Before Music Master – Petrus Teacher-Student Relationship

The former Music Master–Petrus relationship is a bond of musical instruction, reverence, and intimate care that becomes most visible at the Master’s end of life. Petrus, once among his favorite pupils, serves as secretary and companion, witnessing a physical decline accompanied by increasing spiritual composure. After the Master dies, Petrus tries to preserve their bond by turning the places and objects associated with him into a shrine. That devotion brings him close to abandoning life; Joseph Knecht’s intervention eventually guides him back into the Castalian hierarchy.

Apprenticeship and Companionship

Petrus came from Monteport to see Knecht bearing the former Music Master’s cordial greetings and invitation. In explaining why the visit mattered, he described himself as a former pupil and, more particularly, as one of the old man’s favorites. The Master, he said, had opened the mystery of music to him and made him capable of serving it; Petrus attributed his later ideas, respect for the Order, maturity, and inner concord to that teacher’s influence.

For the year before the visit, Petrus had lived beside the Master as secretary and companion, an assignment given him by the present Music Master. He shared meals and walks with his teacher, made music with him, and slept in an adjoining room, while pursuing some studies and courses of his own. His attendance was not merely an official duty: he described a deep attachment and veneration, and regarded proximity to the old man as a privilege. The young pupil’s account makes the relationship reciprocal in practice, even though it remains framed by the Master’s authority as teacher and patron.

Witness to the Master’s Aging

Petrus’s closeness gave him an unusually sustained view of the former Music Master’s physical aging. The Master grew weaker and frailer, ate less, and returned from short walks increasingly tired, but was never really sick. At the same time, Petrus saw him becoming more spiritual, devout, dignified, and simple-hearted in the tranquility of old age. This change was gradual rather than a sudden collapse: the Master continued taking little walks and playing music every day, and until shortly before Petrus’s visit he still gave organ lessons to two beginners, having always preferred the company of the youngest pupils.

The ending of those lessons alerted Petrus. When the Master dismissed the two pupils, Petrus began watching him more closely, treating the change as a sign even though the Master’s health was not acutely failing. The old man’s growing silence alarmed him more than any single physical symptom. Over several months the Master had almost ceased speaking; he still heard nearly as well as before, but seemed increasingly to inhabit an inward world, detached from ordinary company. Petrus urged a few of the Master’s former friends, including Knecht, to visit while recognition and interest remained possible.

The relationship’s care also contained a limit Petrus could not remove: the Master did not want to be tended. Although Petrus served as secretary and attendant, he said the difficulty of the role lay in the Master’s refusal of care; the old man still wanted only to give, never to take. The contrast is central to Petrus’s later response. His desire to preserve and serve the Master after death extends the care he practiced in life, but loses the balance implicit in the teacher’s own self-effacing example.

Devotion After the Master’s Death

After the Master died, Petrus’s close attendance passed into a prolonged, maladaptive form of mourning. He remained at the pavilion where the Master had spent his final days and guarded it, keeping its furnishings and arrangements painstakingly unchanged. The room of death—with its armchair, deathbed, and harpsichord—became a shrine in his eyes. His other principal activity was tending the grave. He imagined his vocation as a permanent service to the dead man, watching over the places tied to his memory as a temple servant might guard a sacred site, and perhaps hoped that the pavilion and grave would become destinations for pilgrims.

This memorial devotion turned imitation into self-endangerment. Petrus took no food for several days after the funeral, then restricted himself to the small, infrequent meals the Master had eaten in his last days. His conduct suggested that he meant to imitate the old man so completely that he would soon follow him in death. When he could not sustain that course, he instead clung to the prospect of becoming permanent guardian of the house and grave. His grief therefore kept him bound not only to the Master’s memory but to the distinctive position he had occupied as favorite pupil and intimate attendant; returning to ordinary duties seemed intolerable to him.

The attachment’s aftermath also exposes the difference between remembering a teacher and making him an object of worship. Petrus’s preservation of the room and its contents treats the dead Master’s former surroundings as if they could hold the relationship intact. Knecht later challenges the belief that founding such a cult is either a religious act or something viable within Castalia. His correction does not deny Petrus’s loyalty; it separates genuine affection from a memorial practice that has stopped the pupil from resuming a life among the living.

Knecht’s Intervention and Petrus’s Return

Petrus’s condition became a concern for the Monteport authorities after he had to be removed by force from the pavilion. His distress persisted, and he was kept under observation in an infirmary cell, where the usual disciplinary response was poorly suited to his withdrawn and grieving state. Though Petrus had been the former Music Master’s last favorite pupil, he was not simply restored to his former place when the teacher died: the role that had organized his life had disappeared, and he could not readily return to commonplace responsibilities.

Knecht was initially reluctant to interfere in a Monteport student’s troubles, which were outside the ordinary scope of his Waldzell office. When he decided to help, however, he proposed taking Petrus under his wing on the condition that the young man be treated as well and allowed to travel alone. His invitation asked Petrus to visit and hinted that Knecht hoped to hear an account of the former Master’s last days. The prospect of leaving the pavilion and its difficulties proved welcome. Petrus accepted a proper meal, received a travel pass, and set out on foot for Waldzell.

At Waldzell, Knecht arranged for Petrus to stay among the Archive’s guests and instructed everyone to ignore his jitteriness. He was treated neither as a delinquent nor as a patient, nor as someone exceptional. Knecht then gave him a supervised, deliberately limited task: to record the former Music Master’s final musical exercises and studies. Petrus also took on minor routine Archive work, ostensibly because the staff was overburdened. The arrangement kept the old teacher’s musical legacy in view while giving Petrus ordinary work and a place among other people, rather than letting his identity remain fixed as keeper of a shrine.

Once Petrus had calmed and seemed ready to fit into the hierarchy again, Knecht addressed his belief in the dead Master’s cult directly through a series of brief talks. Petrus remained frightened of returning to Monteport even after he appeared otherwise cured, so Knecht secured him a post as assistant music teacher in one of the lower elite schools. Petrus behaved acceptably in that position. Their relationship was not a replacement for his bond with the former Music Master: Knecht’s role was to help him relinquish an impossible memorial vocation and carry his musical formation into a life of service.

The Relationship’s Significance

The former Music Master’s influence survives in Petrus as both an education and an attachment. Petrus credits him with opening music to him and shaping his intellectual and spiritual maturity; his close attendance in the final year gives that gratitude a practical form. Yet the story distinguishes the teacher’s effect from Petrus’s attempt to preserve the teacher unchanged. The Master’s late-life simplicity and refusal to be served stand against the pupil’s drive to guard every object and place associated with him.

Petrus’s trajectory also reveals why attentive care matters within Castalia. The former Music Master had helped form a pupil capable of deep devotion, but after his death that devotion became a danger when it could no longer find expression in reciprocal teaching and companionship. Knecht’s response does not erase the loss or dismiss the bond. By giving Petrus a modest archive assignment and then a teaching post, he redirects the relationship’s legacy from the cult of the dead toward music, education, and participation in the living community.