TEXT:  
    
    
    
    
   The Music OF Erich Zann
    
   by H. P. Lovecraft
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
   Written Dec 1921
    
   Published March 1922 in The National Amateur, Vol. 44, No. 4, p. 38-40.
   I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again
   found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modem maps alone, for I know
   that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the
   antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever
   name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But
   despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the
  
   house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my
   impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the
   music of Erich Zann.
   That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental,
   was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil,
   and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot
   find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a
   half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which
   could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a
   person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.
   The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick
   blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It
   was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories
   shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches
   which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it,
   since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled
   streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly
   steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached.
   I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was
   almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of ffights
   of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular,
   sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with
   struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed,
   incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise.
   Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the
   street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground
  
   below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.
   The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it
   was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because
   they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I
   was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always
   evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the
   Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top
   of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.
   My rcom was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house
   was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strang music from the peaked
   garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was
   an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann,
   and who played eve nings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire
   to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had
   chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the
   only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at
   the declivity and panorama beyond.
   Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was
   haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was
   yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard
   before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The
   longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to
   make the old man’s acquaintance.
   One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway
   and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He
  
   was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque,
   satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered
   and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he
   grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic
   stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west
   side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was
   very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary barrenness and
   neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash-stand,
   a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned
   chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were
   of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of
   dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently
   Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.
   Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden
   bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now
   removed his viol from its motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in
   the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but,
   offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with
   strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own
   devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in
   music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most
   captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird
   notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.
   Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled
   inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked
   him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled
  
   satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and
   seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed
   when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use
   persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to
   awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had
   listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a
   moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew
   suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long,
   cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude
   imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a
   startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some
   intruder—a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible
   above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep
   street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at
   the summit.
   The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain
   capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of
   moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in
   the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window
   and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage
   even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning
   with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with
   both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me,
   and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust
   and offense, his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip,
  
   but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair; then with an
   appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many
   words with a pencil, in the labored French of a foreigner.
   The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness.
   Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous
   disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my
   listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his
   eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could
   not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his
   room touched by an-other. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I
   could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with
   Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would,
   he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
   As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old
   man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my
   metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight
   sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and for
   some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had
   finished reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.
   The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between
   the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable
   upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.
   It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not as
   great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth
   story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy
   and played listlessly. This was always at night—in the day he slept and would
  
   admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the
   weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to
   look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the
   glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to
   the garret during theater hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.
   What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb
   old man. At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold
   enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the
   narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard
   sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and
   brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not;
   but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and
   that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly
   conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild
   power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician
   acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now
   refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.
   Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into
   a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own
   shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof
   that the horror was real—the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can
   utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I
   knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in
   the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor
   musician’s feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing
  
   him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time
   calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close
   both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened
   to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his
   distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child
   clutches at its mother’s skirts.
   Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into
   another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for
   some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of
   intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and
   crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and
   returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note
   implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait
   where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and
   terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil flew.
   It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician’s
   feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as
   from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained
   window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself;
   though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely
   distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or
   in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look.
   Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose,
   seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had
   ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.
   It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful
  
   night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could
   now see the expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive
   was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown
   something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The
   playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the
   qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I
   recognized the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I
   reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play
   the work of another composer.
   Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that
   desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted
   like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his
   frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and
   whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning.
   And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol;
   a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.
   At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had
   sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming
   viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit.
   The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the
   window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the
   chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of
   paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I
   looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes
   were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind,
  
   mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
   A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it
   toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were
   gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to
   gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might
   see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark,
   but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the
   rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked
   while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I
   saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered
   streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive
   with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I
   stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that
   ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos
   and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol
   behind me.
   I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing
   against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place
   where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann
   I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some
   chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above
   that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me,
   and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s
   chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his
   senses.
   He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved
  
   my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in
   his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he
   neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all
   through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and
   babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew not
   why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose
   glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle, finding
   the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed
   thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose
   fury increased even as I plunged.
   Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house;
   racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and
   tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets
   and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the
   broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible
   impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that
   the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.
   Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been
   able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for
   the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely-written sheets which alone could
   have explained the music of Erich Zann.
    
    
    
    
  
   © 1998-1999 William Johns
   Last modified: 12/18/1999 18:43:18
  
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