Page:Buddenbrooks vol 2 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0002mann).pdf/118

RV 108 (BUDDENBROOKS) an extraordinary style; while a sort of shame-faced enjoyment showed upon his absent countenance. A burgeoning and blooming, a weaving and singing rose beneath his fingers; then, softly and dreamily at first, but ever clearer and clearer, there emerged in artistic counterpoint the ancestral, grandiose, magnificent march motif—a mounting to a climax, a complication, a transition; and at the resolution of the dominant the violin chimed in, fortissimo. It was the overture to Die Meistersinger.

Gerda Buddenbrook was an impassioned Wagnerite. But Herr Pfühl was an equally impassioned opponent—so much so that in the beginning she had despaired of winning him over.

On the day when she first laid some piano arrangements from Tristan on the music-rack, he played some twenty-five beats and then sprung up from the music-stool to stride up and down the room with disgust painted upon his face.

“I cannot play that, my dear lady! I am your most devoted servant—but I cannot. That is not music—believe me! I have always flattered myself I knew something about music—but this is chaos! This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness! It is a perfumed-fog, shot through with lightning! It is the end of all honesty in art. I will not play it!” And with the words he had thrown himself again on the stool, and with his Adam’s apple working furiously up and down, with coughs and sighs, had accomplished another twenty-five beats. But then he shut the piano and cried out:

“Oh, fie, fie! No, this is going too far. Forgive me, dear lady, if I speak frankly what I feel. You have honoured me for years, and paid me for my services; and I am a man of modest means. But I must lay down my office, I assure you, if you drive me to it by asking me to play these atrocities! Look, the child sits there listening—would you then utterly corrupt his soul?”

But let him gesture as furiously as he would, she brought

RV 108 (108)