Free Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

might thus express itself; for he maintained an almost shoulder-shrugging indifference to all these splendours, replying to my admiring exclamations with his short laugh and a “Yes, very nice” or “Funny stuff” or “What all don’t people think of!” or “More fun to sell this than groceries.” Sometimes—I repeat that it was at my wish, not his—we would descend from his attic, which gave a pleasant view over the roofs of the town, the castle pond, the old water-tower, and invade the show-rooms. They were not forbidden to us; but young Cimabue came too, partly, I suspect, to keep guard, but also to play cicerone in his pleasant way. From him we learned the history of the trumpet: how once it had to be put together out of several metal tubes with a ball connection, before we learned the art of bending brass tubes without splitting them, by first filling them with pitch and resin, then with lead, which was melted again in the fire. And then he could explain the assertion of the cognoscenti that it made no difference what material, whether wood or metal, an instrument was made of, it sounded according to its family shape and proportions. A flute might be made of wood or ivory, a trumpet of brass or silver, it made no difference. But his master, he said, Adrian’s zio , disputed that. He knew the importance of the material, the sort of wood and varnish used, and engaged to be able to tell by listening to a flute what it was made of. He, Luca, would do the same. Then with his small, shapely Italian hands he would show us the mechanism of the flute, which in the last one hundred and fifty years, since the famous virtuoso Quantz, saw such great changes and developments: the mechanism of Boehm’s cylindrical flute, more powerful than the old conical, which sounds sweeter. He showed us the system of fingering on the clarinet and the seven-holed bassoon with its twelve closed and four open keys, whose sound blends so readily with that of the horns; instructed us about the compass of the instruments, the way to play them and more such matters.
    There can now be no doubt that Adrian, whether he was aware of it or not, followed these demonstrations with at least as much attention as I—and with more profit than it was given me to draw from them. But he betrayed nothing, not a gesture indicated that all this concerned or ever would concern him. He let me ask Luca the questions, yes, he moved away, looked at something else than the thing under discussion, and left me alone with the assistant. I will not say that he was shamming, and I do not forget that at that time music had hardly any reality to us other than that of the purely material objects in Nikolaus Leverkühn’s storerooms. We were indeed brought into cursory contact with chamber music, for every week or so there was a performance in Adrian’s uncle’s house, but only occasionally in my presence and by no means always in his. The players were our Cathedral organist, Herr Wendell Kretschmar, a stutterer, who was later to become Adrian’s teacher, and the singing-master from the Boniface gymnasium; Adrian’s uncle played with them, quartets by Haydn and Mozart, he himself playing first violin, Luca Cimabue second, Herr Kretschmar cello, and the singing-master the viola. These were masculine evenings, with the beer-glass on the floor beside the chair, a cigar in the mouth, and frequent bursts of talk, strange, dry interruptions in the middle of the language of music; tapping of the bow and counting back of the bars when the players got out, which was almost always the fault of the singing-master. A real concert, a symphony orchestra, we had never heard, and whoever likes may find therein an explanation of Adrian’s obvious indifference to the world of instruments. At any rate he seemed to think it must be sufficient, and so considered it himself. What I mean is he hid himself behind it, hid himself from music: very long, with instinctive persistence, he hid