The Dean’s office was handsome, in the modern manner. It was on a corner of the building and two walls were entirely of glass, which the architect had meant to give the Dean a refreshing prospect of the park outside, but, as it also gave passing students a splendid view of the Dean at work, or perhaps in creative lassitude, he had found it necessary to curtain the windows with heavy net so that the office was rather dim. It was a large room, and the decanal desk was diminished by the piano and the harpsichord—the Dean was an expert on baroque music—and the engravings of eighteenth-century musicians that hung on the walls.
Dean Wintersen was pleased that money would be forthcoming to support the research work and reasonable living expenses of Miss Hulda Schnakenburg. He became confidential.
“I hope this solves more than one problem,” said he. “This girl—I’d better call her Schnak because everybody does and it’s what she seems to like—is greatly gifted. The most gifted student, I would say, that we’ve ever had in my time or in the memory of anybody in the faculty. We get lots of people here who will do very well as performers, and a few of them may go to the top. Schnak is something rarer; she may be a composer of real gift. But the way she is going now could land her in a mess, and perhaps finish her!”
“Eccentricity of genius?” said Darcourt.
“Not if you’re thinking of picturesque behaviour and great spillings of soul. There is nothing picturesque about Schnak. She is the squalidest, rudest, most offensive little brat I have ever met as Dean, and I’ve dealt with some lulus, let me tell you. As for soul, I think she would strike you if you used the word.”
“What ails her?”
“I don’t know. Whoever does know? Background the essence of mediocrity. Parents utterly commonplace. Father a watch-repairer for one of the big jewellery stores. A dull, grey fellow who seems to have been born with a magnifying-glass in his eye. Mother a sad zero. The only thing that singles them out at all is that they are members of some ultra-conservative Lutheran group, and they never stop saying that they have given the girl a good, Christian upbringing. And what have they brought up? A failed anorexic who never washes her hair or anything else, snarls at her teachers, and habitually bites the hand that feeds her. But she has talent, and we think it is the real, big, enduring thing. Just now she’s on the uttermost extreme thrust of all the new movements. The computer stuff and the aleatory stuff is old hat to Schnak.”
“Then why does she want to do this work on the Hoffmann notes? That sounds like antiquarian stuff.”
“That’s what we all want to know. What makes Schnak want to fling herself back more than a hundred and fifty years to complete an unfinished work by a man we generally write off as a gifted amateur? Oh, Hoffmann had a few operas performed in his lifetime, but I’m told they are run-of-the-mill. In music he has a reputation as a critic; he praised Beethoven intelligently when nobody else did. Schumann thought a lot of him, and Berlioz despised him, which was a kind of inverted praise. He inspired a lot of far better talents. A literary man, I suppose one would say.”
“Is that a bad thing to be? Mind you, I only know him through that opera—you know, Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. It’s a Frenchified version of three of his stories.”
“Odd that it’s another unfinished work; Guiraud pulled Offenbach’s score together after his death. Not a favourite of mine.”
“You’re the expert, of course. As a mere happy opera-goer I like it very much, though it’s not often intelligently done; there’s more in it than meets the eye of most opera directors.”
“Well, the puzzle of why Schnak wants to take on this job can only be solved by her. But we on the faculty are pleased, because it fits nicely into musicological research and we’ll be able to give her a doctorate for it. She’ll need that. With her personality she needs every solid qualification she can get.”
“Are you trying to coax her away from her ultra-modernity?”
“No, no; that’s fine. But for a doctoral exercise something more readily measurable is better. This may steady her, and make her more human.”
Darcourt thought this was the moment to tell the Dean about the Cornish Foundation’s plan to present the revived and refreshed opera as a stage piece.
“Oh, my God! Do they really mean that?”
“They do.”
“Have they any idea what it might mean? It could be such a flop as operatic history has never known—and that’s saying a lot, as you probably know. I know she’ll do a good job, but only so far as the material permits. I mean—cosmetic work on the orchestration, and reorganization and pulling-together and general surgery can only go so far. The Foundation, the Hoffmann basis, may not support anything the public could possibly want to see.”
“The Foundation has voted to do it. I don’t have to tell you that eccentricity isn’t confined to artists; patrons can suffer from it too.”
“You mean it’s a bee in the bonnet.”
“I’ve said nothing. As secretary of the Foundation I am just telling you what they intend. They know the risks, and they are still prepared to put a good deal of money into the project.”
“They’ll have to. Have they any idea what mounting a full-scale new opera, that nobody knows or has studied, could run to?”
“They’re game for it. They leave it to you, of course, to see that Schnak delivers the goods—in so far as there are any goods to deliver.”
“They’re mad! But don’t think I’m quarrelling with anybody’s generosity. If this is what’s in the cards, Schnak will need supervision on the highest level we can manage. A musicologist of great reputation. A composer of some distinction. A conductor who has wide experience of opera.”
“Three supervisors?”
“Just one, if I can get the one I want. But with a lot of money I think I can coax her.”
The Dean did not say who he meant.
3
The week after arthur fell ill, Maria could do no work at all.
Ordinarily she had much to keep her busy. Her marriage had temporarily interrupted her academic career, but she had once again taken up her thesis on Rabelais, though marriage made it seem less pressing—she would not say less important—than before. And she had a great deal to do on behalf of the Cornish Foundation. Darcourt thought he was overworked, but Maria had her own burden. It was she who first read all the applications for assistance, and it was tedious work. The applicants seemed to want to do the same few things—write a book, publish a book, edit a manuscript, show their paintings, give a concert of music, or simply to have money to, as they always put it, “buy time” to do any of these things. Probably many of these requests were worthy, but they did not fit into Arthur’s notion of the Cornish Foundation, and it was Maria who wrote polite personal notes advising the applicants to look elsewhere. Of course there were the visionaries, who wanted to dam and dredge the Thames to discover the foundations of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre; or who wanted to establish a full-scale carillon de Flandres in every provincial capital in Canada and endow the post of carillonneur; or who wanted to be supported while they painted a vast series of historical pictures showing that all the great military commanders had been men of less than average stature; or who yearned to release some dubiously identified wreck from the Arctic ice. These had to be discouraged firmly. Borderline cases, and they were many, she discussed with Darcourt. The few proposals that might appeal to Arthur were sifted from the mass, and circulated to all the members of the Round Table.