Saint Cecelia or The Power of Music (A Legend) by Heinrich von Kleist

Heinrich von Kleist (18 October 1777 – 21 November 1811) was a soldier, writer, publisher, and accused spy. A key figure in the German Romantic movement, he nevertheless saw little popular or critical success during his short and turbulent life. The short story “Saint Cecelia” was first published in October 1810, in Kleist’s daily newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter. A little more than a year later, he committed suicide along with a friend, Henriette Vogel, on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee, a lake in the forested outskirts of Berlin.

More fiction and miscellaneous prose by Kleist can be found in Anecdotes, published last year through Sublunary Editions:

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, when iconoclasm raged in the Netherlands, three brothers, young students at Wittenberg, and a fourth, employed as a preacher in Antwerp, met in the city of Aachen. They were there to claim an inheritance, which had come down from an elderly uncle, whom none of them knew, and having no one else they could rely upon, took their lodgings at an inn. After the lapse of some days, which they spent listening to the preacher’s account of the strange events that had taken place in the Netherlands, it so happened that the nuns at the convent of St. Cecelia, which at the time stood just outside the city gates, were to solemnly observe the feast of Corpus Christi; and so the four brothers, inflamed by youth, fanaticism, and the Dutch example, decided to give Aachen itself the spectacle of an iconoclastic riot. The preacher, who had already led more than one such enterprise, gathered together, on the evening prior, a number of young students and merchant’s sons devoted to the new teaching, and they passed the night at the inn with much food and drink and oaths against the papacy; and when daylight had risen above the battlements of the city, they outfitted themselves with axes and all manner of destructive instruments useful for instigating their wicked business. They gleefully agreed on a signal, at which they would begin smashing any window decorated with biblical scenes; and certain they would have a large following amongst the populace, they set off for the cathedral, as its bells first rang out the hour, determined to leave no stone upon another. The abbess, who had already been warned by a friend, at the break of day, regarding the imminent danger to the convent, vainly sent messages, on multiple occasions, to the Imperial officer commanding the city, requesting guards for their protection; the officer, who was himself an enemy of papism, and as such, at least on the quiet, devoted to the new doctrine, refused, under the astute pretense that the abbess was dreaming up phantoms, and that no shadow of danger threatened her convent. Meanwhile, the hour had come for the ceremonies to begin, and the nuns, with tears and prayer, in pitiful anticipation of what was to come, prepared for mass. They had no other protection than the cloister bailiff, a man of seventy-one, who positioned himself, along with some armed stablehands, at the entrance of the church. In the nunneries, as is well known, trained in playing every kind of instrument, the nuns perform their own music; often with a precision, sensitivity, and understanding that is missed in male orchestras. (perhaps because of the feminine gender of this mysterious art). Now, it so happened, to double their distress, that Sister Antonia, who usually conducted music for the orchestra, had, a few days earlier, fallen grievously ill with typhoid fever, so that the convent, notwithstanding the four impious brothers, who could already be seen cloaked among the pillars of the church, was in a state of agitated confusion for lack of decent music to perform. The abbess, who on the evening of the day previous had ordered that an ancient mass, originating from an unknown Italian master, should be performed, as it had been several times already, by choir and orchestra, to the greatest effect, because of the special holiness and splendor of its composition, sent down, more than ever insisting on her will, for Sister Antonia, to ask how she was doing; the nun assigned this errand, however, returned with news that the sister lay in a completely unconscious state, and that it was inconceivable for her to direct the music as scheduled. Meanwhile, some most alarming scenes had already taken place in the cathedral, where gradually more than a hundred miscreants of every age and station, equipped with axes and crowbars, had gathered; several of the stablehands, posted at the door, were crudely taunted, and the most brazen and impudent remarks were ventured against the nuns, who now and then, on their pious business, appeared singly in the nave or in the aisles: to such an extent, that the cloister bailiff went into the sacristy and implored the abbess, on his knees, to cancel the celebration and place herself under protection of the city commandant. But the abbess, unshakable, insisted that the feast day, which had been arranged for the glory of the Most High God, must be celebrated; she reminded the bailiff of his duty, to protect the mass and solemn procession, which was to be held in the cathedral, with life and limb; and she ordered, as the bells tolled out the hour, for the nuns to take an oratorio with them, never mind which one or the other, and get on with their performance. The nuns in the organ loft were preparing to do just that; the score of a musical work, which they had often performed, was being distributed; violins, oboes, and contrabasses were being checked and tuned: when Sister Antonia suddenly, fit and well, a little pale in the face, appeared at the top of the steps; she was carrying the score to the ancient Italian mass, the performance of which the abbess had so urgently insisted, under her arm. When the astonished nuns asked where she had come from and how she had recovered so suddenly, she answered: “never mind, sisters, never mind” handed out the score she was carrying and sat down at the organ, glowing with enthusiasm, to take over the direction of that excellent piece of music. And thus it was something like a wonderful heavenly consolation that entered the hearts of the pious women; immediately, they sat down at the rostrum with their instruments; indeed, the very trepidation in which they found themselves supervened to bare their souls aloft, as if on wings, conducted through all heaven of sound; the oratorio was performed with all possible musical splendor; not a breath stirred during the entire performance, neither from pew nor aisle; especially during the Salve regina and even more so during the Gloria in excelsis, it was as if the entire church assembly had been struck dead; to such an extent that, despite the four accursed brothers and their flunkies, not even the dust on the paving stones was disturbed, and the convent survived right until the end of the Thirty Years War, when through an article in the Treaty of Westphalia, it was nevertheless secularized.

Six years later, after this event had long been forgotten, the mother of the four young men arrived from The Hague, making legal inquiries with the magistrate in Aachen, on the sad pretext that her sons had completely vanished, as to the route they might have taken from the city. The last news heard of them in the Netherlands, the home to which they actually belonged, was, as she reported, a letter from the preacher to his friend, a schoolteacher in Antwerp, written before the specified period, namely on the eve of the feast of Corpus Christi, in which he gave, on four densely packed pages, with much cheerfulness, or rather unbridled exuberance, a preliminary report for an undertaking planned against the convent of St. Cecilia, about which the mother, however, did not want to elaborate. After many unsuccessful efforts to find the persons this distraught woman was seeking, the authorities finally remembered that, for a number of years, which roughly matched the information provided, four young people, whose homeland and ancestry were unknown, had been living in the city’s lunatic asylum, recently founded by the Emperor. However, since their illness consisted of a certain religious monomania, and their behavior, as the magistrate dimly remembered having heard, was of an exceedingly morbid and melancholic kind, this accorded so poorly with the character of the brothers, which their mother knew all too well, that she could give little credence to this report, especially because it seemed to indicate that the persons in question were Catholic. Nevertheless, being curiously affected by several of the details used to describe them, she went one day, accompanied by a court messenger, to the madhouse, asking the wardens for the courtesy of a scrutinizing visit with the four miserable deranged men under their care. But who could describe the horror of the poor woman when, at first sight, as soon as she stepped through the door, she recognized her sons: they were seated, in long black gowns, around a table on which a crucifix stood, and they seemed, leaning forward with clasped hands, to be adoring it. The woman, robbed of her strength, collapsed into a chair, and regarding her question as to what they were doing, the wardens answered: they were, quite simply, glorifying the Savior, believing themselves, such was their purport, better able than others perceive that he was the one true Son of the one and only God. They added that the young men, for six years now, had led this spectral life; that they slept very little, took very little food; that not a sound passed from their lips; except that they would rise from their seats at midnight and intone, in a voice to shatter the windows, the Gloria in excelsis. The wardens concluded by assuring her that the four young men were, for all that, in perfect bodily health; that they even had a certain undeniable tranquility of mind, albeit of a solemn and ceremonious variety; and that they would, when told they were insane, shrug their shoulders pityingly and answer, as they had done on more than one occasion: that if the good city of Aachen knew what they knew, then it too would cast aside its business and gather with them, around the crucifix, to sing the Gloria.

The woman, who could not bear the terrible sight of these unfortunates, and soon thereafter, on tottering knees, allowed herself to be led back home, went on the morning of the following day, for information regarding the cause of this monstrous incident, to one Veit Gotthelf, a well- known cloth merchant in the city; for this man was mentioned in the letter written by the preacher, which revealed that he had been an eager participant, on the day of the feast of Corpus Christi, in the project to destroy the convent of St. Cecilia. Veit Gotthelf, the cloth merchant, who in the meantime had married, fathered several children, and taken over his own father’s considerable business, received the stranger with great affection: and when he learned of the matter that had brought her to him, he locked the door, and having obliged her to sit, was heard as follows: “My dear woman! If you promise not to involve me, who was a close associate of your sons six years ago, in any investigation, I will confess to you frankly and unreservedly: yes, we did have the malicious intent cited in the letter! But how this act failed, though everything was planned, everything was executed with the utmost precision, with a truly godless brilliance, is incomprehensible to me; heaven itself seems to have taken the cloister of pious women under its holy protection. For you must know that your sons, as a prelude to more drastic actions, had already permitted themselves to disrupt the service with their antics: more than three hundred villains, armed with hatchets and wreaths of pitch, from within the walls of our then misguided city, awaited nothing but a sign from the preacher, whereupon they would raze the cathedral to the ground. But then, at the onset of the music, with one striking simultaneous movement, your sons remove their caps; little by little, as if moved by some deep, inexpressible emotion, they place their hands before their bowed heads, and the preacher, wheeling about suddenly after a momentous pause, calls out that we should do likewise. Vainly, several of his companions urge in whispers, nudging him carelessly with their elbows, to give the prearranged signal for the iconoclasm; the preacher, instead of answering, falls to his knees, hands laid crosswise on his chest, murmuring, along with his brothers, forehead pressed fervently into the dust, the entire series of prayers they had so recently mocked. Deeply confused by this sight, the pack of miserable fanatics stand there, bereft of their ringleaders, irresolute and inactive, until the end of the oratorio, which sweeps down wondrously from the organ loft; and since, at that very moment, on the orders of the commandant, multiple arrests are made, and several ruffians, who had become disorderly, are seized and led away by the city guard, nothing remains but for the wretched mob to remove themselves, under cover of the dispersing congregation, from the church. That evening, after having vainly asked several times after your sons at the inn, I go with several friends, in a state of terrible uneasiness, back to the cloister, enquiring with the doorkeepers, the imperial watch also helpfully at hand, regarding their whereabouts. And how shall I describe my horror, dear woman, at seeing those four men still prostrate, as they had been before, with clasped hands, kissing the floor with breast and brow, as though they were turned to stone, in passionate adoration before the altar! The cloister bailiff, who came over at that very moment, vainly bid them, shaking their arms and pulling at their cloaks, to leave the cathedral, which had already grown quite dark, none else being present: they pay him no heed, half rising to their feet, as if in a dream, until servants come and take them under the arm and lead them out through the main portal: where at last they begin following us into the city, although with frequent sighs and heartrending glances back at the cathedral, which shines magnificently behind us in the sunset. Gently, kindly, we ask them again and again, what in the world, what terrible thing, capable of reversing their innermost being, had happened to them; they press our hands, gazing at us with affection, cast down their eyes thoughtfully, and from time to time—ah, with an expression that still breaks my heart—wipe away their tears. Coming back to their lodgings then, they fashion a cross, delicate and ingenious, from birch twigs, and set it down, pressed into a small mound of wax, between two candles, which a maid provides, on a large table in the middle of the room, and while their friends, whose number grows by the hour, stand by their side in scattered groups, wringing their hands, speechless with misery, and watch their silent, ghostly doings: they take seats around the table, as if their senses were impervious to any other phenomena, and clasping their hands, mutely prepare for worship. They desire neither the food, ordered that morning to regale their companions, brought in by the maid, nor the bedding she piles in an adjoining room as night falls, for they appear so tired; and so as not to provoke the outrage of the innkeeper, disconcerted by these theatrics, the friends must sit off to the side, at a lavishly appointed table, consuming the dishes prepared for a large party, salting the food, as it were, with their own bitter tears; then suddenly, the midnight hour strikes; your four sons, after listening a moment to the muffled sound of the bell, rise from their seats abruptly, in one simultaneous movement; and as we set down our napkins and watch from across the room, full of tense expectation as to what might follow such a prelude, they begin, in a dreadful and hideous voice, to intone the Gloria in excelsis. So can wolves and leopards be heard, when, in the icy depths of winter, they bellow at the firmament; the pillars of the house, I assure you, shook, and the windows, struck by the evident force of their breath, rattled, as if fistfuls of heavy sand were thrown against the panes, threatening to shatter them. At this appalling scene, we scatter, insensible, hair standing on end; we disperse, leaving behind our hats and cloaks, into the neighboring streets, which, instead of us, were soon filled with a hundred or more people frightened from their sleep; the crowd presses, bursting through the front doors, up the stairway and into the dining room, seeking out the source of that dreadful and outrageous bellowing, which, as if on the lips of sinners eternally damned, arose from the profoundest depths of flaming hell to the ear of God, piteously begging for mercy. Finally, at the stroke of one, heeding neither the outrage of the innkeeper nor the shocked exclamations of the surrounding crowd, they shut their mouths; with a cloth, they wipe the sweat from their brow, which drips down, onto chin and chest in heavy drops; spread their cloaks and lie down, to rest a while after such a work of agony, direct on the floorboards; the innkeeper, letting them have their way, makes over them, as soon as he sees them slumbering, the sign of the cross; and glad to be free of misery for a moment, he induces the crowd, still present and muttering amongst themselves, to leave the room, with the promise that tomorrow will bring about a salutatory change. But alas! with the first cockcrow, the unfortunates rise again and begin again, before the cross on the table, the same monkish routine, desolate and spectral, which exhaustion alone had momentarily interrupted. They accept neither admonition nor assistance from the innkeeper, whose heart melts at the pitiful sight of them; they request he courteously turn away their friends, who had otherwise gathered in their company every morning; they desire nothing from him but bread and water, a little straw, if possible, for bedding: such that the innkeeper, who otherwise profited a great deal from their merrymaking, felt compelled to report the whole incident to the authorities, requesting they have these four men, in whom the devil must be at work, removed from his house. Whereupon, on the orders of the magistrate, they were put under medical examination and being found insane, as you know, lodged within the chambers of the madhouse, which the late Emperor, in his generosity, for the good of such unfortunates, had founded within the walls our city.” Veit Gotthelf, the cloth merchant, said this and more, which we, considering that enough has been said to understand the inner context of the matter, are here suppressing; and he once more urged the woman not to implicate him in any way. should judicial inquiries be made into the incident.

Three days later, when the woman, shaken to the core by this report, had, on the arm of a friend, made her way to the convent, with the melancholy intention, during their walk, the weather being so fine, of viewing that terrible site, where God, as if by invisible lightning, had laid waste to her sons: they found the entrance to the cathedral, being in the process of renovation, barred and could see, with some difficulty, if they stood on tiptoe and peered through chinks in the boards, nothing but the rose window that glittered splendidly at the far end. Many hundreds of laborers, singing cheerful songs, were busy on slender, intertwining scaffolds, raising the spires a good third higher and covering the hitherto slate-covered roofs and battlements with a strong bright copper that gleamed under the rays of the sun. A dark stormcloud, black with gilded edges, lowered against the convent edifice; it had already spent itself over the vicinity of Aachen, and having hurled a few more powerless thunderbolts in the direction of the cathedral, it sank, dissolved into vapors, muttering discontent, to the east. It happened that, as the women contemplated this double spectacle, immersed in many thoughts, from the steps of the extensive monastic apartments, a sister of the convent, passing by, chanced to discover who stood beneath the portal; with a result that the abbess, who had heard that the lady was carrying, on her person, a letter concerning the events of Corpus Christi, immediately sent the sister down, entreating the Dutchwoman to come up. The latter, although shocked for a moment, nevertheless prepared herself, with all possible reverence, to obey the summons given her; and while the friend, at the nun’s invitation, went into an adjoining room close by the entrance, the double doors were opened for the stranger, who mounted the stairway to the beautifully appointed upper chambers. There she found the abbess seated on an armchair, a noblewoman of serene and queenly appearance, her feet supported by a footstool resting on dragon claws; on a lectern by her side, lay the score for a piece of music. The abbess, after having a chair brought in for the stranger, revealed that she had already heard, from the mayor, of her arrival in the city; and after inquiring, in a humane fashion, about the condition of her unhappy sons, as well as encouraging the woman to accept, because it could in no way be changed, the fate which had befallen them: the abbess disclosed her wish to see the letter, which the preacher had written to his friend, the schoolteacher in Antwerp. The woman, having gained enough experience to foresee the consequences of such a step, was for a moment thrown into a state of confusion, but since the abbess’ venerable countenance demanded unconditional trust, and it was quite improper to believe that she would make public use of its contents; she took the letter, after some brief reflection, from her bosom and delivered it, with a fervent kiss on the hand, to the regal lady. The woman, while the abbess read the letter, then glanced over to the lectern, on which the score lay carelessly opened; and since, through the report of the cloth merchant, it had occurred to her that surely the power of the music itself had, on that eldritch day, confused and destroyed the minds of her poor sons: she turned to the sister of the convent, who was standing behind her chair, and timidly asked: “Would this be the musical work performed in the cathedral six years ago, on the morning of that strange feast of Corpus Christi?” And when the young sister answered: yes indeed, she remembered hearing that this was so and that ever since then, it had been customary for the score, when not in use, to be kept with the reverend mother herself: the woman rose, deeply troubled, and stood, assailed by many thoughts, before the lectern; she gazed at the unknown magic signs, whereby, it seemed, a terrible spirit described its arcane sphere and thought herself sinking into the earth, for she had found the score opened precisely on the Gloria in excelsis. It seemed to her as if the whole terror of that music, which had so violated her sons, had come rushing about her head; she felt as though she might lose her wits at the mere sight of it, and having then quickly pressed the paper to her lips, with infinite humility and submission to divine omnipotence, she sat back in her chair. Meanwhile, the abbess, who had read through the letter, said, folding it up: “God himself protected the convent on that wonderous day, against the presumption of your grievously errant sons. The means by which He did so may, since you are Protestant, be a matter of indifference; you could scarcely understand, moreover, what I might say to you on this subject. For absolutely no one knows, in the urgency of that terrible hour, when the storm of iconoclasm threatened to descend upon us, who sat down at the organ and conducted the music you find opened before you. Through testimony, recorded on the morning of the following day, in the presence of the cloister bailiff and several other men, and filed in the archive, it is proven that Sister Antonia, the only one of us capable of conducting the work, was ill for the entire duration of its performance and lay sick, unconscious, utterly paralyzed, in the corner of her monastery cell; a convent sister, who, as a blood relative, was charged with her bodily care, did not leave her bedside for the entire morning, while the feast of Corpus Christi was being celebrated in the cathedral. Indeed, Sister Antonia herself would have inevitably confirmed and verified that it was not she who, in such a strange and disconcerting way, had appeared in the organ loft, if her completely unconscious state had allowed her to be questioned about it, and had she not died that very evening, as a result of the delirium from which she suffered, which had previously not seemed life-threatening. Moreover, the Archbishop of Trier, to whom this incident was reported, has given the only compelling explanation, namely that it was Saint Cecelia herself who performed that terrible and glorious miracle, and I have now just received a papal missive confirming this.” And with that, promising that she would make no use of it, she returned the letter to the woman, which she had only requested to obtain further information on matters she already knew; and having enquired whether there was any hope for the restoration of her sons, and whether she could perhaps, with money or some other means of support, contribute anything toward that end, to which the woman, kissing the hem of her robe and weeping answered no: she raised a hand in a gesture of kindly farewell and dismissed her.

Here this legend ends. The woman, whose presence in Aachen was entirely useless, left behind a small endowment, held in trust by the courts, for the benefit of her poor sons, and returned to The Hague, where, a year later, deeply moved by this incident, she was again received into the bosom of the Catholic Church; her sons, for their part, died in old age, happy and peaceful, after they had once more, as was their custom, sung the Gloria in excelsis.