Powers, Richard - Orfeo

We’re all here, Lisa Keane said. Let’s listen anyway. We don’t really need the lecture.

They didn’t really need the music. Yet the pattern was as old as dying. A sudden turn in the aging body after the back straightaway, a need for more serious sound. Els had seen it in every uptown concert he’d ever attended: everyone in the audience, old. Auditoriums a whitecapped sea. For years he’d thought that these incurables were the survivors of another time, the children of early radio’s doomed project of cultural uplift. But the years passed, the old died away, and more old people came to replace them. Did something happen to the fading brain, some change in meter that made it turn away from the three-minute song? Did old people think that classical held the key to deathbed solace, an eleventh-hour pardon?

I’m sorry , he said . I didn’t bring a single disc. They’re sitting in a stack in the living room, on top of my lecture notes.

Klaudia Kohlmann, the retired clinical therapist who’d talked Els into this teaching gig, tipped herself out of her overstuffed chair, crossed to where he stood, and drew a small black slab out of her Incan shoulder bag. She held out the weapon as if she meant to phaser him. He took it and flipped it on, watched by the eight people who’d come for their next installment in the further adventures of an endlessly dying art.

Els gazed at the tiny black rectangle. Like a detonator in an action film, it possessed one button. He pressed it, and the screen filled with a white-shrouded figure in a small rowboat near a rocky outcrop covered with cypresses.

He fingered the miracle again. All of recorded music — a millennium of it — nestled in his hand. Els looked out across the sleeper cell of ancient pupils who waited for their payoff. It crossed his mind to tell them that the Joint Security Task Force wanted him and he really must be going. He glanced back down and flicked at the screen. Two more menus flashed by, leaving him with a patient prompt and a tiny thumb keyboard.

Although he no longer believed it told a coherent story, Els had given the group the last century’s major milestones in rough chronological order. He’d led them from Debussy to Mahler, from Mahler to Schoenberg, revealing the parent’s genes still hiding out in the child. He described the riots at the premiere of The Rite of Spring . He played them Pierrot Lunaire, those whispers on the edge of a moonlit abyss. He took them down into the Great War. He raced them through the frantic twenties and thirties, Futurism and free dissonance, Ives and Varèse, polytonality and tone clusters, and the scattered attempts to return to a home key that had been forever blown away. And still, each week, his clutch of core listeners kept coming back for more.

The group followed his account like it was an old Saturday serial— The Perils of Pauline —a footrace between triumph and disaster forever coming down to the wire. And as the sessions unfolded, Els found himself cheating, stacking the deck. He cherry-picked the evidence, the way NASA had done when they sent their golden record billions of light-years through space and wanted to make a good first impression on the neighbors.

In this way, he’d taken his eight pupils up to the year of his birth. And today, he’d wanted to give them a piece that proved how catastrophe might be luckier than anyone supposed.

Kohlmann handed him a cable to the room’s speaker dock. Come on. Don’t leave us hanging.

Els pecked into the search box: F-O-R.

A drop-down list leapt ahead of each keystroke, predicting his desire. The top of the list had the most likely suspects: Howlin’ for You. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. For All We Know. The bottom of the list: there was no bottom.

He fed in more letters: T-H-E. The thinned list was still infinite. Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked. Sing for the Moment. For the First Time.

Els typed on: E-N-D. The planet-sized catalog zeroed in on several dozen suspects. For the End. Waiting for the End. Ready for the End of the World. Two more letters — O-F — and there it was, in the middle of the drop-down list, in a dozen different performances: Quartet for the End of Time .

All my music ever wanted was to tunnel into forever through the wall of Now.

The last day of spring 1940. The Nazis pour into France. Just past the crumbling Maginot Line, the Wehrmacht captures three musicians fleeing through the woods. Henri Akoka, an Algerian-born Trotskyite Jew, is caught clutching his clarinet. Étienne Pasquier, acclaimed cellist and former child prodigy, surrenders without a struggle. The third, organist-composer Olivier Messiaen, a weak-eyed birder and religious mystic who hears in color, has saved nothing in his satchel but a few essentials: pocket scores of Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, and Bach.

Days before, all three Frenchmen were playing in a military orchestra at the citadel at Verdun. Now their captors march them at gunpoint, with hundreds of others, to a holding pen near Nancy. They walk for days without food or drink. Several times, Pasquier faints from hunger. Akoka, a big-hearted, hardheaded man, pulls the cellist up and keeps him going.

At last, the prisoners arrive at a courtyard where the Germans distribute water. Fights break out among the captives. Packs of desperate men battle each other for a few swigs. The clarinetist finds Messiaen seated far from the fray, reading a score from his pack.

Look , the composer says. They’re fighting over a drop of water .

Akoka is a pragmatist. We just need to get some containers so they can distribute it .

The Germans round up their prisoners and force them on. At last the column arrives at a barbed-wire enclosure in an open field. The three musicians mill about with hundreds of others in the summer rain. Their country is lost. The entire French Army is routed, captured, or dead.

The rain stops. A day passes, then another. There’s nothing to do but wait under an indifferent sky. The composer produces a solo for clarinetist, saved from the captured citadel. Akoka sight-reads it, standing in a field full of prisoners. Pasquier, the cellist, serves as human music stand. The piece, “Abyss of the Birds,” grew from Messiaen’s dawn military watches, when the day’s first chirps would turn into a morning orchestra. It passes the captive time.

Henri Akoka is a good-natured joker, who likes to say, I’m going to go practice now , when he’s off to take a nap. But this music disconcerts him. Impossibly long crescendos, tumults of free rhythm: it resembles no music he has ever heard. Six years before, Akoka took the premier prix at the Paris Conservatory. He has played for years in the Orchestre National de la Radio. But this piece is the hardest solo he has ever seen.

“I’ll never be able to play it,” Akoka grumbles.

“Yes, yes, you will,” Messiaen tells him. “You’ll see.”

FRANCE FALLS WHILE they rehearse. Giant swastikas drape from the Arc de Triomphe. Hitler hops out of a Mercedes and trots up the great stairway of the Palais Garnier, the first stop on his private Paris tour.

THE MUSICIANS LIVE for three weeks under the stars in the enclosed field. After the disgrace of the armistice, they’re shipped to Stalag VIII-A — a camp on a five-hectare lot outside the town of Görlitz-Moys, in Silesia. There, the trio is stripped and processed, along with thirty thousand other prisoners. A soldier with a submachine gun tries to confiscate the composer’s satchel. The naked Messiaen fights him off.

The speed of France’s defeat surprises the Germans. Stalag VIII-A can hold only a fraction of the tens of thousands who pour in. Most live in tents; the lucky trio find space in the barracks, which at least have toilets and earthen stoves. Food is scarce: ersatz coffee for breakfast, a bowl of watery soup for lunch, and for dinner a slice of black bread with a lump of grease. The cellist Pasquier gets a job in the kitchen, where he takes to stealing scraps to share with his comrades. The man who works next to him is killed for stealing three potatoes.