Just as I was thinking this, ‘Lara’s Theme’ oozed out of the speakers. We looked at one another and laughed, and she made a gesture as if to push back her chair and rise. Maybe she saw alarm in my eyes because she laughed again and then, playing along, threw her napkin down on the table. The gesture took her hand more than halfway across the cloth. But she didn’t get up, or push her chair back, just went on smiling, and left her hand on top of her napkin, knuckles raised.
And then I touched her.
Harmony
THEY HAD DINED well at 261 Landstrasse, and now passed eagerly into the music room. M-’s intimates had sometimes been fortunate enough to have Gluck, Haydn or the young prodigy Mozart perform for them; but they could be equally content when their host seated himself behind his violoncello and beckoned at one of them to accompany him. This time, however, the lid of the klavier was down, and the violoncello nowhere visible. Instead, they were confronted by an oblong rosewood box standing on legs which made the shape of matching lyres; there was a wheel at one end and a treadle beneath. M- folded back the curved roof of the contraption, disclosing three dozen glass hemispheres linked by a central spindle and half-submerged in a trough of water. He seated himself at the centre and pulled out a narrow drawer on either side of him. One contained a shallow bowl of water, the other a plate bearing fine chalk.
‘If I might make a suggestion,’ said M-, looking round at his guests. ‘Those of you who have not yet heard Miss Davies’s instrument might try the experiment of closing your eyes.’ He was a tall, well-made man in a blue frock coat with flat brass buttons; his features, strong and jowly, were those of a stolid Swabian, and if his bearing and voice had not obviously denoted the gentry, he might have been taken for a prosperous farmer. But it was his manner, courteous yet persuasive, which impelled some who had already heard him play decide to close their eyes as well.
M- soaked his fingertips in water, flicked them dry and dabbled them in the chalk. As he pumped at the treadle with his right foot, the spindle turned on its bright brass gudgeons. He touched his fingers to the revolving glasses, and a high, lilting sound began to emerge. It was known that the instrument had cost fifty gold ducats, and sceptics among the audience at first wondered why their host had paid so much to reproduce the keening of an amorous cat. But as they became accustomed to the sound, they started to change their minds. A clear melody was becoming detectable: perhaps something of M-’s own composition, perhaps a friendly tribute to, or even theft from, Gluck. They had never heard such music before, and the fact that they were blind to the method by which it came to them emphasised its strangeness. They had not been told what to expect and so, guided only by their reasoning and sentiment, wondered if such unearthly noises were not precisely that – unearthly.
When M- paused for a few moments, busying himself on the hemispherical glasses with a small sponge, one of the guests, without opening his eyes, observed, ‘It is the music of the spheres.’
M- smiled. ‘Music seeks harmony,’ he replied, ‘just as the human body seeks harmony.’ This was, and at the same time was not, an answer; rather than lead, he preferred to let others, in his presence, find their own way. The music of the spheres was heard when all the planets moved through the heavens in concert. The music of the earth was heard when all the instruments of an orchestra played together. The music of the human body was heard when it too was in a state of harmony, the organs at peace, the blood flowing freely and the nerves aligned along their true and intended paths.
The encounter between M- and Maria Theresia von P- took place in the imperial city of V- between the winter of 177- and the summer of the following year. Such minor suppressions of detail would have been a routine literary mannerism at the time; but they also tactfully admit the partiality of our knowledge. Any philosopher claiming that his field of understanding was complete, and that a final, harmonious synthesis of truth was being offered to the reader, would have been denounced as a charlatan; and likewise those philosophers of the human heart who deal in storytelling, would have been – and would be – wise not to make any such claim either.
We can know, for instance, that M- and Maria Theresia von P- had met before, a dozen years previously; but we cannot know whether or not she had any memory of the event. We can know that she was the daughter of Rosalia Maria von P-, herself the daughter of Thomas Cajetan Levassori della Motta, dance master at the imperial court; and that Rosalia Maria had married the imperial secretary and court counsellor Joseph Anton von P- at the Stefanskirche on 9th November 175-. But we cannot tell what the mixing of such different bloods entailed, and whether it was in some way the cause of the catastrophe that befell Maria Theresia.
Again, we know that she was baptised on 15th May 175-, and that she learnt to place her fingers on a keyboard almost as soon as she learnt to place her feet on the floor. The child’s health was normal, according to her father’s account, until the morning of 9th December 176-, when she woke up blind; she was then three and a half years old. It was held to be a perfect case of amaurosis: that is to say, there was no fault detectable in the organ itself, but the loss of sight was total. Those summoned to examine her attributed the cause to a fluid with repercussions, or else to some fright the girl had received during the night. Neither parents nor servants, however, could attest to any such happening.
Since the child was both cherished and well-born, she was not neglected. Her musical talent was encouraged, and she attracted both the attention and the patronage of the empress herself. A pension of two hundred gold ducats was granted to the parents of Maria Theresia von P-, with her education separately accounted for. She learnt the harpsichord and pianoforte with Kozeluch, and singing under Righini. At the age of fourteen she commissioned an organ concerto from Salieri; by sixteen she was an adornment of both salons and concert societies.
To some who gawped at the imperial secretary’s daughter while she played, her blindness enhanced her appeal. But the girl’s parents did not want her treated as the society equivalent of a fairground novelty. From the start, they had continually sought her cure. Professor Stoerk, court physician and head of the Medical Faculty, was regularly in attendance, and Professor Barth, celebrated for his operations on cataract, was also consulted. A succession of cures was tried, but as each failed to alleviate the girl’s condition, she became prone to irritation and melancholia, and was assailed by fits which caused her eyeballs to bulge from their sockets. It might have been predictable that the confluence of music and medicine brought about the second encounter between M- and Maria Theresia.
M- was born at Iznang on Lake Constance in 173-. The son of an episcopal gamekeeper, he studied divinity at Dillingen and Ingolstadt, then took a doctorate in philosophy. He arrived in V- and became a doctor of law before turning his attention to medicine. Such an intellectual peripeteia did not, however, indicate inconstancy, still less the soul of a dilettante. Rather M- sought, like Doctor Faustus, to master all forms of human knowledge; and like many before him his eventual purpose – or dream – was to find a universal key, one that would permit the final understanding of what linked the heavens to the earth, the spirit to the body, all things to one another.
In the summer of 177-, a distinguished foreigner and his wife were visiting the imperial city. The lady was taken ill, and her husband – as if such were a normal medical procedure – instructed Maximilian Hell, astronomer (and member of the Society of Jesus), to prepare a magnet which might be applied to the afflicted part. Hell, a friend of M-’s, kept him informed of the commission; and when the lady’s ailment was said to be cured, M- hastened to her bedside to inform himself about the procedure. Shortly thereafter, he began his own experiments. He ordered the construction of numerous magnets of different sizes: some to be applied to the stomach, others to the heart, still others to the throat. To his own astonishment, and the gratitude of his patients, M- discovered that cures beyond the prowess of a physician could sometimes be effected; the cases of Fräulein Oesterlin and the mathematician Professor Bauer were especially noted.