"Daniel Da Cruz - Mixed Doubles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

20. The Solid-Gold Runway 31 March 1930 195
IVтАФ Quadrille
21. Gem├╝tlichkeit 12 September 2002 207
22. Rivers 11 August 2002 218
23. Firebaugh 11 August 2002 224
24. Double Duty 10 January 2003 234
25. Fugue 12 January 2003 239
26. Swan Song 15 August 3921 251
Coda 18 February 2088 260
 I
Two-Part Invention
1. PRELUDE
23 JUNE 1996
3

JUSTIN P OPE was divided into three parts: ambition, genius, and gall.
He had the ambition to be acclaimedтАФlike the young BeethovenтАФthe greatest composer of his age.
He had the gall to pretend that he was indeed such a genius. And he had the genius to get away with it.
Pope's genius was to convince people who should have known betterтАФhis professors and fellow
studentsтАФthat within him burned a veritable volcano of musical cre-ativity, which burst forth at intervals
in an eruption of deafening brass and cymbals and bass drums leavened, inexplicably, by passages of
simple, unadorned, and all-too-brief melody. That he was able to compose such eloquent melodies
proved that he possessed a talent of the highest order. That he sandwiched them between ear-crunching
avalanches of unorganized sound, his mentors solemnly explained to the unconvinced, who winced when
they listened to Pope's music, was merely to en-hance their beauty by contrast with the lack of harmony
of what preceded and followed. Immensely proud of their student, they explained that his compositions
were a log-ical extension of the dissonances of modern masters such as Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Hoist,
Poulenc, Milhaud, Cage, Hindemith, Copeland, Webern, and Glass. Not for him the outdated austerities
of Bach, Buxtehude, Telemann, and Handel. Pope, genius that he was, could have written that sort of
music had he so chosen, but his imagination had leapt across the centuries, and the music that the genie
within compelled him to write left him no leisure to cater to the shallow tastes of yesterday. Or so they
said . . .
Alas, for the kind of music that filled his hours and his notebooks there was no audience except the
professors he had gulled into believing that his was the voice of the future. It was music full of complex
and grating dishar-monies, jerky rhythms, long silences broken by thunder-ous chords, arpeggios that
mixed and intermingled like paints smeared haphazardly on an artist's palette. Yet sometimes, by an
alchemy mysterious even to him, they resolved into stunning chromatic tone pictures, sunbursts of sound,
with the sweep and majesty of a Turner battle scene. Those lyric passages convinced everyone that
Pope could, had he so wished, have written the rest of his music to the same measure. Such grace notes
of genius, the erudite critics of the Bay area proclaimed, would one day flower into an oeuvre that would
enrapture the world.
Some dayтАФbut not today. Meanwhile, he stole. Not everything: merely most of the charming melodies
that enchanted his professors; the dissonances were his own. He had to steal, for in no other way could
he satisfy his yearning for fame while he was young and vigorous and able to enjoy it. Once he made his
mark, he told himself, he would have the leisure to really learn the art of composition or, even better, use
his celebrity to launch a musical career in which his natural talent for fraud could be put to good use, like
conducting.
Meanwhile, he had to get on with the business of win-ning his doctor of music degree, the safe refuge
of those who desired a musical career but had no talent.
And so, without protest from his conscience, from the yellowed, crumbling archives of the Faculty of