I did not sleep well that night. I had murky dreams that this morning's dream chose not to reproduce. But at least I managed to get to sleep as soon as I was alone, tormented in the midst of the ever longer silence of the city by the belated doubt which I will now never be able to resolve, whether Claudina the prostitute was, after all, a real Argentinian and a magnificent actress, who had managed miraculously and unwittingly to suppress all trace of her origins, or if, on the contrary, she was an extremely stupid girl from Madrid doing her level best to disguise her accent and thus give some verisimilitude to her lies, although, if that were the case, only she would ever know. When I closed my eyes, after looking briefly at the empty wall and thinking, as I used to then, that this would be yet another night spent with no one watching over my sleep, the whole room still smelled of Claudina the prostitute, and the truth is, it smelled good.
INSTEAD OF BEING HERE WITH THIS pen and these sheets of paper for the better part of the day, I should have been studying the new role, in yet another Verdi opera, that I will soon be singing in Verona and in Vienna: it will be the first time I will have sung the role of Radames in Aida. A tenor has no option but to sing Verdi all his life unless he specializes in Wagner, something which I haven't done and never will do. Wagnerian singers are obsessive creatures and tremendously finicky, or, rather, as well as being finicky — as we musicians all tend to be — they insist on trying to appear original both in their singing and in their habits, and that desire, as everyone who has had any direct contact with the production or transmission of the art will know, is the most maddening thing there is. I myself have many eccentricities. (For example, the pen I am writing with at the moment has, as do all my other pens, a matte black nib, because a shiny, gold nib — as most nibs are— would hurt my eyes which, as I write, inevitably remain fixed only millimetres away from that gleaming nib as it scratches over the surface of the paper.) But I will never reach the same extremes as Hörbiger, who, although he had already appeared in Madrid four seasons before in the role of Otello, sang mainly Wagner, especially the Wagnerian roles of Tristan and Tannhauser. In his day, he was a brilliant and innovative interpreter of these roles, but his craving for originality grew gradually stronger and more all-encompassing as, over the years, his powers declined, and in the latter part of his career, he used to boast about his own eccentricities and say very proudly that in order to feel even moderately well, he needed to have eleven hours' sleep a night, to change his clothes four times a day, to bathe three times and to make love twice. If that were true, I really don't know how he had time for anything else. But his real mania and his real obsession was that he could not set foot on the stage if, from his hiding place behind the curtain a few moments before the performance began — one swift, bloodshot eye coinciding every few seconds with the crack in the curtain — he could see that there was a single stalls seat empty. He didn't care what was happening in the circle (although he preferred it to be full), but, accustomed as he was to the constant ovations of his youth, he could not abide there to be any gaps in the stalls or in the boxes. However, this is precisely the situation a minute before any performance begins, because there are always some members of the audience who come late, and Hörbiger would make the impresarios raise the curtain five, seven, ten, twelve, even fifteen minutes later than the appointed hour in order to allow time for the stragglers to arrive, so that he could peer out and find that all the seats in the stalls and the boxes were occupied. Those who had arrived promptly would grow irritated and, to the anguish of their ears, the orchestra, grown bored, would keep tuning and re-tuning their instruments. But despite these generous delays— to which the organizers of these events always agreed beforehand in order to avoid Hörbiger's bouts of despair, his loud yells (sometimes audible on the other side of the curtain), his threatened fainting fits and his insulting remarks, for he was always quick to brand the organizers as incompetents or saboteurs and to accuse them of having plotted with some vengeful colleague by not advertising his performance widely enough — there are always season-ticket holders or invited guests who fall ill or are away traveling and forget to hand on their tickets to friends, and so Hörbiger, once he had grasped this problem, was in the habit of tirelessly and boorishly nagging the other singers and the conductor to make sure, when using their quota of invitations, to give them to people who would, wider no circumstances, fail to turn up or else would take care that someone went in their place. And not content with this, he would demand that the impresarios should have at least fifteen or so employees or hired hands ready in the theater corridors ("They do it on television, don't they?" I heard him say in loud, threatening tones to the mayor of Madrid himself — the late mayor), who, if there was a problem, and if, after a quarter of an hour's postponement, there were still empty seats, would irrupt into the auditorium and, without delay, eliminate any lacunae. Hörbiger's problem grew more acute with every season, and from having been a real genius in his youth and an artist of immeasurable talent in his maturity, during his latter years, he rapidly lost both voice and artistry, and attracted fewer and fewer people to each performance he gave, so that gradually the admission time for stragglers was extended further and further (but they, for their part, fully aware of Hörbiger's obsession and reluctant to endure the inevitable waiting, arrived later and later, thus closing the vicious circle) and the number of employees or hired hands, who had to be ready when the order came to intervene and occupy those irremediably empty seats, grew larger and larger. At his last appearances, colleagues say that the corridors and the foyers of the respective theaters in which these took place were peopled by strange, tie-wearing rustics whom one could tell had never been to an opera before in their lives and who — being doubtless exclusively television viewers — did not even seem to know that they should keep quiet during the performance. And on his very last appearance, in Munich and again in the role of Otello which I saw him play, they say that more than half the stalls seats were filled not only by these false aficionados or hired laborers and by the very few spectators up in the circle who had been invited to come downstairs — to the fury of those who had paid more for their tickets — but also by all the ushers, porters, cloakroom attendants, cleaning women and even box office staff, whose presence was so urgently needed that they did not even have time to replace their uniforms, overalls and work clothes for something more presentable, even if it was one of those twisted, clumsily-knotted ties which, only a short time before, had sufficed to fill other theaters and which Hörbiger had never imagined that all too soon he would miss. That day, in Munich, not far from the summer scene of his greatest Wagnerian triumphs, the mighty Hörbiger brought his incredible career to a close in a way that was as fitting as it was unexpected: when, forty-five minutes after the hour appointed for Verdi's
Otello to begin, and when, as I have said, they had recruited everyone in the building (they even had to resort to vital behind-the-scenes workers) to fill up the stalls and the boxes; when, as I say, the most admirable Heldentenor or heroic tenor of our times once more pressed his reddened eye to the opening in the curtain and, with the help of a small Japanese telescope which he sometimes used to inspect the vaster auditoria, he espied with horror an empty seat in the antepenultimate row of the right-hand aisle, an extraordinarily shrill note that no one has ever been able to repeat, and for which the word "moan" — they say — is but a poor definition, echoed round the whole theater. I suppose that last, irredeemably empty seat finally upset the balance of his already fragile sanity, for the fact is that, in full Otello costume, with his blacked-up face, his wild, curly wig, his eyes and lips made to look bigger with makeup, an earring in one ear and his telescope in his hand, the magnificent Hörbiger stepped onto the stage, climbed down into the stalls area, strode through it, to the astonishment of an already irritable public, and sat down in that one accusing seat, thus completing the audience that had been his downfall. When the conductor in person (Parenzan, an old friend of his) went to fetch him and, with kind words and great tact, tried to persuade him to return to the stage in order to begin the performance, assuring him that he would go straight out into the street and invite some passer-by to occupy his seat, Hörbiger, completely deranged by then and unable even to recognize Parenzan, the colleague who had shared in so many of his triumphs, started yelling that he had paid to see and hear the "divino" and that he had no intention of leaving his seat or of giving up to some interloper a ticket for which he had been forced to scrimp and save for months and then to stand in line for days outside the box office of that ghastly theater. And it was high time, he shrieked indignantly, that they stopped messing about and began the performance. The audience picked up on that one phrase and applauded it, thus unconsciously recognizing the tenor's double role and unwittingly giving a last ovation to the cause of his malaise. Hörbiger left the Munich opera house dressed as the Moor of Venice, borne thence by his colleagues Iago, Cassio, Roderigo and Montano, who had no option but to drag him forcibly from that far-flung aisle seat, amidst a genuinely mutinous audience. Hörbiger has not performed since. I don't know where he is now, and I prefer not to think about it as I fix my gaze on the black nib scratching across the paper, because I fear that it may be a place where they encourage him to sleep out his indispensable eleven hours and allow him to bathe and to change his clothes as often as he likes, but where it may prove difficult for him to enjoy his twice-daily love-making. Whatever the truth of the matter, what one can say to his credit is that, however fantastic and fraudulent his methods, the great Hörbiger always managed to fill the stalls and the boxes in every theater from the night of his debut to that of his unexpected retirement, although in order to achieve this, on that last night when he uttered only one note and heard only one ovation, he was obliged to transform himself into the most impatient, unstinting and long-suffering spectator of himself. Poor, great Hörbiger. A similar end, or one not much better, awaits us all, but I am convinced that the reason Wagnerians are the most prone to such spectacular collapses is their excessive love of originality. That is why I am not a Wagnerian and never will be.