It was George Cooper, who had dozed through much of the examination, who asked: “I notice that you have used some keys at important moments in the opera that would not perhaps have suggested themselves first to most composers. A flat major, and C flat major, and E flat major—why those? Any special reason?”
“They were ETAH’s favourites,” said Schnak. “He had a theory about keys and their special characters, and what they suggested.”
“ETAH? Who is ETAH?” said Professor Pfeiffer.
“Sorry. E. T. A. Hoffmann; I’ve got into the way of thinking of him as ETAH,” said Schnak.
“You mean you identify yourself with him?”
“Well, working from his notes and trying to get into his mind—”
Professor Pfeiffer said nothing but made a derisive noise in his nose. But then—”These theories of key characterization were very much a thing of Hoffmann’s time,” he said. “Romantic nonsense, of course.”
“Nonsense or not, I think we ought to hear a little more about it,” said Cooper. “What did he think about those keys?”
“Well—he wrote about A flat major: ‘Those chords carry me into the country of eternal longing.’ And about C flat major: ‘It grasps my heart with glowing claws’; he called it ‘the bleak ghost with red, sparkling eyes’. And he used E flat major a lot with horns; he called it ‘longing and sweet sounds’.”
“Hoffmann was a drug-taker, wasn’t he?” said Professor Pfeiffer.
“I don’t think so. He boozed a lot and sometimes he came near to having the horrors.”
“I’m not surprised, if he could talk that sort of rubbish about the character of keys,” said Pfeifer, and was ready to drop the subject. But not Schnak.
“But if that’s the way he thought, oughtn’t I to respect it? If I’m to finish his opera, I mean?” she said, and Professor Diddear made a noise in his nose, as if to suggest that Professor Pfeiffer had been caught napping.
“I suppose you explain your excessive use of extraneous modulation as coming from Hoffmann’s adulation of Beethoven.”
“Hoffmann adored Beethoven and Beethoven thought a lot of Hoffmann.”
“I suppose that is so,” said the great musicologist. “You should remember, young lady, what Berlioz thought about Hoffmann: a writer who imagined himself to be a composer. But you have chosen to devote a great deal of work to this minor figure, and that is why we are here.”
“Perhaps to suggest that Berlioz could have been wrong,” said Dr. Gunilla; “he made a fool of himself often enough, as critics always do.”
She knew that Dr. Pfeiffer had written an essay about Berlioz which accorded Berlioz about seventy marks out of a hundred, which was as far as the Professor was inclined to go. If she could use Berlioz as a stick with which to beat Pfeiffer, so be it.
It was one o’clock.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that our work this morning is only a part of this unusual examination,” said the Dean. “We assemble again at two in the theatre, for a private performance of this opera, conducted by Miss Schnakenburg, on which a portion of your decision must necessarily rest. Proof of the pudding, you know. Meanwhile the Cornish Foundation has invited us to lunch, and we are already late.”
Professor Pfeiffer did not like lunching as a guest of the Cornish Foundation.
“Are they not involved?” he asked the Dean. “Is the candidate not their protégée? I do not like to use such a term, but is this an attempt to buy us?”
“I think it’s just decent hospitality,” said the Dean, “and, as you know, hospitality is a co-operative thing. The Romans very wisely used the same word for ‘host’ and ‘guest’.” Pfeiffer did not understand, and shook his head.
The luncheon took place at the best restaurant in Stratford—the small one down by the river—and Arthur and Maria did everything they could to make the examiners happy. Easy work with Berger, Cooper, Diddear, and Penny Raven. Easy work with the Dean, and even with Professor Adelaide O’Sullivan, who was only a bigot about tobacco. Professor Pfeiffer, however, and Dr. Dahl-Soot had thrown aside the decorum of the examination room and were going at it, hammer and tongs.
“I totally disagree with this procedure of witnessing a performance of this work,” said the Professor. “It brings in elements extraneous to what we are to decide.”
“You don’t care if it can be seen as effective on the stage?”
“I care only if it is effective on the page. I agree with the late Ernest Newman: a great score is more finely realized when one reads it in the tranquillity of one’s study than when one sits in a crowd and endures the ineptitudes of orchestra and singers.”
“You mean you can do it better in your head than a hundred accomplished artists can do it for you?”
“I can read a score.”
“Better than, say von Karajan? Than Haitink? Than Colin Davis?”
“I do not follow the purpose of your line of questioning.”
“I am just trying to find out how great a man you are so that I can treat you with appropriate reverence. I can read a score, too. Am pretty well known for it, in fact. But it’s still better when I raise the baton and a hundred and twenty artists set about their work. I am not an opera company in myself.”
“So? Well—make of it what you will, but I rather think I am. No, I never drink wine. A glass of Perrier, if you please.”
What Professor Pfeiffer did not drink was certainly compensated for by what the others drank. It had been a thirsty morning. Before lunch was over, all but Pfeiffer were jovial, and Professor George Cooper showed a tendency to bump into tables, and laugh at himself for doing so. They were, after all, musicians under the professorial gown, and a well-set table was one of the elements in which they lived. They all thanked Arthur and Maria with a heartiness that made Professor Pfeiffer suspect the worst. But he could not be bought. Oh no, not he.
5
First in the line of dressing-rooms on the stage level was a small kennel reserved for the use of the conductor, when there was one, and a quick-change room if that should be needed. Here sat Schnak, desolate and alone. She had known rejection before this: had there not been the boy who said that sex with her was like sleeping with a bicycle? She had known the loneliness of leaving home and parents. She had known the bitterness of being a loner, of not fitting into any group, while being still too young and insignificant to wear loneliness like a badge of honour. But never had she known wretchedness like this, when she was about to take a great step forward in her life as an artist.
She knew that she would not fail. Francesco Berger had made it clear to her, a few weeks ago, that the examination was a rite of passage, a ceremonial and scholarly necessity; the School of Music would not permit the examination to take place if it were not ninety-five per cent certain to be a success. The examination was either the last and most demanding of the torments of student life, or the first and simplest of the torments of professional life. She had nothing to fear.
Nevertheless, she feared. Her experience as a conductor had been confined to a few bouts with a student orchestra, which was fractious enough, because inexperienced. A professional orchestra was something very different. These old pros were like livery-stable horses: they were used to all sorts of riders, and they were determined to do, so far as possible, what they chose. Oh, they wouldn’t wreck the performance; they were musicians, through and through. But they would be sticky about tempi, sluggish about entrances, perfunctory in phrasing; they wouldn’t be bossed by a raw kid. Gunilla would conduct at all the public performances, unless Gunilla was kind and let her do one or two mid-week shows. Gunilla knew how to get what she wanted out of an orchestra, and she had the kind of sharp tongue musicians respect—professionally severe, but not personal. What had she said to the harpist yesterday? “The arpeggi must be deliberate, like pearls dropping in wine, not slithering like a fat woman slipping on a banana skin.” Not Oscar Wilde, but good enough for a rehearsal. Gunilla had coached her, had allowed her to conduct a full orchestra rehearsal, and had given her an hour of notes afterward. But once she lifted her baton this afternoon, she was alone. And that old hellion Pfeiffer would be watching every minute.