The Old, Evil Songs

Die alten bösen Lieder…

Drew couldn’t shake the growling, painful slog of Robert Schumman’s song out of his head. Maybe that was a gift; he needed to learn it for his recital, after all. Though he would sing it in German, the English translation he had studied always seemed to float beside the song like a faint shadow.

The old, evil songs,

the wicked, depraved dreams,

let us bury them now;

fetch a large coffin.

Drew had always been an emotionally delicate person, though he tried to conceal it with what he hoped was a reasonable dose of stoic masculinity. No matter how he tried to laugh it off, this strange song and its even stranger text from Heinrich Heine had burrowed into his heart like a hard little insect. It was a chilly fear sitting in the middle of his chest, and he worried it would be there forever.

Die alten bösen Lieder is the terrifying finale of a song cycle called Dichterliebe, and Drew planned to perform the entire song cycle during his upcoming recital. The other lieder in the cycle weren’t nearly so chilling, and many had pleasant themes. Drew wondered if Schumann had made a mistake by placing an ugly little piece about burying “old, wicked songs” in a coffin at the end of his song cycle, but who can know the mind of a genius composer–not to mention one with mercury poisoning?

Drew was sitting in the hallway floor outside the practice rooms, as most music students did while they waited for a room to free up. He was reading the scores of the three pieces he had prepared to sing in his lesson today, listening to the melodies in his head and ensuring that the text was fully memorized. 

A pair of lavender sneakers with yellow laces caught his peripheral vision, and he looked up and smiled at a familiar face. Hope, his student accompanist, flopped down next to him and hid a mischievous grin behind her binder.

“I have got something to show you,” Hope whispered. Drew couldn’t help laughing softly. Hope was a strange one, but he liked her. 

“Ok, what is it?”

“You’ll have to come with me. You don’t have anything until Music History, right?”

Drew nodded. Hope squealed and bounced with delight, causing a few other students in the hallway to look up. Drew noted that they smiled and returned to their music scores. Hope was indisputably the best pianist in the school, and most people had enough respect for her talent to forgive her eccentricities.

Hope tugged on his sleeve, stood up, and began trotting down the hall towards the exit. Drew smiled and followed her.

It was late spring, and the trees were heavily laden with new leaves. Being suddenly enveloped by tender green life was a pleasant shock to Drew’s nose and lungs, and he breathed deeply of the heady, sweet scent of the forest. Hope’s long, black hair and lavender shoes were easy to spot, but she darted between the trees more easily than Drew did, and he began panting as he tried to keep up with her.

Hope disappeared down a hill and around a giant oak tree. Drew followed, and he looked down the hill to see her standing in a small clearing walled by steep banks and large trees. New leaves filtered the sun’s rays, giving the light a dim and green quality. Hope was grinning and hopping slightly as she pointed to something on the ground. 

Drew’s eyes were still adjusting to the strange forest light, but as he stepped further down into the clearing he was able to make out a shape that was both familiar and bizarre.

A grand piano.

The back leg was almost completely immersed in soft soil and leaf debris, and half of the right leg was buried as well, so it protruded from the ground at an odd angle. The keyboard was slanted to the right and dipped down towards the back, but all eighty-eight keys were intact. The lid was broken off at the hinges and had mostly slid off, and the bulk of the instrument was obscured by vines, leaves, and a couple of old squirrel nests. 

Drew stared silently, mouth open and eyes wide. Hope was pleased by his reaction. She skipped to the piano with a childish laugh and knelt in front of the keys. Drew hadn’t noticed the absence of a piano bench until this point. Initials had been scratched in the rotten fallboard, possibly "M.G." or M.C.", but it was hard to make out in the weathered wood.

Hope began to play. Drew was surprised to hear recognizably piano-like sounds, though warbled and jangly, emerge from the mass of vines and squirrel nests. Hope giggled and said, “A lot of the strings are broken, but look! If you play in G-flat you get most of the diatonic notes!” 

Drew shook himself out of his stupor, walked closer to the piano, and sat down. “Don’t you mean F-sharp?” He asked teasingly.

Hope smirked at him and continued to play.

Drew was suddenly aware that she was improvising. This was music that had never been written down, never even heard by another person. It was living music. Music for this moment, this forest, this piano…

Drew suddenly felt himself pulled towards sleep. The wild music, the dim green light, and the thick fragrance of the forest mingled into one overpowering force, and his body longed to submit to it by falling into deep sleep.

He blinked rapidly and stood up. “I should go. Are you ok out here?”

Hope didn’t respond immediately, but continued to play. Her face had taken on a somber expression he had never seen, and there was a shadow of pain in the creases of her chin and forehead. After a moment, she looked up at him and nodded sharply, still playing. Drew took that as a ‘yes.’

As he hiked back to the music building, the next stanza of Schumann’s song crawled out of a dark doorway in his mind,

Therein I will put a great deal,

but I won’t say yet of what;

the coffin must be even larger

than the Heidelberg Cask.

Two weeks went by. Hope had not invited Drew out to the forest again, and he had only seen her during Music History class and at his voice lessons. 

Something was changed about her. She remained as eccentric as ever, skipping and squeaking and giggling at all the wrong times, but a dark look was prone to cross her face every now and then. Drew had seen her draw her knees to her chest and very nearly cry during Music History last week. 

Drew was normally too busy to notice such things, but he found a new, sensitive place in his heart which caused him to pay attention to her like never before. He worried about her, and found himself often remembering her face as she played the forgotten piano in the woods.

And fetch a bier

of strong thick boards;

they must also be even longer

than the bridge at Mainz.

Matters were not helped by the obsessive drumming of Schumann’s song in his head. 

Drew wondered if his worry for Hope had more to do with being poisoned by Die alten bösen Lieder than anything in the real world. It was as if the ghost of Schumann had reached out of the nineteenth century and caught his psyche by the throat. Drew’s recital couldn’t come quickly enough–he would sing and Hope would play as they performed the wretched song, and then he would be free of it.

As he wearily left a practice room, Drew remembered the way the scent of the forest had filled his chest when he was chasing Hope towards the piano. He decided a walk in the woods might be just what he needed. 

Drew left the music building and entered the forest. After walking for a few minutes he froze and jerked his head toward a familiar, jangly sound drifting through the trees. It was the forgotten piano.

Drew did not remember the way to the clearing, but following the sound was easy enough. He crested a hill and looked down to see Hope kneeling by the slanting keyboard. He noticed that the piano had sunk several more inches into the ground, and the highest keys on the right-hand side were nearly engulfed by the soil. 

Hope played feverishly, with spectacular octave runs in the right hand and explosions of fortissimo chords in the left hand. She was improvising again. 

It was raw, veiny music. Drew was almost embarrassed to hear it, for he knew it was the sound of her heart turned inside out. 

He felt it was better to make his presence known than to have spied on her in such a vulnerable state, so he climbed down the bank and approached the piano.

“Ah, Hope? Hope? I don’t mean to disturb you…Hope?”

She didn’t respond. Drew’s chest tightened as he got near enough to see her face. Was she in agony, or ecstasy? Was she exhilarated, or in tremendous pain? Her wide eyes and open mouth seemed to communicate every emotion possible, and she continued to play madly. 

She was bent forward as she played on her knees, for the keys were now much closer to the ground. It appeared that Hope had added her initials underneath the original ones on the fallboard–"H.L." for Hope Lee. Drew thought he saw a green vine wrapped around her right leg, but dismissed it as a trick from the light. He considered leaving.

All at once, she stopped playing and looked up. Her eyes were vacant, but they met his. “Drew,” she said absently. “The piano…it understands…pain. It wants it. My pain.”

Drew was flooded with concern for her, and he knelt beside her, putting one arm around her shoulders and taking both her hands with the other. She wasn’t well, he was sure of it. 

“Hope, you need to go home and rest. Something’s wrong. You need to take some time to get back to yourself.”

Hope took a quick breath as though she were going to respond in protest, but then sighed and slumped towards Drew. He helped her stand, and supported her as they walked out of the forest. 

Once back at the Music Building, Hope insisted on taking the bus home alone. Drew sat with her until the bus arrived and she had boarded it safely. 

Drew began walking back to the Music Building. As he crossed the parking lot he happened to see Dr. Cowell, Hope's piano teacher, walking to her car. Still driven by concern for Hope, he waved at Dr. Cowell and jogged in her direction. 

"Dr. Cowell, s--sorry to bug you…I wanted to talk to you about Hope--Hope Lee?"

Dr. Cowell was a tall woman with a gentle face. She smiled a little and nodded, standing by her open car door with her keys in her right hand.

"I'm just worried about her. She's not…not herself. Have you noticed anything lately?"

Dr. Cowell's eyes were filled with compassion. 

"Just be a good friend to her, Drew. She doesn't have many good friends. Hope has been through a lot."

It was hard for Drew to imagine an impish character like Hope having anything horrible in her past. He nodded hard, wanting Dr. Cowell to be assured that Hope would have at least one good friend. 

"There’s…there's this, uh, piano. In the woods. I know that sounds weird--and gross--but anyway, Hope seems kind of obsessed with it. I found her playing it today. Seemed like she might have been there for hours. I'm worried that it's having some kind of…effect…on her. Should I keep her from going out there or something?"

Dr. Cowell looked away for a moment. 

"Drew, sometimes dealing with your past can get really messy before it starts getting better. Sometimes you have to steer your pain right into the storm, because that's the only way to get out on the other side. Just be there for her."

Drew was surprised that Dr. Cowell had nothing to say about the piano, but something about her tone made him feel that her words were trustworthy and shouldn't be questioned further. 

"Oh, alright--thank you, Dr. Cowell."

She sat in the driver's seat of her car and started the engine. 

"Oh, just Martha. Everyone calls me Martha."

Drew smiled politely as she closed the car door and drove away. Drew was working very hard towards his degree in music, and it would be hard for him to so casually dismiss his title, should he ever earn it. Still, he respected Dr. Cowell--uh, Martha.

And fetch me, too, twelve giants;

they must be even stronger

than strong Christopher

in the strong cathedral at Cologne on the Rhine.

They shall bear the coffin out

and sink it into the sea,

for such a large coffin

deserves a large grave.

Drew looked for Hope the next morning, but she was nowhere to be found–not even in the practice rooms, where she normally spent her free time. When Music History began, her seat was empty. Drew resolved to find her.

Leaving the class abruptly, Drew bolted to the nearest exit and sprinted into the woods. He was aware that the sky was dark, and strong winds signaled an approaching thunderstorm. The air was ripe with electricity, and once he was about ten yards into the forest it was as dark as night. 

There. The sound of the piano.

Drew altered his course towards the eerie clanging of the dilapidated instrument. He soon recognized the large trees and the banks that plummeted down towards the clearing, and there he saw her.  

Hope was playing furiously. She vacillated between intricate, atonal passage work that weaved in and out of fugal structures, and open-palmed bashing that resulted in more clanging of broken strings and shattered hammers. A bolt of lightning illuminated the clearing, revealing the strands of her hair standing straight out on all sides as static electricity welled up around her. Drew could see that the top octave was fully submerged in soil now, leaving Hope to occasionally scratch the ground with her right hand as she instinctively reached for notes which were no longer there.

Drew wanted to rescue her. He remembered Dr. Cowell’s advice, though, and surprised himself by climbing down the bank and sitting down next to Hope without a word.

It was painful to be so close to her. Drew felt the chaotic noise of the piano rattle in his chest. It raised images in his mind of memories he had wanted to ignore, hurts he had laughed away. He felt himself begin to cry.

Hope continued playing, Drew continued crying, and the storm continued gathering for some time. Almost without realizing it, Drew picked up a small rock by his knee and began carving his initials into the fallboard beside the two others. It was the obvious thing to do, though Drew couldn’t have explained why.

A sharp crack of thunder made Drew jump, and when the rumbling had ceased, he heard a low sob from Hope. Her hands began to shake and she bent forward so that her nose almost touched the keys, and slowly she stopped playing as her sobs increased. The only sounds were thunder, Hope crying, and Drew crying. 

Drew reached for Hope and pulled her close, and the two clung to each other and let their tears flow. 

“It’s–it’s gone. It’s all gone now,” Hope managed between gasps. Somehow, Drew understood. 

The hard, cold pain of past wrongs was replaced with warm tears. What had been rigid was now soft. What had been wild was now tamed. What had been a tyrant was now a child. 

The memory was there, but the scar didn’t hurt anymore.

The ground beneath them lurched, and Drew scrambled away from the piano, gripping Hope’s arm and pulling her up the bank towards the giant trees. There, they turned around panting and witnessed the old instrument sinking into the ground as though it were sinking into water. After less than a minute, there was no trace of it at all. The rain began to fall in large, heavy drops, and Drew and Hope continued to stare down into the dark place where there had once been a piano.  

Do you know why the coffin

must be so large and heavy?

I have also sunk my love

and my suffering in it.