The Music OF Erich Zann by H.P. Lovecraft
The Music OF Erich Zann
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written Dec 1921 
Published March 1922 in The National Amateur, Vol. 44, No. 4, p. 38-40. 
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again 
found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modem maps alone, for I know 
that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the 
antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever 
name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But 
despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the 
house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my 
impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the 
music of Erich Zann. 
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, 
was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil, 
and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot 
find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a 
half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which 
could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a 
person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil. 
The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick 
blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It 
was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories 
shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches 
which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, 
since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled 
streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly 
steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached. 
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was 
almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of ffights 
of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, 
sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with 
struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, 
incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. 
Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the 
street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground 
below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street. 
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it 
was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because 
they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I 
was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always 
evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the 
Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top 
of the street, and by far the tallest of them all. 
My rcom was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house 
was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strang music from the peaked 
garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was 
an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, 
and who played eve nings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire 
to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had 
chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the 
only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at 
the declivity and panorama beyond. 
Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was 
haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was 
yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard 
before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The 
longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to 
make the old man’s acquaintance. 
One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway 
and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He 
was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, 
satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered 
and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he 
grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic 
stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west 
side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was 
very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary barrenness and 
neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash-stand, 
a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned 
chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were 
of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of 
dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently 
Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination. 
Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden 
bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now 
removed his viol from its motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in 
the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but, 
offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with 
strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own 
devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in 
music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most 
captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird 
notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions. 
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled 
inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked 
him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled 
satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and 
seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed 
when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use 
persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to 
awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had 
listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a 
moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew 
suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, 
cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude 
imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a 
startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some 
intruder—a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible 
above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep 
street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at 
the summit. 
The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain 
capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of 
moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in 
the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window 
and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage 
even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning 
with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with 
both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, 
and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust 
and offense, his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, 
but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair; then with an 
appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many 
words with a pencil, in the labored French of a foreigner. 
The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. 
Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous 
disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my 
listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his 
eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could 
not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his 
room touched by an-other. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I 
could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with 
Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, 
he wrote, defray the difference in rent. 
As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old 
man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my 
metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight 
sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and for 
some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had 
finished reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend. 
The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between 
the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable 
upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor. 
It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not as 
great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth 
story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy 
and played listlessly. This was always at night—in the day he slept and would 
admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the 
weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to 
look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the 
glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to 
the garret during theater hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked. 
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb 
old man. At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold 
enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the 
narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard 
sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and 
brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; 
but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and 
that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly 
conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild 
power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician 
acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now 
refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs. 
Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into 
a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own 
shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof 
that the horror was real—the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can 
utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I 
knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in 
the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor 
musician’s feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing 
him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time 
calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close 
both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened 
to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his 
distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child 
clutches at its mother’s skirts. 
Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into 
another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for 
some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of 
intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and 
crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and 
returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note 
implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait 
where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and 
terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil flew. 
It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician’s 
feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as 
from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained 
window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; 
though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely 
distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or 
in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. 
Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose, 
seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had 
ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door. 
It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful 
night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could 
now see the expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive 
was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown 
something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The 
playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the 
qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I 
recognized the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I 
reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play 
the work of another composer. 
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that 
desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted 
like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his 
frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and 
whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. 
And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; 
a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West. 
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had 
sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming 
viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. 
The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the 
window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the 
chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of 
paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I 
looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes 
were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, 
mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest. 
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it 
toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were 
gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to 
gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might 
see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, 
but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the 
rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked 
while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I 
saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered 
streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive 
with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I 
stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that 
ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos 
and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol 
behind me. 
I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing 
against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place 
where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann 
I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some 
chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above 
that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, 
and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s 
chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his 
senses. 
He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved 
my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in 
his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he 
neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all 
through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and 
babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew not 
why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose 
glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle, finding 
the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed 
thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose 
fury increased even as I plunged. 
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; 
racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and 
tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets 
and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the 
broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible 
impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that 
the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled. 
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been 
able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for 
the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely-written sheets which alone could 
have explained the music of Erich Zann. 




© 1998-1999 William Johns
Last modified: 12/18/1999 18:43:18
