Song and music

Song and music in the novel are more than entertainment: they create fellowship, offer consolation, and carry histories that characters struggle to speak aloud. The same practice can turn a slaughtering room into a communal meeting place, shelter a child at bedtime, or bring the memory of a wartime friend into the present. Across these settings, singing becomes both a form of care and a vessel for grief, with a reach that exceeds any one singer or community.

A Club Built on Shared Voices

Fidelis Waldvogel misses the singing club he belonged to in Ludwigsruhe, where membership had been limited to master butchers. In America, he sees no reason to keep music confined by profession and begins a club that will become a town institution. Its first meeting takes place in the high-ceilinged slaughtering room at Waldvogel’s Meats, where the walls return the sound to the singers. The choice of venue joins music to Fidelis’s working life, but the people drawn there make the club a wider civic gathering.

The company includes the bank employee Portland Chavers, banker Zumbrugge and one of his clerks, bootlegger Newhall, Sheriff Hock, Doctor Heech, and Roy Watzka, the town drunk and Delphine Watzka’s father. Newhall supplies beer; the sheriff tolerates the arrangement, while Heech tries to monitor how much the men drink, even as his vigilance may soften when they persuade him to join them. Fidelis provides crackers, cheese, and summer sausage, as well as the good humor that accompanies his singing. The group’s mixed membership matters: men divided by occupation, reputation, and civic position become a chorus, teaching one another songs and joining their voices in familiar melodies. Their first gathering lasts until dawn, and Eva falls asleep to their singing, a sound that becomes part of her weekly routine.

The club’s musical fellowship does not erase the tensions around it. As German immigrants change their names, display American flags, and speak English where they can, some singers become uneasy that German-language songs might be taken as disloyal. The club answers the concern by singing patriotic American songs, though repetition makes those selections wear thin. Its repertoire then draws on songs learned by Roy in the hobo jungle, murdered-girl ballads, labor songs, a tune the men call the Polish national anthem, and a Métis waltz Cyprian Lazarre taught them. The shifts of language and genre show a group negotiating belonging through performance: it can reassure itself with patriotic music and then return to older, more varied songs that carry the members’ different experiences.

War, Silence, and the Song for a Friend

For Fidelis and Cyprian, music exists beside a war they rarely discuss. They shared the First World War, and its memories return in fragments: a picture, a sound, a word. Each man may pause under the pressure of recollection, struggle inwardly, and continue; the other senses the disturbance and offers a joke or takes a long drink rather than demanding an explanation. Their silence is not evidence that the past has gone. It is a practice of living with what remains, while music and companionship offer brief ways to carry the pressure together.

Fidelis’s account of Johannes makes that relationship between song and memory explicit. Johannes had saved Fidelis twice in combat, but in the war’s final days Fidelis remained beside Johannes as he lay dying in a damaged aristocratic house amid continuing shelling. The wounded in the cellars were in danger, and Fidelis stayed upstairs with his friend. Johannes asked him to sing. In the freezing room, amid the sounds of the shattered building, Fidelis sang; afterward he wrapped Johannes’s face with a silk scarf his mother had given him for luck, then left without burying him. The song does not undo the death or resolve Fidelis’s guilt at leaving. It is the last act of companionship he can offer, and the memory remains available to him years later when he finally tells Delphine Watzka what happened.

The club also gives Roy a setting in which grief can turn into performance. During a period of sobriety, he interprets Delphine’s remark about everyone trying to fill an emptiness as an earnest direction for his life, though he admits that nothing works for him as well as alcohol. At a gathering of the singers, sitting among crates and creaking chairs in an arbor partly pulled down by grapevines, Roy lectures about the void and the kinds of things people use to fill it. The episode places song-making and talk side by side: the club can sustain fellowship, but it cannot guarantee that a member’s sorrow will be eased or prevent a return to drinking.

Songs as Care at Home

Fidelis, who rarely displays tenderness openly, uses song to care for his family. When Eva is ill, their son Markus comes upon Fidelis kneeling beside her bed, holding her foot and silently weeping. Fidelis gently tucks the blanket around her feet, sits beside the bed, takes her hand, and sings her favorite song, the one about the water maidens on a river in Germany. Markus listens from the doorway and later falls asleep with the sound of his father’s voice in his ears, his fingers touching the paper heart in his pillow. The scene places grief and comfort within the same act: Fidelis’s song does not deny Eva’s illness, but it gives the family a moment of closeness that Markus will remember.

The bedtime singing is part of a repeated pattern. When the boys were small, when they were ill or could not sleep, and when Eva asked him to, Fidelis sang old German lieder in a restrained voice that filled the room with a comforting resonance. Markus especially loves the song about the Lorelei and asks to hear it repeatedly. On the journey that takes Fidelis, Delphine, and the boys away from Germany, a sleepy, miserable Markus asks his father to sing. Fidelis repeats the Lorelei song until the passengers’ breathing settles, then hums another tune to keep himself awake. For Delphine, who is only gradually working out the meaning of the Lorelei song, the moment reveals a side of Fidelis she has not fully known: a man capable of harsh work and guarded mourning who also sings to steady his sons. The song becomes part of their passage forward, even as its imagery recalls an older German world.

Public Memory and the Voices of the Dead

Music also provides a way for difficult histories to enter public life, though not always as a settled account. In 1954, Fidelis and the surviving master butchers gather in Ludwigsruhe to sing at the unveiling of a monument to victims of the bombing. Delphine watches as the singers take their places before the crowd. Their voices rise together, forming what seems to her a solid wall of melody. As she listens, the music becomes entangled with the history of the town and the destruction the ceremony is meant to commemorate. She imagines smoke and ash coming from the singers’ mouths, an unsettling vision that makes the living chorus seem to carry the residue of violence even as the gathering proceeds in public ceremony. Their song is beautiful to her ear, but its beauty does not make the past simple or harmless.

The novel widens this connection between voice and remembrance through Step-and-a-Half’s fragment of a Ghost Dance shirt. She believes the shirt offered its wearer comfort through contact with the dead, and understands the Ghost Dance songs as part of that connection. In the present, songs travel through Argus from many traditions: German songs, voyageurs’ paddling songs, American anthems, Cree lullabies, hymns, and other music. The range matters because no single community or history owns the act of singing. A song can move between speakers and listeners, and between the living and those they remember; the novel presents music as inherited and shared rather than wholly original.

That idea returns in Erich Waldvogel’s life as a German prisoner of war in America. His voice changes in adolescence, surprising him with its richness, and he begins singing to pass time in camp. Other prisoners join him, exchange words, and make singing a nightly event. The songs enter their dreams, while the men’s sleeplessness and distress remain audible in the bunkhouses. Erich longs for Ludwigsruhe and memories of his grandfather and brother, but avoids revealing his American upbringing or family identity. To him, singing with the prisoners is a way to occupy time and form a group, even as the political beliefs he has adopted make his ties to his family difficult to acknowledge. Later, when Markus learns that a prisoner named Waldvogel never speaks but can sing, the description becomes a clue to Erich’s identity. In this way music carries a recognition that ordinary conversation has not supplied.

A Motif That Outlasts Its Singers

Song repeatedly crosses boundaries that other forms of communication cannot: between comrades who do not discuss their war, between a father and sons who need comfort, between immigrant traditions and a changing American town, and between the living and the remembered dead. The novel does not make music a cure. Fidelis’s song cannot save Johannes; the club cannot fill Roy’s emptiness; public singing cannot dissolve the history behind Ludwigsruhe’s memorial. Its power is more specific and more durable: it gives people a means to accompany one another, to preserve fragments of experience, and to make grief audible without requiring it to be fully explained.