Music in literature

A bit of an obscure one, but Gunter Grass' novel The Meeting at Telgte revolves around a (fictional) meeting of German poets and intellectuals towards the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1647. There is an amusing passage where a major composer comes in whose very presence is towering, authoritarian and masculine and who treats the poets as if mere children. 

As it is 20 plus years since I read it I am not totally sure which composer it is - it might be Schutz as his dates would fit. Can anyone help me out?

Overall the novel, though of interest, was a bit of a dry read...

Mark,

Yes, Schutz (1585-1672) certainly appears in the list of Dramatis Personae at the end of the English Edition of 'The Meeting at Telgte', and there does not appear to be any other major composer on the list It was published in England in 1981 and I recall that I read it immediately, and have not looked at it since, and I'm afraid I do not specifically remember the passage you are referring to. Perhaps I need to reread it!

However, although Grass's 1647 meeting is entirely fictional, but set at the end of the Thrty Years War, Grass based it on a real meeting of German poets in 1947 who were also trying to see how Germany could be 'rehabilitated' after a devasting war, and Grass used his (genuine) historical poets, but doing fictional things, to 'reflect' the actual poets who attended in 1947.

I understood that (for those in the know) the fun of the novel, when it came out in Germany in 1979, was in working out which 1947 actual attendees were represented by which 1647 historical figures. Was the 1947 meeting attended by a living major composer?

Alan

All this is getting very up my street and down my alley.  There's apparently been some speculation that a model for Schütz in Grass's novel could be Henze, who in his autobiography Bohemian Fifths talks about being taken to a Gruppe 47 meeting by the author Wolfgang Hildesheimer (it's where he meets Ingeborg Bachmann). This has been disputed on the grounds that at the time Henze, about 21, would have lacked the stature given (inevitably) to Schütz in the book. A book by Bettina Varwig called Histories of Heinrich Schütz, which came out last year, raises more disquieting possibilities, though they don't turn on a specific Gruppe 47 identification for Grass's Schütz.

I've wondered: could it be that when Grass's Schütz appears we're meant to think of Karl Amadeus Hartmann?  I don't believe he ever attended a meeting of Gruppe 47, but his seniority and significance for postwar German composers were immense, and his withdrawn, "austere" demeanour in the book might point to Hartmann's stance of "inner emigration." Further, isn't Grass's Schütz looking to write an opera? - Hartmann of course did write a Thirty Years' War opera, Simplicius Simplicissimus, based on a work by Grimmelshausen, the novel's Gelnhausen (and, up to a point, Grass). I'm not suggesting a watertight connection here - fiction is never that simple - but I am honestly unaware if anyone has ever proposed this, and it seems at least plausible.  If anyone does find it somewhere, could they please announce?

I have, by the way, seen reviews of an opera based on Grass's novel by Eckehard Mayer, first performed at Dortmund in 2005.  Schütz's role is evidently a spoken one!  I'd like to hear the piece.

Good stuff DST, Petra and Arbutus. That's what I like about this forum, that there are others who explore the same - what to call them - interesting byways.

DST you may be right in thinking it's either Henze or Hartman - it would as you say have to be someone respected in 1947. What kind of genre is this novel? Post-modern retrospective faction?! Interesting to use real figures in the 17th Century to suggest equally real figures in the 20th!

Arbutus - yes the Coe bioghraphy is amazing. Shame about BS' early suicide. Another experimental British novelist who also committed suicide strangely round about the same time - early seventies - was Ann Quinn - can't find her books anywhere - but one of her novels Berg was made into the black comedy film Killing Dad with Denholm Elliott.

Mark

DST your comments are fascinating. I definitely need to re-read it and do a bit of detective work!

Small world Arbutus! I have a slim paperback of Poems Two by BSJ published by Trigram Press. (The only poetry I have by him). Inside it says 'published in three editions, paperback, cloth and a signature edition of 100 copies specially bound and numbered and signed by the author'. You are very lucky then! Hold on to it.

Thanks so much for the link on Ann Quinn from Dalkey. It means I can get them at last. I passed up on the Calders when they were around and have regretted it since. Nice to talk to someone who also likes experimental fiction by British writers! (And French of course).

(Just coming back on topic - The Kreutzer Sonata story listed by Parla above is of course the one used as the inspiration and title of Janacek's 2nd String Quartet).

Another author in point is Charles Bukowski, variously described as a 'low-life literary laureate' or 'low-life literary bum'. He frequently made reference to the greats in his stories. The snippet below is typical - it's right from the start of a story called 'Doing Time with Public Enemy No. 1' from the volume 'Tales of Ordinary Madness':

I was listening to Brahms in Philadelphia, in 1942. I had a small record player. it was Brahms' 2nd movement. I was living alone at the time. I was slowly drinking a bottle of port and smoking a cheap cigar. it was a small clean room. as they say, - there was a knock on the door. I thought it was somebody come to give me the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer. 2 big dumb peasant-looking men.

Bukowski?
yeah.
they showed me a badge: F.B.I.
come with us, better put on a coat, you'll be gone awhile.

Yes the erratic punctuation is faithfully reproduced. Maddeningly on this occasion he didn't say which Brahms' 2nd Movement, but there are other references in his stories to Beethoven, Haydn etc...His love of classical music and references to it are nicely incongruous as his stories often deal with low-life types, hard-drinking and womanising, cons etc....worth a read!

Mark

Thanks mjwal. I have e-mailed Prof. Chapman so hope he gets back to me. That one in particular sounds right up my road! I couldn't see it on Amazon books...

Mark