Lovecraft, H P - The Music Of Erich Zann

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The Music Of Erich Zann

The Music OF Erich Zann

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Dec 1921

Published March 1922 in The National Amateur, Vol. 44, No. 4, p. 38-40.

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

The Music Of Erich Zann

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

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TheMusicOfErichZannTheMusicOFErichZannbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenDec1921PublishedMarch1922inTheNationalAmateur,Vol.44,No.4,p.38-40.Ihaveexaminedmapsofthecitywiththegreatestcare,yethaveneveragainfoundtheRued’Auseil.Thesemapshavenotbeenmodernmapsalone,forIknowthatnameschange.Ihave,onthecontrary,delveddeepl...

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