Possessed by the devil

The demon of the viola da gamba

Graham Strahle

An Ungrateful Instrument

by Michael Meehan Transit Lounge $32.99 hb, 212 pp

Subtler in its purring resonances than the cello and more closely resembling the human form in its body, the viola da gamba was cultivated to its greatest heights in the court of Louis XIV. The great virtuoso Marin Marais will be the most familiar name for any who are acquainted with this instrument, but two later figures of equal ability were Antoine Forqueray and his son, Jean-Baptiste. Tumultuous in their relationship, they become the rather unexpected subject of a compelling new novel by Michael Meehan.

Lovers of the gamba and its music will be fascinated but shocked as they turn its pages. Antoine Forqueray’s few surviving pièces de viole have earned the reputation of being among the hardest of all gamba music to perform, surpassing in difficulty even the most technically challenging works of Marais. They are gruff, bellicose works that wrestle over the instrument’s seven strings with a physicality that must have felt dangerously new for its time. Meehan is wonderful at describing his wild improvisations; he makes Forqueray seem possessed by the devil.

Forqueray is known to have possessed a terrible temper, both as husband and father. Meehan conveys in remorseless detail how Forqueray inflicted cruelty on his wife and particularly on his son while teaching him how to play his almost impossibly hard compositions. We quickly learn that this man is a pure sadist, regularly beating the young Jean-Baptiste during lessons and smashing his instrument in a fit of anger.

Reminding us how Leopold Mozart punished his son Wolfgang Amadeus whenever he played a wrong note, Jean Baptiste’s scarred journey through life forms the backbone of this novel. Disturbingly, we read how the father laughs as he pounds his little boy in time to the music, in the process ‘forging links between beauty and the memory of pain’. The confluence of beauty and agony, love and torture, make an ever-present undercurrent.

Meanwhile, the marital misery that Antoine causes reaches a climax when his wife, Henriette-Angélique Houssu – a fine musician herself, descended from a family of organists – files numerous legal complaints him and ultimately leaves him for good. Her petitions to the court, outlining his endless cruel acts and seeking a separation, read in perfect eighteenth-century legalese.

The real cleverness of this novel, though, lies in how Meehan casts the whole story in the voice of the mute older sister, Charlotte Elisabeth. Ignored during their upbringing as she retreats into silence, she becomes the oracle of truth as she recounts every instance of their father’s bad behaviour with forensic precision. Antoine attempts to teach her the viol and mould her into a prodigy, but she is repulsed by his violence. When he repeats it all on her young brother, she subsumes her life into his to give him strength. As they huddle together, their intimacy takes on a close sensuality: they touch each other’s lips and entangle their bodies while he taps out rhythms on her body to calm their pain. She worries that if she actually speaks to him, they might separate into two persons.

Forming another counterpoint in the novel is a lonely old luthier who lovingly fashions a new viol in his forest workshop for Jean-Baptiste. The accounts Meehan gives of how this man carefully carves the instrument are meticulously accurate. It turns out that Meehan learned about this area directly from Canberra instrument maker Ian Watchorn.

Those who recall Alain Corneau’s 1991 film Tous les matins du monde will find immediate resonances. With its beautiful soundtrack played by Jordi Savall, it shows the bereaved Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, having retreated to a forest hut to play his gamba in solitude, growling at the young Marin Marais who comes to learn about the instrument’s secret arts from him. In Meehan’s novel, which serves as a kind of sequel to that film, it happens again but with a devilish twist: that secret art gets passed down by Antoine Forqueray to his son, at the greatest cost.

While Tous les matins du monde is bathed in beauty, An Ungrateful Instrument is drenched in violence. It paints a more desperate time in history when the ancien régime was on the verge of extinction due to all its accumulated excesses. Forqueray and his extravagant music lie at the tailend when revolution lies in wait. The most memorable scene has Jean-Baptiste and his Venetian-born harpsichordist wife, Marie-Rose Dubois, giving a fabulous performance of Antoine’s masterwork, Jupiter (from his Cinquième suite), which transcends all the instrument’s previously known capabilities.

Inquisitive readers, on finishing Meehan’s marvellous story, must hear Jupiter as it has been attempted by a few brave modern players: its depiction of the Roman god of thunder waging war against his celestial underlings is positively Lisztian.

There is much to admire in this book, not least in how Meehan draws opposites into sharp conjunction. He paints a frighteningly real portrait of a sadist, whose only form of caring for his children was to humiliate them. The narcissistic abuse he meted out, and the sort of cowering response this elicits, call to mind Kafka’s excruciatingly painful ‘Letter to His Father’. The irrational swings to be encountered between lust and hatred, and between punishment and dependency, can be hard to bear.

One can be grateful that this small but remarkable sliver of musical history has been elevated so skilfully to fiction. Descriptively powerful and swift in its storytelling, An Ungrateful Instrument is an unsettling but fearsomely good read. Its lesson is surely that great figures of the artistic past should not necessarily be idolised as human beings: sometimes they are deeply loathsome. g