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EUTERPE, episode 1

Written by Enrico Toro

Editor's note: Giacomo Carissimi and Girolamo Zenti are historical characters. They each gave important contributions to classic music. The first is considered the most important composer of the Roman baroque movement, an innovator of the era; the second was a well-traveled harpsichord maker, renowned for the invention of the bentside spinet. Some of his instruments are still used and copied today.
In 1631 they are both in their prime and at the beginning of bright and important careers.
Then the Ring of Fire came. Its effects slowly but inexorably spread all over Europe, changing the lives of millions of people. This story, the first of several episodes, tells the beginnings of their new lives.

Maestro Giacomo Carissimi to Father Thomas Fitzherbert SJ of the Illustrissimus Collegium Anglicanum in Rome
June 1633,

Very Reverend Father Fitzherbert,

How are you?

I only now have time to write you this letter before leaving tomorrow morning headed for the Holy Roman Empire first and then to Thuringia, in Germany. My final destination is the town of Grantville where I am going to learn and study.

I hope this letter will find you once back from Amalfi as I hope your residence in the costiera gave you some relief from the sickness that affects your lungs. You know I have always preferred to sharpen my quills to write music and not words, but I feel the need to share with you all the events that brought me to leave Rome.

I'm writing you in English to show you how the months you spent trying to hammer this language into my hard head have not gone wasted.

This letter and the ones that will follow are maybe another way to make my English fluent, especially if you will feel free to correct any mistakes you will find in my prose with your usual and blessed Jesuitical iron discipline.

I have been told that many inhabitants of Grantville are Germans and, grazie alla Divina Provvidenza, the four years I spent as master of chapel at the Collegium Germanicum made my German more than passable and I can always use some French and some Latin. If I am lucky some of them will speak Italian, too!

Anyway, with the prices of parchment these times, I better stop rambling and go to the point. Sometimes it seems there isn't enough paper in the whole world to write all the thoughts and feelings, the joy and the turmoil, that are nowadays in my mind.

It's strange to think how a single evening can change a man's approach to life and how an encounter made a man who felt uncomfortable leaving the Aurelian's walls (you know how much I hated my position in Assisi) travel hundreds of miles to reach a far, almost mythical town. But if there is a man who can make a lazy, contemplative man leave all behind for adventure this is Messer Giulio Mazarini.

I had never met the man before. I only knew him for his fame of being one of the finest diplomats in Europe, a man with a golden tongue and of sharp wits. I have been told that he had just arrived from a mission in Germany. So I wasn't at all surprised once I came to know he would have lectured the students of our seminary in the latest developments in the Holy Roman Empire.

After all, the Collegium Germanicum, where I have the honor to teach sacred music and to direct the choir, has been created to prepare the German clergy to better deal with the dangers of the Reformation.

I wasn't surprised when he attended a concert we gave in his honor in Saint Apollinare, as I wasn't surprised when he visited me in my studio after the cantate and motets were over. Paying compliments to the author is customary and polite behavior, after all. But it was what he brought with him that shocked me.

He handed me a parchment of paper and let me unroll it. While my hands and eyes were busy opening it, he asked: "Many say you are the brightest musician here in Rome, maestro. Can you tell me what is this?"

I stared at it for a while before answering. "It's part of a music composition, it seems. But the writing, it is slightly different; some of the symbols are more complex than the ones I use, more structured, more evoluted. The printing quality is awesome. Where did you get this, if I may ask?"

"Grantville. You did hear about it, didn't you?" Mazarini walked closer to the fireplace where I keep some comfortable armchairs.

"Of course I did. Everybody is talking about it. Yet I think most of what I heard are rumors, like the one that says they are a bunch of demons or warlocks riding monsters who spit flames." Then I added, shaking my head, "Are they really from the future?"

"Yes, they are, and the music you hold is from a piece called the Goldberg Variations, a series of sonatas composed by an artist who will live more than fifty years from now. I think his name is Bach."

I was completely amazed by his words. I confess that I don't know what was shaking more, my hands or my voice.

"Can I borrow it? I want to copy it and try to play it."

"Unfortunately, I am not sure you will be able to do it. The American lady who gave it to me described it as a transcription for pianoforte. It will need another adaptation to be played on an harpsichord or an organ."

"A pianoforte? What is that?"

"A musical instrument from the future I listened to while in the American town. It looks like an harpsichord or a spinet but it sounds quite different: richer, more full, less metallic. They told me it will be invented by an Italian at the beginning of the next century. But that's not the only amazing mechanical thing these people have. You should hear their music recordings, too; it's like . . . Well it's hard to explain. The sound of a whole orchestra coming out loudly from a box. They call it a `CD player.' It can play music and sounds over and over again."

"What?"

"I'm not sure how it works, but it's as if you play something on the organ and somebody captures this sound and writes it down on a machine like printing does with words. Then, then to listen again what you played, they only have to use again the machine."

"It's hard to believe. A machine that captures sounds?"

"Hard to believe, but nonetheless perfectly real. One of them told me they had been a good help in beating the Spanish army last year."

"A music that defeats an army! Sounds like some kind of joke. That's something I'd like to hear!"

I think he realized how much he had succeeded in capturing my interest and offered to stay longer to talk about that strange place if I had more of my questions. I couldn't quiet my curiosity, so I went to one of the drawers and took a bottle of that smooth muscat from Montefiascone called "Est Est Est" you know I love so much. I poured the wine into two pewter cups I keep at hand and lighted a series of candles to have more light in the room.

At the moment I didn't realize it, but we must have been talking for hours. He got my complete attention and I learned many more things about that remote place, all uncanny and extraordinary.

I learned how the people of Grantville allied themselves with the Swedish and the German Protestant princedoms. I learned of their skill in manufacturing things, of their religious tolerance, of their fantastic knowledge of many new subjects in matter of science and medicine and, at the end, Mazarini, suddenly reluctant, told me a few things of their strange and almost utopian ideas about the government of a state.

Only when the night was beginning to turn into a new morning did our meeting come to an end. Mazarini, smiling, made his offer.

"It would be a fine thing if one of our most talented young musicians traveled there to learn more about music, and maybe get familiar with these up-timers, as they call themselves. There is a lot to gain from an unofficial exchange of knowledge."

Some way I knew it was coming, but I wasn't the more prepared for it.

"But, Messer Mazarini, I have my job here and I'm not accustomed to travel for such a long distance."

"I know, I know, but think about how much your natural talent can gain from such an experience. You don't have to make any decision now, of course. Nevertheless, should you agree with me, contact me at the Basilica of San Giovanni and maybe I will be able to help you with your travel."

He is pretty important now but I feel like that man will make an even better career! He knew how to cast the hook, how to make the bait irresistible, and in what exact moment I did bite. A master in human behavior.

Indeed I don't know if it was my curiosity or my love for music, but I suddenly realized that if music from the future, strange new musical instrument and music in boxes existed, I had to see it in person no matter how much I had to travel.

The weeks that followed have been full of frantic activity and preparations for this trip. I live a simple life and I earn well, but my savings were not enough to sustain myself for a long time. So the first thing was to find funds.

The Company of Jesus didn't help with them. They still had not adopted a position about Grantville and told me to wait. If I wanted to go, they would let me do it without losing my job, since it is not uncommon for teachers to take a long sabbatical for study. But the only thing they could have helped with was granting me hospitality in their houses along the way. This was quite satisfying, I must honestly say. Considering the extension of the network of their houses, such an offer looks like a very relevant asset for a traveler.

Besides that, the rector of the Collegium Germanicum invited me to travel for part of the road with a delegation of Jesuits directed to Wien. It would have been safer for me, he said. But, he added, once I left them I would be on my own.

When I was not busy preparing for my trip I passed my time studying the music sheets Messer Mazarini brought me. Some of the symbols were different, but the pentagram, the notes, the clefs, and most of the rest were the same.

The more I studied the music, the more I realized how rich and amazingly moving it was. All my compositions seemed simple, elementary in comparison.

The piece of music I had in my hands was a canon whose voices were not only written at the distance of only half note (one of the most difficult forms of canon) but also they moved as if they were the freely conceived voices of a trio sonata.

And if this was something written not so far away in the future, I was wondering, what about the music written in the later centuries? My resolve to visit this town in Germany grew day by day.

Unfortunately my financial problems were unchanged, even with Mazarini's help.

I applied to Cardinal Scipione Borghese for a donation of two hundred scudi, enough to live well for three years, I thought. The cardinal had always been very liberal with money when arts are involved. But it seems that any patron I could find wasn't very much at ease with the idea of financing trips to such a place of mystery. A place whose soldiers had repeatedly whipped Catholic armies.

Besides, it appears that sponsoring something that sounds like cultural contamination is not appreciated in today's Rome, when a Protestant country is involved. Obtaining a loan from a bank was altogether impossible without some aristocrat or some church institution backing my request.

So, at the end, I got many suggestions, but funds none.

One of the suggestions I decided to follow was to have a partner in this enterprise. Somebody with more financial means. Both Mazarini and my Dutch friend Pieter, the painter know as Il Bamboccio, pointed out that maybe an instrument maker would be interested in studying musical instruments of the future. He could be talked into reproducing and selling them. Pieter told me that one of his patrons had just bought a new spinet from Girolamo Zenti, who now resides in Rome.

Girolamo Zenti is to instrument making what Caravaggio was to painting: a genius, but with an unruly and crazy life. Despite his being a gambler and womanizer, his harpsichords and spinets are among the best produced. And he is just twenty-six years old.

When I was shopping for a new spinet for the oratory I'd been told that the waiting time to have a Zenti is more than two years. I had not met the artisan previously, but I knew one of his apprentices who had come to Sant Apollinare to fix the pedal of the old harpsichord. So I knew where his shop was: Rione Monti, built in part over the old Suburra of the ancient Romans. With so many brothels and inns nearby, it was the perfect place for an unrepentant sinner like Girolamo.

Curiously his shop is just between the two churches of Santa Maria dei Monti and San Salvatore, where is taking place another of the endless restoration and building works that are filling the town today. Even if since the jubilee the situation has improved, I believe Romans are doomed forever to share their living space and their roads with scaffolds, bricks, and debris.

The first impression one gets when entering the Zenti enterprises is one of business. The shop occupies a whole building. I had to cross a small, sunny courtyard, full of cats and stacks of timbers protected by tarps, to reach the working rooms at ground level.

A man was idly waiting at the front door. His long hair ...