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 journal The National Amateur. It is one of the most popular stories of Lovecraft, has been widely reprinted and translated into several languages, including into German and French. Up to the present it has inspired writers, illustrators, filmmakers, musicians and not least to their own creations.

Narrative situation, temporal and spatial framework

As in a number of other texts Lovecraft there is a nameless narrator, the "Music of Erich Zann " reported by the, and indeed more pronounced temporal distance, which is discussed at the outset. The distance between the narrating and the experiencing self is manifested in the fact that the narrator the place of action can no longer find, although he employs old city maps. The short story takes place in an unnamed French university city which has trains from Paris. Lovecraft knew at that time neither Paris nor France from his own experience, none of his other stories have there their venue.

The events play out, as the narrator indicates, " during the last months of his impoverished life as a student of metaphysics " from. There follows a detailed description of the place: first the neighborhood, then the Rue d' Auseil, including the house in which the narrator was living. The Lovecraft - typical ingredients of horror appear piece by piece: darkness, old age, stench and decay. Then there is the motif of the steep, passing into stairs street that Lovecraft has also repeatedly used: After a steep rise above flights of stairs, between bent forward, almost touching ancient, decaying houses includes a huge wall the road that is dominated only by the House that inhabits the narrator.

Action

There, the narrator hears at night the eponymous music that comes from above, from the attic room on the top floor. As he tells the paralyzed caretaker Blandot, it comes from a " viol player" (Probably a cellist ), the silent German Erich Zann, the evening in a "cheap theater orchestra" is busy and at night plays for himself. Fascinated by the strange harmonies, he fits the old man from the stairwell. On a visit to Zann's room but it not playing the eerie nocturnal melodies, and as the narrator tries to whistle and even expressed the desire to take a look through the window imposed over the wall of the city, Zann interrupts the visit abruptly from.

But the fascination of the narrator does not shrink. One night he hears again the staircase the raging tool and then an inarticulate cry. Zann lets him in and tells him he will lay for him a full report of his obsession in German language. Suddenly heard from outside also, " deliberate and intentional " ( deliberate and purposeful ) sound, and immediately the eerie cello Zann begins anew. It rises a storm that destroys the window and blowing the leaves described - and outside the narrator does not see the lights of the city, but chaotic, light and informal, sound -filled infinite space. In a panic, he flees, reached the inhabited city and finds the place of horror and fascination never again.

Analysis

The story follows a plot curve, which is very characteristic of Lovecraft's stories: Successive clues are constructed, which can be increasingly unlikely a natural solution to the puzzle. Nevertheless, the narrator holds firmly to this fiction until the overwhelming supernatural reality penetrated at the peak of the action (here with the view from the window ). In this narrative, the pattern is realized schlackenlos; because otherwise absent in Lovecraft as frequent references to the mythical world created by him and also by pre- interpretations and formulaic attributes economical use is made, the sudden change is particularly surprising. This Schlackenlosigkeit is also cited as a reason that the narrative is so popular, including Lovecraft's your own corresponds to the linguistic form that consistently holds up to the climax of the plot on objectifying narrator report, albeit increasingly being enriched with emotional array expressions. Only at the moment of escape, the narrator is a set long on its distance and joins asyndetically, almost breathless, verbs of motion to each other - at the same warp back to the wistful coda:

The " calculated uncertainty ", with Lovecraft endows the intrusion of the supernatural, extends also to the themed art form, the music. In contrast to the five years later written counterpart Pickman 's Model, where in the way of painting the doom -making threshold is exceeded, the description of the music played by Zann remains abstract. There are no indications of Representatives, shapes and workmanship; only by a Hungarian dance and a fugue-like piece is mentioned, everything else stays in vagueness. The narrator is, as Lovecraft himself, " unversed in music" and thus fails to capture the structure of the music, it is referred to only with enhancing vocabulary of being overwhelmed. This leaves the imagination free space. Donald Burleson has proposed to read the mention of a joint as a reference to the text structure that follow the guidelines of a fugue itself.

Reception

The "Music of Erich Zann " is one of the most popular short stories Lovecraft. During his lifetime, it was reprinted several times, Dashiell Hammett in Horror Story Collection " Creeps by Night" in 1931 and on a full newspaper page in the London Evening Standard (24 October 1932).

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

A comic version of the story appeared in 1994 in the band Lovecraft by Reinhard Kleist. Klaus Hagemeister created illustrations for the work; the short story was published with these illustrations as " graphics novella" in a limited edition of 250 copies. There is also a cinematic realization of John Strysik, an eight-minute stop-motion film adaptation of Anna Gavrilov and not a few metal and ambient bands that try to implement the music of Erich Zann in sounds, for example, Bal - Sagoth, Mekong Delta ( concept album the Music of Erich Zann, 1988) and the classical composer Alexey Voytenko and Stephen Tosh. In 2003, a German -language audio book with the short story and its companion piece, Pickman's Model; Spokesman it is the Tocotronic member Dirk von Lowtzow.

A sequel, entitled " The Silence of Erika Zann " James Wade wrote.

At the festival, Inhuman music, literary scholar and musician Ebba Durstewitz on February 23, 2013 gave a lecture on musical adaptations of Erich Zann - substance - in Berlin's House of World Cultures.

Expenditure and realizations

Initial publication

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

German -speaking first publication

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

More

• The music of Erich Zann. Illustrated by Klaus Hagemeister. Edition Phantasia, Bell Home, 2001. ISBN 3-924959-59-5
• The music of Erich Zann. Stop-motion film by Anna Gavrilov. Bauhaus University Weimar 2005. Http://www.trickfilmnoir.de/
• Pickman's Model - The Music of Erich Zann. Read by Dirk von Lowtzow. Audio book, Universal Music, Berlin, 2003. ISBN 3-8291-1346-3
• The Music of Erich Zann. Film version, directed by John Strysik. 1980th 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: Hunter of Darkness Audio Book Read by David Nathan, Lubbe Audio; February 2007 ISBN 978-3-7857-3296-0