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

Music at the University of California, for three years he had ab-stracted themes written for such extinct
instruments as the cor anglais, oboe d 'amore, diplo-kithara, racket, and lira da braccio by the
unknown Renaissance composers Luigi Baptistini, Mario Mariocuti, Emil Harnishneggar, Petrus
Lermontov, and others. He then spliced them into the jangling, discordant passages that so bewildered
and repelled, and therefore impressed, his teachers.
In his final year of graduate school Pope was a campus phenomenon. By consensus of both teachers
and his sheeplike classmates, he was easily the most gifted of them all, a composer destined for greatness
in his own time. Here was a composer who would not, like the pa-thetic Franz Schubert, die in poverty
and obscurity be-fore his talent could fully mature.
On the other hand, Pope reflected on the night of 23 June 1996, as he trudged through the rain toward
the Omar Haffar Molecular Sciences Building, his fate might be far worse than Schubert's: a life of
ignominy and rid-icule . . .
The note had arrived in the afternoon mail. Unsigned, it contained a single hand-printed word:
"Baptistini." At intervals over eight months, he had received two oth-ers like it. The first had read
"Lermontov." Nine weeks later he had received the second, with the single word "Mariocuti."
The first had elicited little reaction. Someone had per-haps detected a resemblance between one of his
com-positions and one of Lermontov's. A mere coincidence. It happened all the time in music. Handel
had plagiarized his own works shamelessly, while Respighi had plun-dered those of others. Even the
great Wagner had not been above borrowing a phrase that was, note for note, first heard in
Mendelssohn's Symphony no. 5тАФin reality his no. 10тАФthe Reformation.
Examples of conscious plagiarism were countless. Beethoven used a theme first written in 1800 for his
"Creatures of Prometheus," borrowed it for a country dance in 1802, then for the Variations in E Flat
Major, and finally in 1803 for the finale of his Eroica Symphony. The prolific Franz Schubert himself had
not been above borrowing the principal theme from his opera Rosamunde later in a string quartet and in
a theme and vari-ations for piano, the Impromptu in D Flat.
But probably the most egregious case of wholesale "borrowing" had been of the theme first heard in
Bach's Third Partita for Unaccompanied Violin in E Major. He himself had used it again twelve years
later, rearranged for organ in his 29th Cantata, and finally in his great B Minor Mass. It was also
borrowed and rearranged by Robert Schumann, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Fritz Kreisler, William Smith,
and Leopold Stowkowski, among others. If Pope appropriated the music of others for his own, at least
he was in the best company.
Still, the receipt of the second note, bearing the name Mariocuti, disturbed him. There was here no
question of coincidence. Pope had lifted three distinct themes from Mariocuti's Missa Solemnis in C
Minor, a work so ob-scure that according to the library checkout sheet, no one at the university had
even looked at it for more than thirty years. And yet somebody obviously had, and had de-tected Pope's
fraud. The thought gripped him like an icy hand around the throat. He began to look over his shoul-der,
to gaze deeply into the afternoon shadows, but to no avail: no secret watcher lurked there.
Pope's anxiety was allayed somewhat by the thought that he was in his final trimester, following which
he would receive his doctorate and be free forever from the necessity to steal the themes of others.
Conditional upon his receiving his Ph.D., he had already received several excellent offers from leading
American conservatories. He would accept the one requiring the lightest teaching load and get down
finally to writing great music, for he was vain enough to believe that the spark of true musical genius
smoldered within him.
Meanwhile, however, the final movement of his ma-jor work to date, the Symphony in D Major, the
Malibu, still had to be written, and he lacked a theme for it. Taking all precautions to avoid being
followed, he went to the university's musical library late one night in mid-May and spent four hours
ransacking the stacks for an appropriate theme. He finally found one by Luigi Baptistini that clashed
nicely with the stolen motifs from the earlier movements. He made a photocopy and within ten days had
submitted the finished symphony to his adviser, who was visibly moved and fulsome in his praise. Pope's
Ph.D. was in the bag.