“But surely that’s absurd,” said Hollier. “Will the libretto be ready, not to speak of the music? And then I suppose the theatrical people will have to have a little time to get it up?”
“The theatrical people will have to be got under contract not later than next month,” said Geraint. “My God, have you no idea how opera singers work? The best are all contracted three years ahead. A thing on this scale won’t need the biggest stars, even if we could get them, but intelligent singers of the next rank won’t be easy to find, especially for an unknown work. They’ll have to shoehorn this piece into very tight schedules. And there’s the designer, and all the carpentry and painting work, and the costumes—I’d better stop, I’m frightening myself.”
“But the libretto!” said Hollier.
“The libretto is going to have to hustle its stumps. Whoever is responsible for it must get to work at once, and be quick. The words have to be fitted to whatever music exists, remember, and that is tricky work. We can’t fart around forever with sun-gods and Chrétien de Troyes.”
“If that is your attitude, I think I had better withdraw at once. I have no desire to be associated with a botch,” said Hollier, and took another very big whisky from the decanter.
“No, no, Clem, we’ll need you,” said Maria, who still cherished a tenderness for the man who had—it seemed so long ago now—taken her maidenhead, almost absent-mindedly. Not that, as a girl of her time, she had possessed anything so archaic as a maidenhead, but the word was suitable to the paleo-psychological spirit of Clement Hollier.
“I have a certain reputation as a scholar to protect. I am sorry to insist on that, but it is a fact.”
“Of course we’ll need you, Clem,” said Penny Raven. “But in an advisory capacity, I think. Better leave the actual writing to old battered hacks like me and Simon.”
“As you please,” said Hollier, with drunken dignity. “I admit without regret that I have no theatrical experience.”
“Theatrical experience is precisely what we’re going to need, and lots of it,” said Powell. “If I’m to see this thing through, I shall have to crack the whip, and I hope nobody will take offence. There are a lot of elements to be pulled together if we’re going to have a show at all.”
“As a member of the academic committee that is supposed to be midwife to this effort, I have to remind you that there is an element you’ve left out, that will have a big say in whatever is done,” said Penny.
“Meaning?”
“Schnak’s special supervisor. The very big gun who is coming to the university to be composer-in-residence for a year, for this express purpose,” said Penny.
“Wintersen keeps hinting about that,” said Darcourt; “but he’s never mentioned a name. Do you know who it is, Penny?”
“Yes, I do. It’s just been finally settled. No one less than Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot.”
“Golly! What a name!” said Darcourt.
“Yes, and what a lady!” said Penny.
“New to me,” said Arthur.
“Shame on you, Arthur. She’s acknowledged to be the successor to Nadia Boulanger, as a Muse and fosterer of talent, and general wonder-worker. Schnak is a very, very lucky child. But Gunilla is also said to be a terror, so Schnak had better look out or we shall see some fur flying.”
“From what point of the compass does this avatar appear?” asked Arthur.
“From Stockholm. Doesn’t the name tip you off?”
“We are greatly privileged to have her, I suppose?”
“Can’t say. Is she a Snark or a Boojum? Only time will tell.”
6
I like that man Powell. He has the real professional spirit. My God, when I think what it was like for me, getting operas on the stage in Bamberg, and even in Berlin, and sometimes wondering where I would find enough musicians to make up the orchestra we needed! And what musicians some of them were! Tailors by day, and clarinetists by night! And the singers! The chorus were the worst. I remember some of them sneaking offstage when there was no work for them to do and sneaking back in three minutes, wiping their mouths with the back of a hand! And wearing their underpants beneath their tights, so that the courtiers of Count Whoever-it-was looked as if they had just stumbled in from the wastes of Lapland. Things are much better now. Sometimes I can intrude myself into a performance of something by Wagner—Wagner who wrote so very kindly of me and admitted my influence in his splendid use of the leitmotif—and, so far as a shade can weep, I weep with pleasure to see how clean all the singers are! Every man seems to have been shaved the very day of the performance. Every woman, even though fat, is not more than five months pregnant. Many of them can act, and they do, even if not well. No doubt about it, opera has come a very long way since my days in Bamberg.
To say nothing of money! The artists who appear in my Arthur will be able to go to the treasury every Friday night with confidence that a full week’s salary will be forthcoming. How well I remember the promises, and the broken promises, of opera finance in my time. Of course, as director—and that meant conductor and sometimes scene-painter as well—I usually had my money, but it was wretchedly little money. These modern theatre people don’t know they ‘re alive, and when I consider their good fortune I sometimes forget that I am dead. As dead, that’s to say, as anybody in Limbo is.
At last I begin to pluck up hope. I may not be in Limbo forever. If Geraint Powell puts my Arthur on the stage, and even five people stay till the end, I may win my freedom from this stoppage in my spiritual voyage, this mors interruptus (to give it a classical ring).
My own fault, of course, if I died untimely, I must admit that I died by my own hand, though not as surely as if I had used the rope or the knife. Mine was death by the bottle, and by—well, enough about that. Death by Romanticism, let us call it.
But by the Almighty’s great mercy, an existence in Limbo is not all tears of regret. We may laugh. And how I laughed when that woman professor—that is something new since my time, when a learned woman might be a bas bleu but would never have thought of intruding herself into a university—when that woman professor, I say, read those letters from Planché to Kemble.
They were new to me. I remember his letters, and the high spirits and assurance they gave off like a perfume. He was so certain that I, who had not written an opera in some time—seven years, was it—would welcome his jaunty assistance. But these letters, in which he reported our exchanges to Kemble, were quite new, and brought back all that trouble in a new and funny light. Poor Planché, industrious Huguenot, with his determination to do his best for Madame Vestris and her magnificent limbs. Poor Planché, with his certainty that an opera audience could not be persuaded to sit still while anything important was being played, or sung. Of course his notion of opera was bad Rossini, or Mozart defaced by that self-loving brigand Bishop. His Covent Garden was a theatre where nobody listened unless one of the Great Necks was shrieking or trumpeting; where people took baskets of cold grouse and champagne to their boxes and stuffed themselves during the music; where those of the right age—between fourteen and ninety—flirted and nodded, and sent billets doux from box to box, wrapped around little bags of sweets; where the soprano, if the applause was sufficiently insistent, would pause in the opera to sing some popular air; after my death it was often “Home, Sweet Home”, which was Bishop’s monumental contribution to the art of music; where a soprano’s jewels—the real thing, achieved by lying complaisantly under the bellies of rich, old fumbling noblemen—were of as much interest as her voice; as the Great Neck declined, the Grande Poitrine became the object of interest, and the bigger it was the more diamonds it would accommodate. Service medals, jealous rivals called them.