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The Music of Erich Zann
by H.P. Lovecraft
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue
d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on
the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every
region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil.
But despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street,
or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of
metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely
disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil, and I recall that I took none
of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and
perplexing; for it was within a half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by
peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a
person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.
The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed
warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that
river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also
odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help
me to find it, since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled
streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue
d’Auseil was reached.
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff,
closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of ffights of steps, and ending at the top in a
lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and
sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall,
peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally
an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they
kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to
house across the street.
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it was because they were
all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I
came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many
poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the
Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and
by far the tallest of them all.
My rcom was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty.
On the night I arrived I heard strang music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day
asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who
signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played eve nings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that
Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen
this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street
from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the
weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his
harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of
highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I
resolved to make the old man’s acquaintance.
One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him that I
would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with
shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words
seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and
he grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic stairs. His
room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall
that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of
its extraordinary barrenness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a
dingy wash-stand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned
chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and
had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem
more deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of
the imagination.
Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and
lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his viol from its
motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did
not employ the music-rack, but, offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for
over an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own
devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind
of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the
absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to
myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of
them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed
during the playing, and seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had
noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion,
regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host’s weirder mood
by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this
course for more than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face
grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right
hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further
demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if
fearful of some intruder—a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible
above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge
had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the summit.
The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I
felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights
beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could
see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with
a frightened rage even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time
motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both
hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would
go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offense, his own anger seemed to
subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair;
then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words
with a pencil, in the labored French of a foreigner.
The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that
he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music
and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again
and not mind his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could
not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by
an-other. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my
room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not
hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim
of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness.
In the silence there came a slight sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the
night wind, and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had
finished reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.
The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments
of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the
fourth floor.
It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not as great as it had
seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call
on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night—in
the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room
and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out
of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which
must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theater hours, when Zann was away,
but the door was locked.
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I
would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase
to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I
often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and
brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held
vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a
symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich
Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old
musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to
admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.
Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of
sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not
come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real—the awful,
inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible
fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in
the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician’s feeble effort to
rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I
renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to
the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly
unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face
gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother’s skirts.
Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which
his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but
having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be
satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to
the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of
mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account
in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil
flew.
It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician’s feverishly written
sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock.
Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half
fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low
and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or in
some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect
was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend
the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred
door.
It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more
horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face,
and could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward
something off or drown something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must
be. The playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of
supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized the air—it was a wild
Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I
had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol.
The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking
frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and
bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and
lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm,
deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had sprung up outside as
if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I
had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced
slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and
the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table
where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past
conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing
had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window.
I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished
panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue
d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It
was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain
and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles
sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no
friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable;
unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth.
And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked
garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me,
and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.
I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table,
overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with
shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed
to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be
heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me,
and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s chair, and then
found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.
He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his
head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee
from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his
unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the
darkness and babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew
not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged
uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle, finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I
plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of
that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out
into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and
over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark
bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions
that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all
the lights of the city twinkled.
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue
d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the
closely-written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.
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