The music of Erich Zann

The Music of Erich Zann (Original title: The Music of Erich Zann ) is a short story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft , written in December 1921 and first published in March 1922 in The National Amateur magazine . It is one of Lovecraft's most popular stories, has been reprinted many times and translated into several languages, including German and French. Up to the present day she has inspired writers, illustrators, filmmakers and not least musicians to create their own.

Narrative situation, temporal and spatial framework

As in a number of other texts by Lovecraft, it is an unnamed first-person narrator who reports on the "Music of Erich Zann" from a clear temporal distance, which is addressed right at the beginning. The distance between the narrating and the experiencing self manifests itself primarily in the fact that the narrator can no longer find the location of the action, even though he is using old city maps. The short story takes place in an unnamed French university town with features of Paris . At that time Lovecraft knew neither Paris nor France from personal experience, none of his other stories are set there.

The events take place, as the narrator states, “during the last months of his impoverished life as a student of metaphysics”. A detailed description of the place follows: first of the district, then rue d'Auseil , and finally of the house where the narrator lived at the time. The ingredients of horror typical of Lovecraft appear piece by piece: darkness, old age, stench and decay. In addition, there is the motif of the steep street, which flows over into stairs, which Lovecraft has also used repeatedly: After a steep climb over flights of stairs, between leaning, almost touching, ancient, crumbling houses, a huge wall closes the street, which is only dominated by the house that the narrator lives in.

action

In his room at night the narrator hears the eponymous music coming from above from the attic room on the top floor. As the paralyzed caretaker Blandot tells him, it comes from a "viol player" (meaning a cellist ), the mute German Erich Zann, who works in a "cheap theater orchestra" in the evenings and plays for himself at night. Fascinated by the strange harmonies, he matches the old man in the stairwell. During a visit to Zann's room, however, the latter does not play the eerie nocturnal melodies, and when the narrator tries to whistle them and even expresses the desire to take a look through the curtained window over the wall at the city, Zann abruptly breaks off the visit from.

But the fascination of the narrator does not wane. One night he heard the instrument racing again in the stairwell and then an inarticulate scream. Zann lets him in and tells him that he will write a full report of his obsession in German for him. Suddenly a distant, “deliberate and purposeful” note sounds from outside, and Zann's eerie cello playing begins again. A storm rises that destroys the window and blows the leaves written on it - and outside the narrator does not see the lights of the city, but chaotic, light and formless, sound-filled infinite space. He flees in a panic, reaches the inhabited city and never finds the place of horror and fascination again.

analysis

The narrative follows a plot curve that is very characteristic of Lovecraft's stories: clues are gradually built up that make a natural solution to the riddle increasingly improbable. Nevertheless, the narrator sticks to this fiction until the overwhelming, supernatural reality asserts itself at the climax of the plot (here with the view out of the window). In this story, the pattern is realized without slag; Since the references to the mythical world he had created, which are otherwise so frequent in Lovecraft, are missing and the use of predictions and formulaic attributes is made more sparingly, the sudden turn is particularly surprising. This lack of slag is also cited as the reason that the story is so popular, among others by Lovecraft himself. It corresponds to the linguistic form, which up to the climax of the plot consistently adheres to the objectifying narrative report, albeit increasingly enriched with emotionalizing expressions. Only at the moment of flight does the narrator give up his distance for a sentence and asyndetically , as it were breathlessly, strings together verbs of movement - to find his way back to the wistful coda :

Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me.

The “calculated inaccuracy” with which Lovecraft equips the intrusion of the supernatural also extends here to the themed art form, music. In contrast to the side piece Pickman's model , written five years later , where the perilous threshold is crossed on the way of painting, the description of the music Zann played remains abstract. There are no references to representatives, forms and design; There is only talk of a Hungarian dance and a joint-like piece, everything else remains an approximate. The narrator, like Lovecraft himself, is “unversed in music” and is therefore unable to grasp the structure of the music, it is merely referred to with increasing vocabulary of overwhelming. This leaves the imagination free. Donald Burleson has suggested reading the mention of a fugue as an indication of the text structure, which itself follows the guidelines of a fugue.

reception

The "Music of Erich Zann" is one of Lovecraft's most popular short stories. It was reprinted several times during his lifetime, for example in Dashiell Hammett's horror story collection "Creeps by night" in 1931 and on a full newspaper page in the London Evening Standard (October 24, 1932).

The work was translated into German by HC Artmann ; the German version first appeared in 1968 by Insel-Verlag and then in the 1970s in a number of anthologies in the Fantastic Library at Suhrkamp .

A cartoon version of the story was published in 1994 in the band Lovecraft by Reinhard Kleist . Klaus Hagemeister created illustrations for the work; the short story appeared with these illustrations as a "graphic novella" in a limited edition of 250 copies. There is also a cinematic realization by John Strysik, an eight-minute stop-motion film adaptation by Anna Gawrilow and quite a few metal and ambient bands that try to translate Erich Zann's music into sounds, for example Bal-Sagoth , Mekong Delta ( Concept album The Music of Erich Zann , 1988) as well as the classical composers Alexey Voytenko and Stephen Tosh. In 2003 a German audio book was published with the short story and its side piece, Pickmans Modell ; The speaker is Tocotronic member Dirk von Lowtzow .

James Wade wrote a sequel entitled “The Silence of Erika Zann”.

On February 23, 2013, at the Inhuman Music Festival , the literary scholar and musician Ebba Durstewitz gave a lecture on musical adaptations of Erich Zann's material in the Berlin House of World Cultures .

Markus Winter used the short story as the core narrative for the first season finale of his radio play series Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Chronicles of Horror .

Editions and Realizations

Initial release

• The Music of Erich Zann . In: The National Amateur , 44: 4 (Mar 1922), pp. 38-40.

First publication in German

• The music of Erich Zann . Translated by HC Artmann. In: Cthulhu. Ghost stories. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt / Main, 1968, pp. 72–85.

additional

• The music of Erich Zann. Illustrated by Klaus Hagemeister. Edition Phantasia, Bellheim, 2001. ISBN 3-924959-59-5
• The music of Erich Zann. Stop motion film by Anna Gawrilow. Bauhaus University Weimar 2005. http://www.trickfilmnoir.de/
• Pickman's Model - The Music of Erich Zann. Read by Dirk von Lowtzow. Audiobook, Universal Music, Berlin, 2003. ISBN 3-8291-1346-3
• The Music of Erich Zann. Film adaptation, directed by John Strysik. 1980. IMDB link
• The Music of Erich Zann. In: Dashiell Hammett (ed.): Creeps by night. Chills and Thrills . John Day, New York, 1931.
• The music of Erich Zann. In: Jäger der Finsternis, audio book read by David Nathan, Lübbe Audio; February 2007 ISBN 978-3-7857-3296-0

literature

• Donald R. Burleson: The Music of Erich Zann . In: ders .: Lovecraft - Disturbing the Universe . University Press of Kentucky, 1990, pp. 67-76. ISBN 0-8131-1728-3
• Giorgio Manganelli : Foreword . In: HP Lovecraft: Cthulhu. Ghost stories . Suhrkamp: Frankfurt / Main, 1972, pp. 5-13. ISBN 3-518-36529-0
• David E. Schultz, ST Joshi (ed.): An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of HP Lovecraft . Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8386-3415-X
• Gary Hill: The Strange Sound of Cthulhu - Music Inspired by HP Lovecraft . Edition Roter Drache: Remda-Teichel, 2011, 320 pages, 70 illustrations, ISBN 978-3-939459-40-8

Web links

Wikisource: The Music of Erich Zann  - Sources and full texts (English)

supporting documents

1. ↑ See [1] .
2. ↑ See Manganelli 1972, who also identified these ingredients in other Lovecraft short stories.
3. ↑ cf. Schultz / Joshi, p. 94.
4. ↑ That here viol what actually gamba means is not only used as a poetic name for the violin, shows ST Joshi; Remarks in Lovecraft's letters suggest that he was envisioning a cello. See the notes in: HP Lovecraft: The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories . Edited and annotated by ST Joshi. Here: p. 377
5. ↑ See Donald Burleson: Lovecraft: A Critical Study . Greenwood Press, University of Michigan, 198, p. 64. ISBN 0-313-23255-5 ; ST Joshi, David E. Schultz: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , p. 177.
6. ↑ Manganelli 1972, p. 12
7. ^ Burleson 1990.
8. ↑ See the notes in: HP Lovecraft: The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories . Edited and annotated by ST Joshi. Here: p. 377.
9. ↑ Ebba Durstewitz on musical adaptations to Erich Zann on www.taz.de, March 30, 2013
10. ↑ What is Erich Zann's music? at www.hkw.de, House of World Cultures, Berlin 2013