church rings out, its tone brittle and cold in the thin night air, calling the people of Jenzburg to worship.
He is a moderately successful man by the standards of his time and place. He makes a living by giving music lessons to the children of the local aristocracy. Sometimes, when their regular conductor is indisposed, he leads a local ensemble in performances of popular orchestral works and is able to earn himself a little extra money. And occasionally he receives commissions to arrange well-known pieces to suit the needs of particular musicians, providing himself with a further, if rather unreliable, source of income. This latter is something he particularly loves to do, although there is always a faint discord of resentment sounding at the back of his mind when he does so. But the earnings from all of these activities give him an acceptably comfortable life and allow him to rent spacious, furnished apartments in a part of town only slightly past its best.
He has every reason, then, to be satisfied with his life. And yet Franz Kraft is a discontented man. The reason for this is his growing feeling that old-age is encroaching, day by day dulling the verve and zest that once seemed to fill him. He is fifty-two years old, a decent age given the life-expectancies of his time. And he simply feels from time to time, tonight being one such time, that his own death is looming near. He catches the occasional glimpse of its terrible inevitability in shadows cast across an old wooden doorway, or in the weathered, lichened stonework of one of Jenzburg's churches. He is tormented by thoughts that it will not be long before his gravestone is cut, and carved with its two dates, and placed with finality at the head of a freshly-dug grave, ultimate and unavoidable like the final bar-line at the end of a musical score. And then all that will be left of him in the world is his name on the stone, becoming slowly more unreadable with each passing year, until ultimately it fades into illegibility.
He has never married and so has no children to carry on his name or to hear his ideas and thoughts about the world. He is a religious man, indeed Christian doctrine is utterly central to his being, and he knows, with an absolute certainty, that he will attain an eternal afterlife in heaven when he does die. But this provides him with a curiously small amount of comfort. It is perhaps guilt about this, and a desire for confession, that is a part of the reason he is kneeling down and praying tonight.
But also, there is something more. For tonight he is going to pray to God for help in achieving the continuance of his life on Earth. A means by which his name can live on after his death. A sort of indirect and vicarious form of immortality. Not that he is going to ask God for anything at all unreasonable - not an extension to his allotted number of years on Earth, or anything presumptuous of that sort. His position is simply this.
For years, for all of his adult life, he has composed music - beautiful music, stirring music, exultant music. Music glorying God, praising God, worshipping God. This has been his life's work, his love, his passion. And truly he has not done any of it for his own benefit or to elevate himself. His devoutness and pious sincerity is total. But with his departure from the world imminent, the thought that all of his music might go unheard, might be forgotten, is weighing upon him more and more. For he has never succeeded in achieving the recognition as a composer he knows he deserves and there is a very real danger, he knows, that he never will.
This is the crux of the whole matter. This is the truly unbearable thought for him. It is really this that drives him to prayer tonight. Desperately, passionately, he wants his music to live on after he has gone.
Sometimes he feels that it is vanity to wish for such recognition. But, he reasons with himself, there is something in all of us which hopes we will be remembered after our deaths. Others build great buildings, or sit alone writing stories in the hope that others will one day read them. Perhaps it is just the natural urge to reproduce and carry on the species, sublimated and transformed. Perhaps it is the unbearableness of thinking that we will depart the world utterly and forever when we die. But whichever, Franz Kraft knows that his desire is really no sin. It is something very deep in him, but it feels wholesome, not some temptation of the devil. It feels to him like a part of the way in which God has made him.
And so, feeling guilty at asking what he is asking, but going ahead anyway, he begins. It is, in fact, the first time he has ever requested anything from God for himself.
"Oh God, the almighty, the beneficent, grant me, I beseech thee ..."
He kneels there for a long while, silently mouthing his prayers, pouring out his soul. Outside, on the narrow, icy, sleigh-furrowed streets of Jenzburg, there is a brief flurry of human activity as the evening service in the nearby church comes to an end, and then the calm and quite returns. For an hour or more he kneels, lost in his earnest supplications.
And then, suddenly, it seems to him that God answers. There are no definite words as such, but he finds himself overwhelmed by a feeling of absolute, reassuring calm and at the same time, a rich, sweet, wonderous thrill such as he has not felt since he was a child, discovering snow or music or love for the first time. And then the music begins in his head. Franz Kraft hears the voice of God singing to him.
In his mind, the heavenly melody slowly unfurls : flowering and glorious like the most colourful of all sunrises; as beautiful as the trees of the forest after snow as the moonlight illuminates them; as deeply pleasing as the babbling of secret mountain brooks. Sixteen perfect notes, in perfect, glowing succession. The divine voice rich, delicate and exquisite. Bass, tenor, alto and treble all at once.
At the breathtaking beauty of the notes, tears come to Franz Kraft's eyes. Such a simple melody, but more glorious, more uplifting than he ever would have thought music could be. Now that he hears it, he knows that it will be in his mind for ever; that it will weave itself in and around his thoughts and feelings for all of his days to come; that all other music will now seem pale and superficial by comparison. Moved, awed, glorying, stunned into silence by sheer ecstasy, he kneels in silence.
He remains there for a long time, lost in wonder at the divine gift, whilst the fire before him burns slowly down to its embers, fading from red to yellow to gray. The Great Melody, the sixteen great notes, glide and thrill through his mind still, more and more glorious each time he hears them.
And slowly, his thoughts turn to the technical matters of writing the music down. In his mind, intermingled with his feelings of religious awe, he hears more sounds. Variations on the sixteen notes. Progressions which diverge into different melodies. A great crescendo where finally, at the end, the great notes are played in their entirety, almost unbearably grand and moving.
Soon, in an hour or so, as a gray ghost-light starts to drift out of the Bavarian snow, he will look up from his prayers and, dreamlike, pick up his quill and paper to commence the great work. Throughout the whole of tomorrow he will sit at his desk, scrawling musical notes onto blank bar-lines. Fervently, almost frenzied, he will work, writing as quickly as his fingers will allow, desperately trying to get down the harmonies and melodies that fill his mind before he forgets them. He will write as rapidly as fingers will allow him to, but even so it will not be quick enough to record all of the music he hears. Long into the next night, and the day after that, he will sit, allowing himself only the briefest of interruptions, ignoring cold and hunger, working and reworking each passage of the music and wishing he had ten hands to write with.
Over the weeks, months and years to come, it will be like this often for Franz Kraft. The intense creative impulse that burns in him now, the impulse that usually lasts only for a day or two, will come to consume him completely. He will become so engrossed in his task that it will utterly dominate his life. His music lessons and other activities will slowly fall by the wayside and he will end up working only enough to allow himself to subsist. He will withdraw from the world, mindless of what events occur around him, until he becomes all but a hermit. His rooms, and indeed he himself, will become unkempt and dishevelled. But none of this will matter to him - he will want only to be at his desk, working on his masterpiece.
In fact, he will now live on for quite a long time. His fears about his imminent death are unfounded. He will have twelve more years of life in Jenzburg, and will spend almost every waking moment of them working at his task - writing music, rewriting music, arranging music, tearing up music that is not quite right. He will never, in fact, achieve the recognition he hopes for on Earth. He will never live to see any of his works published. But he will stop dwelling on the possibility and will now live out his remaining years engrossed in his work, and happy enough. He will become slowly poorer, but he won't mind. Indeed, he will barely notice.
And when he finally does die, at the fine old age of sixty-four, the great work, the High Mass, will be there, completed. At the very end, it will be only the creative effort of it that sustains him. He will die soon after the task is completed, like a man who loses a beloved wife of many years and loses also the will to live.
It is on another cold winter's night, like that of twelve years previous, that he steps uncertainly out onto the icy, deserted streets of Jenzburg - an old man now, a little crooked and a little uneven in his walk. The snow he slips and toils through is feet deep; it has taken him all of his strength to force his front door open against the barricading snow-drift and he is breathing very quickly now in short, shallow, panicky breaths. He makes his way slowly up the street, leaning into a wind that seems to sliver the skin from his bones.
Clutched to his chest he carries the manuscript of the High Mass - several hundred sheets of musical score bound into a simple parchment folder. Only one thought now fills his entire universe - to bring the work to the nearby church and place it upon the altar where others will be able to find it. Then his music, the music of God, will be passed on. It will live. His great labour will be complete. There is no doubt in his mind that it only needs people to see and hear the work for this to happen. He knows it to be the greatest, most profound, most beautiful musical ever composed.
The cold is intense. It cuts through his thin clothing and seems to turn his bones into icicles. Single-mindedly, seeing only the church down the street ahead of him, he trudges on. A warm, yellowy light flickers out from the church's windows - light from the candles lit within. But his progress is slow; it begins to seem that he is achieving no forward motion at all, as if the snow is absorbing each step like sand, or as if the bitter wind is deliberately holding him back. The church up ahead never seems to get any nearer. For a dizzying, disorientating moment, it actually seems to be moving further away from him, receding backwards down the street.
There is only one thing he can do. He strides on. There is nothing left for him in the world but to get to the sanctuary of the church. God has given him this great music; God will see that he is allowed to complete the task. After a few more paces, he finds that he is no longer feeling the cold - indeed that a warmth is starting to spread throughout his body. He finds that he can no longer feel the terrible, biting cold in his feet, as if he is no longer walking on the ground. Water fills his eyes and the light from the church smears and becomes nothing but an indistinct blur. He closes his eyes to try and clear his vision.
There is another moment of disorientation, and a taste of cold water is suddenly in his mouth. He opens his eyes to find that he is lying on the ground, half buried in the snow where he has fallen. With one of his eyes he can see nothing but a gray whiteness; with the other he can see along the street. A few yards away, out of reach now, the manuscript lies on the snow. Beyond it, in a direct line from where he lies, the lights from the church waver above the ground. Slowly the scene fades as his eyes close, but there is no despair in him. He knows that his body will be found, that the work will be found, the both of them waiting there upon the pristine snow. His music will live.
And then Franz Kraft sees no more.
After a moment's pause the wind picks up once again. It opens the folder containing the manuscript of the High Mass. And one after the other, like leaves flying free from a tree, the pages are lifted by the wind and borne away. Some fly over the rooftops of the town. Some drift and flit back up the street. Some rise upwards, off into the icy heavens. Others fall to the ground again and lie scattered around the body of Franz Kraft like strewn flowers.
Tomorrow morning, they will find him there, old Kraft the recluse, locked away in his rooms all these years composing his great, divinely-inspired work, frozen and half-buried in the overnight snow but looking strangely content in his death.
They will lift up his body, and carry it solemnly up the street to the church whilst preparations are made for his interment. Others, meanwhile, will try to gather together the pages of the musical score they find scattered all over the town. In the days to come, many pieces of the work will be collected together - pages found frozen into the ice of the town's lake, or caught in the branches of the trees.
They will try to put all of the pages back together in their proper order, to recreate the High Mass, but it will prove to be impossible. Many of the sheets will remain lost, whole sections and movements missing. Some attempts will eventually be made by local musicians to play those fragments of the work that are recovered, but they will be able to reproduce only tantalizing glimpses of soaring, glorious music before coming to a missing section of the work and having to stop. Incomplete, scattered, the Great Melody will be lost to the world.
But it will become a local legend in the town of Jenzburg that, one day, the complete manuscript of Franz Kraft's High Mass will be reassembled. Every now and then, it will be said, another sheet of the music turns up, found in some hidden corner of the town, at the bottom of a chest or between the leaves of other old papers. Like the gradual unfolding of a divine plan, the slow revelation of some great secret, the work will be brought back together piece by piece. And then finally, one day perhaps far into the future, the High Mass, the Great Melody, will be complete once again, to be played and heard.
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