The Meltdown

Abstract

26 WLT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2016 photo : brook ward ( flickr . com / brookward ) S ome years ago a diabolical fire, triggered by lightning, ravaged Donmark cathedral. It was a terrible tragedy, though fortunately no lives were lost and no one was injured. Most of the cathedral, however, was burned beyond repair. The Donmark city council, in conjunction with the Diocese of Y–, decided that an altogether new building would have to be designed and erected in place of the old. So they approached the celebrated architect Grimsdale Rollo, who proposed an audacious idea: a smaller-scale imitation Norman cathedral made from concrete and limestone, with stained-glass windows, but with an external, protected, gigantic pipe organ. Now, after five years, the project had been realized, and everyone was very happy. Rollo walked off with a considerable sum of money, the city council congratulated itself on its daring and good taste, and the local press gushed over this symbol of cuttingedge architectural modernity. Countless tourists flooded in to the quaint little city, greedily taking photos of the cathedral and its pipe organ with their digital cameras. While staring at it, however, most of the locals felt a little uneasy. It was certainly bizarre. The whole thing was an outlandish hybrid of stone and pipes and brass and valves. The colossal central thrust of interlocking curved tubing pointed toward the heavens and seemed to be reaching out ever further to try and join them. It was as though this ersatz Norman austerity had been finished off with an afterthought: the addition—or rather superimposition—on its spires and columns of this massive apparatus fiction The Meltdown by Baret Magarian Seeking greater meaning—and perhaps overidentifying with an obscure nineteenthcentury composer—a schoolmaster determines to wake his sleeping village by playing its long-silent organ. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 27 of musicality. What was normally housed inside a cathedral now provided the exterior with a second, displaced skin. The sound that the organ produced, when all the stops were out, would have been deafening , smiting the listener with all its armor-plated force. Consequently, the thing was never actually played as Donmark, with its quaint shops and tearooms, would have been laid waste by the aural equivalent of an atom bomb. The whole thing was protected from the elements by an immense, raised shield that stood atop the highest towers of pipes like a fragmented, ossified tent. • The village schoolmaster, Mr. Luces, was an amateur organist, and he was particularly fond of the organ works of Ferruccio-Valentin Clemente, an obscure nineteenth-century Italian-French composer. Clemente had been a child prodigy, and once, according to legend, had astonished Pagianini after a recital in Parma, playing Paganini’s Caprice no. 24 on the piano while blindfolded. Clemente became a kind of performing monkey for awhile, pushed zealously by his baker of a father, who cared very little about music and a great deal about money, insisting the boy do endless rounds of concert tours in Europe and Sicily. Eventually Clemente gave it all up at the age of nineteen and shifted his attention to composition. The illustrious music critic Eduard Hanslick once passed judgment on one of his quartets, and it is worth quoting his remarks in full just to get an idea of the violence of the great critic’s reaction: Ferruccio-Valentin Clemente’s music puts one in mind, principally, of the Black Death. When one hears it a violent nausea takes hold. Mercifully, once away from the presence of this music, life returns and so does sanity. Clemente has shown us that, with the best will in the world, certain individuals, no matter how hard they try, can only produce works that are, at best, sickeningly bad and, at worst, incontestably evil. With this in mind I would urge Clemente to take his own life and spare the world, which is already replete with ugliness and horror, from having to stomach any more of his abominations. Clemente, perhaps understandably, never recovered from this blow. His life was to take ever-darker turns. His first wife threw his musical scores in the Seine after she found out he was having an affair with her mother...