It would be madness to try to describe the hurricane that now began, it suddenly says in the middle of this story. A narrator admits his inability to convey a natural spectacle to his listener. The great storyteller Edgar Allan Poe’s intention was to put the indescribable, the incomprehensible, the eerie and grotesque into words, and it is exciting how his stories struggle for wording. Poe is known for his dark horror stories in which he dissected the bourgeois psyche in all its oppressive and perverse excesses. And he wrote some of the cleverest classic detective stories in which he established the logic of the genre.
One of his most ludicrous stories is “A Descent into the Maelström”, published in 1841. The setting is a huge natural phenomenon, the raging whirlpool of water off the Norwegian coast. It is a very simple story, with deadly consequences, about a fisherman who is drawn into this whirlpool and circles in it for hours, his impending end at the bottom before his eyes. And how he can then escape from it… However: “My hair, which had been raven black the day before, was as white as you see it now.”
The music creates an atmosphere of tension that prepares the narrative
The fisherman and his brothers are of course aware of the dangers of the Maelström – the Norwegians say Moskoeström, after the island of Moskoe near it – but the fishing grounds beyond the mouth are simply the most productive, which is why they keep going there. For a quarter of an hour the area of the whirlpool is calm and passable, during the change between ebb and flow, the “dead water”. One day the brothers can’t make the return journey and get caught in the vortex with its “smooth, luminous and coal-black wall of water”. Everything is pulled down here inexorably, whales and bears, spruces and beeches, ships of all sizes.
Martin Auer arranged and directed Poe’s text, and the Martin Auer Quintet provided the music. The first few minutes, with their jazzy sounds – a restrained clarinet, scraping drums, flickering piano tones – create an atmosphere of tension that prepares the narrative. Then the narrator begins, laconic and calm, it is Christian Brückner. He has narrated countless audio books and was the German voice of Robert De Niro in the cinema dozens of times, starting with “Godfather II” and “Taxi Driver”. He will be 80 years old on October 17th.
Edgar Allan Poe: Down into the Maelstrom. Storytelling concert with Christian Brückner and the Martin Auer Quintet. Translated from English by Gisela Etzel. Argon Verlag/HR 2023. 1 CD, 75 minutes, 20 euros.
(Photo: Argon Verlag)
Auer and Brückner call their work a narrative concert, which is a nice description for a genre in which music and voice work together equally. The music never whips up the horrors of the Maelström in a dramatic and sonic manner; the narrator always retracts pathetic sentences, guided by Poe’s clever narrative direction. The serenity of classic storytelling – which of course is always based on oral communication.
Round objects take the longest to reach the deadly bottom of the whirlpool
A simple story, a few hours in the inexorable circular descent into the Maelström. Poe has no sense of the spectacular or horror; he is a great analytical mind, strongly fascinated by philosophy and science. There is cool calculation and razor-sharp thinking in his storytelling (especially in his poems). The fisherman makes important observations as he circles – round objects take the longest to reach the deadly bottom of the whirlpool and be swallowed…
Christian Brückner has exactly the right, sober, objective tone for it. And suddenly this simple horror story, which also sounds very nice in the narrative concert, gains an incredible complexity and becomes a parable of man and his thirst for knowledge. “No matter how boastful it sounds, it is nevertheless true: I began to feel what a wonderful thing it was to die in this way, and how foolish it was of me, at the sight of such magnificent evidence of God’s glory in my own wretched life to think. I think I blushed with embarrassment as that thought crossed my mind. After a while, I was overcome by a wild curiosity about the whirlpool itself… I actually felt it Wish“To fathom its depths, though I had to sacrifice myself in the process, and my chief sorrow was that I should never tell my old companions on land of the wonders I would behold.”