“Her what?” said Arthur, aghast.
“Her Knockers. She meant some underground spirits who worked in the mines of Britain, and were called Knockers.”
“Is there something ambiguous about Knockers?” said Hollier. “I’m sorry. I’m not very well up on the latest indecencies.”
“Knockers nowadays means breasts,” said Powell. “Door knockers, you know, which show up so prominently on the front. ‘She has a great pair of knockers,’ people say. Probably better known in England than here.”
“Ah yes. I wondered if it were a misreading for Knackers,” said Hollier. “Meaning the testicles. Perhaps the Magnanimous Cuckold would be the person to talk about those.”
“For God’s sake try to be serious,” said Arthur. “We are in very deep trouble. Doesn’t anybody understand that? Are we seriously going to spend a great amount of Uncle Frank’s benefaction to stage an opera that is all about Knackers and Knockers and Nobs and Tits and gay fairies? Is my hair going white, Maria? I distinctly feel a withering of my scalp.”
“As a student of Rabelais, all this sniggering, half-hearted indecency makes me throw up,” said Maria.
Penny spat out a mouthful of grape seeds, not very elegantly, on her plate. “Well—you have the music, you know. Or plans and sketches for it.”
“But is it any good?” said Maria. “If it is on the Planché level, we’re through. Absolutely through, as Arthur says. Was Hoffmann any good? Does anybody know?”
“I’m not a judge,” said Penny. “But I think he wasn’t half bad. Mind you, music’s not my thing. But when I was in London the BBC broadcast Hoffmann’s Undine in a program called Early Romantic Operas, and of course I listened. Indeed, I took it on tape, and I have it here, if you’re interested. Have you got the right sort of machine?”
It was Maria who took the tapes and put them in the hi-fi equipment that was concealed in a cupboard near the Round Table. Darcourt made sure that everybody had a drink, and the Cornish Foundation, in the lowest spirits it had known since its establishment, composed itself to listen. Nobody wore an expression of hope, but Powell was the least depressed. He was a theatre man, and was accustomed to abysses in the creative process.
It was Arthur who first was jolted into new life by the music.
“Listen, listen, listen! He’s using voices in the Overture! Where have you heard that before?”
“They’re the voices of the lover and the Water Sprite, calling to Undine,” said Penny.
“If he goes on like that, maybe we’re not in too much trouble,” said Arthur. He was a musical enthusiast, a bad amateur pianist, and it was his regret that his Uncle Francis had not left him his enviable collection of musical manuscripts. He would then have had the uncompleted opera safe in his own hands.
“This is accomplished stuff,” said Maria.
As indeed it was. The Cornish Foundation, according to individual musical sensitivity, roused themselves. Darcourt knew what he was hearing; he had first become acquainted with Francis Cornish because of a shared enthusiasm for music. Powell declared music to be one of the elements in which he lived; it was his desire to extend his experience as a director of opera that had made him urge the Foundation to consider putting Arthur of Britain on the stage. Hollier was the tin-eared one, and he knew it, but he had a feeling for drama and, though now and then he dozed, Undine was unquestionably dramatic. By the end of the first act they were all in a happier frame of mind, and demanded drinks as cheer, rather than as pain-killers.
Undine is not a short opera, but they showed no weariness, and heard it to the end. It was then almost four o’clock in the morning and they had been at the Round Table for nine hours, but except for Hollier they were alert and happy.
If that’s Hoffmann as a composer, it looks as if we were right on the pig’s back,” said Arthur. “I hope I’m not carried away by relief, but I think it’s splendid.”
“He truly does use the lyre of Orpheus to open the underworld of feeling,” said Maria. “He used that phrase often. He must have loved it.”
“Did you hear how he uses the wood-winds? Not just doubling the strings, as even the best Italians were apt to do when this was written, but declaring another kind of feeling. Oh, those magical deep wood-winds! This is Romanticism, right enough,” said Powell.
“New Romanticism,” said Maria. “You catch Mozartian echoes—no, not echoes, but loving recollections—and some Beethovenian beef in the big moments. And God be praised he doesn’t wallop the timpani whenever he wants intensity. I think it’s great! Oh, Arthur—” and she kissed her husband with relief and joy.
“I’m glad we heard his letter to Planché first,” said Darcourt. “You know what he’s getting at, and what he hoped to achieve in Arthur. Not music just to support stage action, but to be action in itself. What a shame he never got his chance to go ahead!”
“Well, yes; I don’t want to pour cold water,” said Hollier, “but as the least musical among you, I can’t forget that we haven’t a libretto. Assuming, as I am sure you do, that the Planché stuff is totally unusable. No libretto, and is there enough music to make an opera. Does anybody know?”
“I’ve been to the library for a look,” said Arthur, “and there’s quite a wad of music, though I can’t judge what shape it’s in. There are scribbles in German on some of the manuscript which seem to suggest action, or places where action would come. I can’t read that old German script well enough to say much about it.”
“But no words?”
“I didn’t see any words, though I could be mistaken.”
“Do you think we can really turn Schnak loose on this? Does she know German? I suppose she may have picked up some from her parents. Not poetic German, certainly. Nothing Romantic about the senior Schnaks,” said Darcourt.
“I don’t want to nag, but without a libretto, where are we?” said Hollier.
Powell was impatient. “Surely with all the brains there are around this table we can put together a libretto?”
“Poetry?” said Darcourt.
“Libretto poetry,” said Powell. “I’ve read dozens of ‘em, and the poetic heights are not enough to make you dizzy. Come on! Faint heart never made fair libretto.”
“I’m afraid I’m rather the fifth wheel of the coach so far as music is concerned,” said Hollier. “But the Matière de Bretagne is right in my line, and I have a pretty clear recollection of Malory. Anything I know is at your service. I can fake a late-medieval line as well as most people, I suppose.”
“So there we are,” said Powell. “Right on the pig’s back, as Arthur so Celtically puts it.”
“Oh, don’t be hasty,” said Hollier. “This will take some time to establish, even when we’ve decided which of the Arthurian paths we are going to follow. There are many, you know—the Celtic, the French, the German, and of course Malory. And what attitude do we take to Arthur? Is he a sun-god embodied in legend by a people half-Christianized? Or is he simply the dux bellorum, the leader of his British people against the invading Saxons? Or do we choose the refinement of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes? Or do we assume that Geoffrey of Monmouth really knew what he was talking about, however improbable that may seem? We can dismiss any notion of a Tennysonian Arthur: he was wholly good and noble and a post-Freudian audience wouldn’t swallow him. It could take months of the most careful consideration before we decide how we are going to see Arthur.”
“We’re going to see him as the hero of an early-nineteenth-century opera, and no nonsense about it,” said Geraint Powell. “We haven’t a moment to lose. I’ve made it clear, I think, that the Stratford Festival will allow us to mount ten or twelve performances of Arthur during its next season and I’ve persuaded them to slot it as late as possible. Late August—just a year from now. We’ve got to get cracking.”