H. P. Lovecraft - The Music Of Erich Zann.pdf

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The Music OF Erich Zann
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Dec 1921
Published March 1922 in The National Amateur, Vol. 44, No. 4, p. 38-40.
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again
found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modem maps alone, for I know
that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the
antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever
name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But
despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the
 
house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my
impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the
music of Erich Zann.
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental,
was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil,
and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot
find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a
half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which
could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a
person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.
The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick
blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It
was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories
shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches
which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it,
since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled
streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly
steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached.
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was
almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of ffights
of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular,
sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with
struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed,
incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise.
Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the
street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground
 
below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it
was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because
they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I
was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always
evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the
Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top
of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.
My rcom was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house
was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strang music from the peaked
garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was
an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann,
and who played eve nings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire
to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had
chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the
only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at
the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was
haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was
yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard
before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The
longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to
make the old man’s acquaintance.
One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway
and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He
 
was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque,
satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered
and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he
grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic
stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west
side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was
very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary barrenness and
neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash-stand,
a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned
chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were
of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of
dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently
Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.
Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden
bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now
removed his viol from its motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in
the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but,
offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with
strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own
devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in
music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most
captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird
notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled
inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked
him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled
 
satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and
seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed
when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use
persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to
awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had
listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a
moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew
suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long,
cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude
imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a
startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some
intruder—a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible
above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep
street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at
the summit.
The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain
capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of
moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in
the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window
and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage
even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning
with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with
both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me,
and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust
and offense, his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip,
 

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