‘monumental patience’. There were many people he wanted to wipe from his memory: Wallner, the humpbacked tailor; Lehel, the headmaster of the grammar school, whose stupidity was unsurpassed; Nadabán, the local poet; Mahovenyecz, the obsessive chess-player, employee of the water-tower; Mrs Plauf and both her husbands; Dr Provaznyik, who, with his doctor’s diploma, eventually succeeded in easing everyone’s path into the grave; they all deserved it, from the constantly crocheting Mrs Nuszbeck to the hopelessly mad chief of police, from the chairman of the local council with his eye for prepubescent girls to the very last roadsweeper, in short ‘the whole breeding ground of dark stupidity’ was to be annihilated in one fell swoop and for ever. Of course, the person he most devoutly wished to remain ignorant of was Mrs Eszter, his wife, that dangerous prehistoric beast from whom he, ‘by the grace of God’, had separated years ago, who reminded him of nothing so much as one of those merciless medieval mercenaries, with whom he had tied that infernal comedy of a marriage thanks to an unforgivable moment of youthful carelessness, and who, in her uniquely dismal and alarming essence, summed up all that ‘multifarious spectacle of disillusionment’ the society of the town, in his view, somehow succeeded in representing. Even before the beginning when, glancing up from his score, the fact of his being a husband dawned on him and he examined his spouse rather more thoroughly, he was presented with the insoluble problem of how to avoid calling his over-ripe fiancée by her astonishing Christian name (‘How can I call her Tünde, after a fairy in a poem,’ he had pondered, ‘when she looks like a sack of old potatoes!’) and though, after a while, this problem seemed relatively unimportant, he never dared utter his alternatives to it aloud. For ‘the deadly appearance’ of his marital partner, which chimed in so perfectly with the quality of the awful choir he was doomed to conduct, was as nothing to the revelation of his better half’s inner character which pointed unmistakably to something military and martinet-like, that recognized one beat and one beat only, that of the forced march, and only one melody, that of the call to arms. And since he was unable to keep step, the martial trumpet sound of her voice made him shudder, and turned his marriage into what was, in his view, a satanic cell, a trap from which it was not only impossible to escape but which made the mere thought of escape appear to lie beyond him. Instead of ‘the basic life-energy and the poor-man’s implacable need for moral certainty’ he had unconsciously expected, shamefully in retrospect, at the time of their engagement, he found himself facing something that, without exaggeration, amounted to an ‘imbecility’ that intensified from sickness to overweening ambition and a kind of ‘vulgar arithmetic’ shot through with the crude spirit of the barracks, a roughness, an insensitivity, an inferno of such deeply destructive hate and crass boorishness, that over the decades it utterly incapacitated him. He became incapacitated and defenceless because he could neither bear her nor rid himself of her (the merest mention of divorce would loose a merciless torrent of abuse on his head …), nevertheless he suffered life under a single roof with her for close on thirty years, until one day, after thirty nightmare years, his life had reached a low point ‘from which there was no descent’. He was sitting by the window of the director’s office in the converted chapel which was the music academy, pondering the significance of some unsettling comments made by Frachberger, the blind piano tuner, whom he had just let out through the door. He looked out at the pale sunset, noted people laden down with nylon bags making their way home down the dark cold streets, and the thought flashed by him that, slowly, he too should start home, when a wholly unexpected and utterly unfamiliar sense of choking seized him. He wanted to stand up, get a glass of water perhaps, but his limbs refused to move, and he understood at that moment that it was not a passing fit of airlessness but a permanent fatigue, the disgust, bitterness and immeasurable misery of over fifty years of ‘being exhausted by such sunsets and such journeys home’ that had him in its grip. By the time he arrived at the house in the avenue and shut the door behind him, he had realized he could stand it no longer and decided to lie down; he would lie down and never get up again so that he would never lose another minute, because he knew the moment he lay down in his bed that night ‘the great burden of human decline into madness, imbecility, dullness, thick-headedness, gracelessness, tastelessness, crudity, infantilism, ignorance and general stupidity’ was not something that could be slept off even in fifty more years. Throwing all his previous caution aside, he invited Mrs Eszter to leave the house at her earliest convenience and informed his office that owing to his state of physical decline he was relinquishing all his privileges and obligations forthwith; as a result of which, to his greatest astonishment, his wife disappeared just like that, as in any fairy tale, and the formal decision concerning his pension arrived a few weeks later by special post, wishing him well for his ‘outstanding work in musical research’, bearing an indecipherable scrawl for a signature, signifying that from that day forth, by the ineffable grace of fortune, he should remain undisturbed and live only for that which he now considered to have been his mission in the first place, that is to recline on his bed and banish boredom by composing, day and night, sentences like variations ‘on the same bitter theme’. Who or what he should thank for the strikingly exceptional behaviour of the institution or of his wife he had no idea, especially once the first waves of relief had washed over him, though the general conviction that his unexpected retirement was due only to the fact that his many years of research into ‘the world of sound’ had reached a last and decisive turning point was clearly based on a misapprehension, a mistaken hypothesis that was not entirely unfounded, although — in his case — it was incorrect to speak of musical research but rather of a moment of anti-musical enlightenment, something that has been glossed over for centuries, a ‘decisive revelation’ that, for him, amounted to a particularly distressing scandal. On that fateful day he was doing his customary evening round of the buildings so as to check that no one remained inside before it was locked up, and finding himself in the main hall of the academy, he saw Frachberger — clearly forgotten by the others — and as so often before, when he had come upon the old man engaged on his monthly work of tuning the pianos, he couldn’t help but hear him muttering to himself. On hearing that muttering Eszter would normally sneak out of the room without signalling his presence, a gesture born of sensitivity (or possibly distaste), and get someone else to hurry the old man up, but that afternoon he found no one, not even a cleaner, in the building, so it was left to him personally to rouse him from his meditations. Tuning fork in hand, presumably so he should distinguish more clearly between those wavering As and Es, this master craftsman lay, as was his wont, athwart the instrument, incapable of making the slightest movement without an accompanying noise, merrily conducting a one-sided conversation. At first his utterances seemed nothing but idle chatter, and as far as Frachberger himself was concerned it was indeed no more than that, but when, having found an as yet untuned chord, he cried out a second time (‘How did this sweet little fifth get here? Terribly sorry, my dear, but I shall have to take you down a peg or two …’), Eszter was all attention. Ever since he was young he had lived with the unshakeable conviction that music, which for him consisted of the omnipotent magic of harmony and echo, provided humanity’s only sure stay against the filth and squalor of the surrounding world, music being as close an approximation to perfection as could be imagined, and the stench of cheap perfume in the stuffy hall together with Frachberger’s senile croakings represented a crude violation of such transparent ideality. This Frachberger creature was the last straw that late afternoon: a fury seized Eszter and, while still in its first fit, quite against character, he frog-marched the confused ancient out of the hall, and rather than pressing the white stick into his hand, practically threw it after him. His words though were not so easily disposed of: like siren voices, they wailed inside him, torturing him, and, perhaps already suspecting where this innocent-sounding chatter would soon lead, he couldn’t put them out of his mind. Naturally enough, he recalled a sentence from his own academic training, to the effect that ‘European instruments of the last two or three hundred years have been tuned to what is known as “well-tempered” pitch’, and though at that time he had seen no particular signficance in the fact, it having been no concern of his what precisely lay beneath this simple statement, the once cheery sound of Frachberger’s solitary mumbling now suggested that it referred to some sort of mystery, a kind of vague burden that had to be shifted before it crushed his desperate belief in the perfection of musical utterance, and in the weeks following his retirement, as soon as he had survived the most dangerous vortices of his own fatigue, he set about the grinding labour of immersing himself in the subject that seemed to strike most viciously at his person. And it quickly became apparent that his immersion in the subject entailed engagement in a painful struggle of liberation against the last stubborn fantasies of self-delusion, because, once having worked his way through the dusted shelves full of relevant books in the hall, he had also worked out of his system that last illusion concerning the nature of ‘musical resistance’ with which he had tried to shore up his beleaguered values, and just as Frachberger ‘took a pure fifth down a peg or two’, so he too toned down the heroic mirage of his ideas until only those terminally darkening skies were left. Peeling away the inessential, or rather evoking the essential underlying concepts, he attempted, above all, to differentiate between musical and non-musical sound, positing that the former was distinguished by certain symmetries arising from harmonics inherent in its basic physical nature, that its characteristic quality lay in the fact that single vibrations comprised a whole series of so-called periodic waves which could be expressed in terms of relations between whole numbers; then went on to examine the essential conditions under which two sounds existed in harmonious relationship with each other, and established that ‘pleasure’, or the musical equivalent of such a sensation, was occasioned when the two above-mentioned sounds or tones produced the maximum number of harmonics and when the fewest of these were within critical proximity of each other; all this so he should be able, without the least tinge of doubt, to identify the concept of musical order and the ever more lamentable stations of its history, whose decisive conclusion he had almost reached. Because of his indifferent state of mind, whenever he learned anything new he tended to forget specific details and was obliged to refresh his memory and enlarge upon it, so it wasn’t surprising that during those feverish weeks his room was buried under a vast mountain of note-paper listing such a great mass of functions, calculations, decimal points, fractions, frequencies and harmonic indices that you could hardly walk for them. He had to understand Pythagoras and his mathematical daemon, how the Greek master, surrounded by his admiring students, established a musical system that, in its own terms, was wholly mesmeric, all through calculations based on the length of a stopped string, and he absolutely had to admire the brilliant insight of Aristoxenus, who trusted to the genuine musicianship and instinctive inventiveness of the ancient player and relied entirely on the ear, and, because he clearly heard the universal relationship betwen pure tones, believed the best course he could take was to tune the harmonics of his instrument to the famous Olympian tetrachord; in other words he had to acknowledge and marvel at the fact that ‘the philosopher most concerned with the underlying unity of the cosmos and harmonic expression’ had, from wholly distinct temperamental premises, arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions. At the same time he was forced to acknowledge that what followed, to wit the sad history of the so-called development of the science of music, demonstrated the limits of natural tuning, and to observe that the problematic process of pitching an instrument, which, owing to difficulties of modulation, firmly excluded the use of the higher registers, rendered it ever more insufferable, in other words he was forced to watch events taking their fatal course, as the essential question — the meaning and value of pitch — was gradually, step by step, forgotten. The way led through Master Salinas of Salamanca, the Chinese master Tsai-Yun, through Stevinen, Praetorius and Mersenne, to the organ-master of Halberstadt, and while this last managed to resolve this issue once and for all to his own satisfaction in his