“Not a musical reading,” said Powell. “You all know your music—or you should—and we won’t sing for a day or two. No; I want you simply to read the words, as if this were a play. The librettist is with us, and he will be glad to clear up any difficulties about meanings.”
The company was in the main an intelligent one, perhaps because it was not what conventional critics would call a company of the first order. The singers were, upon the whole, young and North American; though they had all had plenty of opera experience they were not accustomed to the usages of the greatest opera theatres of the world. Reading held no terrors for them. There were one or two, of whom Nutcombe Puckler was the leader, who could not see any reason to speak anything that could possibly be sung, but they were willing to give it a try, to humor Powell, in whom they sensed a man of ideas who knew what he was doing. Some, like Hans Holzknecht, who was to sing the role of Arthur, did not read English with ease, and Miss Clara Intrepidi, who was to be Morgan Le Fay, stumbled over words that she had sung with no difficulty in her rehearsals with Watty. The one who read like an actor—an intelligent actor—was Oliver Twentyman, and the best of the group found that by Act Two they were trying, with varying success, to read like Oliver Twentyman.
If the company was youthful in the main, Oliver Twentyman balanced matters by being old. Not astronomically old, as some people insisted; not in his nineties. But he was said to be over eighty, and he was one of the wonders of the operatic world. His exquisitely produced, silvery tenor was always described by critics as small, but it had been heard with perfect clarity in all the great opera theatres of the world, and he was a favourite at Glyndebourne and several of the more distinguished, smaller American festivals. His particular line of work was characters of fantasy—Sellem in The Rake’s Progress, the Astrologer in Le Coq d’Or, and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It had been a great coup to get him for Merlin. His reading of his part in the libretto was a delight.
“Marvellous!” said Powell. “Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you to take heed of Mr. Twentyman’s pronunciation of English; it is in the highest tradition.”
“Yes, but are not the vowels very distorted?” said Clara Intrepidi. “I mean, impure for singing. We have our vowels, right? The five? Ah, Ay, Ee, Oh, Oo. Those we can sing. You would not ask us to sing these impure sounds?”
“There are twelve vowel sounds in English,” said Powell; “and as it is a language which I myself had to acquire, not being born to it, you must not think me prejudiced. What are those vowels? They are all in this advice:
Who knows ought of art must learn
And then take his ease.
Every one of the twelve sings beautifully, and none gives such delicacy as the Indeterminate Vowel which is often a ‘y’ at the end of a word. ‘Very’ must be pronounced as a long and a short syllable, and not as two longs. I am going to nag you about pronunciation, I promise you.”
Miss Intrepidi pouted slightly, as though to suggest that the barbarities of English speech would have no effect on her singing. But Miss Donalda Roche, an American who was to sing Guenevere, was making careful notes.
“What was that about knowing art, Mr. Powell?” she said, and Geraint sang the vowel sequence for her, joined by Oliver Twentyman, who seemed, with the greatest politeness, to wish to show Miss Intrepidi that there were really twelve differentiated sounds, and that none of them were describable as impure.
On the whole, the singers enjoyed reading the libretto, and the day’s work showed clearly which were actors who could sing, and which singers who had learned to act. Marta Ullmann, the tiny creature who was to sing the small but impressive role of Elaine, came out very well with
No tears, no sighing, no despair
No trembling, dewy smile of care
No mourning weeds
Nought that discloses
A heart that bleeds;
But looks contented I will bear
And o’er my cheeks strew roses.
Unto the world I may not weep,
But save my Sorrow all, and keep
A secret heart, sweet soul, for thee,
As the great earth and swelling sea.
But it was not quite such a good moment when Donalda Roche and Giles Shippen tried to read, in unison,
O Love!
Time flies on restless pinions
Constant never:
Be constant
And thou chainest time forever.
Nor was Miss Intrepidi the celebrated audience-tamer she was reputed to be when faced with her words to the villain Modred:
I know there is some maddening secret
Hid in your words (and at each turn of thought
Comes up a skull) like an anatomy
Found in a weedy hole, ’mongst stones and roots
And straggling reptiles, with his tongueless mouth
That tells of Arthur’s murder.
But Miss Intrepidi was a real pro, and having made a mess of her words she cried, “I’ll get it; don’t worry—I’ll get it!” and Powell assured her that nobody had the least doubt she would.
When the reading was completed, late in the afternoon, Gunilla spoke to the company for the first time.
“You see what our Director is doing?” she said. “He wants you to sing words, not tones. Anybody can sing the music; it takes an artist to sing the words. That’s what I want, too. Simon Darcourt has found us a brilliant libretto; Hulda Schnakenburg has realized a fine score from Hoffmann’s notes, and we must think of this opera as, among other things, an entirely new look at Hoffmann as a composer; this is music-drama before Wagner had put pen to paper. So—sing it like early Wagner.”
“Ah—Wagner!” said Miss Intrepidi. “So now I know.”
All of this, and the careful rehearsals which followed—on the floor, as Powell said, meaning that he was planning the moves and when necessary the gestures of the singers—was victuals and drink to the Cranes. (They were always referred to as the Cranes, though Mabel took pains to explain that she was still Mabel Muller, and had sacrificed nothing of her individuality—though she had obviously sacrificed her figure—in their spiritual union.) Al cornered and buttonholed everybody, and made himself conspicuous in his desire not to be obtrusive. He was on the prowl to capture and note down every motivation, and the notes for the great Regiebuch swelled to huge proportions. Oliver Twentyman was a Golconda to Al.
Here was tradition! Twentyman had, in his young days, sung with many famous conductors, and his training had become legendary in his lifetime. He had worked, when not much more than a boy, with the great David ffrangcon-Davies, and repeated to Al many of that master’s precepts. More wonderful still, he had worked for three years with the redoubtable William Shakespeare—not, he explained to the gaping Al, the playwright, but the singing-teacher, who had been born in 1849 and had worked with many of the great ones until his death in 1931—who had always insisted that singing, even at its most elaborate, was based upon words, upon words, upon words.
“It’s like a dream!” said Al.
“It’s a craft, my boy,” said Nutcombe Puckler, who was still waiting for a decisive word about the Blurt, or possibly just the Sneeze. “And never forget the funny stuff. Wagner hadn’t much use for it; he thought Meistersinger was a comic opera, of course, and you should have seen my Beckmesser in St. Louis a few years ago! I stopped the show twice!”
Al was a special nuisance to Darcourt. “This libretto—some of it gets close to poetry,” he said.
“That was the idea,” said Simon.
“Nobody would take you for a poet,” said Al.
“Probably not,” said Darcourt; “when are you expecting the baby?”
“That’s a worry,” said Al. “Sweetness is getting pretty tired. And worried, too. We’re both worried. We’re lucky to be sharing this great experience, to take our minds off it.”
Mabel nodded, hot, heavy, and dispirited. She longed for the move to Stratford, out of the terrible, humid heat
of a Toronto summer. As she lay on the bed in their cheap lodgings at night, while Al read aloud to her from the macabre tales of Hoffmann, she sometimes wondered if Al knew how much she was sacrificing to his career. As women have wondered, no doubt, since first mankind was troubled by glimmerings of what we now call art, and scholarship.
“Will you give my feet a rub, Al? My ankles are killing me.”
“Sure, Sweetness, just as soon as we finish this story.”
Why, he wondered, was Sweetness crying when, twenty minutes later, he got around to rubbing her feet?
(11)
ETAH IN LIMBO
What an amusing drama life is when one is not obliged to be one of the characters! No, no; that sounds like Kater Murr! But I have enjoyed myself more in the past few weeks than at any time since my death. Homer was quite wrong about the gloomy half-life of the dead. The remoteness, the removal, of my afterlife is vastly agreeable. I see all the people who are preparing my opera; I comprehend their feelings without needing to share them painfully; I applaud their ambitions and I pity their follies. But as I am wholly unable to do anything about them, I am not torn by guilt or responsibility. It is thus, I suppose, that the gods view humankind. (I apologize if, by speaking of “the gods” in the plural, I am being offensive to whatever awaits me when I move into the next phase of my afterlife.) Of course, the gods could intervene, and frequently did so, but not always happily from a human standpoint.
The trials of Powell and Watkin Bourke are very familiar to me. How often have I wrangled with singers who thought Italian was the only language of song, and who cried down our noble German as barbarous. Of course they made exquisite sounds, some of them, but they had a limited range of meanings for their sounds; Italian is a dear language and we owe much to it, but our northern tongues are richer in poetic subtlety, in shadows, and shadows were the essence of my work both as composer and as author. How I have struggled with singers whose one desire was to “vocalize”—a word that had just come into fashion and seemed to them the height of elegance and musical refinement. How deliciously they yelled when one wished that they should utter some meaning! How pressingly they would urge me to change German words to others with which they could make a prettier sound! And how incomprehensible was the word that lay ravaged at the bottom of any sound they made, as they roared, or cooed, or squalled, or sobbed with such richness of inane musicality! “Gracious lady and supreme artist,” I would say to some fat bully of a soprano, “if you pronounce the word on the tone no louder than you could speak it, it will be sound enough, and replete with significance that will ravish your hearers.” But they never believed me. Nothing encourages self-esteem like success as a singer.
And why not? If you can stir an audience to its depths with your A altissimo, what need you care for anything else?
Or if you can make an audience laugh, is it surprising if you cease to care how? This man who wants to sneeze, or blurt his wine in somebody’s face, is different only in kind from the Jack Puddings of my time. With them all comedy was rooted in sausage; give them a sausage to eat and they would undertake to keep a sufficient part of the audience in roars of mirth for five minutes; allow them to add an onion to the sausage and it was eight minutes. How sad such merriment is! How divorced from the Comic Spirit!
I am becoming devoted to Schnak. Devoted, that is to say, only as a spirit may be; she is cleaner since the Swedish woman seduced her, but she is without charm. It is her musical genius that enslaves me. Yes, genius is the word I shall use. By that word I mean that she will have enough individual quality to impose herself upon the music of her time as a truly serious artist, and she may achieve fame, even if it follows her death. After all, Schubert is now known as a genius of the first order, yet when I became aware of his work very few people in my part of Germany had heard of him, and he did not survive me by more than five years. Of all the music I know, Schnak’s, working on the foundations I laid down, most resembles that of Schubert. When she has done it best, our work together has that melancholy serenity, that acceptance of the pathos of human life, that speaks of Schubert. Dr. Dahl-Soot knows it, but the others say the music is like Weber, because they know that Weber was my friend.
That strange ass Crane is tracing all the music to Weber. He is one of those scholars who is certain that everything in art is laboriously derived from something that came before it. Much as I admired Weber, I never saw a Weber score to which I would willingly have signed my own name.
Poor Schubert, dying slowly, as I did, and of what was essentially the same disease. Nobody, so far as I know, has found out why that disease causes one man to die a driveller and a horror, and another to compose, in his last year, three of the supreme pianoforte sonatas in all the realm of music.
I should not be hard on Crane. Perhaps he is worrying about that baby, or his swollen woman, Mabel Muller. There is an erotic unction about Al that must not be ignored. Mabel, poor wretch, must be ranked low on the list of the victims of art.
There are other victims, of course, and, from my point of view, greater ones. I am sad for the Cornishes, Arthur and Maria. They long so humbly to be counted among the artists, but they are not given even the artistic status accorded to Nutcombe Puckler. Without meaning to be cruel, the artists, and even those novices in art, the gofer girls, reject them because they do not appear to be doing anything, although it is their money that is the underpinning of the whole affair. Not doing anything, when every day they write fat cheques for this, that, and the other? Writing those cheques because they truly love art and wish it to prosper! Writing those cheques because they would sing if they could, or paint their faces and join the crowd on the stage!
I sometimes saw people like them in the theatres where I worked as Powell works now. Wealthy merchants, or minor nobility, who footed the bills, and not always to gain a place in the ranks of society but because they so greatly loved those things that they could not do. A patron has one of two courses: he may domineer and spoil the broth by insisting on too much salt or pepper; or he may simply do what God has enabled him to do, and that is to pay, pay, pay! I was as bad as anyone in my time. I kissed hands, bowed low, and paid compliments, but I eagerly wished them all in hell, because they were underfoot when my work was being done. Seeing myself as my own creation, the master-musician Johannes Kreisler, I scorned my patrons and saw in them nothing but the disciples of the odious Kater Murr! As if there were no self-seeking among artists! I wish I could comfort Arthur and Maria, who feel the subtle cold of the artists’ scorn, but placed as I am, I cannot do it.
I can see, however, that their fate is different, and who may hope to escape his fate? They are living out, in a comic mimesis, the fate of Arthur and Guenevere, but to be ruled by a comic fate is not to feel oneself as a figure of comedy. It is their fate to be rich, and to seem powerful, in a world of art where riches are not of first importance, and their power is unavailing.
Like all the others, I long for the move to Stratford.
7
When the company moved to Stratford and, in Powell’s phrase, went into high gear on the production, it would have been easy to miss the fact that Schnak was deeply in love with Geraint. She tagged after him; but the Stage Manager, her assistants, and the gofer girls also tagged after him. She hung upon his words; but Waldo Harris, the Stage Director, and Dulcy Ringgold, the Designer, also hung upon his words. Nobody took any notice of Schnak’s infatuation but Darcourt; nobody else saw the special quality in her tagging and hanging. Nobody else saw the lovelight in her eyes.
They were not eyes in which one would look for the lovelight. They were small, pebbly, squinty little eyes. Nor was Schnak a figure upon whom love sat like an accustomed garment; her motion was not graceful, because, in one of Darcourt’s Old Ontario phrases, she was as bow-legged as a hog going to war; her voice was as snarly as ever, though under Gunilla’s guidance her vocabulary was larger and not so dirty; she had no graces, and the least of the gofers could have wiped the floor
with her in a contest of charm. But Schnak was in love, and this was not a matter of bodily awakening and bodily satisfaction as it had been with Gunilla, but beglamoured and yearning passion. This is the romanticism in which her work has drenched and soused her; I am sure she tosses on her bed and murmurs his name to her pillow, thought Darcourt.
He took his chance to ask Gunilla if she were aware of this. “Oh, yes,” said the Doctor; “it was bound to happen. She must try everything, and Powell is an obvious mark for a young girl’s love.”
“But you don’t mind?”
“Why should I mind? The child is not my property. Oh, we have had merry hours, to the great scandal of that fat busybody Professor Raven, but that was a teacher-and-pupil thing. Not love. I have known love, Simon, and with men also, let me assure you, and I know what it is. I am not such a romantic as to think of it as the great educational force—broadening her experience, enlarging her vision, and all that nonsense—but it is something everybody feels who is not a complete cabbage. I must see that it doesn’t spoil her work; people seem to have forgotten that all this elaborate contrivance boils down to an examination exercise, and Hulda must get her degree, if there is not to be a great waste of money.”
Elaborate contrivance indeed it was. The company was lucky in having the theatre for the last three weeks of rehearsal. Not the stage; not yet. There was still a week of performances of a play which called for only one small set, but all the workrooms and both rehearsal rooms were now devoted to Arthur, and during the last two weeks the stage would be available to the singers when it was not wanted by the technicians.
The technicians bulked very large. It seemed to Darcourt that they almost swamped the opera. On huge paint-frames in one of the workrooms the scenery was being painted, for Powell wanted proper scenes, and not the usual wrinkled cyclorama, suggesting a sky that had shrunk and faded in the wash.
“In Hoffmann’s day there was no stage light, in our sense,” he said, “and anything like a lighting effect had to be painted on the scenery. And that’s how Dulcy is doing it.”