The Music of Erich Zann
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"The Music of Erich Zann" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in December 1921 and published in the May 1925 issue of Weird Tales.
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[edit] 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 with a local 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 being that the old man has discovered melodies and rhythms of which the sound open up a portal to another dimension and call through to the creatures living there.
[edit] Setting
The setting of the story is presumably Paris, though the city is never named. Auseil is not a French word, but it has been suggested that Lovecraft derived it from the phrase au seuil, meaning at the threshold.[1]
[edit] 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]
[edit] Connections
James Wade wrote a sequel to the story, "The Silence of Erika Zann", first published in The Disciples of Cthulhu (1976).
[edit] References
- Lovecraft, Howard P. [1925] (1984). “The Music of Erich Zann”, S. T. Joshi (ed.): The Dunwich Horror and Others, 9th corrected printing, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.
- S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia
[edit] Notes
[edit] External links
- "H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Music of Erich Zann'", The H. P. Lovecraft Archive; publication history
- "DIE MUSIK DES ERICH ZANN", An excellent adaptation of the story done in stop-motion animation by Anna Gawrilows.
