Six Sixty-Six. Six Sixty-Six. The same note struck in the same way on the piano six hundred and sixty-six times. It was beautiful, Massimo, he said. Its beauty was an otherworldly beauty. It would either drive you mad or draw you into another dimension. When it was performed later, by Pollini at Dartington, and then at Bregenz, the audience rioted, and walked out. Cage said to me: This is a piece I would like to have written if only I had thought of it. But he was wrong. He could never have written it. I was fond of Cage, he said, he had an inkling of the way of the Buddha, but fatally contaminated by American New Ageism. He never understood my music. If he had written Six Sixty-Six he would have been content with the idea, he would have been indifferent to the sound. Whereas I was not interested in the idea, he said, I was interested in the sound. Suddenly, he said, what had been a barrier between me and what I wanted to say became precisely the thing that I wanted to say. What Nepal taught me, he said, was that what we are striving for is not transcendence but transformation. The world is there to be transformed. The human being is there to be transformed. Not transcended, transformed. When a note is played six hundred and sixty-six times it is transformed. The ear that hears the same note six hundred and sixty-six times is transformed. All my life, he said, I had felt this urge to eat the world because I loved it so much, to eat it and ingest it and make it a part of me. It was the same with women, Massimo, he said to me. Eat and ingest, eat and ingest. But of course you cannot eat the world, Massimo, he said. You cannot eat a woman. And so you fall back, frustrated and despondent, until the urge seizes you again, and again you make the effort and again you fail. But when I came back from Nepal, after I had been hurled about and shaken in the great washing machine of Nepal, he said, I found that all the problems, all the barriers, had fallen away. Instead of striking the same note again and again in frustration, I wrote Six Sixty-Six. The performer of the piece has to take his time. The pacing must be absolutely even. It is intolerable to listen to, he said. It is intolerable to play. Why? Because it is so close to ecstasy. The second piece I wrote, he said, another piano piece, Heraclitus, could not have been mistaken for Cage. The first section had the superscription: ‘What was scattered, gathers; what was gathered, scatters.’ The second: ‘Under the comb, the tangle and the straight path are the same.’ The third: ‘The sun is new, all day.’ Each section lasts less than a minute, he said. But when Pollini played them in Bregenz they had a greater effect on the audience than Mahler’s Song of the Earth. One person had a fit. Another began to take off all her clothes. When I wrote those pieces, he said, I was glacially calm, but I knew I had arrived at last. Instead of being my enemy, with whom I had to fight every inch of the way, as it had seemed when I worked with Scheler in Vienna, he said, music had become my friend, with whom I was happy to spend long hours. A sound is not a step on the way to something else, he said, but it is itself a universe in which we should be happy to set up our dwelling. I, who had never felt at home anywhere, he said, was now made to feel at home by music. In those early years of my return from Nepal, he said, of my resettling in Rome after all those years away, I was drunk with possibility. I could not spend enough hours at my desk, my piano. I would work from early morning far into the night and sometimes I would not go to bed till dawn, and a few hours later I would be back at my desk, at my piano. It was as if the barriers had been broken and the waters were rushing out, sweeping me before them, and it was as much as I could do to keep my head above the water. Some days I did not eat at all, he said, and some nights I did not sleep at all, but I always made sure I was well-dressed and that my clothes were clean and well-pressed. Always. Nor was I in a hurry, he said. When you have entered the world of music, he said, when you are penetrating to the heart of each sound, then time ceases to matter. You are no longer working with time and you are no longer working in time. Each sound in itself, he said. Each passing moment in itself. That is the secret, Massimo, he said. That is the secret. The composer is not a craftsman, Massimo, he said to me. He is not a genius. He is a conduit, a go-between. A postman. That is what he has been chosen for. It is no reflection on his character that he is chosen, it is simply a fact. I was chosen, Massimo, he said to me, and I had to do what I was chosen for, just as you were chosen to help me in my task. Fortunately everything conspired to make that possible, he said. Everything from my upbringing in the great house in Sicily to my years in Monte Carlo, to my meeting with my wife and our many stormy years together in London and Paris and Switzerland, to her leaving me and my despair and my trip with Tucci to Nepal. After his stroke he talked more and more about the shape of his life. We cannot foretell how any of it will turn out, Massimo, he said, but when we look back everything seems fated. Everything seems to have had a purpose. Even the absurdity of being born into a Sicilian noble family, the most ridiculous fate anyone could wish for. Artists have always come from the middle classes, he said. Very few have been aristocrats. Being born into the aristocracy is a terrible handicap, he said. Look at Lord Berners. He was a gifted man who was ruined by his class and his caste. The middle classes are both more ambitious and more hard-working, Massimo, he said, that is why the bulk of artists, from Dante to Shakespeare and from Beethoven to Thomas Mann, have come from that class. The only trouble with the middle class is its tendency to avoid risk. I, on the other hand, have always taken risks. You could say that I love risk. From the beginning I was frightened of nothing, he said. That has always stood me in good stead. I was not afraid to write waltzes for the palm court orchestras of Monte Carlo, and I was not afraid to tell Scheler that I did not feel he had anything to teach me. From the beginning I felt you were wasting my time, Scheler retorted. From the beginning I felt that your damned Italian and Sicilian aristocratic arrogance would never allow you to make the most of your undoubted talents. Your undoubted talents, he said, for he prided himself on his fair-mindedness. It was no use telling him he was barking up the wrong tree, that he was leading his pupils into a dead end, he would not have understood me. We parted if not amicably at least with enormous politeness on both sides, a Sicilian aristocratic politeness on my side and a Viennese Jewish politeness on his. Poor Scheler, he said, he was not fortunate enough to escape to America like his master. His wife was ailing and he stayed, though his friends had found him a post at Buffalo. I heard later that he had been deported and killed, he and his wife and all his family. A cesspit, Massimo, he said. Europe was a cesspit in those years. And the stink has not entirely disappeared. In Italy, at any rate, they still long for a strong man to lead them, a man with an iron chin. We have not seen the end of it, Massimo, he said. When I go to Hungary and Romania to hear my music played I hear about the monstrousness of the gypsies. When I go to Belgrade I hear about the smell left by the Turks and the Bosnians. When I go to Poland I hear about the treachery of the Jews. There’s no end to it, Massimo, he said. No end to it. The best place to be is in your study, he said, making music. I have been fortunate, Massimo, he said to me, that all I have ever really been interested in is women and music. For while women can hurt you, they also enrich your life. Even my wife enriched my life. I always recognised that, whatever she did to me, and she did terrible damage to me, he said, she nevertheless, on balance, enriched my life. That is why I have no regrets, Massimo, he said to me. He was lying in his bed, very small and very white. He still dyed his hair so that it was as black as it had always been, but his face was very white. He was still writing his music. I had to prop him up. Annamaria could not do it, she was too old and weak herself. I should get rid of her, he said. If I had any common sense I would get rid of her, but she has been with me for so long I do not have the heart. So I propped him up with all these pillows and placed the plank on his knees and he wrote. When he tired of writing he rang the bell and asked me to sit with him. That is when he talked. I have no regrets, he often said that. It would be foolish to have regrets. Besides, what sort of life was it that I gave her? When we married I still went out into the world, he said. I still played the host when she required me to, and presided over the dinner parties that she organised. The trouble was that she had a bourgeois soul, despite her filthy aristocratic ways. At heart she was a bourgeois and I was not, he said. I was an artist. I was only happy when I was writing music or thinking about music. Artists should either be married to adoring women who will put up with anything, like Bach, he said, or they should be married to remarkable women, like Mozart, or they should not be married at all. That was what my wife was trying to say to me when she ran away, he said. At first I did not understand and I went after her and brought her back, first from Oxford and then from New York. But when she finally left me at the end of the war I sensed that was the end. The end of our relationship and the end of my married life. Human beings are such slow learners, Massimo, he said to me. It takes them years and years to learn the simplest things. After that, he said, I knew I was by myself. It is a different thing being by yourself at twenty and being by yourself at forty, he said. At twenty you are by yourself because you have not yet found the right person. But at forty you are by yourself because you have understood that partnering is not for you. That is a terrible discovery to make, he said, but it is also a liberating one. The best thing Arabella did for me was to leave me, he said. In Paris after the war I ran after every woman I came across except for Mme Pierre Jean Jouve, but I could sense that the writing was on the wall. Some of them were so beautiful I was able to forget my destiny for a while in their embrace. Some of them were so intelligent or so kind that I was able to bask for a while in their company and convince myself that they were the partners for me. But I knew that sooner or later I would have to go away. I would have to be shaken up or I would simply wither and die. I had no intention of withering in Paris and dying, he said. There was still too much to do. So I left Paris, I left my dear Henri Michaux, and I went to Nepal with Tucci and Maraini, both remarkable men. Maraini was the photographer, a scholar of Japanese culture as well as of Indian and Tibetan. He had one finger missing from his left hand because during the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp he had cut it off and cooked it to feed his little daughter. Bartok was another who had a loving wife, he said, but she was not with him in Egypt when I became acquainted with him and with Hindemith at the Congress for World Music which was held there. I had long been interested in that country and Daniel and I spent many happy weeks there before the Congress. At the Congress itself our host was a pupil of Bartok’s, who was living in that country. There is a photo he took of me with Bartok and Mr and Mrs Hindemith and with the great Austrian ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel, with the pyramids in the background. Bartok was the sweetest and gentlest of men, he said, but Hindemith was a typical German, with a typical German wife. It was fashionable in those days to go out into the desert with a group of friends and play at being archaeologists. We would find a mound and start to dig and soon we would find all sorts of ancient Egyptian treasures, brooches in the form of scarabs and little statues of the winged sky-god Nut and other deities of ancient Egypt. When you cleaned the dirt off these you would often find, inscribed in a corner, ‘Made in Germany’. I have never been in the least interested in the monumental aspect of ancient Egypt, he said. It stinks of Empire and reminds me of the monstrosities built by dictators everywhere, by Mussolini in Rome and Hitler in Berlin and Stalin in Moscow and Ceau¸sescu in Bucharest. But some of the birds and farmyard animals depicted in the tombs are remarkable, as is the Coptic and Islamic art of Egypt. The folk traditions, both artistic and musical, of that country are remarkable too, he said. But it was to be many years before I understood what it was about it I found moving and how to relate it to my own music. For I am not interested in incorporating folk rhythms into my music, as Bartok was, or the rhythm of Buddhist or Gregorian chanting, as some composers are today. I am interested in finding through my own work what it is that this work has in common with these traditions. Only in that way can we move forward, he said. Anything else is pastiche and no better than the populist and pretentious work of Prokofiev and Shostakovitch, much beloved of those with a sentimental disposition and tin ears. Sometimes I sat with him for the whole day and he said nothing. He lay there wit