The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

First published: 1983, in German as Der Untergeher; English translation, 1991

Type of work: Anti-Kunstlerroman

Time of work: 1981

Locale: Wankham, a village in Upper Austria

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, an Austrian writer and former pianist now living in Madrid
• Wertheimer (Der Untergeher), an Austrian amateur philosopher and former pianist who hanged himself twelve days before the beginning of the story
• Glenn Gould, the Canadian-American piano virtuoso and their friend, who recently died of a stroke

The Novel

Returning from the funeral of his friend Wertheimer in Switzerland to his Vienna apartment, which he is trying to sell, the narrator decides on the spur of the moment to visit Wertheimer’s hunting lodge in Upper Austria. Although he also owns a house in the area, he plans to stay overnight at a desolate inn in the nearby village. As he enters the inn, he begins to reflect on the lives and careers of his two closest friends, Wertheimer and Glenn Gould, whose deaths threaten to overwhelm him. The three met twenty-eight years earlier, in 1953, at a master class given by Vladimir Horowitz at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Accomplished pianists at the time, both Wertheimer and the narrator were so overcome by Gould’s virtuosity that they gave up their own careers as concert pianists, got rid of their valuable pianos, and turned to fruitless intellectual pursuits. Nevertheless, the three remained “life-friends” and visited one another in Salzburg in 1955 and in New York in 1969. It was Gould who named Wertheimer “Der Untergeher” (the founderer). The narrator finds the name appropriate, for unlike himself, who escaped the stifling cultural and political climate of Austria and had pretensions as a writer in Madrid, Wertheimer remained in Austria, a mere dabbler in philosophy.

Gould, whom the narrator calls “the most important piano virtuoso of the century,” is the subject of the book on which the narrator has been working for nine years. The two first met on the Monch mountain, also known as “suicide mountain,” in Salzburg, quickly became friends, and, together with Wertheimer, rented a house in the suburban town of Leopoldskron, in order to escape Salzburg’s obtuseness and animosity to art and the intellect. The house, which formerly belonged to a Nazi sculptor, was ideal for Gould’s eccentricities and clowning. Gould, “the most clairvoyant of all fools,” established the “total order” that he needed for his obsessive piano playing by, among other things, squirting the house’s monumentally ugly sculptures with champagne, cutting down an ash tree that was blocking his window, and practicing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the work that was to become his trademark, without interruption until early in the morning.

According to the narrator, Wertheimer’s ambitions as a piano virtuoso ended even before he met Gould, when Wertheimer first heard Gould play the Goldberg Variations in a classroom in the Mozarteum. In the Leopoldskron house, it became even clearer that the narrator and Wertheimer were no match for Gould’s fanatical genius. He was the triumphant one, they the failures. Eventually Wertheimer auctioned off his Bosendorfer grand piano in Vienna, while the narrator gave his Steinway to a provincial teacher’s nine-year-old daughter, who destroyed it in short order. While all three men over the years barricaded themselves from the world in their respective apartments and retreats (Gould in New York, Wertheimer in Vienna and in his hunting lodge, and the narrator in Madrid), only Gould’s isolation led to any productive activity. After thirty-four concert appearances, Gould refused to play in public again and allowed himself to be heard only through his legendary recordings. In his forest studio, he perfected himself “to the extreme limit of his and in essence all piano-instrumental possibilities.” He died of a stroke, apparently while playing the Goldberg Variations.

Wertheimer never recovered from Gould’s death, which only intensified his insecurities, his sense of inferiority, and his suicidal tendencies. Soon after word reached him of his friend’s death, his sister, whom he had tyrannized for years in their exclusive Viennese apartment, suddenly left him to marry an extremely wealthy owner of a Swiss chemical company. He took revenge on her by hanging himself from a tree outside her house in a village near Chur, Switzerland. As the narrator, who in the course of his narrative walks from the inn to the hunting lodge, discovers from Franz, one of Wertheimer’s woodsmen, Wertheimer had carefully planned his final days. He invited his friends, including the narrator, and his former fellow music students, whom he despised and avoided for years, to stay at his lodge. Preoccupied with writing his book, On Glenn Gould, the narrator ignored Wertheimer’s repeated invitations. The day before the guests arrived, Wertheimer burned the stacks of papers on which he had written his life’s work in the form of thousands of aphorisms. He also ordered a worthless, badly out-of-tune piano from the Mozarteum. After not having played for more than a decade, Wertheimer proceeded to perform works by George Frideric Handel and Bach on the piano every time his guests were in the house. Driven wild by the unbearable noise, they caroused in the village and tore apart the lodge, until after two weeks he sent them packing. Shortly thereafter he left for his sister’s. Finally, alone in Wertheimer’s room, the narrator listens to Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations, which had been left on Wertheimer’s record player.

The Characters

In the narrator’s remembrances of his friends, it is remarkable how similar their backgrounds were. All three of them came from wealthy families that had no sympathy or understanding for their musical talents. They all studied the piano as a way to get revenge on their parents, intentionally isolated themselves from a world they saw as barbarous, and suffered from lung disease, which forced them to live in the country, which they hated. Both Wertheimer and Gould died when they were fifty-one, the same age as the narrator and even Thomas Bernhard when he wrote Der Untergeher. Despite these similarities, the narrator repeatedly contrasts Glenn Gould’s artistic success with Wertheimer’s failure—at one point he describes Wertheimer as “the exact opposite of Glenn Gould”—while his own achievement in life seems to consist chiefly in surviving, in not foundering on his renunciation of a musical career.

The narrator’s adulation for Gould is tempered by his awareness of Gould’s total sacrifice of himself to his art. During the summer of the Horowitz course, the narrator coined the phrase “piano radicalism” to describe Gould’s obsession with perfection, his intolerance of imprecision, and his total self-discipline. At the time, he expected that Gould would quickly be destroyed by the monstrosity of his task, the reckless simplicity of his life’s goal: to become an art machine. The ideal for him was to become superfluous as Glenn Gould, to be the piano, the Steinway, so that nothing, most of all himself, stood between Bach and the Steinway: “Glenn Steinway, Steinway Glenn only for Bach.”

As the narrator approaches Wertheimer’s hunting lodge, he realizes that when he returns to Madrid he will have to begin his Glenn Gould essay over again, for now he is able to understand Gould’s art only in contrast to Wertheimer’s non-art. Wertheimer had far too little courage and too much anxiety to become a virtuoso pianist, which requires, according to the narrator, “a radical fearlessness toward everything and everyone.” He was too timid, for example, to tackle the Goldberg Variations. Plagued by self-doubt and self-pity, Wertheimer never discovered his own uniqueness but remained condemned to perpetual imitation, which the narrator sees as a cause of Wertheimer’s restlessness and his addiction to walking to the point of exhaustion. He blamed his misfortunes on his sister, who was for him nothing more than his page-turner in the years when he still played the piano. In theory and in his aphorisms, he had “mastered all the unpleasant things in life, every despairing situation, the whole wearing evil in the world, but practically, he was not capable of mastering anything at all.” The bizarre performance on the out-of-tune piano at the hunting lodge and his suicide were the only decisive and original acts of his life.

Critical Context

Following in the wake of Bernhard’s five-part autobiography (1975-1982; published in English under the title Gathering Evidence, 1986), Der Untergeher, like the narratives Beton (1982; Concrete, 1984) and Wittgensteins Neffe: Eine Freundschaft (1983; Wittgenstein’s Nephew, 1987), strives to blur the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, biography and autobiography, and the fictive and real worlds. Although these later prose works use the calamitous themes of Bernhard’s first four novels—Frost (1963), Verstorung (1967; Gargoyles, 1970), Das Kalkwerk (1970; The Lime Works, 1973), and Korrektur (1975; Correction, 1979), they do so with greater detachment and humor and in a more readable and engaging style.

Common to all Bernhard’s protagonists is an austere intellectual isolation, the condition for the creative fulfillment for which they long but which they never achieve. Glenn Gould’s “world-virtuosity” in Der Untergeher is thus exceptional in Bernhard’s prose works and yet is countered by Wertheimer’s perversely negative example. Still, the grotesquely comic tragedy of Wertheimer’s final decline serves as a faint, parodying echo of the genuinely communal creative moments in the Leopoldskron house in 1953.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXVIII, September 1, 1991, p. 27.

Chicago Tribune. September 15, 1991, XIV, p. 6.

Fetz, Gerhard. “The Works of Thomas Bernhard: Austrian Literature?” in Modern Austrian Literature. XVII, nos. 3/4 (1984), pp. 171-192.

Kirkus Reviews. LIX, July 1, 1991, p. 803.

Library Journal. CXVI, August, 1991, p. 140.

Meyerhofer, Nicholas J. “On Biography as Autobiography: Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher (The Succumber),” in St. Andrews Review. No. 30 (1986), pp. 15-19.. Thomas Bernhard, 1985.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVI, September 8, 1991, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly CCXXXVIII, July 5, 1991, p. 58.

Quill and Quire. LVII, July, 1991, p. 50.

Sharp, Francis Michael. “Literature as Self-Reflection: Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke,” in World Literature Today. LV (Autumn, 1981), pp. 603-607.

The Village Voice. October 8, 1991, p. S7.

The Wall Street Journal. October 8, 1991, p. A20.

The Washington Post Book World. XXI, September 15, 1991, p. 4.

Wolfschutz, Hans. “Thomas Bernhard: The Mask of Death,” in Modern Austrian Writing, 1980. Edited by A. Best and H. Wolfschutz.