The revelation
The Revelation is a 2007 novel by Robert Schneider . The book tells the fictional story of the music researcher Jakob Kemper from Naumburg (Saale) , who found a late work by JS Bach that was lost in the town church of St. Wenzel in 1992 . After the first viewing, it turns out that the find - an oratorio based on texts from the Apocalypse - exceeds Bach's great works in scope and audacity. The discovery changes the life and thinking of Jakob Kempers in one fell swoop and pulls him into a vortex of unforeseen events.
The novel, which Schneider calls a musical joke , was published by Aufbau-Verlag . In 2008 it was awarded the Fantastik Prize of the city of Wetzlar and has so far been translated into 11 languages.
content
The music researcher Jakob Kemper, in his mid-forties, who believes he is misunderstood, has lived alone for decades in an empty house in the old town of Naumburg, near the St. Wenceslas Church. His coarse father, a former brush maker , is still full of National Socialist ideas and was able to preserve this beyond the GDR era. He despises his musically gifted son and regards church music as a relapse into feudalism . He causes Jacob the greatest pain when he marries his great love Eva in a second marriage. From this marriage the son Leo arises, with whom Jacob has a good relationship. Jakob teaches the 11-year-old to play the piano and feels like a father to him.
On Christmas Eve 1992, while talking to his stepbrother in the organ gallery, Leo finds an old, dusty travel bag. Kemper opens the bag and it almost hits him with a blow: It contains an autograph with a hitherto unknown work by Bach. When he reads the score and, thanks to his great musical talent, listens to it, he fevered with excitement. He has discovered a piece of lost music that would last at least seven hours in a concert performance, a work with musical stylistic elements that were previously thought to be impossible. A revolution for Bach research.
Kemper immediately canceled all services as organist and called in sick, especially since he had completely inexplicable experiences while studying the find. The score not only documents music, it can conjure up memories of the past, the repressed and the future. The discovery throws him completely off track. At the end of his life, Bach seems to have found a kind of cosmic law and implemented it in music that heals the human soul or plunges it into deepest despair. Kemper suffers wild phantasmagorias, alternating between exuberant euphoria and violent nightmares.
He is unhappily in love with Lucia Lübke, who comes from the West and after the fall of the Wall opened a small travel agency in Naumburg whose business is bad. She is the only one he tells about the mysterious find. Lucia advises him to hand over the precious autograph to the appropriate passages, but Kemper hesitates. He finally sees himself as a recognized and prized member of the Bach Society . He does not want to forego this satisfaction. He who always came up short, who was always passed over.
In the meantime, four high-ranking Bach researchers arrive in Naumburg to examine the famous, but dilapidated organ by Zacharias Hildebrandt , which the old Bach verifiably inspected and played. In order to free himself from the burdens that he had to face when he discovered the score, Kemper secretly slips the bundle of notes into Dr. Zinser from Leipzig, one of these researchers. He and his boss read the score, but because what can't be, they consider the work to be a forgery by Kemper, who wants to make himself important with it, and send it back to him.
Only one Japanese scientist, Yoshiba Koyatake, listens and believes Kemp's remarks that Bach could have left a work that the music world knows nothing about. Driven by a research instinct, Koyatake breaks into Kemper's apartment at night, finds the score and has similar experiences while reading: This music is a sword. She names the culprit. She names you herself. (P. 248 f. Of the original edition, 2007.) Koyatake begs his colleague to destroy the bundle.
Kemper decides not to destroy the notes. He reads the score one last time, reliving the experience that this music re-establishes and reconciles the relationship with his brother Karl, who died under unknown circumstances. For the first time he confronts his guilt, understands his outsiderhood by reconciling himself with his own life and making peace with the all-powerful father. He takes the old travel bag and puts the notes back where little Leo found them. He consciously renounces fame and power. Let someone else find the score. Or she him. Perhaps another 246 long years will have to pass. (P. 265)
The last chapter of the novel, a kind of satyr play, takes the reader back to the year 1746. The language factor gives way to a style modeled on the Baroque period, with quotations from letters from Bach, his sons and contemporaries being woven in. The old, misanthropic Bach appears and confesses to the organ builder Gottfried Silbermann that all his life he despised musical science, yes, hated it (p. 274). The epilogue also reveals why Bach forgot the notes of his revelation in Naumburg.
Narrative
The novel consistently uses a pointed language that is unusually rich in dialogue for Schneider, but does not dispense with poetic stylistic devices and topoi from German Romanticism , which it deliberately counteracts. The pathos provides tailor an invigorating antidote to the side: the humor. The predominant character of the text is whimsical, yes, even satirical. Nevertheless, in terms of genre, it is more of a novella than a novel, whereby the unheard-of event, the falcon in the sense of Paul Heyse , is not the discovery of the lost score , but what the unknown music evokes in Kemper: the will to reconcile with one's own biography.
Schneider ties a series of storylines, which he composes through unusually densely. (Father-son conflict, love story with Lucia, the mysterious death of the brother, the ominous score, description of the state of the academic world around classical music, the post-reunification period in Germany.) He illuminates the psychology of his characters and places them in the context of their past and the border-crossing world of being and appearance.
The literary description of non-existent music, for which Schneider is known in Schlafes Bruder , also finds its counterpart here. What probably always excites the author is the description of unheard of, even sometimes impossible music. Schneider applies a process that uses a series of termini technici to suggest the plausibility of baroque music that has not been notated .
interpretation
Revelation allows the reader to read the book from several angles. On the one hand it is a detective novel that has the hunt for an immensely valuable manuscript on the subject, where the inexperienced hero becomes the hunted of a hypertrophic scientific enterprise, on the other hand the snapshot of Germany after the fall of the Wall in 1992 with the corresponding East-West debate, thirdly one unfulfilled love story - Schneider leaves the ending open - and finally a pure music novel.
The text makes a number of references to the who's who of today's Bach research and maintenance. The Dutch conductor and organist Ton Koopman can easily be recognized in the fictional character of Frits van Hulle, an extroverted organist with ludicrous tempos . The figure of Hans-Georg Sperling undoubtedly stands for Christoph Wolff , one of the greatest Bach connoisseurs of our day, who actually teaches at Harvard, and the renowned Japanese Bach researcher Yoshitake Kobayashi hardly hides behind Schneider's figure of Yoshiba Koyatake.
reception
With the publication of the novel The Revelation , Schneider's tide seems to have turned with regard to the partially devastating reception of his books by German literary criticism. "With his new novel, the author has managed to turn things around again," says Alexander Kissler in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He certifies Schneider "not to overgrow the fable with rhetoric, but to skillfully process romantic topoi".
"In his storytelling, Schneider seems to have found the right balance between fine humor and biting irony on the one hand, and seriousness and love for the subject on the other," writes Peter Urban-Halle in the Berliner Zeitung. "This book is different and, above all, better than his last novels. Best of all are the disarming humor, entrancingly funny dialogue and an amazing sense of comedy."
Ulrich Steinmetzger comments in the Neue Rhein Zeitung: "The new novel is voluntarily funny, because Schneider created a real caricature here and not even the slightest bit of an ambitious head birth, and that is the new, rather astonishing quality of this book."
literature
- Robert Schneider: The Revelation . Aufbau-Verlag , Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-351-03212-8
Secondary literature
- Interview with Wolfgang Huber-Lang and Robert Schneider. In: Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, November 12, 2007.
- Alexander Kissler, Only sinful people get famous. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 6, 2007
- Peter Mohr, From Vorarlberg to Naumburg. In: Cover culture magazine , April 24, 2008.
- Wolfgang Paterno , being famous was often like purgatory. In: Books, p. 36ff., No. 9, 2007.
- Rainer Schmidts, On the Power of Music. In: Focus , November 19, 2007.
- Peter Urban-Halle, The score in the organ. In: Berliner Zeitung , November 29, 2007.
- Eberhard Reimann, revelation of a great talent. In: New Germany daily newspaper , October 9, 2007.
- Ulrich Steinmetzger, Better to go up the stream than down. In: Neue Rhein Zeitung , October 17, 2007.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Otten, I am my books . In: Publik-Forum , No. 15, 2008.
- ↑ Alexander Kissler: Only sinful people become famous . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 6, 2007.
- ^ Peter Urban-Halle: The score in the organ . In: Berliner Zeitung, November 29, 2007.
- ↑ Ulrich Steinmetzger: Better up the stream than down . In: Neue Rhein Zeitung, October 17, 2007.