Читать книгу Time's Door - Esther Meynell - Страница 14

But sterner things took hold of him when they reached Milan, where Paganini settled down for a time. There Paganini put Giovanni through a course of technical training besides which everything he had done and learned before seemed like falling asleep on a soft pillow.

“By the sweat of the brow you learn to be aSICK FIDDLERS fiddler,” said Paganini grimly, “There is no other method. You must work till there are no difficulties left, till you have forgotten that they ever existed, just as you are unconscious of the labour of your lungs by which you breathe. Only in sickness do you notice this, and it is only sick fiddlers who think of difficulties—poor invalids who struggle on to the platform in the last stages of decay!”

He laughed his sepulchral laugh.

“I have so few pupils because so few know what work means. There is no fierceness in them. But I see a little spark in you, that is why I took you with me, Giovanni. I would even take the stick to you as my father took it to me, if necessary—a great sign of affection!—but I have an idea it will not be much needed. Also I think your gentle mother would be grieved, and I would not wish to make her more unhappy. The hand of God has fallen upon her with sufficient heaviness as it is.”

But Giovanni’s mother would have been considerably disturbed could she have seen at this time the manner in which he was working, the tenseness of his eagerness. As though he would copy his master in all ways his physical form drew out into lankiness, the lines of his face sharpened, his already long hand lengthened itself visibly. He would fall upon his bed at night sometimes too exhausted to shed his garments. But his sound slumbers and his youthful resilience saved him from intolerable strain—also the fact that Paganini’s own health was in so poor a state. There were days when he could not teach, could not endure that Giovanni should touch a fiddle, so turned him loose to amuse himself in idleness. Giovanni’s eager young mind found much to interest him in Milan, and realised almost for the first time that there were other arts and other beauties than those of music. The changed direction of his thought refreshed his musical powers. The vast Duomo, so pinnacled, decorated, ornate, was an immense surprise to the Roman boy, and it did not please him, till one night he saw it turned into a dream in the light of the moon. But when he felt homesick he turned to the noble row of Roman columns in the Corso di Porta Ticinese—he walked slowly alongside them, he ran his hand down their flutings, he stood at a point where he could see two tall cypresses beyond them silhouetted against the sky. He was at home. The Church of St. Ambrogio appealed to him far more than the Duomo, he went there often, and also to the Dominican Church of St. Maria Delle Grazie. In the beautiful refectory of the Dominicans he saw the great ravaged Last Supper of Leonardo. It impressed him as no picture had ever before impressed him. He saw other paintings also, and many strange interesting things.

But Paganini, as soon as he was recovered fromTHE DEVIL’S FAILURE his indispositions, recalled Giovanni sharply from his pilgrimages about Milan, and hard work began again. Sometimes, when pleased with Giovanni’s progress, Paganini would beguile the hours with long tales, telling him episodes in his own life, telling him many things about violins. As he talked he filled the boy with a sense of the mystery of the fiddle—“The one perfect thing the human hand has made,” he called it, “The one thing even God could not improve. The Devil has never tried, after his failure!”

“Failure to make a fiddle?” Giovanni questioned, puzzled.

“No, foolish one. Do you not know the tale? I thought it was told to every Italian baby. God was showing the Devil all the animals and insects and birds He had made—the elephant and the fire-fly, the flaming tiger and the lamb, the rhinoceros and the donkey, the nightingale and the toad. The Devil was very jealous that God had been able to think of so many shapes, and of furs both spotted and striped, and wings and silvery scales of fishes, but he covered it all up and said ‘Pooh! I could make a much better animal than any of these if I tried!’ ‘Try then,’ said the Lord God. So the Devil set to work, and after drawing plans and thinking of everything that God had not used, he produced, with immense labour—a spider!”

“Well,” said Giovanni laughing, “The web of the spider is a very pretty thing.”

“It is,” Paganini agreed, “And it can teach you a useful lesson, as it taught me. Do not have your fiddle strings so thick as they are usually made. I watch one day a spider spinning his web, and I see how he takes the thread and tugs it with his claw—so fine it is, but strong. I think to myself what a string that would be on which to play, what unearthly sounds one could draw from it, harmonies remote as the stars! So I experiment, and I find the thinner string helps much.”

“But will it not snap, Maestro?”

“Yes, often, then one plays upon the strings that remain. It is quite simple. I have done that many times. Once I love a lady, so as I had little chance to speak with her, I play my love to her on two strings. The high string, that was the lady, the deep string, that was me, and they sing to each other and tell all their love.”

“Was the lady pleased?” asked Giovanni, leaning with his elbows on his knees and gazing absorbedly at the teller of these tales.

“I think so,” Paganini replied, smiling enigmatically.

On another occasion he told Giovanni another violin tale.

“From every accident comes a lesson,” he said,THE BROKEN BOW “A string snaps and you learn to play without it, a bow is broken and you learn the advantage to have half a bow. There was once a composer born at Cremona called by the name of Claudio Monteverdi—you, my little German child, may not have heard of him, for he came long before your Bach who so curiously fills your musical sky—but he was a composer of much merit, and for his music he wanted better instruments than then existed. He had written some music to tell how Tancredi wounded his love Clorinda, whom he did not recognise, and to show the lover’s grief he desired a tremolo from the violins”—Paganini’s long fingers shook in imitation of that desired tremolo—“but the heavy and clumsy bows of that time could not attain it. Monteverdi, driven to frenzy, seized the bow of the nearest fiddler and smote him with it so that it broke off short. Then he commanded the violins to try again. The chastised fiddler asked how he could play with a broken bow. ‘As well with a broken bow as with a whole one!’ cried Monteverdi—ah, can you not see his noble rage!—and the man was so frightened that he tied up the hairs of his bow to the broken end and played thus. After a few moments Monteverdi stopped the others and bade him play alone, and then told him joyfully that his lighter bow had given the effect he desired. I do not promise you,” Paganini continued, “that story is true, but it is true to essentials, for from accidents we learn.”

Of pure technical knowledge Giovanni absorbed in those months with Paganini enough to last him all his life. He could neither grasp nor use the whole of it at once. It was as though Paganini had given him a great lump of gold and told him to break off bits as he needed them. Certainly he realised ways to do things on the violin which had never been done before Paganini did them, learned secrets which were unknown to other violinists, acquired a lovely tone of great purity. Paganini told him that had his ear not been as sensitive as his own he would never have taught him for more than a day.

“I have no use for the tone-deaf, who think E flat is the same thing as D sharp!” he cried, looking particularly sardonic.

There seemed no imaginable thing that Paganini could not do with his violin, but one thing surprised Giovanni—grandson as he was of a distinguished Leipzig musician, and possessing also, through his Italian father an hereditary and special feeling for the music of Sebastian Bach—the fact that Paganini was ignorant or careless of that music. So he decided to put Bach away in his mind, along with the thought of Gerda, and devote himself to acquiring the skill which should enable him to play Bach’s music and in particular the Chaconne in the manner he hoped one day to play it. He had a feeling deeply rooted that Bach’s music was unlike any other music, and that in some strange way Bach mattered to him. This was partly owing to the Letters, though his knowledge of them at this time was very incomplete. But his feeling about Bach and all that concerned him was unlike his feeling about anything else. So when he realised that Bach’s music was a country where Paganini did not walk he became entirely silent on the subject, shut up that side of his heart, but followed Paganini passionately on all other paths.