Käthe had arrived and was preparing dinner, going in and out of the kitchen; I didn’t want to be around her. I went back to the entry hall and opened the door to von Üxküll’s apartments. There were two handsome rooms there, a study and a bedroom, tastefully furnished with old pieces in heavy, dark wood, oriental carpets, simple metal objects, a bathroom with special equipment, probably adapted to his paralysis. Looking at all this, I again felt a vivid sense of confusion, but at the same time I didn’t care. I walked around the study: no objects cluttered the massive, chairless desk; on the shelves there were only music scores, by all sorts of composers, arranged by country and period, and, set aside, a small pile of bound scores, his own works. I opened one and contemplated the series of notes, an abstraction for me, I didn’t know how to read music. In Berlin, von Üxküll had spoken to me about a work he was planning, a fugue or, as he had said, a suite of serial variations in the form of a fugue. “I don’t know yet if what I envisage is actually possible,” he had said. When I had asked him what the theme would be, he had made a face: “It’s not romantic music. There is no theme. It’s just an étude.”—“Whom are you writing it for?” I had then asked.—“For no one. You know quite well they never play my works in Germany. I’ll probably never hear it played.”—“Why are you writing it, then?” And he had smiled, a big, happy smile: “To have done it before I die.”
Among the scores there were of course some Rameau, some Couperin, Forqueray, Balbastre. I took a few from the shelf and leafed through them, looking at the titles I knew well. There was Rameau’s
