Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [135]
She found what she was looking for, and returned to the bench with three bound pieces of music.
“Here are the Bach pieces. They’re fairly old, I haven’t looked at them in several years. Still, I’m almost sure…” She lapsed into silence, flipping quickly through the pages of the Bach scripts on her knee, one at a time, glancing back now and then at the “Lied” on the rack.
“Ha!” she let out a cry of triumph, and held out one of the Bach pieces to me. “See there?”
The paper was titled “Goldberg Variations,” in a crabbed, smeared hand. I touched the paper with some awe, swallowed hard, and looked back at the “Lied.” It took only a moment’s comparison to see what she meant.
“You’re right, it’s the same!” I said. “A note different here and there, but basically it’s exactly the same as the original theme of the Bach piece. How very peculiar!”
“Isn’t it?” she said, in tones of deep satisfaction. “Now, why is this anonymous composer stealing melodies and treating them in such an odd fashion?”
This was clearly a rhetorical question, and I didn’t bother with an answer, but asked one of my own.
“Is Bach’s music much in vogue these days, Mother?” I certainly hadn’t heard any at the musical salons I attended.
“No,” she said, shaking her head as she peered at the music. “Herr Bach is not well known in France; I believe he had some small popularity in Germany and in Austria fifteen or twenty years ago, but even there his music is not performed much publicly. I am afraid his music is not the sort to endure; clever, but no heart. Hmph. Now, see here?” The blunt forefinger tapped here, and here, and here, turning pages rapidly.
“He has repeated the same melody—almost—but changed the key each time. I think this is perhaps what attracted your husband’s notice; it is obvious even to someone who doesn’t read music, because of the changing signatures—the note tonique.”
It was; each key change was marked by a double vertical line followed by a new treble clef sign and the signature of sharps or flats.
“Five key changes in such a short piece,” she said, tapping the last one again for emphasis. “And changes that make no sense at all, in terms of music. Look, the basic line is precisely the same, yet we move from the key of two flats, which is B-flat major, to A-major, with three sharps. Stranger yet, now he goes to a signature of two sharps, and yet he uses the G-sharp accidental!”
“How very peculiar,” I said. Adding a G-sharp accidental to the section in D-major had the effect of making the musical line identical with the A-major section. In other words, there was no reason whatsoever to have changed the key signature.
“I don’t know German,” I said. “Can you read the words, Mother?”
She nodded, the folds of her black veil rustling with the movement, small eyes intent on the manuscript.
“What truly execrable lyrics!” she murmured to herself. “Not that one expects great poetry from Germans in general, but really…still—” She broke off with a shake of her veil. “We must assume that if your husband is correct in assuming this to be a cipher of some sort, that the message lies embedded in these words. They may therefore not be of great import in themselves.”
“What does it say?” I asked.
“ ‘My shepherdess frolics with her lambs among the verdant hills,’ ” she read. “Horrible grammar, though of course liberties are often taken in writing songs, if the lyricist insists upon the lines rhyming, which they nearly always do if it is a love song.”
“You know a lot about love songs?” I asked curiously. Full of surprises tonight, was Mother Hildegarde.
“Any piece of good music is in essence a love song,” she replied matter-of-factly. “But as for what you mean—yes, I have seen a great many. When I was a young girl”—she flashed her large white teeth in a smile, acknowledging the difficulty of imagining her as a child—“I was something of a prodigy, you understand. I could play from memory anything I heard, and I wrote my first composition at the age of seven.” She gestured at the harpsichord, the rich veneer shining with polish.
“My