The company was in the main an intelligent one, perhaps because it was not what conventional critics would call a company of the first order. The singers were, upon the whole, young and North American; though they had all had plenty of opera experience they were not accustomed to the usages of the greatest opera theatres of the world. Reading held no terrors for them. There were one or two, of whom Nutcombe Puckler was the leader, who could not see any reason to speak anything that could possibly be sung, but they were willing to give it a try, to humor Powell, in whom they sensed a man of ideas who knew what he was doing. Some, like Hans Holzknecht, who was to sing the role of Arthur, did not read English with ease, and Miss Clara Intrepidi, who was to be Morgan Le Fay, stumbled over words that she had sung with no difficulty in her rehearsals with Watty. The one who read like an actor—an intelligent actor—was Oliver Twentyman, and the best of the group found that by Act Two they were trying, with varying success, to read like Oliver Twentyman.
If the company was youthful in the main, Oliver Twentyman balanced matters by being old. Not astronomically old, as some people insisted; not in his nineties. But he was said to be over eighty, and he was one of the wonders of the operatic world. His exquisitely produced, silvery tenor was always described by critics as small, but it had been heard with perfect clarity in all the great opera theatres of the world, and he was a favourite at Glyndebourne and several of the more distinguished, smaller American festivals. His particular line of work was characters of fantasy—Sellem in The Rake’s Progress, the Astrologer in Le Coq d’Or, and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It had been a great coup to get him for Merlin. His reading of his part in the libretto was a delight.
“Marvellous!” said Powell. “Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you to take heed of Mr. Twentyman’s pronunciation of English; it is in the highest tradition.”
“Yes, but are not the vowels very distorted?” said Clara Intrepidi. “I mean, impure for singing. We have our vowels, right? The five? Ah, Ay, Ee, Oh, Oo. Those we can sing. You would not ask us to sing these impure sounds?”
“There are twelve vowel sounds in English,” said Powell; “and as it is a language which I myself had to acquire, not being born to it, you must not think me prejudiced. What are those vowels? They are all in this advice:
Who knows ought of art must learn
And then take his ease.
Every one of the twelve sings beautifully, and none gives such delicacy as the Indeterminate Vowel which is often a ‘y’ at the end of a word. ‘Very’ must be pronounced as a long and a short syllable, and not as two longs. I am going to nag you about pronunciation, I promise you.”
Miss Intrepidi pouted slightly, as though to suggest that the barbarities of English speech would have no effect on her singing. But Miss Donalda Roche, an American who was to sing Guenevere, was making careful notes.
“What was that about knowing art, Mr. Powell?” she said, and Geraint sang the vowel sequence for her, joined by Oliver Twentyman, who seemed, with the greatest politeness, to wish to show Miss Intrepidi that there were really twelve differentiated sounds, and that none of them were describable as impure.
On the whole, the singers enjoyed reading the libretto, and the day’s work showed clearly which were actors who could sing, and which singers who had learned to act. Marta Ullmann, the tiny creature who was to sing the small but impressive role of Elaine, came out very well with
But it was not quite such a good moment when Donalda Roche and Giles Shippen tried to read, in unison,
Nor was Miss Intrepidi the celebrated audience-tamer she was reputed to be when faced with her words to the villain Modred:
But Miss Intrepidi was a real pro, and having made a mess of her words she cried, “I’ll get it; don’t worry—I’ll get it!” and Powell assured her that nobody had the least doubt she would.
When the reading was completed, late in the afternoon, Gunilla spoke to the company for the first time.
“You see what our Director is doing?” she said. “He wants you to sing words, not tones. Anybody can sing the music; it takes an artist to sing the words. That’s what I want, too. Simon Darcourt has found us a brilliant libretto; Hulda Schnakenburg has realized a fine score from Hoffmann’s notes, and we must think of this opera as, among other things, an entirely new look at Hoffmann as a composer; this is music-drama before Wagner had put pen to paper. So—sing it like early Wagner.”
“Ah—Wagner!” said Miss Intrepidi. “So now I know.”
All of this, and the careful rehearsals which followed—on the floor, as Powell said, meaning that he was planning the moves and when necessary the gestures of the singers—was victuals and drink to the Cranes. (They were always referred to as the Cranes, though Mabel took pains to explain that she was still Mabel Muller, and had sacrificed nothing of her individuality—though she had obviously sacrificed her figure—in their spiritual union.) Al cornered and buttonholed everybody, and made himself conspicuous in his desire not to be obtrusive. He was on the prowl to capture and note down every motivation, and the notes for the great Regiebuch swelled to huge proportions. Oliver Twentyman was a Golconda to Al.
Here was tradition! Twentyman had, in his young days, sung with many famous conductors, and his training had become legendary in his lifetime. He had worked, when not much more than a boy, with the great David ffrangcon-Davies, and repeated to Al many of that master’s precepts. More wonderful still, he had worked for three years with the redoubtable William Shakespeare—not, he explained to the gaping Al, the playwright, but the singing-teacher, who had been born in 1849 and had worked with many of the great ones until his death in 1931—who had always insisted that singing, even at its most elaborate, was based upon words, upon words, upon words.
“It’s like a dream!” said Al.
“It’s a craft, my boy,” said Nutcombe Puckler, who was still waiting for a decisive word about the Blurt, or possibly just the Sneeze. “And never forget the funny stuff. Wagner hadn’t much use for it; he thought Meistersinger was a comic opera, of course, and you should have seen my Beckmesser in St. Louis a few years ago! I stopped the show twice!”
Al was a special nuisance to Darcourt. “This libretto—some of it gets close to poetry,” he said.
“That was the idea,” said Simon.
“Nobody would take you for a poet,” said Al.
“Probably not,” said Darcourt; “when are you expecting the baby?”
“That’s a worry,” said Al. “Sweetness is getting pretty tired. And worried, too. We’re both worried. We’re lucky to be sharing this great experience, to take our minds off it.”
Mabel nodded, hot, heavy, and dispirited. She longed for the move to Stratford, out of the terrible, humid heat of a Toronto summer. As she lay on the bed in their cheap lodgings at night, while Al read aloud to her from the macabre tales of Hoffmann, she sometimes wondered if Al knew how much she was sacrificing to his career. As women have wondered, no doubt, since first mankind was troubled by glimmerings of what we now call art, and scholarship.