The performance unexpectedly strikes the four brothers into a state of strange religious madness: they begin fervently crossing and prostrating themselves, their companions are dumbfounded and the riot does not take place. The condition and behaviour of the young men compel the civil authorities to consign them to the lunatic asylum in Aachen where they remain for the rest of their lives; they spend their days gazing with rapt attention at a crucifix and never uttering a word. But at midnight they start to their feet and for one hour precisely they chant ‘in a hideous voice’ something that resembles the setting they have heard of the Gloria in excelsis from the Mass. Their performance is, however, less like singing than like the howling of wild animals or of damned souls in hell; the impression of those who witness it is that the brothers are diabolically possessed, and Kleist’s depiction certainly hints that they have been reduced to a state of automatism, when they rise ‘with a simultaneous movement’ as midnight strikes. Kleist seems, moreover, to be quite well aware that the condition of the four young men could be regarded merely as a psychological phenomenon and that religious madness of one sort or another is a clinically attested fact. He is known to have been interested in psychopathology and to have visited madhouses to look at their inmates. It is highly probable that in his conception of this particular story he had been influenced by an account written by the poet Matthias Claudius of four patients at an institution in Hamburg: these were, Claudius reports, four brothers who spent most of their time in silence, except that whenever the bell was tolled to signify that someone in the asylum had died, they would sing part of a dirge and had thus come to be known as the ‘death cocks’ (Totenhähne). Since this account resembles the St Cecilia story in several particulars there can be little doubt that Kleist was acquainted with it, and in general with the fact that compulsive singing is a feature of the religious madness syndrome, evidently related to glossolalia or echolalia. But he also appears to have known that such ‘singing’ can in some cases be weird, cacophonous and terrifying. The report by Claudius was doubtless a source for his story, but an even more curious and striking parallel case occurred in England at the end of January 1973 and was widely reported in the press. The following extracts are from the Daily Telegraph of 2 February 1973:

Two young men and a woman, members of an American-based religious cult which encourages its followers to put themselves into a hypnotic trance, were in the psychiatric unit of Great Yarmouth hospital last night.

They were taken from a house in Stafford Road after neighbours, frightened by continuous wailing and chanting for three days, called in police and local church leaders…

The Rev. Stanley Miller… identified the chanting as a perverted form of glossolalia – a term for ‘speaking in tongues’, the mind having no control of what is said… It was the continuous chanting of one phrase, ‘Baby Jesus’, which frightened neighbours in the terrace…

Mr Miller added that when he saw the two women and three men in the house on Wednesday night they were in such an advanced state of trance as to be possessed by the devil. ‘Their eyes were closed and what they were doing was manifestly evil. The chanting was spine-chilling’…

The Times reported a neighbour as saying: ‘The chanting was something I never want to hear again. It was spine-chilling and could be heard fifty yards from the house.’ Similarly, the chanting of the four brothers in Kleist’s tale, when they begin it after their return from the church, wakes the neighbours who rush to the inn in horror to see what is going on.

In St Cecilia Kleist is taking us two ways into the realm of the uncanny: first there is the phenomenon of the madness itself, the psychotic manifestation in which, as Freud would say, the repudiated or repressed material re-emerges or returns to the supposedly rational surface of life. But secondly – and this appears to be the point that Kleist particularly wanted to emphasize – this sudden and seemingly pathological conversion of four anti-Catholic militants takes place in circumstances that cannot be wholly accounted for without supposing some sort of supernatural intervention. Only one of the nuns in the convent knows how to play and conduct the mysterious Italian Mass which, on the Abbess’s instructions, is to be performed. This particular nun, Sister Antonia, is on the morning of the festival lying mortally sick in her cell; nevertheless, she appears at the last moment, seats herself at the organ and conducts the music with triumphant and devastating effect. But witnesses later testify that Sister Antonia had never left her cell or even regained consciousness, dying the same evening. The conclusion seems to be that St Cecilia herself has impersonated Sister Antonia in order to save her convent and punish the ‘blasphemers’.

In the elaborated extension of the story for the book version, Kleist arranges the events in a manner that seems specifically designed to highlight the mysterious central occurrence, namely the direct intervention of the saint. The final version begins with two paragraphs of narration which take the reader only as far as the moment during the Corpus Christi Mass when, contrary to expectation, the sacred music proceeds without interruption. This narrative then breaks off, ending merely with a reference to the convent’s further half-century of prosperity until its secularization at the end of the Thirty Years War. The third paragraph takes up the tale six years after that Corpus Christi Day, introducing a new character who is not mentioned in the original version, and whose introduction increases the story’s dramatic poignancy: the mother of the four young men, having heard no news of them for all these years, comes to Aachen to make inquiries and to her horror discovers them in the madhouse, oblivious to everything but their strange monotonous life of religious contemplation and repetitive cacophonous chanting. She is told nothing about the connection between their madness and the intended iconoclastic riot, which has long been forgotten by most of Aachen. This omission of the explanatory connection creates a dramatic suspense which in the long fourth paragraph Kleist proceeds to resolve, using the device of retrospective (‘flashback’) narration. The mother visits a further new character, the cloth-merchant Veit Gotthelf, a former friend of the brothers, and his account takes us back to the point at which the second paragraph ended. During the Mass on Corpus Christi Day six years before, he and the other would-be iconoclasts had been awaiting the signal to disrupt the service, which one of the brothers was to have given. But no signal was given: instead, the brothers had suddenly bowed their heads as the music began and sunk to their knees in an attitude of the utmost devotion. After the service their followers had dispersed in bewilderment; later, having vainly waited for the brothers, Veit Gotthelf and some friends went back to the convent church and there found them still kneeling in prayer. Then follows the vivid description of their strange and terrifying behaviour at the inn that night and their eventual consignment to the asylum.