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| Weird Tales 1925.05 |
Opening Statement:
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil...it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.What in Brown Jenkin's Name..?
A strange old man seems to hold lethal cosmic forces at bay with his strange music.Synopsis:
The narrator lodges in a hotel at the top of a mysterious street. He hears beautiful, weird music coming from the room above his own. However, when the narrator visits the mute Erich Zann in person, he plays more “normal” music. Zann is startled when the narrator tries to recite the "weirder" musical themes. Upset, Zann has the narrator move to a lower floor. One night, the narrator eavesdrops and hears Zann playing the weird music with fury. He enters after Zann seems to collapse in exhaustion. Zann is in the process of confessing his whole story (in writing) when weird tones come from outside his window. Zann immediately starts playing furiously again. The window glass breaks and Zann’s confession is blown out the window. The narrator looks out the window and sees some kind of "other world of darkness" (in place of the city lights he had expected to see). He soon realizes that Zann has "died", but that he still continues to play his cello, automaton-like. The disturbed narrator flees from the mysterious forces in the room. Later he cannot find the hotel or the street it was located on.Essential Saltes:
It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.From Dr. Armitage's Notes:
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.
- This story seems to take place in Paris. "The Moon Bog" takes place in Ireland. However, Lovecraft's stories generally focus around New England, New York City or the Antarctic.
- "Viol" is short for "violoncello", which is long for "cello".
- Like the village described in "The Festival", Erich Zann's apartment house disappears from the public record.
The Horrible Conclusion:
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely-written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.Read it here.
Follow'd by "Herbert West: Reanimator".
