Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Beethoven, Olympian peak, shakes his fist, cracks a punchline, storms heaven by force. Botkin does Opus 18 Number 1, Opus 59 Number 2, and Opus 133, the Grosse Fuge, three string quartet landmarks to give a blurry route description of that lonely launch into the unknown. She mentions the famous intrastaff annotation— Must it be? "Either a rage against fate, a rejection of metaphysics, or a reference to his landlord on the doorstep again demanding the rent in cash."

In Botkin's version, this flinging wide of sound's expressive possibilities — contrasting keys, intensifying form, expanding tonal vocabulary — paradoxically spells the beginning of the end of concert music. As with a tumor that initially stimulates a patient into rosy vigor, self-destruction hides in the richest profusion of musical invention in history. Undaunted, she takes on the unmanageable rash of romanticism. She sings with Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, indulges the introspection of Chopin and bravura of Berlioz, puts up with Lisztian pyrotechnics, and arrives too quickly at Brahms, the most unbearably beautiful of all. "Then we have two towering operatics who might as well have lived on different planets. The first is Verdi. You know all his tunes already; you just don't know they are his. The second, undeniably a genius, I'd rather not go into just now."

"All right," Ressler guesses. "We skip him. Who's next?"

"Well, music gets mixed up in nationalism. Every land its spokesman: Norway, Grieg; Slovakia, Dvorak; Finland, Sibelius."

"I get the pattern."

"The names start shrinking and clumping in groups. The Five. Les Six. " She concedes a few more individuals: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel, Bruckner, Mahler, Schönberg, Stravinsky. "More continuously than most realize, post-romanticism shades off into the eclectic anarchy of the twentieth century. And here we arrive at the far end, writing pieces of unhearable symmetry on one extreme, and on the other, picking notes out of a hat." The thumbnail trip has lasted all afternoon. Outside, the first negative traces of dark. Botkin, hearing herself compress the whole story into a few hours, is bewildered at how a race with fixed needs could get from Machaut to Milhaud in so few breaths.

Ressler feels her displacement, the little light that has gone out in her tent. But empathy makes him suddenly impatient. "What incredible sprawl. The stuff makes no sense. How can I be expected to remember all this?"

Botkin turns to him pityingly. "How do you remember your stereochemistry?"

"False analogy," he snaps. "That's a system."

"History is a system too." She returns to the dry tone predating their friendship. "You might try taking a few decades to study it."

"Too cluttered. Too many names___"

Botkin snorts. "You want a short list, I suppose? Tops of the Pops in each critical period?"

"Yes. That would be fine."

"You Americans are all the same."

"So: all those fellows in the Dark Ages and Renaissance…?"

"Give that to Josquin, with Monteverdi the transition."

"Baroque?"

"Bach. We want help with our dishes, do we not?"

"Classical's clearly Mozart. Beethoven his own class, I suppose."

"Has anyone ever told you that you are a quick study?"

"Romantic? Brahms?" Botkin doesn't answer. She is hearing a light in the night. "And beyond?"

His tutor returns. "Post-romantic… Mahler, definitely. Twentieth century___" She drifts into silence that lasts so long Ressler thinks she has forgotten the question. As he is about to suggest they quit for dinner, Botkin smiles. "Our century: Adrian Leverkühn." He won't get the quip for decades.

"Maybe I'm not after stylistic history, per se. Not names themselves — not even the short list." He smiles affectionately. "I need to locate the musical message. Do you know what I mean?" Botkin shakes her head. "Can you look at a score and tell… simply by the pattern of notes, whether the composer has uncovered something correct?"

He has not said what he means; so not surprisingly, she misunderstands him. She tells of Mahler applying for a conducting job, lying about his knowing an opera he'd never heard. "He was hired, spent an afternoon with the full score, and conducted the piece that evening, from memory."

She tells the story with such passion that Ressler asks, "That man moves you?"

Botkin laughs. "You have discovered my surreptitious character flaw. Have you any idea what it means to be in love with turn-of-the-century suspensions in a world fixated on drums? Despite effort, I cannot assimilate to the North American ethos. Do you recall that supermarket where we ran into one another? They have, this week, at every checkout, a tabloid reading, 'Millions Dead in Epidemic.' I saw that yesterday and thought: 'So we've brought on the end.' It did not cheer me to discover that the article was about the Bubonic Plague.

"Unquestionably, the music we're talking about is dead. I will not inquire into the source of your sudden surge in interest. Perhaps you shouldn't get started with it. Surely you realize the extent of the transistor age, and where it must lead. I can forgive the children; somehow, they understand the deliberate decision to permanently militarize the world. Even our old refuge science— older for some, granted — is conscripted. So: an eighteen-year-old needs music that can be listened to entirely in three minutes. Just in case.

"And yet, if we're to be saved, the prophase must do the saving. Youth. You've read von Baer, Haeckel, the developmental ho-mologists?" Ressler shakes his head, says he knows "of" them. "My God!" Botkin cries. "Don't tell me they've dropped 'ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny' from formal training. Perhaps they still read Rilke, in any case: 'Glaubt nicht, Schicksal sei mehr als das Dichte der Kindheit.' Don't ever think that fate's anything more than the condensation of childhood. Champaign-Urbana, with more engineering buildings than pizza parlors, is already a lost cause."

"But music," Ressler reminds her.

"Exactly. But music." She plays him the first hundred bars of Mahler's Ninth, that premonition of wholesale disintegration of the dream — the abandoned condensation of childhood. She tells of the composer's anguished marginalia — the "Oh Alma!" penned into the score upon his discovering that his young wife was copulating with another man. She describes Mahler's session with Freud, how the composer lay prostrate on a couch in Leiden in 1910 for four hours, as Ressler has lain all afternoon. "I picture Freud taking the score of this symphony, studying its figuration, seeing, as you suggest, even as an amateur, that the composer has revealed something terrible, real, and saying to his patient, 'Don't let me cure you of this.' That, my friend, is your musical moment. But we're wasting our time. Come. Let's go have a meal. There is still eating, drinking, good talk."

They walk through the deserted corridor, leave the building, lock it behind them. Halfway across the quad, Botkin stops. She turns on Ressler fiercely. "You've worked in a lab, you've scribbled in enough notebooks to know better. I tell you, the world is not modulations and desire. It is stuff, pure and simple."

The attack floors Ressler. He can't think why he deserves this dressing-down. A minute later, Botkin is pleasant again, discussing the choice of restaurants. Over ordering, she speculates, "Your 'musical message.' I've always been partial to text. I don't mean opera; I've never liked flailing. But let me tell you two litanies, late mutations on the Viennese tradition. The first arises in Mahler's Resurrection: 'What you have loved and striven for is yours.' I would love to believe that. The second, more realistic, is from a Webern cantata. You admire the compaction in a nucleotide sequence? This man's Opus 21 is a perfect palindrome: a symphony that reads the same forward and backward, entirely generated from a densely threaded theme. Of course, the ear can't hear that perfect order. As far as the listener is concerned, the piece might as well be random! But his text. His 'message,' as you so wonderfully and naively put it. I paraphrase the cantata: 'Keep deep down, for the innermost life hums in the hive.'"