The Music of Erich Zann

"The Music of Erich Zann"
Author	H. P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror
Publisher	The National Amateur
Media type	Magazine
Publication date	March, 1922

"The Music of Erich Zann" is a short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. Written in December 1921, it was first published in National Amateur, March 1922.^[1]

Synopsis

A university student is forced, by his lack of funds, to take the only lodging he can afford. In a strange part of the city he had never seen before, on a street named "Rue d'Auseil", he finds an apartment in an almost empty building. One of the few other tenants is an old German man named Erich Zann. The old man is mute and plays the viol^{[lower-alpha 1]} with a local theater orchestra. He lives on the top floor and when alone at night, plays strange melodies never heard before. Over time, the student gains Zann's trust, and eventually learns of his secret, that the old man has discovered melodies and rhythms of sound of an almost otherworldly nature. Zann plays these sounds to keep back unknown and unseen creatures from Zann's window, which is said to look out into a black abyss, most likely another dimension. One night, Zann's music reaches a crescendo, and the student, staring out the window in hopes of seeing the normal world outside, instead stares into an infinite abyss. The window shatters, and an unnatural wind sweeps through the room, carrying away all of Zann's music notes into the darkness, despite the students attempts at catching them. Fleeing the house after he finds Zann seemingly dead despite his body still playing the violin, the student escapes not just the house but the neighborhood entirely. Years later, he writes down his accounts, and tells that he has never been able to find Rue d'Auseil again, as it does not appear on any maps, and no one else seems to ever have heard of it.

Setting

The setting of the story is presumably Paris, though the city is never named. Auseil is not a true French word, but it has been suggested that Lovecraft derived it from the phrase au seuil, meaning at the threshold.^[3] Auseil is read like oseille, meaning sorrel or, colloquially, money.

Reaction

Lovecraft considered "The Music of Erich Zann" one of his best stories, in part because it avoided the overexplicitness that he saw as a major flaw in some of his other work. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia notes that it "might, however, be said that HPL erred on the side of underexplicitness in the very nebulous horror to be seen through Zann's garret window."^[2]

The story was frequently anthologized even during Lovecraft's lifetime, including in Dashiell Hammett's 1931 collection Creeps by Night.^[3]

Ramsey Campbell has stated that "The Music of Erich Zann" was "the single Lovecraft story that the late Robert Aickman liked".^[4]

Influence

Literature

James Wade wrote a sequel to the story, "The Silence of Erika Zann", first published in The Disciples of Cthulhu (1976).

In Charles Stross's The Laundry Files novels series including The Jennifer Morgue, The Fuller Memorandum, The Apocalypse Codex and The Rhesus Chart one of the characters has a violin made by an "Erich Zahn" which is made from human bones and, when played, eats the soul of the intended victim.

Panu Petteri Höglund's collection of Cthulhu stories in Irish, An Leabhar Nimhe, includes a story called "Paappana, nó Ceol Erkki Santanen," with several allusions to this story, such as the name of the protagonist, Erkki Santanen.

Film

A short film adaptation was directed by John Strysik in 1980.

Another short film adaptation was directed by Reuben Baron in 2016.^[5] This adaptation notably makes Erich Zann a Jewish Holocaust survivor, ironic in light of Lovecraft's anti-Semitism.

Leigh Blackmore scripted a short film version in 1975, however the script was never shot.

Music

American composer Raymond Wilding-White created a piece in 1980 by the same name for violin and electronics, with Eugene Gratovich of DePaul University in the role of the university student.

Univers Zéro's album Ceux du dehors (1981) includes a track titled "La musique d'Erich Zann". According to drummer and bandleader Daniel Denis, all members read the short story in the studio and promptly improvised the piece.^[6]

German technical thrash metal band Mekong Delta titled their 1988 second album The Music of Erich Zann after the story.

British Anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni featured a depiction of Eric Zann on the original cover of their 1988 album Cacophony.

Hungarian Metal band Without Face has a song called "The Violin of Erich Zann" on the 2002 album Astronomicon.

German ambient band Forma Tadre titled their 2008 album The Music of Erich Zann.

French post-black metal band The Great Old Ones references the story in the song Rue d'Auseil on their 2012 album Al Azif.

Greek death metal band Septic Flesh references the story in the song "Lovecraft's Death" on their 2008 album Communion.

Alexey Voytenko composed "The music of Erich Zann" for violin solo in 2009.

American thrash metal band Revocation song "Madness Opus" off their 2014 album Deathless is based on off The Music of Erich Zann.

Eric Zann is a pseudonym of Jim Jupp, who has released an album on the Ghost Box Music record label.

French composer Claude Ballif wrote stage music of the same name.

American composer Richard Horner wrote a five-movement piece of the same title for electric guitar.^[7]

Notes

↑
- Although Zann's instrument is often depicted as a violin (see "Influence" below), Lovecraft's intended use of this term appears to be to refer to a violoncello: in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (October 31, 1931?) he describes Zann as a "'cellist".^[2]

↑ Straub, Peter (2005). Lovecraft: Tales. The Library of America. p. 823. ISBN 1-931082-72-3.
1 2 Joshi and Schultz, p. 177.
1 2 Joshi and Schultz, p. 178.
↑ Ramsey Campbell, "Chasing the Unknown", in Cold Print. Headline, 1993, ISBN 0-7472-4059-0, (p.12).
↑ "The Music of Erich Zann". October 2, 2016.
↑ Colli, Beppi (August 9, 2005). "Interview: Daniel Denis (Univers Zero)". Clouds and Clocks. Retrieved February 14, 2016.
↑ "The Music of Erich Zann". January 26, 2007.

References

Lovecraft, Howard P. (1984) [1925]. "The Music of Erich Zann". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.
Harksen, Henrik. Metaphysics in "The Music of Erich Zann" . Denmark: H. Harksen Productions, 2003 for the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association Mailing No 123 (July 2003).
S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

External links

Works related to The Music of Erich Zann at Wikisource
"H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Music of Erich Zann'", The H. P. Lovecraft Archive; publication history and full story text
The Music of Erich Zann public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Works by H. P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle

Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Case of Charles Dexter Ward The Whisperer in Darkness At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time

Short stories	"The Tomb" "Dagon" "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" "Polaris" "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" "Memory" "Old Bugs" "The Transition of Juan Romero" "The White Ship" "The Street" "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" "The Statement of Randolph Carter" "The Terrible Old Man" "The Tree" "The Cats of Ulthar" "The Temple" "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" "Celephaïs" "From Beyond" "Nyarlathotep" "The Picture in the House" "Ex Oblivione" "Sweet Ermengarde" "The Nameless City" "The Quest of Iranon" "The Moon-Bog" "The Outsider" "The Other Gods" "The Music of Erich Zann" "Herbert West–Reanimator" "Hypnos" "What the Moon Brings" "Azathoth" "The Hound" "The Lurking Fear" "The Rats in the Walls" "The Unnamable" "The Festival" "The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air" "The Call of Cthulhu" "Pickman's Model" "The Silver Key" "The Strange High House in the Mist" "The Colour Out of Space" "The Descendant" "History of the Necronomicon" "The Very Old Folk" "Ibid" "The Dunwich Horror" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"

Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" "The Curse of Yig" "The Mound" "Medusa's Coil" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Out of the Aeons" "The Tree on the Hill" "Till A’the Seas" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Thing in the Moonlight"

Juvenilia	"The Mystery of the Grave-Yard" "The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist"

Poetry	Fungi from Yuggoth

Essays	"Supernatural Horror in Literature" To Quebec and the Stars The Cancer of Superstition Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity

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