And Modred’s response:
The temptation of Guenevere by Lancelot. His declaration of love and her sad cry:
The revelation to the lovers Guenevere and Lancelot that the Maid Elaine, whom Lancelot deflowered when under Morgan’s evil spell, must die of her love, but die gladly:
And Lancelot’s recognition of the treachery of his love, and his bitter acceptance of implacable destiny:
The audience—not, one would have supposed, greatly susceptible to Arthurian romance—were now wholly in the grip of the opera, and the buzz of enthusiasm at the interval was heartening.
Darcourt had something very much on his mind.
“Penny,” he said, cornering her in the foyer, “will you let Clem have your seat for the Third Act? I’d like you to be with me for at least a part of this.”
“Nicely said, Simon, but I know what you mean. I’ve been talking with Clem, and whatever he has been dousing himself with, he’s overdone it. I was almost asphyxiated, and I know what you must have been going through. ‘A bundle of myrrh is my well beloved to me: he lieth all night between my breasts’. But not if I can help it. I’ll be delighted to relieve you. We’ve pulled it off nicely, don’t you think?”
We, again. What have you done? thought Darcourt. A few sessions of bitchy criticism of my work.\
“My guess, for what it’s worth, is that our Snark is really a Snark, and not a speck of a Boojum. Did you ever hear such enthusiasm? In Canada, I mean, the Home of Modified Rapture.”
“It is certainly going well,” said Darcourt, who had sighted Yerko leaning, with pachydermatous elegance, over a very small but excitable lady with orange hair. “Let’s go in. Third Act any minute now.”
The Third Act was very much as Geraint had outlined it, so long ago as it now seemed, when they had dined unhappily on Maria’s Arthurian feast. Perhaps inevitably the emphasis was different. The music for Merlin, when he denounced the villain Modred, was arresting:
And later:
Then Modreds unrepentant, properly villainous death:
But it was Hans Hoizknecht, as the King, who had the best of it. Fine actor, fine singer, he drew the most from the shattered Arthur’s recognition of his unrecognized incest, the bitterness of his son Modred’s hate, and—heaviest of all—the betrayal by his beloved wife and his beloved friend. But his invocation to Love, as a charity beyond even the poetry of fleshly possession, was his best moment, and his conclusion—
–moved many of the audience, somewhat to their embarrassment, to tears.
Walter Scott is very good, but Schnak has raised him to another level, thought Darcourt. I wonder if she really understood what she was setting to music? If so, there’s hope for her, tormented child as she is. But with musicians you can never be quite sure.
At the death of Arthur, the scene melted magically again to the shores of the Enchanted Mere, which had not been seen since the Overture. But it was not quite the same scene, for this was deeply autumnal; leaves, and a few snowflakes, scudded across the stage where the Knights stood, leaning on their swords. They sang:
The body of Arthur—but not the living Hoizknecht—was placed in a shallow craft in which it sailed across the water, and as it disappeared Merlin flung after it Caliburn, now safely in its scabbard, and an armoured hand rose from the waves and seized it. The great chords that had introduced the opera were heard again, and the curtain fell.
Marshalled by Gwen Larking, Penny Raven, Clement Hollier, and Simon Darcourt appeared during the final curtain-call. Nobody knew who they were or why they were there, but at the end of every operatic first night a few people make inexplicable appearances, and the charity of the audience includes them.
Geraint, surprisingly steady on his feet, was thunderously applauded. He appeared to be in excellent spirits and looked wondrously romantic in full evening dress. He and Gunilla were, indeed, the commanding figures in the rather untidy tableau at the final curtain.
Schnak, Darcourt observed with satisfaction, managed a number of curtsies without a stagger.
11
Champagne! So much of it, and not a drop for me. It is one of the inconveniences of Limbo that one retains all one’s carnal appetites but is utterly debarred from satisfying them. So, as I move unseen through the party that follows the first public performance of my Arthur, I am aware of brimming glasses and full bottles everywhere, and because of my spiritual condition—we are very chaste in Limbo, oh yes, very chaste—I am denied even the elfin satisfaction of tipping a few glasses down shirt-fronts and into the crannies of bosoms. I, who once drank champagne from pint pots! But I gather that the wine has gone up in the world and this crowd sips it reverently.
I suppose this is my night of triumph. My opera, projected but never finished, has now been finished indeed, and on the whole to my satisfaction. Am I a little jealous of the Schnakenburg child? Certainly she has a deft hand with orchestration, and what I sense to be a developing gift for melody, but I do not feel the true Romantic fervour in her, not yet. Perhaps it will never come again, as we knew it who first felt its pain and beauty; we, of whom it was my luck to be among the foremost.
Did I like the performance? Ah, there we move into a realm where I cannot be sure of my answer. The music was played and sung vastly better than it would have been in my Dresden days. The orchestra far outshone the assemblage of villains I had to put up with, and the Dahl-Soot woman had much of the daemonic spirit of my own Kapellmeister Kreisler. The stage pictures were thrilling. The singers, marvellous in the telling, could act, and did so, even when they were not singing. What would the Eunike family—three of whom I had to use in my production of Undine—have said to that? This was indeed a music drama, performed with a unity of style and intent quite impossible in my time.
But—one is a creature of one’s time. I missed elements in this production that were familiar, rather than good.
The prompter, for one. Oh, those prompters of my time, who all seemed to have been born old, all born with a cold in the head, all addicted to snuff and brandy, all foul-tempered and all soured from the nape to the chine with their personal failure as composers, or singers, or conductors! They crouched in the little hutch among the footlights, which was shielded from the audience, as a usual thing, by an ornamental shell, bent forward into a hood. Only their heads showed above the stage level, and their heads were heated to roasting-point by the oil lamps in the footlights. Below stage level they were frozen by the draughts of the undercroft of the stage, and every time the stage-hands set a trap in action there was a rush of air as some god or demon was whisked upward onto the stage, and the prompter was choked with the dust of years. In this living hell the prompter hissed his directions to the singers and flung them their cues just before they were to sing, often giving them the note in the cracked voice of a man dying of phthisic, complicated by snuff and the scenery dust—which some of the more spiteful singers took care to kick in his face.