Read Online Correction: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard - Free Book Online

and the chances are that Roithamer went to England also to research Purcell’s and Handel’s art of composition, since he’d loved Purcell and Handel and studied them even before he went to England, he had even written a short paper, a so-called comparative study entitled Handel and Purcell , but it is lost, one of many gems Roithamer wrote in his mid-twenties which are lost, probably because he was really unaware of their value and because he was the kind of man who in any case did not appreciate his own written works of art once they were finished, no matter how successfully, and paid no further attention to them, like that essay of his on Anton von Webern which I also remember, which had outlined a quite original theory of music, also lost like the paper on Handel and Purcell mentioned earlier, his studies of Hauer’s and Schönberg’s theories would keep him immured in his turret room in Altensam for weeks at a time, and everyone around him was always amazed at how he had managed to master the art of playing the piano, which had been indispensable to his studies, since the music lessons he and his siblings took in Altensam, from a former professor of the Schottengymnasium in Vienna, the capital’s foremost humanistic school, who had left Vienna because of a serious lung disease and had come to Altensam with the help of a friend of Roithamer’s father, where he also gave lessons in Latin to children and adolescents, his music lessons were nothing beyond the usual, since Roithamer’s parents, and the professor as well, did not attach the greatest importance, in the education of the Roithamer children, to the so-called aesthetic subjects such as music, but rather to mathematics and foreign languages, but Roithamer had always been different, and while his siblings shone in foreign languages, even in the ancient, the so-called dead languages , all of which simply did not interest him, he was the keenest of music students who from the first regarded the indifferent teaching of the Viennese professor, who continued to be sick in Altensam but without infecting the Altensamers with his disease, as basically instruction in the most important, to him, of all the arts, music as a means to making greater strides in the natural sciences which the growing boy had already fastened upon, for even at the age of eleven or twelve Roithamer had instinctively perceived that music and the knowledge of music was a necessary condition for his ability to enter into the natural sciences, and so he had even then seized upon every opportunity to improve his knowledge of music and, with only that basic instruction in musical theory and practice and in piano playing, he had achieved a mastery of his subject all on his own, and had not only retained that mastery all his life but had even managed to expand and intensify it. Listening to music had always meant the same to him as studying music, so listening to music was for him not only a way of raising his spirits but, by the way he combined hearing and studying the music, he became plunged in thought . While others listen to music and, when they hear, they feel, it was possible for Roithamer to hear music and to feel and to think and to study his science. His chief musical interest had been, on the one hand, Purcell and Handel and Mozart and Bruckner, and on the other hand, the newer and newest music such as Hauer, Webern, Schönberg and their successors. The opening bars of the Webern string quartets which he’d hand-copied on the back of a bill, he’d tacked on the wall above his desk in Hoeller’s garret. He loved this opening, it had always meant much to him.
    The books that mattered the most to him don’t take long to list, I knew them from his constantly reiterated remarks in which he established a connection with these books, they were always basically the same: Montaigne, Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ernst Bloch, and, because he thought that he recognized himself in them, the