Book review: Christian Bernd's short novel, Cantabile

(Translated by Esther Weiss from the German, Faber – 157 pages with preface by George Steiner)

　

　

　

　

One of the more baffling imports of this season, Christian Bernd’s Cantabile offers an intriguing glimpse of an author, well-known and much-feted in his homeland, East Germany, but unknown elsewhere. Faber’s publication of this curious novella, ably, if prosaically, translated by Esther Weiss, is a welcome addition to the firm’s commitment to providing English readers with access to literature from behind the former Iron Curtain. Although the demand for such writing may be limited, it is to be hoped that this singular work, and others in Faber’s series, will find an audience.

Cantabile’s first edition bears the imprint of the Hohmeyer Verlag Leipzig dated 1949. Bernd, born in Erfurt in 1910, seems to have been a prolific man of letters – his biography lists 13 novels, including the monumental trilogy Schlachtenberg, historical fiction set during the period of the Protestant Reformantion and Peasant’s Rebellion. Writing in many genres, Bernd was a central figure in the literature of the now-defunct DDR – he is credited with several plays, wrote film scripts, and published, at least, six volumes of poetry along with criticism, political journalism, and essays. He died in a car crash in 1962 in Havana, Cuba, about the time of the famous Missile Crisis – he seems to have been on assignment as a journalist covering the mobilization of the Cuban people in the face of alleged American aggression. On the basis of Cantabile, Bernd, known to be an avid amateur musician (he played the cello), was well-versed in arcane aspects of music theory and history as well as the technology of organ construction and repair. He writes with penetrating aplomb about organ performance practice and the development of different styles in sacred music. Elaborate descriptions of musical composition in Cantabile sometimes verge on the academic and Bernd’s more ecstatic effusions on his subject pointedly demonstrate the difficulty of putting into words concepts expressed originally in rhythm, timbre, and musical notes. At times, Bernd’s prose resembles similar passages in Thomas Mann’s vast and magisterial Dr. Faustus, a work written around the same time as Bernd’s Cantabile. It should be noted, however, that Cantabile is about one-fifth the size of Dr. Faustus, more witty and agile in its prose, and, for most readers, easier to appreciate because, indisputably, less daunting and ambitious.

Readers expecting grim Socialist realism will be pleasantly surprised by Bernd’s narrative, a globe-trotting plot that seems to anticipate the more playful magical realism that would astound the literary world in later works by Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, and, ultimately, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (There is an nice photograph taken on Havana’s emblematic Calle 23 showing Marquez offering an immense and unsightly cigar to a nonplussed Bernd, the image published in the East Berlin periodical Form und Zweck. On the evidence of the picture, Bernd had the lithe Aryan good looks of German matinee idol.) Bernd’s hero, Stratus, is a Swiss organ maker. Around 1911, Stratus travels to Windhoek in Geman West Africa to install and tune an organ in the Christuskirche, a Lutheran church built to commemorate the triumph of colonists over Herero and Owamba rebels. Stratus discovers that the uprising resulted in horrific genocide inflicted upon the native people and concludes that the church, supposedly commemorating peace, is founded upon a lie. As a covert protest, Stratus installs a single high-pitched pipe that is savagely discordant. When the pipe is played, the organ emits a shriek like a sjamboked child. The church organist, who has participated in the massacre of the native people, commits suicide. Before his death, this organist, an old Boer named Hoestoen, plays for Stratus an old composition, apparently the product of either Buxtehude or one of his contemporaries, Franz Tunder or Nicholas Bruhns. Stratus is enchanted by the music but recognizes that the composition simply can not be played successfully to its original effect in the Christuskirche. The climate, humidity, and geometry of the church with its vaulted ceiling create reverberative effects that confound the music. It simply doesn’t sound right in the Christuskirche, a discord that is symbolically significant in that the score is notated Dona nobis pacim ("Grant us peace"). While playing the composition, the old organist several times is obliged to sound notes that make the screaming sound by which Stratus has signified his protest against the organ’s installation and the setting in which it is played. Bernd suggests that this discordant sound so disturbs Hoestoen with agonizing memories of his complicity in the genocide that he takes his own life.

Through Stratus’ musings (the book is narrated in the first person), Bernd develops the notion that great composers for the organ don’t create their works in isolation from the instrument and the physical environment in which the music is played. To the contrary, the greatest compositions for pipe organ are, so to speak, bespoke – that is, designed for the exact instrument on which they were composed. Such pieces are, in effect, site-specific art-works. They are most effective, and sound best, when played on the original instrument and at the place where the composition occurred. Bernd gives as an example the well-known fact that compositions by Bach don’t sound good at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris – the church as a reverberation of seven seconds and the echoes in the cathedral muddle the polyphonic texture of the composition. By contrast, works by Marcel Dupre, the organist at St. Sulpice and a frequent guest organist at Notre Dame, are designed for the sonic characteristics of those cathedrals and most effectively performed in situ. Bernd, acting as ventriloquist for Stratus, makes similar arguments about the work of Olivier Messiaen, observing that the harmonies and interaction between instrumental voices in that composer’s Quartet for the End of Time in effect replicate sonic characteristics of the Eglise de la Sainte Trinite in Paris where the composer was employed as organist before the Second World War.

Stratus survives both world wars and, like Hoestoen, recognizes his complicity in atrocities committed by the Nazis. (Bernd is hesitant to mention the destruction of the Jews by the Germans. From a political perspective, East Germany tended to emphasize that Nazi violence was largely directed against Communists, thus, avoiding the subject of the ethnic cleansing of its Jewish population. It’s a defect in Cantabile that Bernd descends to this naive and evasive perspective on Hitler’s genocide, treating the murder of the Jews as the persecution of noble, and courageous, Communist dissenters. A sympathetic reader will grasp the political constraints under which Bernd worked and, perhaps, forgive his for this aspect of the novella.) After the Russian occupation, Stratus acknowledges the existence near the East Prussian village where he lives of a concentration camp. Everyone knew that political prisoners were murdered in this camp but Stratus, along with his neighbors had turned a blind eye to this crime. In the aftermath of the War, Stratus is guilt-stricken and, when the full enormity of the crimes are disclosed, like Hoestoen, seems on the verge of taking his own life.

But an obsession intervenes to save Cantabile’s protagonist. One afternoon, Stratus happens upon an old church in a town now located in Poland. The German graveyard next to the old edifice has been torn apart and the tombstones smashed. Stratus enters the church and finds near the organ a manuscript copy of Dona nobis pacem, the piece by Buxtehude or one of his unnamed contemporaries. He plays the piece on the church’s half-ruined, neglected, and poorly tuned organ. Of course, the music sounds awful. But the experience inspires Stratus to a quixotic quest: he will reverse engineer from the music the organ and the church for which the piece was written. That is, Stratus will determine the acoustic characteristics of both the instrument and the church in which the instrument was located from the sound of Dona nobis pacem. And he is confident that he will be able to find that church among the ruined cities of post-War Europe. The second half of the short novella (it’s only about 140 pages) concerns Stratus’ quest to find the organ and church where Dona nobis pacem will sound best – that is, the place for which the composition was written.

This subject matter sounds a bit dour, but, in fact, the latter portions of Cantabile are both suspenseful and witty. Stratus’ quest gives new direction to the novella threatening to decay into post-War German existential angst and aimlessness. Calculation establish the probable volume and geometry of the space for which Dona nobis pacem was written. Other assumptions as to the interior characteristics of this hypothesized church guide Stratus on his search. Along the way, the protagonist encounters a colorful and intriguing cast of scheming architects, demented preachers, and black marketeers – everyone hustling to rebuild the ruins from the war as quickly and cheaply as possible. Post-war central Europe is portrayed as a sort of charnel house where traumatized survivors, messianic prophets, and a variety of hucksters and charlatans compete to loot what remains after the warring armies have withdrawn from the field. Bernd is clear-eyed about the savagery of the forces contending in this landscapes of ruined churches, starving people and abandoned cemeteries. The author even finds space to limn a romantic subplot involving Stratus and a prostitute that he meets in the fire-bombed ruins of Dresden. An element of suspense, as well as gallow’s humor, arises from Stratus’ efforts to find the church where the organ work was composed in the face of his own deteriorating physical condition. The book’s hero is an old man and subject to the ravages of time, and Bernd, avoiding pathos, makes Stratus’ ailments a source of grotesque humor. Surrounded on all sides by ruins, and threatened with the collapse of his own mind and body, Stratus struggles to locate the church before his own physical and mental decay immobilize him.

Two themes motivate the novella’s final chapters. First, the fit between the organ composition and the three-dimensional space in which it originated, becomes an analogy for erotic love. Bernd writes:


It was a mysterious and perfect thing, this exact fit between the sonic dimensions of the music and the vaulted chamber hewn from yielding sandstone. The music fit within the space that had been its womb like a hand in a glove, both shaping (and being shaped) by the building’s form. The magical congruity between lover and the beloved was similar – two becoming one until there was no distinction between them. The soul shapes the body, I think, just as the body forms the soul – so it was with love and the hymn to peace penetrating the carved stone cavities where it had been formed.
Second, Stratus becomes dangerously obsessed with the notion of the lost church as a kind of ideal temple of peace:


All that had gone before – the air raids and cannonades, the starvation and murder – these things were banished from the Temple of Peace that had harbored and, then, given birth to the wonderful composition. If the Church were found and could be mapped precisely, war would be banished. Men would no longer study war and peace would prevail among the nations.
Bernd subtly implies that Stratus may be losing his mind, that the steady deterioration of his body as he treks through the smashed detritus of the War may parallel the decay of his mind. Ultimately, Stratus’ quest ends in the fire-bombed ruins of Dresden. The novella’s ending is surprising and, also, ambiguous: either Stratus finds what he is looking for, or, perhaps, read another way, his search demonstrates the impossibility of ever finding his idealized temple of peace. Under either interpretation, Bernd’s novella Cantabile is a striking achievement and Faber is to be applauded for making this fascinating work of fiction available to English readers.