She had qualified beyond question for her Master of Music, and her reputation as a brat and a nuisance had nothing to do with the matter—apart from making her disliked and even feared by some members of the Faculty.
Predictably Schnak had not chosen to appear at Convocation, properly gowned and dressed to receive her degree at the hands of the Chancellor. She rejected all such ceremonial, or suggestion of a rite de passage, with her favourite term of disapproval. Shit. But she had set to work immediately on preparations for her doctorate, and when autumn came, and she presented herself at the seminars in Romantic Themes in Nineteenth-Century Opera, Traditional Compositional Techniques, and History of Performance Practice, she had already done more reading than most of the other students would do during the year to come, and she threw herself into the obligatory work on Composition and Theory Research with what would have looked like enthusiasm in someone else, but seemed more like angry zealotry in Schnak.
As well as heavy involvement in her university work, she had found time to write the music for After Infinity, and the auditorium was filled with students of drama, of film, and of any manifestation of the avant-garde. An admired student genius had written the scenario and directed the film; great things were expected. There was to be no dialogue, in order that the immediacy of the early silent film might be recaptured and any taint of merely literary values avoided. There would, however, be music, for Chaplin had given his blessing to music as an accompaniment to film, particularly when he wrote the music himself. The student genius could not write music, but he discerned a fellow genius in Schnak, and she had provided music. She had rejected the idea of using a synthesizer, and had composed her score for a piano that had been doctored with pieces of parchment fastened over the strings, assisted by a Swanee whistle ingeniously played under a metal tub, and that simplest of instruments, a comb covered with tissue paper. The effect was of a vaguely melodious but unfocussed buzzing, punctuated by shrieks, and everyone agreed that it had added much to the general effect.
The film-maker was scornful of what he called “linear” quality in a script, so his film bounded along in unconnected sections, leaving the spectators to make out as best they could what was going on. It was not too difficult. Humanity was facing the ultimate predicament; a nuclear leak had rendered all mankind, male and female, sterile. What was to become of the race? Could a woman be found, almost at the point of bearing a child, whose child would have escaped the curse of sterility? If that child could be brought to birth, how should it be nourished? Its mother’s breasts would obviously—well, obviously to the film-maker—be dry, or a source of poison. Might a man, in case of dire global need, suckle a child? This question enabled several sequences to be shown in which male friends of the film-maker—the cast had all worked on a voluntary and friendly basis—strained with selfless zeal to produce milk from their flat and unlikely paps, and one or two of them actually did so, the milk being simulated very cleverly with shaving cream. But it was discovered—during one of the portions of the story that had not been thought worth filming—that one fertile female had escaped the nuclear curse. She appeared as a simple child of twelve (the daughter of the film-maker’s landlady) who must take upon her the task of continuing the race, if a male could only be found still able to impregnate her. The search for a fertile male was indicated by shots of vast emptinesses; long resonant corridors up and down which there was much coming and going by unseen searchers, whose footsteps Schnak had simulated with two halves of a coconut shell. There were scenes of the anguish of a Very Wise Man (played by the film-maker’s great and good friend, who chose unaccountably to do it in a Prince Albert coat and a flowing tie) who, in the culminating scene, had to explain to the twelve-year-old what Sex was, and what would be required of her. The child’s face, filled with a wonderment that could also have been puzzled vacuity, was photographed from unusual angles, and she emerged as an Infans Dolorosa, a Nubile Saviour, and, of course, as a Transporting Symbol. The film was greeted in the main with solemn wonderment, though there were a few coarse souls who sniggered when the child knelt before the startlingly white bare feet of the Very Wise Man emerging from the bottom of his formal trousers, and seemed to adore them. In the great tradition of student despair the fate of mankind was left undecided at the end, which Schnak marked by three descending glissandi on the Swanee whistle.
Subtle campus critics professed to detect a hint of irony in the music, but the majority, while admitting that it might be so, felt that it added a dimension to a brilliant film which would, if everybody had their rights, command a variety of international awards.
When, a few days later, the Faculty met to discuss thesis topics, they were astonished that Schnak proposed to complete her work on Arthur of Britain within one university year. She had done her year of courses for her doctorate and nothing stood in the way except the unusually short time she had allotted to her thesis-composition. A thesis of operatic length and complexity? They demurred.
“I am through with trying to control or advise Schnak,” said Dean Wintersen. “If it kills her or drives her mad, let it be so. I hope to hand over my supervision of work to a distinguished visitor.”
Of course there was curiosity about the distinguished visitor, but the Dean said it was too early to talk of what was not yet assured. As always, the Faculty wished to show its academic scruple by doubt and debate.
“This thesis exercise,” said a professor of musicological research; “who can say what it may involve? I am not at all impressed by this passion to complete what fate has ordained should be incomplete.”
“Ah, but you must admit that it has been done, and well done,” said another musicologist, who did not like the first speaker. “Look at Janet Johnson’s excellent reconstruction of Rossini’s Journey to Rheims. And what about Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Tenth? What this girl wants to do is a forward, not a backward, step. She wants to display for us a Hoffmann who has never been heard before.”
“I have heard one of Hoffmann’s operas in Germany, which I think is something nobody else present can say, and I do not leap with joy at the prospect of another. These early-nineteenth-century operas are mostly very thin stuff.”
“Ah, but that’s the fault of the libretti,” said his enemy, who had indeed never heard a note by Hoffmann but who had a nice private specialization in libretti where nobody could challenge him. “What is the libretto for this one like?”
The question was directed to the Dean, and it gave him a chance to display those qualities which mark a dean off from ordinary professors. He did not, in fact, know anything about the Hoffmann libretto and he would not pretend that he did; if his listeners chose to think on the grounds of what he said that he had seen the libretto, the assumption was wholly their own.
“A certain amount of work will have to be undertaken before that question could be satisfactorily answered,” he said. “Of course we shall have to make sure that all that side of the work is properly handled. We are not literary experts. We shall have to arrange a committee for Schnak that includes somebody from Comparative Literature.”
This was greeted with groans.
“Yes, I know,” said the Dean. “But you must admit that they are very thorough. I had thought of asking Professor Penelope Raven to act. Would that be agreeable?”