Out of all misery...

I adore lots of musicians, also classical ones, even though I have hardly a clue what it means to be one. But while I also like all sorts of music, it does not mean that I like everything.

For example, when I was a teenager, some hateful uncle tortured me with Wagner. I literally had attacks of sweating and stomach ache having to listen to that pathos I would have rather spelled with a "B". Later, Woody Allen instantly found a way to my heart by saying that he couldn't listen to Wagner as it always urged him to invade Poland.

Then, many years later, after having been told about those feelings, my friend Wolfgang, an exceptionally gifted pianist, explained to me with a sardonic smile that Wagner may have been a "B" candidate in any respect, but his music was nevertheless too important to be ignored by musicians. At least, he added, there are those really ingenious sequences, separated by others a great deal worse.

Wait a minute, I said. What if Wagner did not write those ingenious sequences at all? What if he stole them from another musician? Maybe someone who was devoted to him? And Wagner himself did nothing else but add those average transitions?

Wow, said my musical friend and giggled. Well, it would have been a gay guy then, and he was so in love that he even gave up his music for his beloved Richard. Of course, Wagner did not accept him as he surely hated gay people but he indulged him enough to be able to take advantage of him.
I shook my head. Next thing you're telling me is that this becoming more and more likely man was Jewish!
Yes, Wolfgang nodded, that's surely why Wagner felt he had to write his silly pamphlet about the Jew in Music, in order to cover up all of this.
Oh, yes, I said and laughed. Of that I heard. Gustav Freytag used this pamphlet to proof Wagner himself as a Jew in Music!
Now we both laughed.
But why didn't that fanatic lover realise all this at one stage and started asking for his rights?
Only one possibility, said Wolfgang. He was murdered.

Oh, I said. I was just about to write all of this down as a really good script idea. But now I guess I better leave it, since I don't want us to end up being murdered, too - by a contemporary fan, for example!

Yes, nodded Wolfgang. That could very well happen. And it would also be very difficult to explain what we are talking about, when we mentioned those ingenious sequences. You'd need to be a musician to understand. Anyway, I'd rather write something more useful, if I was you. For instance, that the most hated lecturer at the conservatory, who has been writing her habilitation treatise about Wagner for over ten years, is murdered by someone who pushes over the great bookcase in the sheet music library burying the old hag under the works of Georg Philipp Telemann.

Why Telemann, I asked, having not the slightest notion.
That's easy to understand, said Wolfgang, giggling again. Because no one I know of has written more!


© 2009

We gesture. We ask and we doubt. We query, we wonder, we don't want to believe it. We are a little displeased, and then again completely satisfied. We share looks and we avoid them. We shake our heads, and then again we nod, we understand or we don't. We know, and we agree. We knit our brows. We let our hands and fingers fly.

The landlord comes and is very pleased that there are so many of us. He talks with his hands in a way that only a hearing person can do it, meaningless stuff, he knows that, he laughs, he knows he doesn't know what he is saying.

Well, speaks our interpreter with a smile, thank you that we all are invited.

Stefan is always good for a clear perspective. He had a visitor once who was wailing about his last love affair being one big disappointment. For hours and hours, patiently, Stefan was all ears. And when asked for the first time what his opinion was about all this, he said: "Regard it as an exercise."

She's been telling me about the pain of her job. Well, jobs, more than likely, it's all plural, pains of jobs. I myself take multiple pains over listening to her words constantly crawling through my receiver, while those distinct phonemes become insignificant and at the same time as faint as a memory. What is she telling me? I don't know these people. Is this her way of letting me know that she did it and now has the freedom of complaint?