The fourth song, in radiant E-flat, always felt like the first flash of real light in the whole cycle. But tonight it’s a klezmer-tinted, lurching folk dance. They’ve just gone out for a long walk. They’ve only gone on ahead of us. The day is beautiful. The final phrases ascend into bright uplands, the music almost escaping to the distant sunny hill the words describe, alongside two small children who can’t be bothered to turn around and wave.
Then the storm. Does it make him a depressive, that he loves the storm best of all? The thrill of lightning, of an ambulance, of safety crumbling away. The full orchestra, at last — the wrenched strings, the plummeting winds — pumps out a tempest. In the interludes between each stanza, the storm blows out of controclass="underline" at first nothing, then four bars, then eight. The voice ratchets up—in this weather, in this weather, in this weather—rising in each successive entry, from a monotone D to an E to a G. In this raging, in this horror, I would never have let the children out!
Guilty survivor, beating up on himself. The music locates the storm inside the singer’s mind, like the one in Peter Grimes, another work that Clara gave Els in that year of miraculous discoveries. The song’s storm isn’t the one that takes the children; this is a later gale, long after the fact. I would never have let the children out in such weather. I’d worry that they might die. Now there’s no reason to worry about anything.
Fifty-two years of listening, and Els still can’t say how the thing is done. How the notes find that precise signature of doubt and hope. The bliss of giving up. Grief too great to be bought off by the promise of an afterlife. A song that predicts the end of its own tradition. But this time through, near his own cadence, Els no longer hears the prediction buried in the songs, but only the memory of discovering them once, at the end of youth. Of Clara stroking him, the storm of eighteen.
Clara laid it all out for him, after the songs ended: How two years after the premiere, Mahler’s own five-year-old Maria died of scarlet fever. How the composer’s shattered wife took up with another man. How Mahler himself died soon after, of a diseased heart, at fifty. And three years on: the war, the death of a generation, the collapse of the absurd empire whose end his music had long foretold. .
Peter learned the sequel soon enough: How the dead Maria’s half-sister, Manon, the daughter of Alma and the man with whom she betrayed Mahler, died three decades later, of polio. How Alban Berg brought the dead sister back to life in his Violin Concerto, an atonal miasma that climaxed in a chilling Bach chorale. How music blurred the line between prophecy and recall.
Els wraps himself in the rising storm, feeling the madness one more time. The children were taken away from me. I had no say. The crazed gale draws up short. It hangs on a diminuendo; the clarinet, contrabassoon, and harp shrink to nothing. And here is where Clara broke off in mid-caress and grabbed him. The skin on the old man’s forearm puckers, where the ghost of the girl takes hold.
Then the damning glockenspiel, mute for three songs, silent for so long that the ear forgets the forecast from song one. Child’s toy, funeral chime, a light in the night. A bell from out of the pitch-black; a shock but no surprise. A sound that makes hope sound primitive.
Hear that? Clara said, her voice as serene as the singer’s now is. A music box. From the nursery.
The music turns sickly sweet. The storm lifts in a heartbeat, and the sky in all directions clears. The singer says, They rest, they rest in their mother’s house. But everything about the eerie music box insists, You dream.
For years after that first listen, Els read everything on the Kindertotenlieder he could find. He even struggled through articles in German. Every analysis insisted that the last song ended in otherworldly consolation. He knew beyond a doubt that it did not. Something more was happening in those final measures, and to hear it, all a person had to do was listen. He searched for a long time for someone to confirm the eviscerating lilt of that final, music-box lullaby. Years passed, the articles piled up, and at last Els reached the one possible conclusion: music said only what the ear could bear to hear.
Listen, Clara said. These are the deaths that start everything.
Mahler to Bruno Walter: “How dark is the foundation on which our lives rest!”
He killed the player and called his daughter. Stupid superstition. But a simple enough safeguard, with no downside. It was three hours earlier on the Pacific Coast. She would already be hard at work, preparing for tomorrow morning. They had talked three days before. But that was then.
Sara was VP for research of the second-largest data-mining firm in the Northwest. Her company figured out how to make advertisements chase their target users around the Web and read their minds. In her spare time, she competed in standard-course triathlons. Her fortieth birthday present to herself had been surviving a double Olympic distance out in Hawaii. She sat on the board of two museums. She spent her vacations volunteering for an NGO that transferred obsolete supercomputers to sub-Saharan countries. She wasn’t married; she wasn’t even single. Men who weren’t scared of her were usually sociopaths.
Els got her voice mail. Lifetimes ago, in the seventies, when Sara was still a child and Els was still her father of record, he’d hung up in alarm the first time he called a friend and got a machine. It took him years to stop bellowing at answering tapes — repeating, spelling out his name, falling into fatuous improvisation or flustered silence. These days, it shocked him to get a live person.
It’s your father, he told the machine. Give me a ring.
He hadn’t even crossed the length of the room to the kitchen when she called back.
What’s wrong?
It’s Fidelio, he answered. She’s dead.
A pause came across the line. For decades in the classroom, Els had told his composition students that rests were the most powerful elements in a composer’s palette. The negative space, that little, ambiguous leap before the Heil. The silences were the thing that the notes were powerless to reach.
How?
A stroke, I think. I didn’t get an autopsy.
I’m sorry, she said. She was good to you.
Another prolonged fermata, the only sound he could bring himself to make. At last she said, Are you okay?
Sar? he managed. I’ve been thinking. There’s an opening at Shade Arbors.
You’ve taken up golf?
A gated thing, south of the college.
Gated thing.
A condominium association. You know. There’s a bar and a restaurant right there. They even have a gym.
You want to move into a nursing home?
Not a nursing home. Retirement community. The nurses are only there if you need them.
Are you crazy?
You told me you don’t like me living alone.