They were tears which he drummed.
--HEINE.
Perhaps you think because I play upon an instrument of percussion I
admire that other percussive machine of wood and wire, the piano, or
consider the tympanum an inferior instrument?
You were never more mistaken, for I despise the piano as a shallow
compromise between the harp, tympani and those Eastern tinkling
instruments of crystal and glass, or dulcimers and cymbalum. It has no
character, no individuality of its own. It is deplorable in conjunction
with an orchestra, for its harsh, hard, unmalleable tone never blends
with other instruments. It is a selfish instrument and it makes selfish
artists of those who devote a lifetime to it.
Bah! I hate you and your pianos. Compare it to the tympani? Never,
never! It is false, insincere, and smirks and simpers if even a silly
school girl sits before it. It takes on the color of any composer's
ideas, and submits like a slave to the whims of any virtuoso. I am
disgusted. Here am I, an old kettle-drummer--as you say in your
barbarous English--poor, unknown, forced to earn a beggarly living by
strumming dance tunes in a variety hall on a hated piano, and often
accompanying singers, acrobats, and all the riffraff of a vaudeville,
where a mist of vulgarity hangs like a dirty pearl cloud over all. I
don't look at my music any more. I know what is wanted. I have rhythmic
talent. I conduct myself, although there is a butter-faced leader waving
a silly stick at us while I sit in my den, half under the stage, and
thrum and think, and blink and thrum.
And what do you suppose I do with my mornings--for I have to rehearse
every afternoon with odious people who splash their draggled lives with
feeble, sick music--? I stay in my attic room and play upon my tympani,
my beloved children. I have three of them, and I play all sorts of
scores, from the wonderful first measures of Beethoven's Fifth, to
Saint-Saëns' Arabian music. Ah! those men understand my instrument. It
is no instrument of percussion to them. It has a soul. It is the heart
of the orchestra. Its rhythmic throb is the pulse of musical life. What
are your strings, your scratching, rasping strings! What signifies the
blare of your brass, or the bilious bleating of your wood-wind! I am the
centre, the life giver. From me the circulation of warm, musical blood
emanates. I stand at the back of the orchestra as high as the
conductor. Ah! he knows it; he looks at me first. How about the Fifth
Symphony? You now sneer no longer. It is I who outline with mystic taps
the framework of the story. Wagner, great, glorious, glowing Wagner!--I
kiss his memory--he appreciated the tympani and their noble mission in
music....
Yes, I am an educated man, but music snared me away from a worldly
career. Music and--a woman; but never mind that part of it. Do you know
Hunding's motif in "Die Walküre"? Ha! ha! I will give it to you. Listen!
Is it not beautiful? The stern, acrid warrior approaches. And Wagner
gave it to me, to the tympani. Am I crazy, am I arrogant, to feel as I
do about my darling dwarf children? Look at their beloved bellies, so
smooth, so elastic, so resonant! A tiny tap and I set vibrating millions
of delicate, ethereal sounds, the timbre of which to my ears has color,
form, substance, nuance, and thrills me even to my old marrow. Is it not
delicious--that warm, velvety, dull percussion? Is it not delicious, I
say? How it shimmers and senses about me! You have heard of drummed
tears? I can make you weep, if I will, with a few melancholy, muffled
strokes. The drum is the epitome of life. Sound is life. The cave-men
bruised stones together and heard the first music.
I know your Herbert Spencer thinks differently, but bah! what does he
know about tympani? Chopin would have been a great tympanist if he had
not wasted his life foolishly at the piano. When he merely drummed with
his fingers on the table, Balzac said, he made music, so exquisitely
sensitive was his touch. Ah me! what a tympanist was lost to the world.
What shading, what delicacy, what sunlight and shadow he would have made
flit across my little darlings on their tripods! No wonder I hate the
piano; and yet, hideous mockery of fate! I play upon an old grand to
earn my bread and wine. I can't play with an orchestra--it is torture
for me. They do not understand me; the big noisy boors do not understand
rhythm or nuance. They play so loud that I cannot be heard, and I will
never stoop to noisy banging. How I hate these orchestral players! How
they scratch and blow like pigs and boasters! When I did play with them
they made fun of my red hair and delicate touch. The leader could not
understand me, and kept on yelling "Forte, Forte." It was in the Fifth
of Beethoven, and I became angry and called out in my poor German (ah! I
hate German, it hurts my teeth): "_Nein, so klopft das Schicksal nicht
an die Pforte._" You remember Beethoven's words!
Well, everybody laughed at me, and I got mad and covered up my
instruments and went home. Jackass! he wanted me to bang out that
wonderful intimation of fate as though it were the milkman knocking at
the door. I am a poet, and play upon the tympani; the conductor and the
orchestra are boors. But I do injustice to one of them. He was an
Alsatian, and spoke bad French. But he was an excellent bassoon player.
He often called on me and we played duets for bassoon and tympani, and
then read Amiel's journal aloud and wept. Oh! he had a sensitive soul,
that bassoon player. He died of the cholera, and now I am alone....
After my failure as an orchestral player I gave a concert in this city,
and played my concerto for seven drums and wood-wind orchestra. The
critics laughed me to distraction. Instead of listening to the
innumerable rhythms and marvellous variety of nuances I offered them,
they mocked my agile behavior and my curiously colored hair. Even my
confrères envied and reviled me. I have genius, so am hated and
despised. Oh, the pity of it all! They couldn't hear the tenderness, the
fairy-like sobbing made by my wrists, but listened with admiration to
the tinkling of a piano, with its hard, unchangeable tone. Oh, the
stupidity of it all!...
But time will have its revenge. I will not stir a finger either. When I
die the world of tone will realize that a great man has passed away,
after a wretched, neglected life. I have composed a symphony, and for
nothing but _Tympani_! Don't smile, because I have explored the most
fantastic regions of rhythm, hitherto undreamed. Tone, timbre,
intensity, rhythm, variety in color, all, all will be in it; and how
much more subtly expressed than by your modern orchestra, with its
blare, blow, bang and scratch. And what great thoughts I have expressed!
I have gone beyond Berlioz, Wagner and Richard Strauss. I have
discovered rhythms, Asiatic in origin, that will plunge you into
midnight woe; rhythms rescued from the Greeks of old, that will drive
you into panting dance; rhythms that will make drunkards of sober men,
warriors of cowards, harlots of angels. I can intoxicate, dazzle, burn,
madden you. Why? Because all music is rhythm. It is the skeleton, the
structure of life, love, the cosmos. God! how I will exult, even if my
skin crackles in hell-fire, when the children of the earth listen to my
Tympani Symphony, and go crazy with its tappings!...
I have led a shiftless, uneventful life, yet I envy no one, for I am the
genius of a new art--but stay a moment! An uneventful life, did I say?
Alas! my life has been one long, desperate effort to forget her, to
forget my love, my wife. My God! I can see her face now, when she
flashed across my sight at a provincial circus. It was in France. I was
a young man drum-mad, and went to the circus to beguile my time, for I
couldn't practise all day. Then I saw her--"Mlle. Léontine, the Aërial
Virtuoso of the Century," the playbills called her. She was fair and
slim, and Heaven had smiled into her eyes.
I am a poet, you see. Her hair was the color of tender wheat and her
feet twinkled star-wise when she walked. She was my first, my only love,
my life, my wife. She loved me, she told me so soon after we became
acquainted, and I believed her; I believe her now, sometimes, when I
strike softly the skins of my dear little drum children. We soon
married. There were no impediments on my side; my parents were dead and
I had a little ready money. I gave it all to her. She took it and bought
diamonds.
"They were so handy in case of hard luck," she said, and smiled. I
smiled, too, and kissed her.
I kissed her very often, and was so desperately in love with her that I
joined the circus and played the drums there; hush! don't tell it to any
one--and the side-drums at that. I would have even played the piano for
her, so frantically did I adore her. I was very proud of my wife, my
Léontine. She did a tremendous act on the trapeze. She swung and made a
flying leap across the tent and caught a bar, and every time I gave a
tap on the big drum just as she grasped the trapeze. Oh! it would have
made your blood shiver to see her slight figure hurtling through space
and landing safely with my rhythmic accompaniment. And how people
cheered, and what crowds flocked to view the spectacle! In some towns
the authorities made us use nets; then the crowds were not nearly so
large. People like risks. The human animal is happy if it smells blood.
Léontine noticed the decreased attendance when the safety nets were
used, and begged the manager to dispense with them.
He often did so, for he loved money as much as she loved fame. She was
perfectly fearless and laughed at my misgivings, so we usually did the
act without nets....
We had reached Rouen in our wanderings through the provinces, and I
mooned about the old town, sauntering through the cathedral, plunged in
a reverie, for I was happy, happy all the time. Léontine was so good, so
amiable, so true. She associated with none of the women of the circus
and with none of the men, except the manager and myself.
The manager reared her; she had been a foundling. She told me this at
the beginning of our intimacy. We often played games of picking out the
handsomest houses and châteaux we passed, pretending that her parents
lived in them. She was very jolly, was my little Léontine, and remained
with me nearly all the time, except when practising her difficult feats;
this she did in company with the manager, who attended to the ropes and
necessary tackling. He was a charming fellow, and very obliging.
One day I was sitting half-asleep in the spring sunshine, with my back
to one of the tents, awaiting Léontine's return. She was, as usual,
rehearsing, and I, composing and dreaming. Suddenly a laugh aroused me,
and I heard a woman's voice:
"But the young idiot never will discover them; he is too blind and too
fond of drumming."