Дэвид Салой - The Innocent

He laughed. ‘Why?’

I opened one of my desk drawers. ‘Do you know this book?’ I said, taking it out and holding it up for a moment. His face showed nothing, or only the slightest tightening of the jaw. ‘I found it in your office at Metelyev Log. It was the only book there, as far as I could see, that wasn’t a medical text book. It’s a book about music. About Johann Sebastian Bach in particular.’ He stared at me impassively. ‘You like puzzles, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Logic puzzles, word puzzles? This book involves a word puzzle – a hidden one. It’s to do with the name of the author. Nikolay Maksimovich Luzhov. The strange thing is, this Nikolay Maksimovich Luzhov doesn’t seem to exist. Did you know that? I’ve looked into it.’

‘I don’t know anything about him.’

‘And his book was published only two years ago. Then it occurred to me where, exactly, I found it. Where in your office. On which shelf. It was on the shelf with your books – I mean, with books written by you. Of course, it might have found its way there by mistake. That’s what I thought at first. And then,’ I said, ‘then I noticed – and this is where the word puzzle comes in – I noticed something about the name Nikolay Maksimovich Luzhov. It’s an anagram. An anagram of another name. Your name.’

When he did not deny that he had written the little volume – and I think part of him was pleased, even under the circumstances, that someone had solved his puzzle; the pseudonym, after all, did not have to be an anagram of his own name – I opened it and looked for the first passage that I had marked.

‘You start,’ I said, ‘with a quotation from someone – Schweitzer is his name – writing about Johann Sebastian Bach. “He inscribed the work completed in Cöthen the ‘Well-tempered Clavier’ by way of celebrating a victory that gave the musical world of that day a satisfaction which we can easily comprehend. On the old keyed instruments it had become impossible to play in all the keys, since the fifths and thirds were tuned naturally, according to the absolute intervals given by the divisions of the string. By this method each separate key was made quite true; the others, however, were more or less out of tune, the thirds and fifths that were right for one key not being right for another. So a method had to be found for tuning fifths and thirds not absolutely but relatively, – to ‘temper’ them in such a way that though not quite true in any one key they would be bearable in all. The question occupied the attention of the Italians Gioseffo Zarlino (1558) and Pietro Aron (1529). At a later date the Halberstadt organ builder Andreas Werckmeister (1645–1706) hit upon the method of tuning that still holds today. He divided the octave into twelve equal semitones, none of which was quite true. His treatise ‘Musical Temperament’ appeared in 1691. The problem was solved; henceforth composers could write in all the keys. A fairly long time elapsed, however, before all the keys hitherto avoided came into practical use. The celebrated theoretician Heinichen, in his treatise on the thorough-bass, published in 1728, – i.e. six years after the origin of Bach’s work – confessed that people seldom wrote in B major and A flat major, and practically never in F sharp minor and C sharp minor; which shows that he did not know Bach’s collection of preludes and fugues.” You then spend the next two hundred pages,’ I said, ‘taking issue with various points in Schweitzer’s text. Your main point is that the phrase “the problem was solved” suggests a problem, and a solution, understood in empirical terms. In fact, you say, in the early eighteenth century many methods of tuning existed, of which equal temperament was only one, and one which was in no way seen as being empiric ally or self-evidently superior to the others. You say that it had existed in various forms since about 1675, and was only taken up universally in the mid eighteenth century. In the intervening period there was a violent difference of opinion as to whether it was an improvement, or in fact an impoverishment, of the pre-existing situation. Even Werckmeister himself, the man who Schweitzer tells us invented the method of equal temperament, did not personally favour it until a theologian persuaded him that its proportions somehow matched those of Solomon’s palace as set out in the Bible – from our point of view, as you say, something entirely nonsensical. Until then, he preferred another method, the so-called “Werckmeister III”, which did not involve equal temperament – and which was quite possibly the method favoured by Bach himself. So the term “well-tempered” in Bach’s title does not even necessarily mean “equally tempered”, and might just as easily refer to “Werckmeister III”, or some other method of tuning. Many people at the time thought equal temperament sounded “wrong”, and Bach may have been one of them. That it does not sound “wrong” to us, you say, just shows how subjective these things are, and how wrong we are to think of the equal-temperament scale as “some sort of fundamental musical material”. That we do think of it in those terms is simply because of the sort of music that has been written for the last two hundred years – music for which it is indeed a fundamental material. You insist that none of this should lessen our esteem for Bach and his work. In fact, you say that its position as the foundation of modern European tonality is even more impressive when we understand that this was not inevitable – that it won that status for itself, through its own qualities. That it made something ex nihilo, and did not simply stumble on something that somehow pre-existed and was just waiting to be found. And you end with a second quotation from Schweitzer, which I liked very much. “Nevertheless, overwhelmed as we are by the intellectual and organisational achievements of this work, we must not lose sight of the fact that they would mean little were it not for the profound and humane beauty of every one of the pieces contained therein. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter: to all of these it gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of restless imperfection to an ideal world of peace, and see reality in a new way: as it were, sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the placid and fathomless water. Whoever has once felt this perfect serenity has comprehended the mysterious spirit that has here expressed all it knew in the language of tone, and will render Bach the thanks we render only to those great souls to whom it is given to reconcile men with life and bring them peace.” Is that a fair summary?’

‘No,’ Lozovsky said.

‘No?’

‘You make it sound like a polemical tract. It’s not.’

‘You don’t think what I’ve said is a fair summary?’

‘No, I don’t. It’s a technical work. It’s about the tuning of musical instruments. Most of it’s taken up with technical detail, which you haven’t even mentioned.’

I looked at him for a few moments. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ I said. ‘I see this as an Aesopian work. I see it as a restatement of the ideas expressed in your 1936 paper. Only here the political implications are more obvious – if we take “equal temperament” to stand for “Marxism”.’ I smiled. ‘Well? What do you say? I’ve been honest with you. That’s what I think.’

‘It’s fanciful,’ he said.

‘Is it?’

‘And even if it were true, which it isn’t, the “Well-tempered Clavier” would presumably stand for 1917, and Bach for Lenin, and I have only love and veneration for Bach and his work.’

‘And for Lenin and his, I hope! No, it’s true. What you say is true. The problem is more subtle. You may love and venerate Bach and his work, and you may even love and venerate Lenin and his – however, you see neither the equal-temperament scale nor Marxism as having an intrinsic progressive truth. Something else might do just as well. Neither is historically inevitable. Nothing is, in your view.’