A Viennese Prelude

Thomas Bernhard's novel Alte Meister records the protracted rantings of a music critic with the palindromically resonant name of Reger – no Christian name is listed. Set more or less at the time of writing (1985) there are no indications of significant associations with the character or work of the notoriously sharp-tongued composer Max Reger (1873–1916), though the musically educated Bernhard (1931–89) was well aware of him, as a reference in his earlier novel Beton (Concrete) confirms.

Alte Meister is subtitled ‘a comedy’, but its humour is nothing if not savage. Eighty-two years of age, Reger might be showing signs of senile decay, exacerbated by the death of his wife. He spends long periods on a bench in Vienna's Kunsthistorischesmuseum. Yet what initially seems to be a good oldfashioned belief in the consolatory powers of great art and a generally upbeat attitude to life – ‘I handle my musical concerns so well because simultaneously I am concerned with painting’ – soon veers into a obsessional elaboration of the conviction that ‘the human mind is a human mind only when it searches for the mistakes of humanity’. According to Reger, ‘the whole and the perfect are intolerable’, so that ‘only when we are fortunate enough to turn something whole, something complete or indeed perfect into a fragment … only then do we experience a high degree, at times indeed a supreme degree of pleasure in it’. For this reason, ‘we have to listen to Bach and hear how he fails, listen to Beethoven and hear how he fails, even listen to Mozart and hear how he fails’.

Perhaps the comedy comes from saying the unthinkable, from assuming that the most deluded fantasies will be taken as literal truth. Reger's is a world where ‘art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously’, where ‘in the end everything eventually becomes a prey to ridicule or at least to triviality, no matter how great and important it may be’. As a consequence, ‘anything we study thoroughly loses value for us’; although, like Reger, we might sometimes try to convince ourselves that ‘music saves me time and again’, the unsparing conclusion is that ‘music destroys a lot more than waste and chemicals do, it is music that eventually will destroy absolutely everything totally’.