— Did he ever recite his own poetry to you?
— No, sir, not that I can remember.
— Did he talk much about it?
— No, sir.
— Did he not think of himself as a poet as well as a composer?
— I do not know, sir.
— Did you get the impression when you knew him that he still wrote poetry?
— No, sir.
— He thought of himself only as a composer?
— He did not think of himself as a composer, sir. More as a conduit for sound. If anyone ever calls me maestro in your hearing, Massimo, he said to me, I give you full permission to take that person by the scruff of the neck and show them the door. Here in Italy, he said, as well as in France and Germany, the culture of authority and deference has never gone away. Just as a courtier, Massimo, he said to me one day as we drove to Orvieto, just as a courtier hopes to get in his master’s good books by calling him Sire and Your Majesty all the time, so these little mini-courtiers who haunt the corridors of the concert halls and opera houses think you will grant them favours if they call you maestro. A cook is a maestro, Massimo, he said to me. A conductor is a maestro. But is a composer a master? What is he a master of? The art of composition, Massimo, he said to me, is the art of submitting, not of mastering, it is the art of listening, not of speaking, it is the art of letting go, not of holding on. In this house, Massimo, he said, I am the master because I pay the wages, but at my desk what am I? Nothing. That devil Scheler tried to make a master out of me in Vienna, he said. He tried to make me master the art of composition, as he put it. He wanted me to be able to explain to him why every note was where it was and not in some other place. He wanted me to master the notes, to become a little Meistersinger of Vienna. But I could not master the notes. Even then I felt it was the notes that were mastering me. It was a cold day in early April. He wanted to go to Orvieto to study the images on the columns of the cathedral there. Those columns are among the wonders of the world, Massimo, he said to me, and no one goes to see them, while everyone goes to gawp at the grotesque homoeroticism of Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. And why do they do that? Only because they have been told it is a masterpiece. Do they know what a masterpiece is? Do they realise that works of art are no more masterpieces than your mother, Massimo, is a masterpiece? No. Sheep, Massimo, sheep, he said. Sheep without the innocence of sheep. Sheep without the kindly disposition of sheep. That is the kind of sheep they are, Massimo, he said to me. How many people does one meet in one’s life who do anything other than follow the leader? Three, he said. I perhaps met three in my lifetime. There was Daniel Bernstein, with whom I went to West Africa and to Egypt. There was Henry Michaux. And there is Matthaeus, whom I see occasionally here in Rome, a man of independent spirit and independent mind. That is all, he said. Three in seventy years. Less than one for every twenty years. What does that say about the human race, Massimo, he said, what does that tell us about our brothers and sisters, so-called? But it has always been like that, he said. Nothing new. When you look back at the history of the world, Massimo, he said to me, what you see is the history of sheep. Of madmen leading sheep and sheep following madmen. Nothing else. I at least can say that I have not been a sheep, Massimo, he said. And that I owe largely to my parents, who gave me the opportunity to develop the way I wanted and to find out what my true path was. And to my chance meeting with Daniel Bernstein in Switzerland, he said. To our chance meeting on the top of a mountain, when I was at an impressionable age. Our trip to West Africa in 1925, he said, was the making of me. To be in the presence of a man like Daniel, he said, was to learn what it means to be a free spirit. He made us leave the car at the bottom of the hill and walk up to the cathedral. The motorcar is a wonderful invention, Massimo, he said, but we must make the effort to approach a building such as a cathedral in the right spirit. I understood the nature of our patrimony, Massimo, he said, when I was shown round the temples of India and Nepal. There I observed a relationship to the space of the building on the part of the worshippers that was once the norm in Europe but has since been forgotten. A temple or a cathedral, Massimo, he said to me, is more than the building you see before you. It is the centre of a sacred space which spreads far beyond the precincts of the temple or the cathedral as such. The approach to such a space is itself a rich experience, he said, for it is the approach to a presence, the presence of the saint or holy man towards whom you are travelling. Even today, he said, when they fill our churches and cathedrals with ghastly so-called religious music beamed out of invisible loudspeakers, even today these buildings have a power over us. Varèse always said that to understand his music you had to understand that he had grown up in the shadow of that great building, the Abbey of Tournus. I myself am fortunate that I only grew up in the vicinity of the little chapel that formed part of our property and that my free-thinking parents treated it as a likeable anachronism. Churches are a wonder, Massimo, he said, but the Church is an unmitigated disaster, as are all large bureaucracies, whether it be those of the ancient Egyptians or the Aztecs or the Soviets or any other empire. It is they who foster the spirit of subservience, it is they who turn us all into sheep. But they cannot be blamed for everything, because after all it is the sheep who instituted the empires and the bureaucracies. In the Book of Samuel, Massimo, he said to me, which as a good Catholic you have never read, in the Book of Samuel the prophet Samuel pleads with the Israelites not to choose a king to rule over them, but they are sheep, Massimo, he said, they are sheep and they want to be like other sheep. Give us a king, they say. Give us a king. And they will not rest till they have one. That is what these Zionists want to set up again, Daniel said to me as we walked round the sacred groves of Ife, they are tired of living without a king and country of their own, which is what has made them what they are, and now they want a country and a bureaucracy and a military and all the other trappings of nationhood. The sacred groves of Ife, he said, were just about as far as one could get from the ballrooms and casinos of Monte Carlo, but for a while in the 20s I moved happily between them. When I was dancing and gambling and playing bridge and tennis in Monte Carlo, he said, I was longing for the sacred groves of Ife, and when I was in West Africa what kept me going in the heat and the endless rain was the thought that I would soon be getting back to my flat in Monte Carlo, to my crisp white sheets and hot water and to all the women who were only too happy to come into my bed. That is how it is, Massimo, he said to me, when you are young you are a butterfly, you flit from flower to flower, and that is as it should be, because unless you do so you will not know what flower it is you eventually want to alight on. The cathedral of Orvieto rises high above the town and of course once you are up there you have a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside. I do not want you to look at the scenery, Massimo, he said to me, I want you to concentrate on the pillars of the west front, where we are standing. There are four of them and on them you will see what is perhaps the greatest sculptural masterpiece of the Italian Middle Ages. Yet we are alone here, he said, while the sheep lie on their backs on their benches gazing up at the monstrosity that is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. That is what we have to put up with, Massimo, he said to me, that is the idiocy of our fellow citizens and of our fellow human beings. No matter. We are here. I am no longer young, Massimo, he said, it costs me an effort to get up here, but get up here I have, and this is my reward. The entire history of the world according to the medieval Christian viewpoint, from its creation to the Last Judgement, carved in stone and still almost as perfect as when it was first made, the fronds of the Tree of Jesse as fresh as any tree in spring, the folds of our Lord’s cloak as loose and flowing as you will see in any Arab street. What brings us close to tears, Massimo, he said, is the total selflessness of these artists. They were not interested in showing off their noses, he said, and they were not interested in giving interviews and attending festivals. No, he said, they were interested in reaching down into the heart of the mystery and bringing it out into the light of day, undefiled, still mysterious. And because of that, he said, they survive, because of that they fill us with wonder. Wonder, Massimo, he said, without wonder life is nothing. Without wonder we are ants. Everything about us is a cause for wonder, Massimo, he said. A woman. Her elbow. Her wrist. A tree. Its leaves. Its smell. A sound. A memory. And the person who can help us to wonder is the artist. That is why the artist is sacred, he said.