THE MISERERE
SOME months since, while visiting the celebrated abbey of Fitero and entertaining myself by turning over a few volumes in its neglected library, I discovered, stowed away in a dark corner, two or three old books of manuscript music, covered with dust and gnawed at the edges by rats.
It was a Miserere.
I do not read music, but it attracts me so that, even though I do not understand it, I sometimes take up the score of an opera and pore over its pages for hours, looking at the groups of notes more or less crowded together, the dashes, the semi-circles, the triangles and that sort of et cetera called keys, and all this without comprehending an iota or deriving the slightest profit.
After this foolish habit of mine, I turned over the leaves of the music-books, and the first thing which attracted my attention was the fact that, although on the last page stood that Latin word so common in all compositions, finis, the Miserere was not concluded, for the music did not go beyond the tenth verse of the psalm.
This it was, undoubtedly, that arrested my attention first; but as soon as I scanned the pages closely, I was still more surprised to observe that instead of the Italian words commonly used, such as maestoso, allegro, ritardando, piu vivo, à piacere, there were lines of very small German script written in, some of which called for things as difficult to do as this: “They crack – crack the bones, and from their marrow must the cries seem to come forth;” or this other: “The chord shrieketh, yet in unison; the tone thundereth, yet without deafening; for all that hath sound soundeth, and there is no confusion, and all is humanity that sobbeth and groaneth;” or what was certainly the most original of all, enjoined just under the last verse: “The notes are bones covered with flesh; light inextinguishable, the heavens and their harmony – force! – force and sweetness.”
“Do you know what this is?” I asked of the old friar who accompanied me, after I had half translated these lines, which seemed like phrases scribbled by a lunatic.
My aged guide then told me the legend which I now pass on to you.
I
Many years ago, on a dark and rainy night, a pilgrim arrived at the cloister door of this abbey and begged for a little fire to dry his clothes, a morsel of bread to appease his hunger, and a shelter, however humble, till the morning, when he would resume his journey at dawn.
The lay-brother of whom this request was made placed his own meagre repast, his own poor bed and his glowing hearth at the service of the traveller, to whom, after he had recovered from his exhaustion, were put the usual questions as to the purpose of his pilgrimage and the goal to which his steps were bent.
“I am a musician,” replied the stranger. “I was born far from here, and in my own country I enjoyed a day of great renown. In my youth I made of my art a powerful weapon of seduction and I enkindled with it passions which drew me on to crime. In my old age I would use for good the talents which I have employed for evil, redeeming my soul by the very means that have brought it into danger of the judgment.”
As the enigmatic words of the unknown guest did not seem at all clear to the lay-brother, whose curiosity was now becoming aroused, he was moved to press his questions further, obtaining the following response:
“I was ever weeping in the depths of my soul for the sin that I had committed; but when I tried to pray to God for mercy, I could find no adequate words to utter my repentance, until one day my eyes chanced to fall upon a holy book. I opened that book and on one of its pages I met with a giant cry of true contrition, a psalm of David, commencing: Miserere mei, Domine! From the instant in which I read those verses my one thought has been to find a musical expression so magnificent, so sublime, that it would suffice as a setting for the Royal Psalmist’s mighty hymn of anguish. As yet I have not found it; but if I ever attain to the point of expressing what I feel in my heart, what I hear confusedly in my brain, I am sure of writing a Miserere so marvellous in beauty that the sons of men will have heard no other like unto it, so desperate in grief that, as its first strains rise to heaven, the archangels, their eyes flooded with tears, will with me cry out unto the Lord, beseeching Mercy; and the Lord will be merciful to his unhappy creature.”
The pilgrim, on reaching this point in his narrative, paused for an instant, and then, heaving a sigh, took up again the thread of his story. The lay-brother, a few dependents of the abbey, and two or three shepherds from the friars’ farm – these who formed the circle about the hearth – listened to him in the deepest silence.
“After travelling over all Germany,” he continued, “all Italy and the greater part of this country whose sacred music is classic, I have not yet heard a Miserere that can give me my inspiration, not one, – not one, and I have heard so many that I may say I have heard them all.”
“All?” broke in one of the upper shepherds. “But you have not heard, have you, the Miserere of the Mountain?”
“The Miserere of the Mountain!” exclaimed the musician with an air of amazement. “What Miserere is that?”
“Didn’t I say so?” muttered the peasant under his breath, and then went on in a mysterious tone: “This Miserere, which is only heard, as chance may fall, by those who, like myself, wander day and night following the sheep through the thickets and over the rocky hills, is, in fact, a tradition, a very old tradition; yet incredible as it seems, it is no less true.
“The case is that, in the most rugged part of yonder mountain chains which bound the horizon of this valley in whose bosom the abbey stands, there used to be, many years ago – why do I say many years! – many centuries, rather, a famous monastery. This monastery, it seems, was built at his own cost by a lord with the wealth that he would naturally have left to his son, whom on his death-bed he disinherited, as a punishment for the young profligate’s evil deeds.
“So far, all had gone well; but the trouble is that this son, who, from what will be seen further on, must have been the skin of the Devil, if not the Devil himself, learning that his goods were in the possession of the monks, and that his castle had been transformed into a church, gathered together a crew of banditti, comrades of his in the ruffian life he had taken up on forsaking his father’s house, and one Holy Thursday night, when the monks would be in the choir, and at the very hour and minute when they would be just beginning or would have just begun the Miserere, these outlaws set fire to the monastery, sacked the church, and willy-nilly, left not a single monk alive.
“After this atrocity, the banditti and their leader went away, whither no one knows, perhaps to hell.
“The flames reduced the monastery to ashes; of the church there still remain standing the ruins upon the hollow crag whence springs the cascade that after leaping down from rock to rock, forms the rill which comes to bathe the walls of this abbey.”
“But,” – interrupted the musician impatiently, “the Miserere?”
“Wait a while,” said the shepherd with great deliberation, “and all will be told in proper order.” Vouchsafing no further reply, he continued his story:
“The people of all the country round about were shocked at the crime; it was related with horror in the long winter evenings, handed down from father to son, and from son to grandson; but what tends most of all to keep it fresh in memory is that every year, on the anniversary of that night when the church was burned, lights are seen shining out through its shattered windows, and there is heard a sort of strange music, with mournful, terrible chants that are borne at intervals upon the gusts of wind.
“The singers are the monks, who, slain perchance before they were ready to present themselves pure of all sin at the Judgment Seat of God, still come from Purgatory to implore His mercy, chanting the Miserere.”
The group about the fire exchanged glances of incredulity; but the pilgrim, who had seemed to be vitally interested in the recital of the tradition, inquired eagerly of the narrator:
“And do you say that this marvel still takes place?”
“It will begin without fail in less than three hours, for the precise reason that this is Holy Thursday night, and the abbey clock has just struck eight.”
“How far is the monastery from here?”
“Barely a league and a half, – but what are you doing?” “Whither would you go on a night like this?” “Have you fallen from the shelter of God’s hand?” exclaimed one and another as they saw the pilgrim, rising from his bench and taking his staff, leave the fireplace and move toward the door.
“Whither am I going? To hear this miraculous music, to hear the great, the true Miserere, the Miserere of those who return to the world after death, those who know what it is to die in sin.”
And so saying, he disappeared from the sight of the amazed lay-brother and the no less astonished shepherds.
The wind shrilled without and shook the doors as if a powerful hand were striving to tear them from their hinges; the rain fell in torrents, beating against the window-panes, and from time to time a lightning-flash lit up for an instant all the horizon that could be seen from there.
After the first moment of bewilderment had passed the lay-brother exclaimed:
“He is mad.”
“He is mad,” repeated the shepherds and, replenishing the fire, they gathered closely around the hearth.
II
After walking for an hour or two, the mysterious personage, to whom they had given the degree of madman in the abbey, by following upstream the course of the rill which the story-telling shepherd had pointed out to him, reached the spot where rose the blackened, impressive ruins of the monastery.
The rain had ceased; the clouds were drifting in long, dark masses, from between whose shifting shapes there glided from time to time a furtive ray of doubtful, pallid light; and one would say that the wind, as it lashed the strong buttresses and swept with widening wings through the deserted cloisters, was groaning in its flight. Yet nothing supernatural, nothing extraordinary occurred to strike the imagination. To him who had slept more nights than one without other shelter than the ruins of an abandoned tower or a lonely castle, – to him who in his far pilgrimage had encountered hundreds on hundreds of storms, all those noises were familiar.
The drops of water which filtered through the cracks of the broken arches and fell upon the stones below with a measured sound like the ticking of a great clock; the hoots of the owl, screeching from his refuge beneath the stone nimbus of an image still standing in a niche of the wall; the stir of the reptiles that, wakened from their lethargy by the tempest, thrust out their misshapen heads from the holes where they sleep, or crawled among the wild mustard and the briers that grow at the foot of the altar, rooted in the crevices between the sepulchral slabs that form the pavement of the church, – all those strange and mysterious murmurs of the open country, of solitude and of night, came perceptibly to the ear of the pilgrim who, seated on the mutilated statue of a tomb, was anxiously awaiting the hour when the marvellous event should take place.
But still the time went by and nothing more was heard; those myriad confused noises kept on sounding and combining with one another in a thousand different ways, but themselves always the same.
“Ah, they have played a joke on me!” thought the musician; but at that moment he heard a new sound, a sound inexplicable in such a place, like that made by a clock a few seconds before striking the hour, a sound of whirring wheels, of stretching cords, of machinery secretly setting to work and making ready to use its mysterious mechanic vitality, and a bell rang out the hour – one, two, three, up to eleven.
In the ruined church there was no bell nor clock, not even a bell-tower.
The last peal, lessening from echo to echo, had not yet died away; the vibration was still perceptible, trembling in the air, when the granite canopies which overhung the sculptures, the marble steps of the altars, the hewn stones of the ogee arches, the fretted screens of the choir, the festoons of trefoil on the cornices, the black buttresses of the walls, the pavements, the vaulted ceiling, the entire church, began to be lighted by no visible agency, nor was there in sight torch or lamp or candle to shed abroad that unwonted radiance.
It suggested a skeleton over whose yellow bones spreads that phosphoric gas which burns and puts forth fumes in the darkness like a blue light, restless and terrible.
Everything seemed to be in motion, but with that galvanic movement which lends to death contractions that parody life, instantaneous movement more horrible even than the inertia of the corpse which stirs with that unknown force. Stones reunited themselves to stones; the altar, whose broken fragments had before been scattered about in disorder, rose intact, as if the artificer had just given it the last blow of the chisel, and simultaneously with the altar rose the ruined chapels, the shattered capitals and the great, crumbled series of arches which, crossing and interlacing at caprice, formed with their columns a labyrinth of porphyry.
As soon as the church was rebuilt there grew upon the hearing a distant harmony which might have been taken for the wailing of the wind, but which was a chorus of far-off, solemn voices, that seemed to come from the depths of the earth and rise to the surface little by little, continually growing more distinct.
The daring pilgrim began to fear, but with his fear still battled his passion for the bygone and the marvellous, and made valiant by the strength of his desire, he left the tomb on which he was resting, leaned over the brink of the abyss, amid whose rocks leapt the torrent, rushing over the precipice with an incessant and terrifying thunder, and his hair rose with horror.
Ill wrapped in the tatters of their habits, their cowls, beneath whose folds the dark eye-cavities of the skulls contrasted with the fleshless jaws and the white teeth, drawn forward over their heads, he saw the skeletons of the monks who had been thrown from the battlements of the church down that headlong steep, emerging from the depth of the waters and, clutching with the long fingers of their bony hands at the fissures in the rocks, clamber over them up to the brink, chanting in low, sepulchral voice, but with a heartrending intonation of anguish, the first verse of David’s Psalm:
Miserere mei, Domine, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam!
When the monks reached the peristyle of the church they arranged themselves in two rows and, entering, went in procession to the choir where they knelt in their places, while with voices louder and yet more solemn they continued to intone the verses of the psalm. The music sounded in accompaniment to their voices; that music was the distant roll of the thunder which sank into murmurs as the tempest subsided; it was the blowing of the wind which groaned in the hollow of the mountain; it was the monotonous splash of the cascade falling down the crag; and the drip of the filtered waterdrops, and the hoot of the hidden owl, and the gliding sound of the uneasy reptiles. All this was in the music, and something more that cannot be expressed nor scarcely conceived, – something more that seemed like the echo of an organ accompanying the verses of the Royal Psalmist’s giant hymn of contrition, with notes and chords as tremendous as the awful words.
The service proceeded; the musician who witnessed it, absorbed and terrified as he was, believed himself to be outside the actual world, living in that fantastic region of dreams where all things reclothe themselves in phenomenal and alien forms.
A terrible shock came to rouse him from that stupor which was clogging all the faculties of his mind. His nerves sprang to the thrill of a mighty emotion, his teeth chattered, shaking with a tremor he could in no wise repress, and the chill penetrated to the marrow of his bones.
At that instant the monks were intoning those dread words of the Miserere:
In iniquitatibus conceptus sum; et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.
As the thunder of this verse went rolling in sonorous echo from vault to vault, there arose a terrible outcry which seemed a wail of agony breaking from all humanity for its sense of sin, a horrible wail made up of all the laments of the unfortunate, all the shrieks of despair, all the blasphemies of the impious, a monstrous consonance, fit interpreter of those who live in sin and were conceived in iniquity.
The chant went on, now sad and deep, now like a sunbeam which breaks through the dark storm cloud, succeeding the lightning-flash of terror by another flash of joy, until by grace of a sudden transformation the church stood resplendent, bathed in celestial light; the skeletons of the monks were again clothed in their flesh, about their brows shone lustrous aureoles, the roof vanished and above was seen heaven like a sea of light open to the gaze of the righteous.
Seraphim, archangels, angels and all the heavenly hierarchy accompanied with a hymn of glory this verse, which then rose sublime to the throne of the Lord like the rhythmical notes of a trumpet, like a colossal spiral of sonorous incense:
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam, et exultabunt ossa humiliata.
At this point the dazzling brightness blinded the pilgrim’s eyes, his temples throbbed violently, there was a roaring in his ears, he fell senseless to the ground and heard no more.
III
On the following day, the peaceful monks of the Abbey of Fitero, to whom the lay-brother had given an account of the strange visit of the night before, saw the unknown pilgrim, pallid and like a man beside himself, entering their doors.
“Did you hear the Miserere at last?” the lay-brother asked him with a certain tinge of irony, slyly casting a glance of intelligence at his superiors.
“Yes,” replied the musician.
“And how did you like it?”
“I am going to write it. Give me a refuge in your house,” he continued, addressing the abbot, “a refuge and bread for a few months, and I will leave you an immortal work of art, a Miserere which shall blot out my sins from the sight of God, eternize my memory, and with it the memory of this abbey.”
The monks, out of curiosity, counselled the abbot to grant his request; the abbot, for charity, though he believed the man a lunatic, finally consented; and the musician, thus installed in the monastery, began his work.
Night and day he labored with unremitting zeal. In the midst of his task he would pause and appear to be listening to something which sounded in his imagination; his pupils would dilate and he would spring from his seat exclaiming: “That is it; so; so; no doubt about it – so!” And he would go on writing notes with a feverish haste which more than once made those who kept him under secret observation wonder.
He wrote the first verses, and those following to about the middle of the Psalm; but when he had written the last verse that he had heard upon the mountain, it was impossible for him to proceed.
He made one, two, one hundred, two hundred rough drafts; all in vain. His music was not like the music already written. Sleep fled from his eyelids, he lost his appetite, fever seized upon his brain, he went mad, and died, at last, without being able to finish the Miserere, which, as a curiosity, the monks treasured till his death, and even yet preserve in the archives of the abbey.
When the old man had made an end of telling me this story, I could not refrain from turning my eyes again to the dusty, ancient manuscript of the Miserere, which still lay upon one of the tables.
In peccatis concepit me mater mea.
These were the words on the page before me, seeming to mock me with their notes, their keys and their scrawls unintelligible to lay-brothers in music.
I would have given a world to be able to read them.
Who knows if they may not be mere nonsense?