Sara Houghteling, The Thomas Cantor, November 15 at 6:30 pm

[Wayne Olson]

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The Thomas Cantor

A STORY

BY SARA HOUGHTELING

ALONG THE FROST HEAVES and icy crust that rut the road from Dresden to Leipzig, a carriage bears two passengers north. One, awake and unhappy, is Imperial Count Hermann Karl von Keyserlingk, Baltic German by birth, Russian ambassador to Saxony, loyal to the czarina, as he was to her father before her. The other passenger is asleep. He is Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, dark haired, age fourteen, a piano prodigy, native of Danzig, von Keyserlingk’s ward of four years. Day wanes early on these travelers. The year 1741 is still new.

While Johann Gottlieb has been eager for this trip, the count, in his old age, would prefer to remain in Dresden. Only dull matters of diplomacy await him in Leipzig, and the journey, some 120 landmeile, is unpredictable once there’s snow. As the count had dreaded, the bridge at Grimma was impassable and delayed them by a day. Though the truth is, he dislikes Leipzig in any season. Whatever matters he negotiates there fare badly. He dislikes the city center and the haughty town fathers. Also, the bread always smells faintly urinous to him. The mere thought of it makes his stomach turn. There must be something in the wheat, he reasons, staring out at the frozen fields. And at least this mundane business will afford him a chance to visit the Thomas Church and its cantor, in whose musical career he has taken an interest.

The carriage crests a hill and rattles like a peddler’s cart as they descend to the city’s outskirts. Soon they will be at the castle, though this knowledge brings little comfort. The count knows all too well what awaits him there: the drafty room above the kitchen gardens, which are noisy from morning until night; worst of all is the curtained bed, where he will try but fail to fall asleep. He cannot recall the last time he slept peacefully. Even at home, his sleep is tenuous. On the road, the nights have become torture.

The carriage slows, its wheels grinding on gravel as they pass the castle’s gate. Their destination is visible now in the distance, dark against a snow-lightened sky. Von Keyserlingk touches his brow to the frost-spiraled window, hoping the cold will ease his aching head. “This traveling to and fro is fine for a younger man,” he says aloud, rousing Goldberg, who sits up, flushed, wiping the side of his face with his sleeve. The imprint of the cushions’ welting hatches his cheek like a dueling scar.

“We’re here?” the boy asks, bright eyed.

“Unfortunately,” the count replies. The driver clicks to his team, the carriage stops, and servants materialize as if spilled.

Ostensibly, Goldberg travels with von Keyserlingk so that the latter may continue to monitor his ward’s education during their two months’ sojourn. In truth, Goldberg’s presence was Frau von Keyserlingk’s idea: the boy, high-spirited and cheerful, is meant to be a tonic to his melancholy. The count thinks this as he watches Goldberg struggle with his overcoat, which seems to have grown too small in the days it took them to travel.

“Try this,” von Keyserlingk says, and hands over his own. Its gray wool and black braided epaulets make the child appear martial and serious. Von Keyserlingk, who tries to be stern for the sake of decorum, cannot help but smile.

“Sir?” the boy asks, not expecting an answer. They listen to the horses outside whinny and stamp, and to the driver, who clucks to them in Ruthenian. The count gathers his papers and books, unread and scattered about, and while doing so tells the boy he will find a piece of pastry in the pocket of the overcoat. Goldberg looks pleased, which pleases the count. But his heart falls when he looks out the carriage window and sees the steward, waiting for him, standing just beyond the carriage in a circle of lantern light. Even after all these years, the count still hates the formality of footmen. He opens the door before the man in blue can reach it. In his haste, he slips sideways on the icy flagstones and must be caught under both armpits, lifted as if he were a child, righted. He despairs that he has slipped; he despairs that the footman expected him to. He hunches against the cold and again makes his way toward the castle, stopping once to turn, carefully, and watch the boy, who stands in the falling snow, feeding pastry to the horses.

The castle itself is little warmer than the carriage. Von Keyserlingk is divested of his riding clothes, then escorted to his room by a maid in a frilly cap. She was still a girl on his last visit. Now she is taller, wearing a serious expression and an apron tied tightly around her waist. He follows her up a staircase, down a corridor, under dusty banners and the glinting eyes of antlered game. The door to his room looks like the drawbridge of a fortress, iron striped and studded, and the maid must give a thrust with her shoulder to open it.

Inside, the fire is already lit. The girl bustles about, plucking at pillows and kneeling at the grate to wrap stones in a blanket. The count eyes the bed unhappily. “So far from the hearth.” He had not meant to say this aloud.

The maid hears him. “If we move it any closer,” she protests, “you will catch fire as you sleep.”

“Oh, I see no problem, Fräulein,” he answers. “In Bombay, they burn the wives when their husbands die.”

She gives him a look of horror, but he is too tired to apologize for such talk. “Goodnight,” he says in a voice he hopes is kindly. The girl only bows. He thinks, She knows better than to wish me the same.

He sheds his clothes, dons woolens and a dressing gown, and climbs into bed, certain he will not sleep. Even lying still, he can feel the carriage’s jolt and sway. His myalgias are always worse after a long journey, and the cold room only aggravates them. He moves the heated stones, tucked at the foot of the bed, to the small of his back, where they burn instead of soothe. Next he rises and stands by the fire, but the light causes pain to mass behind his eye sockets, as if some liquid were building up pressure and must soon burst. Tomorrow he will summon the doctor, though he despises all the doctors in Leipzig. Tonight, he must wait.

He chooses a chair next to the hearth and sits, and from there hears the church bell toll one. At two, candlestick in hand, he goes to his desk to review the documents for the next day’s negotiations on wool and taxes and Salic law. At three, he drapes a coat over his dressing gown and leaves his chambers to walk the castle’s halls in darkness. He finds a certain peace in the pattern of their arrangement, which he has been pacing for nearly thirty years. Details of the walls and floor come back to him on these night walks, as forgotten words revive themselves when he speaks in a foreign tongue. There is the circular groove in the granite at the estate’s northwest corner. Moonlight reflects blue off the white paint in the portraits.

At four, von Keyserlingk puts his ear to Goldberg’s quarters and hears nothing but an enviable snore. He returns to his room and eats the biscuits that the maid has left under a silver bell on a tray by his reading chair. At quarter past, he climbs back into bed and draws the curtains. The trough in the mattress, softened by years of overweight diplomats, seems to have a magnetic force, drawing him toward its center. He hears mice scurry across his plate for the biscuit crumbs. At last, at five, when there are voices in the kitchen gardens, he falls asleep and dreams of his wife, Agathe, stolid, ruddy faced, carrying him across her shoulders like a bundle of wood.

The count’s manservant arrives at seven, and the barber at eight. “A louis if you slit my neck and save me from a day with the archbishop of Mainz,” von Keyserlingk says, head tipped back, wig draped on the round table beside the shaving chair.

The barber, an Italian, replies, “No, I would be executed for killing you. But it is a generous offer.”

Von Keyserlingk pauses, unsettled that the man has answered him literally as opposed to treating it as a joke. He wishes that Goldberg were nearby, for the boy always understands his humor. Indeed, his ward seems to have a preternatural understanding of him, an odd thing, considering their differences in age and station. Even when they first met, at a court occasion in Danzig, when the count’s wife had proposed to the boy’s mother the possibility of patronage, Goldberg had accepted as if he had been waiting for such an offer. Then he took the stage, played Couperin. He seemed a strange creature, this boy in blue satin, nearly saintly, so self-contained, so very different from the count’s own sons, both diplomats, both grown.

The barber presses the count’s face with hot towels, which smell of bleach and boiled cotton and burn his nostrils as he inhales.

Toilet finished, face tingling, von Keyserlingk descends to the negotiation room and sees that he is the last to arrive. The only empty seat at the long table is farthest from the fire. He thinks, though perhaps he is imagining, that he sees the subdeacon of Leipzig smirk. And, to the count’s despair, it is the bishop who begins speaking first and two hours later shows no signs of flagging. Von Keyserlingk’s chair presses against the backs of his knees. The smell of his wig’s perfume sweetens. Just as he tells himself, I cannot bear this a moment longer, the subdeacon of Leipzig eyes him and says, “I believe it is time we adjourn.”

That night, when von Keyserlingk returns to his rooms, he can hardly recall what was said during the day. He takes his supper in his chamber, where he eats with his eyes closed. The skin over his skull feels too tight, as if it’s shrinking, and his head pulses in a steady 3/4. The spoon from his soup is hot, and he puts its handle on the spot where the pain starts, between his brows. Someone is watching him, waiting to enter. Goldberg.

“Please come, sit,” von Keyserlingk says, one eye opened. The boy obeys. The silk ribbon at his neck hangs undone, and his clothes are wet with snow. “Are you not cold? You will catch a chill.”

Goldberg waits a moment, twanging a Jew’s harp in his pocket, if only to exercise a modicum of defiance. Then he ceremoniously reties the ribbon. Von Keyserlingk imagines the harp is a gift from one of the servants, who share his fondness for the boy.

The counts leans over the steaming soup, inhales, eyes closed again, and asks Goldberg to report on his studies—now Latin, Greek, geometry—for which von Keyserlingk has engaged expensive tutors.

“I saw Herr Bach,” the boy replies instead. “He says I must tell you that he is very pleased with my progress.” Goldberg’s cheeks are still pink from the cold, and he waits, regally proud, before he continues. He idolizes the choirmaster, von Keyserlingk knows, and he can hear this in the boy’s voice as he explains Bach’s newest project, a dictionary of musical forms, as Goldberg describes it, with a certain knowing haughtiness, as if he suspects—correctly—that the count can’t understand. If only he knew of the choirmaster’s money problems, his reputation for bickering, that brace of hungry children. How every time he comes to Leipzig, he must endure Bach’s complaints about the stinginess of the Thomas Church fathers, how he can only afford to hire a single singer for each part of his chorales.

He lets the boy go on, he nods indulgently, he breathes in the steam. At last his melancholy seems to drag even Goldberg to a halt. “You aren’t well,” the boy says. “I must leave.”

Von Keyserlingk rubs his eyes and leans back. “Oh, dear, no,” he says. “Stay. For dominoes. Or you can recite your Greek. Something about music, even. Perhaps about the sirens?”

The boy chooses the first. As they play, the count suspects the child is letting him win and recalls the days when he used to do the same. At last the boy can’t stop yawning, and von Keyserlingk sends him to bed.

The count waits, hopefully, for some other interruption, a delivery of a late-night letter, or a servant on her rounds. No one comes. With effort, he rises and undresses by the fire. Quickly now, quickly, he tells himself, watching the light gleam on his hairless shins. His feet remind him of his father’s feet on his deathbed, how they were waxen and horny, the toenails long and yellow. He thinks, Why do such thoughts queue for me at dusk?

The next three days are as miserable as the nights that preceded them. On the fourth, as von Keyserlingk paces the halls, he passes the music room. From inside comes the metallic tinkling of the harpsichord. He stands and listens, recognizing the knotty melody as one of the Thomas cantor’s. He enters the room, and Goldberg stops abruptly. The boy knows how sleep eludes his patron.

“I woke you,” he says, with chagrin.

“If only you had,” the count says, taking a chair by the fire and instructing the child to go on. For some minutes, the count forgets his worries and his pains. The playing is remarkable, not only for its technical virtuosity but for the change it brings upon the boy. At the keyboard, the jovial child is gone. He’s slack-jawed, transported, sometimes humming along. After half an hour or so of playing, Goldberg stops and looks to von Keyserlingk. The count, his hands feeling strangely heavy, gestures that he should continue. The music reminds him of a birch tree in early fall, its leaves fluttering two tones of color, gold and gold-brown. I have seen this, he thinks, somewhere in Bavaria. Before he knows it, he is asleep.

He wakes with morning. The child is gone. There are ashes in the grate, and someone has put a blanket over his legs. He rises, returns to his quarters, dresses quickly. His ears have ceased to ring. The sores that stippled his mouth and tongue are gone, along with the headaches. Even his vision seems sharper, as if some scrim has been cleaned away.

The count searches the castle for the child and finds him eating breakfast in the kitchen, at the servants’ table, beneath wreaths of sausage and garlic.

“Your music refreshed me more than a week in Teplice,” he tells Goldberg, who stares at him, glassy-eyed. “Teplice,” the count repeats, “the spa town. In Bohemia.” The boy looks half-asleep. The count reaches out to tousle his hair but then pulls back his hand and asks, “The piece you played last night. Do you know others like it?”

The boy shakes his head.

“None?”

The boy shakes his head again.

That morning, at the negotiation table, while the others speak, the count writes three letters.

The first is to his servant, ordering the placement of a cot in the music room’s antechamber so that he may repose there at night while Goldberg plays. The second is to the boy’s mother, to report on her son’s educational progress and well-being and to make sure she doesn’t want for anything. Since she will never ask, he also sends a ham and fifty thalers.

The last letter is to the Thomas cantor. He writes, Might Herr Bach consider a new commission, for melodies to calm a soul. He resists using the word my. And remembering the choirmaster’s sensitivity to finances, he adds that he will pay whatever the cantor sees fit.

Noon bells clatter, and the diplomats rise and exit. Von Keyserlingk crosses under the peaked arch of the doorway at the same time as the secretary of the elector of Saxony, a chinless man with protruding teeth. For a moment the secretary’s eyes linger on the count, as if looking at an unfamiliar man.

It takes four days for the packet to arrive from the Thomas Church. Only four days—as if Herr Bach has not bothered to hide that he has earned his commission merely by changing the title of something already complete. Or perhaps, the count thinks, taking up his ivory paper knife, perhaps Herr Bach’s haste is meant to indicate kindness and concern. Or it is a show of bravado. Weighing these possibilities, von Keyserlingk lets the penknife bob in his hand, then slices the twine, opens the packet, and turns to the first page of the choirmaster’s score. But as the two five-lined staves and their armies of marching notes make little sense to him, he summons Goldberg, who glances at it and with a yelp races ahead to the music room. From there the count can hear him rustling the pages and playing snatches of music, not even finishing a phrase before rushing on to the next.

Von Keyserlingk enters the chamber and settles onto his creaking cot. The night is cold, and he pulls the blankets to his nose. Since his first night of sleep, the music’s effect has seemed, ever so slightly, to be waning, and now he fears the new works will not bring it back. From the music room come the sounds of Goldberg dragging his chair, then cracking his knuckles. “Here are my master’s variations,” the child calls out and takes a loud breath as if he is about to sing.

It begins gently. The chords cluster and the melody seems to trip and tangle. It repeats, changes key, drops to a lower register. The line climbs tentatively. It does not at first strike von Keyserlingk as beautiful but more like the playing of a child who is at the keyboard with a new lesson, uncertain of the next note. He knows Goldberg’s skill too well to believe that this could be the case—the uncertainty is written into the music, then. He is unsure whether or not to be pleased. He is certainly not asleep. The variations are peaceful, yes, but not soporific. They have some kind of mechanism beneath, tilting them forward, as if at a slant. Goldberg turns the page. Soon von Keyserlingk has an image of his mother spinning, her foot working the treadle. Pages turn. A dance passes. In the music room, over the sound of the harpsichord, Goldberg laughs out loud. The count is still awake. Again, he fears his ward can no longer deliver him to oblivion. He fears that this is only the beginning of his suffering, which from here can only gather force and speed and intensity. He thinks of his sons, and in particular the firstborn, his namesake and heir, who grows cruel in the presence of weakness. The count is still awake. The count is wrong. He has been sleeping for hours.

The next afternoon, Master Bach himself comes to visit. Von Keyserlingk greets him warmly, showing him to his chair. It has been two years since their last visit, and the count registers how the musician has changed: hair grayed, neck and torso thickened, jawline dropped to jowls. He wears a bright-white wig that has yet to settle.

The count is eager to congratulate the Thomas cantor on his latest composition, though to his embarrassment he cannot articulate anything clever to say. When he opens his mouth, all von Keyserlingk can think of is his mother at her spinning wheel, and he experiences a tugging at the root of his tongue, so intense is his desire to say her name. Petra. In this uncomfortable pause, Bach asks after Frau von Keyserlingk, and their sons, and the count is reminded of the musician’s unerring memory for insignificant details. “I recall at this time last year you wrote that your wife strained her little finger while playing Lully,” the musician says. “Has she recovered, entirely, I hope?”

They dance about with pleasantries until suddenly, bluntly changing tone, Bach leans forward.

“Goldberg is a child unlike any other. Except, perhaps, my own, and really only my Wilhelm Friedemann, at that.”

“There’s nothing the boy can’t do,” the count agrees, taken aback by the shift.

“Nothing,” says Bach, “were he not too exhausted to work.”

Von Keyserlingk, who has spent his life in cool negotiations, feels a blush cross his face. So, Goldberg has spoken of his nightly practice. It does pain the count to think of the boy, exhausted, slump shouldered at the keyboard. Yet, even after only these few nights of rest, von Keyserlingk can’t bear the idea of his insomnia returning.

“I suffer from terrible myalgias,” the count says, hoping to sound scientific. “The empress’s doctors have never seen ones so severe. Incurable, they thought.” He tells the musician that the fate of the negotiations, indeed, the future of the Saxon economy, rests on him and his well-being. “I care very much for the boy. But, you understand, I also must sleep. He is young, hardy.” This last phrase sounds more like a question than he had intended.

Bach rubs his chin and looks out the window. “Then I will play with him at night.”

“At night?” von Keyserlingk asks. “You mean every night?” Immediately he regrets the hopefulness in his voice. He could never have dared request this. But now that it is offered, he can’t believe his good fortune. And yet. And yet part of him, the part that has learned to distrust concessions offered early in negotiations, feels a flicker of unease. There is nothing to concern me, he has to tell himself. What I need most is to sleep, and once sleep comes, my mind will be clear.

And sleep is what comes. Two, three, five, seven, a dozen nights of glorious sleep with Bach and Goldberg playing in the room adjacent to his cot. Meanwhile, the days are lengthening. They have an unexpected albeit brief thaw, and sun. Von Keyserlingk finds himself humming music he must have heard while dreaming. Accordingly, his negotiations improve. He feels like a young diplomat and rouses himself for some backroom dealings, cajoling the secretary of the elector of Saxony into conceding that perhaps last winter his wool merchants did try to starve the Prussian market so as to raise the price of a bushel. With this taken care of, other hurdles—disagreements over Salic law and the tax revenue from the book fair—fall away. His manservant is busy from morning until night, delivering notes to the count from his colleagues and attending to the replies. He has three dinner invitations each evening, though he turns them all down for the sake of his routine.

The only cost, the one he can’t ignore, is that Goldberg is exhausted. He looks like a plant in need of water. Midweek, the count sees a maid outside his quarters, carrying the preparations for a poultice. He stops her, saying he hasn’t ordered one. She replies that his ward did, for his hands. The count follows her to the music room, where he finds the boy alone, massaging his wrist and wincing. When he asks the boy if it would be wise to take a reprieve from his lessons, Goldberg tells von Keyserlingk he’d sooner cut off the limb.

The count’s nights continue. The choirmaster arrives each evening at ten-thirty in von Keyserlingk’s coach. The count has ordered the room kept comfortable, with snuff and brandy, and two sets of slippers and fine cloaks, though neither musician ever thanks him. Indeed, if the musicians speak at all at night, he has yet to hear them. Sometimes von Keyserlingk falls asleep before his prayers are through.

A week before their scheduled departure, as the count is reading his correspondence, Bach appears in the doorway.

The musician doesn’t wait to be invited in but enters and takes a chair. “Goldberg says your negotiations are nearly complete.”

“Yes,” the count replies, cautiously, trying to gauge the reason for the man’s visit.

“They’ve gone well, I trust?” says Bach.

“They have.”

“And you’ll return to Dresden. And bring the boy.”

“I will.”

There is a long pause. Then Bach says, “This is not what I’d advise.”

“Meaning?” asks the count. He shifts in his chair, fingering the wooden scrollwork of the armrest.

“He should stay,” says Bach. “To study, with me. During daylight hours. Were he not so exhausted, he would be capable of even greater progress. Of an exceptional career.”

The count hesitates as he lets the charge sink in. Of course, he knows that it is true. He sees, as well, the corner the Thomas cantor has forced him into. He puts aside a letter and then takes up another, pretending, briefly, to be engrossed. “Surely, the Thomas cantor has many other commissions,” he says as he feigns reading. “Other pressing duties.”

“My other duties do not matter,” says Bach. “And to be frank, my responsibilities are lighter than I might like. I have more than enough time to help your son.”

“My ward,” von Keyserlingk corrects him, feeling instantly, with this word, that his claim has slipped.

“Of course,” says Bach. “Your ward.”

“—who will return to Dresden,” von Keyserlingk continues. “With me.”

Bach’s jaw tightens, his fingers drum. He forces a thin smile. “This is, you think, what he would choose?”

“I know what he would choose.”

“You have asked him, then?”

“It is, I know, what he prefers.”

“Good,” says Bach. “Then I don’t suppose it will bother you to ask?”

The count doesn’t answer. A minute passes, and then another. The count turns back to his correspondence. When he looks up again, Bach is gone. For a long time, he remains at the table. The choirmaster will return that night, he knows. If I haven’t asked Goldberg, he thinks, the cantor surely will. If he hasn’t already. The count rises. The morning’s negotiations are already under way, but instead he goes to find Goldberg as he takes his breakfast. Unable to bring himself to ask Bach’s question, von Keyserlingk offers to read to the boy as he eats. The boy gives him a puzzled glance, and lets him read, until he requests, politely, if he may go off to sleep. In the afternoon, the count remains in his chamber, in case the boy comes. But dusk falls and he is still asleep.

That night, when Goldberg rises at last, von Keyserlingk doesn’t go to the little chamber. From his desk, he can hear the boy’s footsteps, the opening of a door, and almost instantly, the sound of notes. Still he doesn’t ask, but instead leaves his room and walks. He shuffles in his stockings down the corridors, the sound of the harpsichord following him long past the point when he should be able to hear it. He circles back, thinks of knocking, walks away again. He passes the white-daubed paintings and the grooved granite curve in the castle’s northwest corner. Somewhere a nightingale sings. It is past nine o’clock. He must hurry if he wants to speak with the boy before the Thomas cantor arrives.

He returns to the door of the music room and raises his hand to knock, when from inside he hears the murmur of voices. Master Bach has come early. Just as surprising is the sound of the two musicians conversing. The count presses his ear against the door to listen.

Goldberg’s words are too soft to make out.

Someone plays a chord. The choirmaster says, “Yes. But remember, old men lie awake at night. Have pity, for whether or not the aches and pains they feel are true, we must be patient with them. Because someday that old man will be you.”

There’s the rustle of turning pages, and slowly von Keyserlingk withdraws. He walks backward, as one does when retreating from a king. He retraces his steps through the castle, twice, until his feet are numb. He stumbles. Only then does he return to his own suite and climb into the great curtained bed. He has not slept there in weeks. The sheets are stiff with cold and he pulls them up over his head and tries not to move. Outside his window, the dog in the kitchen garden drags her chain and whimpers.

Von Keyserlingk murmurs his prayers again, and asks Sleep to come, but she has already forsaken him. He thinks, I have forgotten how to do this without the music. He recites provincial capitals, major rivers, royal lines, and all the poetry he knows in Greek. He converses with his late mother. He can still feel the cool boniness of her hand in his own, and he says to her, I am untroubled, Mother, it is only a puzzle I must solve, like those I have solved before. He lists for her his successes, as she always liked to hear. Together—or so it seems—they revisit two decades of border disputes, currency exchanges, military appointments, and strategic marriages. It is in the midst of these that the idea comes to him, so simple that von Keyserlingk can hardly believe he has not considered it before.

He has only three days of negotiations remaining, but this is time enough.

At each break in the meetings, he will take the other diplomats aside and remind them of Master Bach’s talents and his equal share of woes. The children. The tightfisted church elders. His beloved Maria Barbara’s terrible death. Not everyone will comply with von Keyserlingk’s suggestion, but he will ask them all, one by one. They are old campaigners, his colleagues. They either owe the count some favor or will be glad to have him in their debt.

Thus, in due time the commissions will begin. From the bishop of Mainz, the duke of Doblenz, the court in Messien. Oratorios, passacaglias, compositions to sanctify and coronate. There’s a basilica being built in Bavaria. Nor will the fathers of the Dresden Frauenkirche want to be outdone.

Yes, the count tells himself, Bach may be a genius, but he is also a musician for hire. He will haggle over his fees. He will be unable to resist his manias for puzzles and symmetry and completion. And Herr Bach will also be required to travel, of the kind which von Keyserlingk himself has grown to hate. And these tasks, both holy and profane, will sweep the boy from the choirmaster’s mind. Then von Keyserlingk can slip away, with Goldberg and the music that will carry him, once again, to sleep.

Beneath him, the dog in the gardens howls until she is silenced with a sharp word and a blow. From then on, the count hears only the distant tinkling of the harpsichord. Soon unconsciousness beckons. He heaves a two-part breath, his limbs twitch, and he enters a deep sleep. A dream begins. In this reverie, everything is true to life, except that it is he who is in the music room, he whose fingers trip along the harpsichord’s smooth keys, whose hand turns the score’s pages. What he cannot know is that as he sleeps, he occasionally taps the coverlet and, through gritted teeth, sings a hoarse, tuneless song.