Fragments of Ofterdingen’s diary are found. From these an attempt is made to reconstruct his world.
THE SECRET NOTEBOOK OF HEINRICH VON OFTERDINGEN
Pelle Bono Caridad, Acting Editor, Ofterdingen Gesellschaft
It is impossible to say anything about the fragments of manuscript which lie before me without first addressing the controversy surrounding the (forced) resignation of our chief editor, Prof. Peter Ceniti, his subsequent disappearance, and his alleged confiscation of a large portion of the material formerly under consideration.
But first an explanation may be helpful, for those readers unfamiliar with the earlier developments in what has come to be known as the Ofterdingen Phenomenon. The mystery commenced in the Spring of 2004, when our erstwhile leader, vacationing in Germany, happened upon a musical manuscript buried in a cave. The score, a single sheet (back and front), comprising thirty three measures for solo piano, and bearing the title, The Blue
Flower, was signed, “Heinrich von Ofgterdingen,” the name of a character in a novel by the Romantic poet, Novalis. Professor Ceniti’s study of the work provoked a flurry of controversy of multi-disciplinary proportions. But that was nothing compared with the uproar that attended Ceniti’s subsequent “miraculous discovery” of the Ofterdingen Mystery Tapes - recordings, according to Ceniti, of the “real” Ofterdingen performing Symphonic
Improvisations. The entire staff of the (newly formed) Ofterdingen Gesellschaft was set to work in a great collaborative effort to come to terms with the issues of musical style and originality raised by the find. Yet as we proceeded, my colleagues and I came increasingly to feel that we were being misled, that the enigma before us was of another nature than what we had, in the first
flush of enthusiasm, presumed. We came to question the reliability, even the sanity, of Professor Ceniti, and wondered if he had not succumbed to the lure of immortal fame. The line between zeal and fanaticism is hard to draw. Ceniti’s behavior, at the end, was quirky, his speech confused. Significantly, such vagueness is characteristic of the fragments of text left behind from the Ofterdingen Notebook.
Ceniti’s claim is that the papers are taken from a diary of the elusive composer, a notebook that documents the evolution of his musical style, while incidentally providing many precious hints on his life and world. In reality, the diary entries before us more often read like the musings (sometimes the ramblings) of an author (or quack) attempting to construct a fictitious
character from the detritus of Romantic culture, seemingly oblivious to his shifting between first and third person.
The entire extant text is reproduced in what follows: the reader can decide for himself what to make of this. Entries are given in chronological order, just as they appear in the manuscript, beginning, as if in the midst of a dream, on July 10 and ending abruptly on September 25. No year is indicated for these dates; any conjecture would hinge on the question of whom we believe the true author to be. The final entry may be construed to contain a farewell message, raising a question as to whether there exist, in fact, any
additional pages to search for. Where, indeed, has Ofterdingen gone?
July 12
Why Ofterdingen?
There can be love, again.
Raises interesting questions about style, originality, quality.
At last (a la India): integrated music-making: mind, ears, fingers.
Addresses issue of relationship of art to world - a reciprocal one: change the nature of reality and the music will be different; envision a better world (arcadian, utopian, eschatological), build it in art, and let that inspire change in the world.
Self, mask, persona… the soul’s mission.
July 15
Celephais! The exquisite images (and Lovecraft's lovely language) furnish perfectly suitable inspiration for an alternative world - the child encounters the world as magic, neither protected nor diluted by “explanation”: thus its beauty and its terror. In this sense Ofterdingen is (I am) uncivilized.
July 16
Is it possible to make something in an antique style that yet possesses originality? Yes, but for the result truly to be music, I need to create an entire person, and in order to do that I need to reconstruct an entire world. Insight (contra the “unbearable lightness of being”): with 150 years’ perspective, re-make Romanticism - better, kinder, lovelier, using various visions for inspiration - Holderlin, Shelley, Lovecraft. From such a world (Tlon!) comes Ofterdingen,
and from this man comes the music - the modes, rhythms, textures, improvisatory forms.
July 17
After a few days without playing, barely thinking of music, the Lyric Mode comes alive, with chromatically shifting dominants and blossoming flowers taking us by surprise. The tonics, long delayed or absent, give way to a magical ambience, a tonal “Never-Land.” And a delicate 7/8 meter allows the rhythm, like the key, to float.
Then a brief, dramatic transition, and the Heroic Mode found its voice, with a theme in A flat, passed then from key to heroic key, from voice to heroic voice.
The Fantastic Mode is not yet yielding such satisfaction - fluttering octaves, dark triads and whole tone fragments, but at least we’ve purged the minor chord of pathos, and are on the way to replacing the major / minor duality with a threefold alternative.
Ofterdingen is taking shape as a living, creative force; a strange sensation - something like patience - comes over me: I am calm in the inevitability of what is unfolding, peaceful in the fullness each moment in a process brings.
July 19
(Reading from Novalis)
The night was warm and clear. Itself like a dream of the sun, the moon hovered over the dream world, brooding within itself; and it led nature back to that primeval age when every bud still slept by itself, lonely and untouched, yearning in vain to unfold the obscure wealth of its own immeasurable existence. The fairy night mirrored itself in Heinrich’s soul. He felt as though the world lay unlocked within him, revealing, as to an intimate friend, all its
hidden charms, and a thousand recollections strung themselves on a magic thread.
July 20
Expression is beginning to merge with technique. Read a passage from Lovecraft's Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath before playing, then made, in the Heroic Mode (but using the “relative minors“), “supernal trumpets”, ascending, followed by cascades of dark waterfall. Hands in alternation. Then a melody, still somber but on “strings”, building (again). Then higher, tinkling thirds and broken octaves (!). Then sweeping arpeggios with parallel and relative minors alternating (a la Schubert) building to a glorious climax, then subsiding to a mysterious doorstep: Gateway chord to the Lyric mode.
(None of this sounds great yet, but it’s so exciting and full of promise!)
The plasticity of theses themes is poignantly contradicted their transformations: They don’t so much alternate as melt, dissolve one into another. Ofterdingen, abashed in the midst of his fecundity, creates a sonic universe whose destiny he cannot control.
July 21
Dinner last night with Bruckner and Alkan. A long, warm discussion on the nature of beauty in music; the outside world seemed to fade….
I told them I’d like to salvage Bruckner’s rapturous themes from their stodgy orchestral prisons, transforming them in Alkans’s scintillating pianism, while as for Alkan I’d like to purge his scores of ironic excess, exalting them with Bruckner’s naïve fervor. They both seemed insulted…
July 23
Quiet, brassy majesty in the Fantastic mode, but improvable - an interesting task in the context of improvisation.
Inspiration was lacking - this happens.
Two thoughts emerging:
1. The forms I’m making are neither developmental nor episodic; rather, successive parts, for all their contrast, seem organically connected, as if a story were telling itself, writing itself.
2. How about a unifying element, an “idee-non-fixe”, a “Sophy-tune” perhaps, transposable across the modes, as well as flexible in rhythm? Another name: The Ideal.
July 24
What does Ofterdingen eat? “Rice and celery soup, boiled beans, fried squash and flowers " (As becomes a race whose habits “remain austere and innocent, avoiding nervous and complicated moods”, whose “sober but tasty cuisine” evokes “an ancient, golden age.”) (Calvino, Invisible Cities)
Later on the 24th
Ofterdingen is from the race of Quarks, a people - like the music they make - lacking in palpable substance, existing as “fogs of probability”. Were such an individual to announce, “My habits remain innocent,” or “My music avoids excess and sentimentality,” this would indicate a self-awareness only possible from the perspective of the already fallen, and he would no longer be what he proclaimed. For, as with the subatomic particles for which his people are named, the act of observation annihilates the object of scrutiny (a belief also held, I am tempted to suggest, by certain reference librarians).
July 30
A “new” mode! Three transpositions possible (after which the original recurs) making a total of four forms. Major third mediants are now possible…
July 31
The diatonic limits that the modes impose restrict choice but unify expression. (Archetypal gestures inhere in each mode.) Ultimately, Ofterdingen differs from the Romantics in being less “free,“ less “original,“ more part of some (secret, venerable, esoteric) tradition…
August 1
Lying in bed last night, I thought: “Gratitude, simply, fully, gratitude, for having had the opportunity to complete the work I’ve done, to have searched through the world and my mind for ideas, to have breathlessly conceived a thought, to have patiently perfected its form, to have arrived at a moment of plenitude, oh, to have lived is so much cause for gratitude!”
August 2
Perhaps, before I was Ofterdingen, I was a graceful, flying insect; perhaps I will be. Then again, perhaps if Ofterdingen (that's me) does good work, he will become such a being as would disdain this his current labor, soaring far above human art. Then why trouble about posterity? asks Ofterdingen. The moment well lived, the earnest improvisation, is truly valuable for what it makes of us. Ofterdingen believes his immortal soul enacts a role in a
cosmic drama transcending his personal life, though expressed through it. So if Ofterdingen is transparent, ephemeral, unreal to the world, so is this world to him.
Yet does he love shining things: melodies and scales, children and butterflies…The world’s most ours when least desired, most lovely in its continual disappearance.
August 3
This crystalline new mode (that we call, perversely, the Antique mode) is taking shape: it is descriptive, not of particulars, but generally of the world Calvino describes - sunny, by the sea, glistening with fruit colors and undulant waves, redolent of fish fryers, open fires, lovely ladies who cook and sew, bustling babes and men who harvest and then play flutes and tell tall tales.
The music, devoid of sevenths and tritones, is iridescent, flickering between major, minor and augmented triads, just as the rhythm ripples from 5/8 to 6/8 to 7/8. Water and light, with breezy textures. The people: calm, lacking excess, but of deep feeling, brave in death’s shadow, their pleasures tempered with vigilance.
August 4
Came upon Bruckner this morning, by surprise, at the old parish church. He was improvising on the organ.
I thought I saw the stained - glass glow,
I think he made the flowers grow.
He revealed to me his theory of harmony - that the chromatic tones insinuate themselves into the diatonic world like so many angels penetrating earthly life, enriching without obtruding. I told him I was the embodiment of his Tenth Symphony (The “Unbegun”), but this made him uncomfortable; he hurried off.
Can the Antique Mode express the essence of Bruckner, distilled to ephemeral pianism? (The primordial nuggets, the chromatic eruptions, the soaring lyricism, the searching motifs, the glimpses of heaven, the smoking silences!)
August 5
A short but ebullient, high energy session today, divided over three pianos. (I am a musical hobo, moving with shy opportunism from one instrument to another.) Highlight: the new, lapidary mode is yielding its own textures, appropriately flickering, an alternative to thirds and sixths as double notes:
Here are the colors I see in this mode:
On G, E flat and B: grape purple and light blue.
On D flat, F and A: yellow and apricot with streaks of red and spring green.
Texture of fruit, texture of crystal.
Augusts 6
Before I ever touched the keys, early in the morning, two ideas came to me:
1. (from reading Brahms’ Trio, op. 8, in the same chair, the previous night, a folksy tune.
2. From my Apocalypse of so many years ago, a near-forgotten melody that
“works” in the Heroic Mode, thus is redeemed from oblivion and reveals itself as a forecasting of my present self. Nothing is ever wasted, nor can we tell the consequences of our acts (so do your best) .
Then “Fruhlingstrozt” by Brahms swept me away: this is him at his best - intimate. A splendid morning!
August 8
In music and in words:
Something serious, rendered as jest,
something natural, colloquial, eliciting wonder, surprise,
something deeply contemplated, seeming improvised.
Not only to write but to live this way:
Without triviality and without preaching,
Avoiding both affectation and cliche,
Well-balanced but spontaneous.
Most important: the form that is emerging, that might serve as a paradigm: not a rounded, recapitulatory shape, but a progression of states, from one mode to another, perhaps linked by transformations of a single theme - and, depending on the order of the modes, various types of forms may arise.
August 10
Last night dreamed of Beethoven, in mystery and solitude, as he dreamed of me. And I saw the themes of his last years, soundless melodies in sunlit realms.
August 17
( a good day)
Homeric Sonata
1. Song of the Sirens (Lyric).
2. Theme of the Waves (Antique).
3. Penelope’s Loom (Fantastic).
August 19
This is a typical form for one “section” :
1. Leisurely, diatonic phrases.
2. Phrase by phrase key changes.
3. Chromatic mixtures.
4. Iridescent key regions, leading back to some quasi-diatonic peroration.
August 27
(breakthrough?)
“Kennst du das Land?” … Took out this anthology of German 19th century poetry, and in the introduction read of some obscure poet who “avoided the dangers of a generalized nature - worship,” a too - idealized, misty and potentially escapist and sentimental tone. The poet avoids the snare by virtue of the loving attention he bestows on details, particulars.
So my solution is staring me in the face: Ofterdingen’s world, a kinder, lovelier, more magical, less mundane but REAL world, is the world of such poetry, where fairy tales live! Hell, Ofterdingen is already the poetic invention of Novalis. These poems, these vivid “re- creationings” can each inspire a pianistic improvisation.
August 29
Reconsidering the above, in light of readings in history: All that’s beautiful is mingled with evil, it all emanates from a fallen world, or worse, inspires it.
Ofterdingen seeks to avoid thematic plasticity in the small and preservation of his work in the large through the strategy of improvisation. This artistic attitude mirrors his self-image: gliding gently through the world. For him the challenge is to create, within limits, personality, as man and as music - a sense of character, lacking in self-indulgence but alive: clean, smooth, lithe, a passing wave.
Ofterdingen’s definition by limitation:
A minimum of repetition and recapitulation, and no written scores.
No diminished (hysterical) seventh chords.
No bombastic octaves or gratuitous virtuosity.
Away from symmetry of meter and phrasing.
Beauty of texture.
Form as progressions of states and modes.
August 31
…Is it possible that these simple, sunny folk have a great secret - that the transparent objectivity of their ways springs from a disbelief in this world? That God and World are false, (they are, after all, made up), that the true creator is The Architect (me), their true homeland immaterial Imagination?
And strangest of all, that this transcendent “Author” has created them all in his image - he too is born, suffers and dies, and even wonders, as they do, he broods eternally on the inscrutable nature of his being. (God as Romantic poet.) God the Twin, who embodies in one being all dualities - Light and Darkness, Evil and Good, Spirit and Matter. Ofterdingen as microcosm. The world won’t yield to lucidity because he who made it isn’t lucid.
September 1
Gnostic Symphony (Improvisation for piano)
1. Primordial Realms of Light and Darkness (“The Mind of the Architect”)
(Archaic mode, 5/8, free tempo, major and minor triads - “The Mingling”)
2. Cosmic Cataclysm (“The Inception of the Game”)
(Fantastic mode, 6/8, fast.)
3. Intoxication: Love of the Earth, Love of Woman
(Lyric mode, 7/8, slow.)
4. Call From Beyond: Prince of Light
(Heroic mode, 4/4, maestoso - Apocatastasis.)
September 5
A smaller piece in one movement (Heroic) based on Ludwig Upland’s “Das Schloss am Mer”. Parallel and relative majors and minors at the service of his dialogue format.
This is a great, new (old) form for improvisation: Theme and Variations on a folk melody. (Focus on textures.)
September 11
Ofterdingen has been away (cosmic time traveler) on musicological research on distant planets. An excerpt, to be read at some future symposium:
…utilize, as the basis of their musical system, not the octave, but the space of the perfect fifth, reproducing the interval content identically in each fifth-space. This interval content is not arrived at by temperament or symmetrical division, but reflects natural intervals from the upper levels of the harmonic series (a natural and, apparently, universal phenomenon). It seems plausible that both the shortened interval of duplication (the fifth) and the extreme microtonal character of the music are related to the fact that the performers in question are diminutive by human standards (reaching only a few centimeters in height), while possessing a hearing gamut of less than three octaves, not to mention the fact that, on the average, an inhabitant of this world exists for merely six or seven weeks - human time. Of course this is all relative, since, to the natives, time is measured according to a system where the home world revolves around its sun every nine minutes (again, our time). The effect this has on rhythm is to render all the music so rapid that melody becomes, to our ears, a blur, a sound - smudge. (The intervallic observations
above are achieved by recording and then slowing down the playback so that the individual tones emerge clearly.) In fact, to be frank, all of the above represents conjecture, due to the impossibility of really communicating with the inhabitants: for all we know the “music” I witnessed might have been a disquisition on politics, or an argument over methods of garbage disposal. For that matter, judging by the (admittedly fleeting,) perplexed expressions on what I assume to be the faces of the inhabitants, the sounds I uttered, in an effort to communicate, seemed so ponderous and abysmal as to elude all understanding; they seemed never to get out from the “hell” of my innocent “hello”, trapped in a halo, as it were, of dissonant overtones that I could not even hear.
September 13
Went to sleep last night thinking about Alkan’s descent into obscurity. The sentence,“ A symphony in B minor was completed but has not survived,“ haunted me. I dreamt of a wondrous work, by turns darkly heroic, plaintively melodious, sardonically playful, ending in tragic collapse. Perhaps it sounded something like...
September 14
Spent all day and half the night in the company of a most extraordinary person. Dionisio Scarlatti y Aldama (born 1812) is the great - grandson of Domenico Scarlatti who abandoned his native Naples and composed those bizarre and magnificent harpsichord sonatas to divert a queen from apathy and a prince from lurking madness.
The present Scarlatti is the driving force, both as composer and as impresario, behind Spanish opera; he also writes poetry and history. Upon request he showed me some charming zarzuelas of his; later we spoke of the family's tempestuous fortunes stretching back beyond Domenico, beyond Domenico's father, the great Alessandro, to ancient roots in Sicily.
Together we looked through dozens of sonatas by Domenico, the chronological contemporary of our great Bach, but (one would conclude on a musical basis) the inhabitant of another world. The extravagant virtuosity, the startling modulations, the forms that seem to unfold in response to an impulse for poetic contrast...
As I spoke with the man and listened to his ancestor's music, the landscape and spirit of Spain unfolded before me - from the noisy streets with their exuberance and panache to the gentle melancholy of moonlit gardens. There was a glitter of gold and a scent of spice, a bubbling of pagan blood in Catholic veins.
I am presently occupied with the attempt to capture something of this in my improvisation: Listen!
September 15
Should symmetry be sacrificed? Is this not the Choice, the Beginning of all, the Happy Fault (Felix Culpa, shortstop, New York Mets), that which commences the game?
Pondering lowering the seventh degree of the Fantastic Mode, at least in descending form.
What results is a Dorian / Phrygian hybrid. Great harmonic possibilities result, along with the thought of reconsidering the character of this mode as more serious, less scherzo-like. This, in turn, fits nicely with the growing conviction that the Antique Mode can be light and quick.
September 16
Improvisation is the eloquent musical analogy to the view of humanity as a work in progress. Habitual patterns of sound, chosen in the stillness of contemplation, growing in unforeseen directions.
Yet in truth I'm never satisfied with the results. I suppose if I were, the game might be over. Still, it's disconcerting: even as the notes spill from my fingers a voice seems to proclaim: "No, that is not what I meant at all."
The almost inaudible, fleetingly felt regrets of the multitude of the Not-Chosen.
September 17
The symmetry of the Heroic Mode is not self-evident as it is in the other modes. This quality is found only when the direction is reversed by precise inversion, which transforms it to a tritone transposition of itself. But this can also be construed as the Locrean mode, the inverse of Lydian both structurally
and emotionally. An almost unbearable agony arises from a soft, crystalline chord...
September 18
Where is Ofterdingen going?
Ofterdingen’s sudden disappearance was mysterious - where did he go? Perhaps he despaired, searching among “crudities of sound,” perhaps, near death, he “dreamed of unknown cities” where subtler senses better symbolized soul-states. And perhaps that dreaming made those cities true, made utopia his place, the soul’s next habitation.
Or was it the bells from the Invisible City of Kitezh that he heard, tolling deep within the fairy tale forest of ancient Russia? It is true, after all, that the Antique Mode is found in Rimsky-Korsakov, in whose diary is also found this remarkable entry:
During that season one more member, Nikolay Lodyzhenski, joined our circle. Lodyzhenski, an erstwhile wealthy landowner gone to ruin, was a young man of education, queer, easily carried away, endowed with a strong, purely lyric talent, and a fairly good pianistic technique in the performance of his own compositions. These consisted of a huge number of improvisations, mostly unrecorded, Among these were to be found separate numbers, beginnings for symphonies, as well as musical fragments belonging nowhere in particular. All of this, however, was so graceful, expressive and even technically correct that it won the attention and goodwill of all of us.
Is this an apparition of Ofterdingen, in disguise? None can say for certain, but the careful listener may have noticed, in the previous few excerpts, a shift in musical idiom toward folkish tunes, spinning upon themselves with variegated ornaments, or wordlessly but soulfully declaiming…
By the way, unhappy with the texture of your improv? Try practicing with the left hand alone.
September 31
Ofterdingen is gone; Lodyzhensky has taken his place. And with the new perspective comes a fresh new world of sound - and that’s 19th century Russia - unburdened by history and tradition, impulsively ingenious.
Just as the Heroic Mode revealed its antithesis at the tritone in the form of the Locrean Mode (see Sept. 17) so our pianist discovers a reciprocal form for both the Lyric and Fantastic Modes. The Lyric, itself a mixture of Ionian and Aeolian tetrachords, when taken from its fifth degree, yields a Dorian / Phrygian hybrid.
The Fantastic Mode, taken from its fourth degree, reveals a Lydian / Aeolian mixture. The new scales possess unique, exotic flavors which Lodyzhensky explores, one after another, in rapturous improvisation.