Orfeo Read Online Free PDF

threatening bottomless contempt if he surrenders and promising prizes if he stays true. Everything alive wants his loyalty.
    Treading water, Peter eyes his father. He wants to tell the man: It’s nothing. A summer game. Patterns on the air—over before you know it. Queasiness engulfs him. How easy it would be, to kick out into the center of the lake until he can’t kick anymore. But Peter can only bob, weightless, between this rebel raft and the imperial shore. The music in his head, that Shaker tune of his green practicing, scatters into noise. He will dog-paddle in place, a lone child, waving his stick arms and kicking his feeble legs until strength fails him and he goes down.
    The day fragments into frozen shards. His father, beet-red, staggers, sheds the cigarette and beer. He plunges into the lake. But he doesn’t swim. There’s rushing, shouting, confusion. Uncles in the water, dragging the thrashing bulk back onto land. His crushed father, clutching his chest, propped against a cabin, ashen and sneering at the wisdom of crowds. That crowd, on the beach, like statues, heads bowed. Too late, Peter swims in, as hard as he can. But he hangs back from the pallid man, terrified, and soon they have his father in a car and heading to a doctor.
    Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the differencefalls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.
    The fatal heart attack followed an hour later, in a rural clinic where the lone GP with his shelves full of gauze bandages, tongue depressors, and rubbing alcohol was helpless to do anything but put Karl Els in an ambulance for Potsdam. He died in transit, miles from anywhere, still blowing his lifeguard’s whistle, leaving behind a son convinced he’d helped to kill him.
    In middle age, Peter Els would spend years writing an opera, the story of an ecstatic rebellion gone wrong. For years, the piece seemed to him like a prophecy of End Time. Not until the age of seventy, an old man burying his dog, did he recognize it, at last, as childhood memory.
Crumb: “Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.” My spirit’s impulse just happened to be criminal.
     
     
    Els brushes off the dirt, goes inside, and looks for something to play for his dog’s funeral. He lands on Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder : five songs lasting twenty-five minutes. Fidelio used to go nuts with the cycle, back in her puppyhood. At the very first measures of the first song she’d start crooning, the way she did when Els took her to the park on a fall night under the full moon.
    The choice feels a little maudlin. It’s not as though a human has died. Not Sara, the three a.m. call he can’t even imagine well enough to dread. Not Paul or Maddy or a former student. Not Richard. Only a pet, who had no clue what was happening. Only an old dog, who gave him unconditional joy and loyalty for no good reason.
    He and Fidelio often attended imaginary musical funerals—preemptive memorials of pure sound. Nothing was more invigorating than dark music, the pleasure of a practice run, the chance to make imagination the equal of death. But tonight is no rehearsal. He has lost the one listening partner who could return to the same old pieces and hear them afresh each night, for the first time. A little lamp has gone out in my tent. Hail to the joyous light of the world .
    The recording sits on his shelf, a prophecy from a hundred years ago. These five songs first taught Els how music might work. In the half century since, he has gone back to them through every sonic revolution. No music would ever again be as mysterious as this music was, the day he discovered it. But tonight he can listen one more time, take in their wild noise the way an animal might.
    He fumbles the disc out of its jewel box while