The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker Page A

rehearsal, but now she intended to put the moment to good use.
    Dominique Carpentier had all the subtlety and patience of a good psychoanalyst. She listened like a stoat, ears alert for any change in the bushes and the grass. Now she calculated, space, shadow, distance. Could she remain here, unobserved at the Composer’s back, watching him at work, beneath the savage lights? The music bit into her consciousness, strange, monumental, solid as the painted brick pillars, a dense intricate texture of embroidered sound. She listened carefully, finding herself unable to follow any single section of the orchestra, aware only of the layered change when the brass entered the dance, steady and mannered as a pavane. The Judge disliked music for the simple reason that it muddied her emotions. And she never went to concerts. The occasion was therefore unusual, provocative as well as interesting, for here was her subject, unwitting, unguarded, performing on this Gothic stage before her. The music shuddered and broke off. A shocking silence followed in which an unfortunate trombonist attempted to slink in unnoticed and was called to account. The exchange took place in English. The Judge heard every bellowed word, magnified by the booming acoustic.
    ‘I’m sorry sir, I just –’
    ‘Take your place. I do not accept excuses as you well know. Speak to me afterwards. SILENCE! Again, from the entrance of the oboes.’
    The choir sat taut, upright, like naughty children whose knuckles smarted from the cane. The Judge concentrated on the Composer’s hunched back and shoulders. She watched his anger dissolving as the music returned. She could learn a lot about someone from studying how he worked. How did he treat his colleagues? What mattered most to him? Suddenly, he stopped them all again.
    ‘No, no, no. Dah, dah, dah, dah. Don’t change the pace. More volume, more breath, but keep the pace steady, steady.’
    Pause.
    ‘Again.’
    He raised his baton. She watched them rise like a wave into the eerie toll of the music and descend, rise, sway, fall, again and again. Outside, the last red light glowed and died in the clear glass windows. Darkness.
    ‘Better, better. Alison, you are a fraction late coming in.’ He bent down to the second violin. ‘I need to hear you just a moment before I do.’ Suddenly he threatened her. ‘If you can’t get it right I’ll hand the part back to Johann.’
    The first violin, who sat waiting, patient, mute, looked up, outraged.
    ‘Now from the beginning again right through to the episode with the brass. Tu n’as pas la partition? Pourquoi? Pourquoi? Réponds-moi!’
    The Judge was sitting behind the rood screen, or the Lettner, so that she was looking at the underbelly of the cathedral, the blank boards, crossbars and supports which held the great wooden crucifix in place, as if she were viewing Golgotha from the wings and observing the technical expertise necessary for the performance. She was also behind the clock. The clock was a surreal, gigantic Gothic folly, carved in wood with a long gallery and intermittent turrets, topped by white saints, a great streaming sun upon its face, the eyes of which actually rotated in time to the ticking seconds. The thing proclaimed: Unsere Zeit in Gottes Händen – Our time in God’s hands, puffed up behind its smug, fat cheeks, and glowered down upon the orchestra. Above the complacent sun stood Death, his skeleton face streaked, as if painted with cat’s whiskers, clutching the raised hammer above his bell to count out the appointed hour. And next to him stood Judgement, her sword in one hand and her own hammer raised in the other, ready to sound the quarter-hours. When the hour arrived, with an echoing groan, clatter and whirr from the creature’s innards, Death turned his double hour glass upside down and banged out the time upon his bell, jerking his head from side to side, again and again and again. Another hour gone, another hour closer to Judgement