Fiction Hermann Burger ,cerita lucah bettudung April 4, 2025 Translated by  Adrian Nathan West

The Orchestra Minion

? Jamison Lung

Yes: doubtless it is I, who undoubtedly am, Herr Conductor—and if your humble servant had a say, you would not stoop to a review of any remaining application letters, which can contain only the importunities of nuisance candidates—the man long sought for the vacant, not to say vagrant, not to say vagarious post of orchestra minion of the municipal philharmonic, left orphaned upon the death of the legendary Herr Urfer. Frankly I ask you, and with you the application board you preside over, how—how?—does an ensemble of the municipal symphony orchestra’s stature suppose it shall manage an entire winter’s worth of concerts with an absence so glaring in its ranks? Heaven forfend that I sink here to the malignant tenor of certain criticisms, feroce assai but not inapposite all the same: Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a flop; The Turangal?la Symphony, a flop; Bruckner’s Fourth, a flop; all flops because, from my perspective, a perspective conditioned by the orchestra minion’s understanding of the world, the dysphonic flashpoint behind the scenes was—let us come right out with it—nonexistent. I shall elucidate the reasons why forthwith. So elementary an omission, so gaping a hole in the lineup, would have sunken any comparable institution in the world: the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw-Orkest, I Musici di Roma, certainly the Camerata Academica of the Salzburg Mozarteum. As God is my witness, each and all of these assemblies of refined and almost inexpressibly superlative instrumental virtuosi endeavor to procure not one man of confidence well versed in the servicing of all those musical utensils a successful performance may require, but instead to seek out, should this person die suddenly—and where would a true orchestra minion meet his death if not behind, or rather under, the stage?—an understudy, recruiting him, as it were, from among the dexterous devotees in the infinitely inspirable standing room. Even a triumvirate of such figures is far from unheard of. When the Vienna Philharmonic gives a guest performance in, say, Lucerne, it goes without saying the high-gloss flyer will lead with the words, Under the musical direction of X, Y, etc. and conclude with, Orchestra Minions: Eigenstiller, Jara, Schr?cknadel. In the long term, of course, I believe three is not the ideal number by which to divide the responsibility of giving lumbar support for luminaries’ performances. But it is a mystery to me that Urfer was not replaced straightaway—or at some point before the ending of the performance—after the botched decrescendo in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Symphony in A Minor, when he was felled by a stroke and tumbled into the open case of a double bass that stood at the ready for him like a coffin. Did the board of the municipal philharmonic perchance affect to preclude another such incident by looking longer and more rigorously for Urfer’s replacement than the sheer indispensability of an Ambrosia Hall valet properly allows? Death is always a scandal. Perhaps the ensemble members themselves, used as they were to availing themselves of Urfer’s talents as of the multiple contrivances of a Swiss Army Knife, were opposed to an expeditious succession? Item, the interregnum, about which the house conductor, His Artificiousness Herr Detmar von Hohenlohe, felt it was his place to opine that a wait-and-see approach was in order, since all his instrumentalists needed was a gofer who could tug nails out of packing crates, was, as perceptive ears could not fail to notice this past winter, an interregnum of compromised consonance and concertation, not to say a hiatus evocative of cacophony! Urfer! Who would make so bold as to dare to do what he had done? He was a legend, unimpeachable of ear and soundless in his servilities. Never did one need Urfer when Urfer was not at hand. Unforgettable, how he suffered, the neuralgic storm that broke across his brow, when a waiter in the opera café was monkeying with the glassware and produced a crystalline tone that fell somewhere between F and F sharp. Be so kind as to tune your inventory, you tone-butcher!, he shouted from the orchestra minion’s corner behind the velvet curtain, and the singers paused to pay him homage with an upward tug of their meaty lips. It was whispered upon Urfer’s expiry in certain ensemble circles that he had been the walking tuning fork for his Artificiousness Detmar von Hohenlohe. The slave to an orchestra is no less a slave to the ear. During rehearsals, should the first chair Esmeraldi pluck a single shrill pizzicato A, Urfer, roused from his storeroom, would burst huffily forth and move his music stand exactly one centimeter higher. As the conductor stands sovereign over the musicians, so the musicians stand sovereign over the orchestra minion. One commands all, and all command one. And yet I shall not offer here a comprehensive necrological commemoration of Urfer, no; I must rather, to keep from steering my candidacy to ruin, do all I can to assure myself he is forgotten. I have only, Herr Conductor, made reference to the deceased in order to affirm that the ideal candidate need not possess, nay, ought not to possess, perfect pitch, notwithstanding the criteria set forth in the posting; it is this very attribute that so untimely—prestissimo, one might say—plucked my predecessor, whom I deign to designate as such, taking for granted that his post will be mine, out of the musical life. Urfer’s stroke, suffered in secret, laid an acoustical veil over the performance: the woodwinds say they sensed an inexplicable draft that hinted, not at the steadfastness of Urfer, but rather at the steadfastness of death. A draft during a performance, a catastrophe for the musicians, and the responsibility of the orchestra minion, no matter what! I shall not, and above all, not with you, Herr Conductor, argue over the bungled decrescendo in the second movement, which fed the ire of the press afterward. No one has proven that this decrescendo was to blame for the late orchestra minion’s death; no one has even proven that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s final wishes are expressed in his Third Symphony in A Minor, opus fifty-six, known as The Scottish, begun in 1829, completed at the beginning of 1842, debuted on 13 March of the very same year, with its eight-bar introduction to the decidedly gossamer scherzo, vivace non troppo, twinkling violin voices and loud blows of the horns, just before the first clarinet intones the main theme; this is further debatable as, a few bars later, the strings must concentrate on one of the most abrupt diminuendi in Romantic tonal literature, when the leitmotiv spins out further in an unprecedented tumult mustering all orchestral resources. If hired, I shall know, as the occasion requires, how to forestall the decrescendo in question. That said, Urfer’s stroke could well be attributed to the assai animato in allegro un poco agitato, which was not entirely beyond reproach, or to a smorzando ruined by connivance between brass and percussion that the departed would have given his life to foil. But again, as I’ve said, this is of minor importance for the initiation of my duties. Far more momentous— absolutely novel—unprecedented in the history of orchestra minion candidacies—is the fact that your humble servant, one August Schramm, known as deaf Auguste among friends, ventures to posit his musical illiteracy as a key qualification for the orphaned post, if by musical we understand the capacity to translate tone into sensation and sensation into mimetically legible rapture. A pianistic abortion was the perennial verdict of my teacher, whom, to the ticking of the metronome, Schramm transformed into a pedagogical cripple. And yet, after hammering the bent, rusty nails of every conceivable doubt into my skull, I remain convinced, doubly so in light of Urfer’s demise, that even a such defective as I, with arms strong like rods in a combustion engine and a fine blanket of hair on his chest, may serve as coolie to the noblest tonal art. I take it for granted that terminal hair growth is greatly diminished in the case of flautists, cellists, and so on.

Now look: irreplaceable as Urfer may appear in the eyes of the most dignified Herr Conductor—and he must have, in light of the appointment crisis, which has lasted through an entire winter’s worth of concerts, with the impossibility of finding a substitute only made worse by the legends swirling around his death in A minor—Urfer was, because he remained a thwarted musicus his whole life long, quite simply not the ideal goalkeeper for the municipal philharmonic. At bottom, the sum of his orchestra minion ministrations amounted to symphonizing with incongruous means: the hammer in his hand was a drum mallet, he adjusted the music stands con brio, if he was sent away to the archives to find a vanished piano score, he toddled off with a mordent skip. What Urfer did backstage across his entire orchestral career was the vain translation of universal music literature and all its conceivable interpretations into a partiture of servility. I am unsure, Herr Conductor, whether I’m expressing myself convincingly enough for a letter of solicitation. To the point, never did the ensemble address Urfer on friendly terms, any more than you’d treat a Wagner opera like a chum, settling down with Tristan und Isolde or Die Meistersinger or whatnot and saying, Look here, pal, it’s time to intone you. Urfer, in his officiousness, knew how to wrangle from the ensemble, and even from Detmar von Hohelohe himself, a kind of respect usually reserved for an opus or a bona fide creator. And when he tumbled over the edge of the double bass case during the second movement of Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Scottish, it was not so much a peripatetic tuning fork that was buried as a musical cosmos, the dying stars of which shed their last glimmers upon the stage. Far be it from me to disparage the Urferian totality’s embodiment-through-subservience of all that music can be—for giftedness was, if you will, Urfer’s livery; I will only say, throwing the name Schramm into the conversation with all the force of a nigh-abortive existence, that Urfer did not yield success, if we take success to mean provisionally, in Ambrosia Hall terms, that the conductor guides the philharmonic to the heavenly spheres while the orchestra minion keeps it on the ground. Schramm is not grasping after this appointment impudently, he has credentials, perhaps not musicality in the sense of inborn talent, but a rigorous sense of his rightful place in a society like Ambrosia Hall: he, the deaf brute, belongs on the dark side of art. There and nowhere else! The selection committee, which you do the honor of presiding over, will have the most various opinions as to the optimal characteristics of Urfer’s successor. Some will say a bit of harmonic knowledge can’t hurt; others will protest, for the love of God, keep out the subpar would-be conductors, soloists, composers. The guild may split diametrically, with one side clamoring for a pasty-faced Urfer stand-in with yet more perfect pitch while the other demands a percussion tuner with an eardrum like tanned leather. So be it! In the opinion of this inconsequential candidate—and drill it into your memory, that is all I am—a tone steward’s understanding of music should at most drive him under and behind the stage. Bruckner, which means toll keeper—that name alone brings him closer to me than all other composers—Schramm used to imagine Bruckner as Atlas in his childhood, buckling under the nine-hundredweight of his symphonies piled on his back, rising high into the sky. The labor of the orchestra minion is no different, but he should not take Bruckner as his paragon, no, a world champion weightlifter would be???????? better, Rimsky-Korsakov, perhaps. Rimsky-Korsakov, the Russian, is the augmentative, what say I, the superlative, the elative, of Bruckner. Underline this, Herr Conductor, or read it as though it were italicized, I shall be returning to this question later. But first, two subqualities merit mention: the orchestra minion must be the quintessence not only of silence, but of fairness. A zealous Wagnerian, a votary of Saint-Sa?ns transmuted into wriggling quicksilver, is ab initio unsuited for the job. I demand absolute musical neutrality. Imagine the havoc an orchestra minion could unleash in the heap of philharmonizers twitching with stage fright should it come to light before the curtains’ parting that he had intervened upon the classic Hohenlohe arrangement of music stands, showing favor to the woodwinds to the detriment of the other instrumentalists’ foot room, which is absolutely essential for keeping time. Nor is it hard to provoke the indignation of these interpretation-artists. The word philharmonic is synonymous with musical machinations, the most perfect of all polyphonies is a conspiracy. And so it is of the essence that the handworker in the background, drudging with his augur, bandsaw, and file, know, at least in proscenium-carpentry terms, how to reconcile bassoon and harp, triangle and viola. Homogeny—that is the music directors job!, Herr Conductor will interject. Of course, of course. But is not the orchestra minion the maestro’s analogue or obverse? Tant pis, it is an open secret that the so-called second fiddles, incapable of achieving virtuosity on their own, are prone to skirmishes during symphony performances; the orchestra minion must not further pique these duelists, as they are known in symphonic parlance, by offering the finest rosin to one and bargain basement pine slop to another. Urfer was, as is well known, a genius in sniffing out and exorcizing these petty grievances. His proficiency in the instrumental sciences told him exactly where a bass tubist’s sore spots lay. The choler of the bass tubist is predictably aroused when piccolo frippery is allowed to trill past under his nose. If and when Schramm is chosen—and should his nomination be declined, neither the conductor, nor the board, nor the ensemble will soon forget the standard of excellence his application has set, and all opposing candidates, even sacrificing body and soul in the pursuit of their labors, must founder upon said standards, the particulars of which shall be omitted—if and when Schramm is chosen, he will know how to put an end to this partisan gibing, adapting his good offices to the diverse philharmonizers. He will render unto the brass section what is proper to the brass section. Urfer did not do this: Urfer let the wind hovel fall into disrepair until the outbursts of the neglected cornetists and horns demolished it. He was a strings spirit, in a word, and the strings’ quarters were impeccable: had the Ambrosia Hall wanted for space, they’d have made a fine setting for the foyer operations. The wind players’ hovel, on the other hand, was like an abandoned storeroom in a barracks. At hand for the orchestra minion are limitless opportunities for sabotage. Just think of the music stands, their intractable metal parts, the endless creaking of the podium, the instability of the acoustical shell! The instrumentalist is an essence, and music is an art, and both are deeply prone to the perfidy of objects. Why is it, at the circus, that the musical clowns are the most beloved acts? Because their antics drag down to the sawdust-covered ground the tightrope-walk of high musical art. A farting sousaphone with an exploding bell is an endless source of jubilation! Just before the first notes sound is when the orchestra minion’s sabotage-lust is greatest; so strong is the temptation, as all gather at the entrance, to snip off a string with his needle-nose pliers that he must knot his hands behind his back. The philharmonizers, walking instruments, as I need not tell you, climb the steps, fiddling, droning, mewling. With one kick at the wooden ceiling overhead, the orchestra minion can strike both cellist and the cello. Once the piece has begun, his power shrivels wretchedly. The musicians are safe, they’ve taken shelter in their sphere, leaving him, their dogsbody, behind in the cemetery of plushly upholstered cases and crates. The entire genius and immanence of Beethoven’s Fifth have absorbed them; no longer are they concerned with him. There is a mutual philharmonization of ensemble and public across the gilded hinge of the conductor. Schramm has no place in this perfect symmetry of cultures. And so, to each his own: my métier is boards and crates and not Polyhymnia and Terpsichore! And I have not applied for the post of orchestra minion in order to revive the old feud between strings and woodwind, percussion and brass, or, if we employ the increasingly controversial Sachs-Hornbostel classification, between idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, and aerophones. Schramm will not follow Urfer, who, in each of his employments, from orchestra seatery to procurement of this musical implement or that, endeavored constantly to aid the cellists in their final victory over the so-called sound effect instruments, which include, Herr Conductor, the wind machine, the flexatone, and the singing saw. I will not hereby affirm that the habitual consumer of program music must warm to the flexatone or the marine trumpet; I shall not raise my voice on one or the other’s behalf; but Urfer, in his maniacal favoritism and defamation, had a penchant for dissuading Detmar von Hohenlohe from such basically inoffensive noisemakers by simply hiding them in a secret spot under the stage; this principle he enforced even when they showed up for a single movement, one pitiful manifestation of these gewgaws’ continued existence. Over the ambience, the tonal colors of the Ambrosia Hall, the very thing that drew the season ticket holders back, Urfer managed to hold far more pernicious sway than Herr Conductor supposes. Of course, I would never be so impudent as to demand a thorough disurferment of the administration of this venerable resonance chamber, prized by the crème de la crème of our city, which in its architectural style offers a cross between the sham-baroque of the old casino in Montreux and a film reconstruction of the former Dresden station in Berlin—still, in the midst of my ingratiations, there’s no harm in scratching away at my predecessor’s patina. But the point, Schramm, get to the damn point! My application theory is, if you will, as follows: precisely because he was reared in the shadows of musical art and has grown hard of hearing like Schramm, does the symphonic janitor strike me as a figure part-damned, part-predestined to atone backstage, in what I deem a buffer zone between art and chaos—to atone for the gala-virtuosity celebrated, or rather perpetrated, in the foreground where the artists take their bows. The orchestra minion, first to set foot into the concert hall and last to leave, condemned to stand his ground as potentiometer, to shoulder a double bass, fire warden, stage manager, lighting technician all in one, Schramm, the meek soul who, when the wrong material has been handed out to the orchestra, ensures that the right notes are circulated in due course in an invisible paper relay, is the embodiment of the ensemble’s shadow government; when the musician, enamored of his part, forgets the rest of the world, the orchestra minion supports him, gives him the certainty that even back by the fire escape, someone is there who will make sure that the tone-creations hovering from the brass funnels and sounding boxes will be channeled forward from the draft-proof acoustic shell, the pieces of which, nota bene, the orchestra minion assembles himself: a peon in a coal gray shirt, looking for all the world like a road worker, a man who earns a wage and not an impresario who demands a fee. He, of all people, for whom a symphony like Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s The Scottish is performed least of all, struggles like none other with this very same work, Herr Conductor; for the orchestra minion, endlessly derided by the viper-tongued philharmonizers, who claim he’s tipsy during the intonations and loiters beer-sotted behind the curtains in the corridors, is locked in a confrontation with the underside of art. All that the public slurps down from the forestage, inhales with the sharpest of audition, processes as sonic effects in the twin temporal lobes of the cerebrum, the orchestra minion experiences as dysphonia. It’s true: Fair Lady Musica has a womb that whelps at night, and out of it crawl idiots and harmonic Hottentots. Would you like, Herr Conductor, for me to tell you what goes on in the symphony’s back alleys? You, who have never been crushed against the firewall by the polyphonic pressure as the tone-poem marches straight through you and away? You, who have always stood glimmering in the front line, amid taffeta robes and pomaded connoisseurs? Never has even a single composer decanted the orchestra minion into one of his compositions. The whole of occidental music was written right past us—right past Schramm. In this sense, the theater is more progressive. There are plays in which the theater minion, with the director’s acquiescence, with a countdown from the prompter and the accompaniment of spotlights, strides straight across the stage, even perhaps receives an ovation of his very own. But what do I care about theater minions? Orchestra minion, that is my calling, the retrieval of sheet music, rosin, and reeds. Musical supplies, but never music itself! Schramm is human refuse, kept backstage in the fleapit of pure untalent while the vast social ceremony of collective tone-generation-and-apperception plays out. And when the musical and social bodies’ copulation culminates in orgiastic applause, and afterward, the hurrahs and handclapping go silent, Schramm is the one who is left behind to sweep Schramm up into the dustpan. This is the most orchestra minionesque of all orchestra minion duties, Herr Conductor. Urfer’s trademark was the jangle: jangling tools, jangling chairs, the jangling conductor’s rostrum. Everything his hands touched turned to an idiophone. How many times did he sit downstairs twanging at a chair leg, playing along with the entire work onstage above him? Wrong, wrong, wrong! Urfer toiled after co-ingenuity, Schramm strives for counter-ingenuity! When perfection-anesthesia gives way to luster-magnificence and the applause roars through the hall; when Detmar von Honehlohe hears cascades of hands clapping in the half-circle of his philharmonizers; when the candelabran foyer-ladies lean spasmodic over the velvet balustrade of the galleries, blow kisses, let their jeweled collars sway; when all this occurs, the orchestra minion is kneeling on the ground in his kingdom and beating his forehead bloody against the wall, as if this would allow him to pierce the barrier that exiles him from all art. Herr Conductor, this is a performance, too. This, too, saps one’s essence. It is said that every orchestra minion dreams that once in his life, after a particularly consummate performance, the conductor will wave him onstage just as the applause is dying down, the doors of the concert hall will open, the maestro will remain standing in the acoustic shell, and will remark, in a gesture like the casting of alms: Yes, even this pink-eyed boozehound with a folding ruler in his leg holster has discreetly done his part to help make this evening a triumph. Allow me to warn the application committee against hoping this orchestra minion might ever step onstage. The boards will not bear his bodyweight. Tapping the symphony from Schramm’s veins has left him so leaden, he will stomp through the wooden platform like an elephant. But how can that be? How can the very structure he is responsible for assembling not sustain his own weight? Are we to presume sixty musicians are weightless? But the artist is weightless, he disgorges himself into his instrument, we even know the ensemble’s members by their instruments’ names: the bassoon came in too late, we say, the harp is on strike, the brass section has mutinied. Could the orchestra minion gather himself to walk forward to the stage’s edge, he would tread through it as though trampling dry kindling. To a man, the philharmonizers, even the lowliest triangle clanker, would have to roll up their sleeves to pitch in and replace the damage caused by one single appearance of this sweating, moronic dupe, this mental defect in their lineup. Schramm refuses to reap unearned honors: for him, any applause would be like a thousand slaps across the face. When the Ambrosia Hall appoints him—and he is so certain of this eventuality that he has considered tucking in his resignation letter along with his application—he will do the opposite, guiding the instrumentalists through the backstage doors in the midst of the huzzahs to show them once and for all what shadow conducting is: what it means to have chaos for one’s audience. He will leave no doubt in their minds that the orchestra minion is the one and only soloist who can carry symphonic poetry to fruition: a soloist in musical mortification. Every note played is plucked from our flesh, Herr Conductor! And yet, despite his performance of this superhuman feat, Schramm remains at his post. Inexistent in front, omnipresent behind. The ovation phase is when his hands are fullest. After the philharmonizers have executed their hemorrhagic or ischemic masterstrokes, and the shouts of viva inflame the hall, the orchestra minion, who has lain on the floor writhing and foaming at the mouth like an epileptic, hurries lightning-fast to the door, where he must not only stand guard for the maestro, whom he has observed through the peephole taking bow after bow at Schramm’s expense, but must also whisper in his face Excellent, Unsurpassable, Unprecedented, for it is in the nature of all executive artists, and in particular all conductors, to demand from the first living being they encounter, not to say step over, on their return from their spheres to the earth’s soil, a homily to their accomplishments in reviewer-ese. Then again, the orchestra minion can only astutely conduct the applause by adopting, as regards his person, a code of absolute bravissimo-abstemiousness. Detmar von Hohenlohe must be extracted at the key moment from the ovation hurricane to be assisted in the pacing of the encore. Imagine a bullheaded maestro maestrissimo bent on scurrying back in the midst of an ovation; even at the risk of tearing them, his coattails must be clutched at with utmost violence; for only by depriving the masses of what they want for just long enough can we make it desirable for them once more. It is no exaggeration to affirm that in these moments, the conductor is a helpless husk in the grip of the orchestra minion’s hairy hand. If, on a festival evening, a Klinkhammer or Van Impe or another such paragon steps out for fewer than ten ovations—curtain calls, as they are known in the theater, while in the music trade we speak of augmented or diminished celebrity codas—then you can take my word for it: his underling has flubbed it. Only when it’s all over, and the philharmonizers emerge from the sanctum sanctorum of the acoustic shell, does the orchestra minion receive his meager compensation for humiliations endured. The musicians are spent, they slink past him obsolete and shabby, the violas, horns, and celli. A bassoon thoroughly profaned, Herr Conductor—you might as well sweep him into the instrument scrapyard that lies beneath the stage, where the harmonium gathers dust and the castoff kettledrums from Haydn’s Symphony in G Major dream their dreams. There’s no denying it: the philharmonizers cannot bear the breath of nothingness that blows past them as the public hurries off and it is time once more to descend into the wind hovel, the strings chamber, to lay their idiophones and aerophones in their coffins and tuck their sweaty tuxes into their lockers in their dressing rooms. For every artist, the critical moment arrives after the ebbing of the applause, when he is provisionally dismissed or disinherited. Inside him, the voice of the masterpiece reverberates, saying: for now, I no longer need you. When this happens, the performers turn envious of Schramm and his janitorial duties, they scamper after a broom, beg to sit at the ticket window, dream of permission to make the rounds. Schramm they must ask to repair the jammed closure of an instrument case; Schramm they use as a shoehorn to wedge themselves back into life. This whining and pleading for Schramm is never at an end. In the last dance ambience of the stairwell, it is enough to call a symphonist a symphonist to convince him of the futility of his calling. And yet, Herr Conductor, you dare ask me, in the name of the application committee, whether it is the orchestra minion who triumphs in the end? Does he avenge his untalent on the artists—disintegrated, disengaged, destitute—by running around shamelessly and making a show of his utility, his ubiquity? If so, then indulge him in this pyrrhic victory, for what advantage does he have, save that the atmosphere that drives the artists to disgust after the curtains close is the same one he slaves away in every day. And yet, the fact remains that music brings delight to its favorite children, the hearing-able and the virtuosos, while it deals a knockout blow to Schramm, not a technical knockout as in boxing, but a knockout of the musical faculties. It is natural to wonder whether such a man, who is soliciting less a post than an endowment he has been denied by birth, is really the right one for the Ambrosia Hall Ensemble. The objection is simple: How can he serve the orchestra when music, the tutelary deity of the philharmonic, has made of him an invalid? Ask away, Herr Conductor, you are well in your rights to do so! And Schramm will not conceal his infirmity, despite the refusal of the examining physicians at the employment agency to diagnose it. His hearing impairment is an inward one, its origins are in his very depths, and no ear, nose, and throat specialist can cure it. And yet, Schramm wants the job, wants bodily ruin, for his health is the one thing this deaf geezer can sacrifice for the sake of music. He who does not want or cannot hear must feel! What musicality means, what occurs in a resonance-spirit swaddled in acoustics, is nigh-impossible for me to imagine. I presume it to be a process analogous to the mechanics of piano keys. Through fine pilot wires and whippens, the notes played set an army of felt hammers in motion, striking golden strings in the hearts of those fragile flowers who are sensitive to sound. A hammering, their attunement is a hammering, Herr Conductor. To know music is to be born an instrument, and that means to be treated as an instrument, to be cared for as an instrument. Just imagine, coming into the world as a viola di gamba, and in the meanwhile, Schramm can’t relate even faintly to a bombed-out bandonion, its wires sticking out in all directions. And so his only entrée to the Ambrosia Hall Society is through the backstairs of this orchestra minion solicitation. I beg you most humbly, Herr Conductor, exert your influence upon the committee you preside over; steer it, induce your confederates to avail themselves of meager Schramm. Look upon my candidacy as you would upon a request for piddling supplies made by some greenhorn volunteer for the dispensable post of second fiddle. And after the reading of my application letter, don’t forget to wash your hands! With utmost respect, Schramm.

Excerpted from?Diabelli?by Hermann Burger, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Published by Wakefield Press. Copyright ? 2025 by Wakefield Press. All rights reserved.