Personae Read Online Free PDF Page B

them had trouble sleeping so had his Goldberg, fourteen but supremely gifted, play harpsichord (no pianos yet) for him in the antechamber in those instances, which playing must have set into stark relief the relative dearth of cosmos-rattling pieces existent at the time so that this Count Kaiserling sought out Bach to request a creation.
    Bach’s response was the following. A timeless aria followed by thirty variations thereof then a heartwounding repetition of the aria as if the whole of life hadn’t just changed in the interim. The aria’s melody is simple if highly ornamented but that’s like saying something like water is simple and so falls well short of the full story. Anyway the variations do not spring from this melody but rather from its harmonic progression and they span the entirety of what can best be termed merely human experience.
    Most importantly it would take more than two centuries for the full significance of the above events to emerge. In those centuries Bach would die leaving his masterful The Art of the Fugue incomplete while other men would don uniforms that they might better enslave or liberate others with great improvement in the tools they used to do same and while there’s been a seeming decrease in man’s ability to invent music like the variations the closer we get to today there’s also been an indisputable sea-change in our ability to preserve that music or more accurately performances of that music.
    And somewhere in those centuries, on September 25, 1932 in fact—in a house in Toronto, Canada—to another family armed with Music, Glenn Herbert Gould was born.

 VI
     Player s A t Pla y O n Th e Stag e Tha t I s Th e World
    PERSONAE
    LIST OF DRAMATIC PEOPLE
     
    Clarissa: a person
    Nestor: another person
    Charles: yet another person
    Ludwig: a fourth person
    Linda: the same person
    Adam: the first person plural
    Not Adam: the last person singular
    ACT ONE
A clinical but ambiguous room with five beds in the shape of an X. A terrible moaning by the four inhabitants growing in intensity and heartfelt pain until reaching a clamorous din. A gun is prominently displayed in a glass case in the corner below a sign indicating it is for emergency use only.
     
    NESTOR: Wait a minute I just realized I’m all moaning but not in any actual pain.
     
    ( all stop, seemingly coming to same realization )
     
    CLARISSA: Your point?
     
    NESTOR: That this is bad enough without us having to create unnecessary noise, that point.
     
    CLARISSA: So without physical pain no reason to moan, that what you’re saying?
     
    LUDWIG: ( moans loudly )
     
    NESTOR: What? ( at Ludwig )
     
    LUDWIG: You two aren’t going to start up again are you?
     
    CHARLES: Moans in agreement.
     
    ( Responsorial moans begin until eclipsing former intensity then suddenly they stop as the front of a wheelchair appears in the doorway. The occupant looks up at his pusher as to why they’ve stopped then gets suddenly and violently rolled forward until coming to rest at foot of Nestor’s bed. Nestor looks down .)
     
    NESTOR: ( pointing )
    Dear God look, his legs, they’re hideously mangled, oh the horror!
     
    WHEELBOUND
    STRANGER: They’re fine actually. ( rising )
     
    LUDWIG: What’s that you say? Call you Adam?
     
    ADAM: I didn’t say that.
     
    LUDWIG: I know you didn’t say that , you said call me Adam.
     
    NESTOR: Yeah and why say call me all ambiguous-like. Your name Adam or not?
     
    ADAM: It isn’t and I never said it was!
     
    CLARISSA: Relax Adam.
     
    LUDWIG: Yeah relax, if you want us to call you Adam we will. We’re easy that way.
     
    ADAM: I don’t so please don’t.
     
    NESTOR: Easy, we all have names, I’m Nestor. Well that is to say my name is Nestor.
     
    CLARISSA: Electra or Clarissa for short.
     
    LUDWIG: Menelaus
     
    ADAM: Huh?
     
    LUDWIG: Menelaus. M-E-N-E
     
    ADAM: I know but isn’t anyone named Tom around here.
     
    LUDWIG: Oh Menelaus is just a nickname of sorts, it’s not my real name,