The Ballet of Dr Caligari

by Reggie Oliver

  We drank. I thought that Sir Daniel left a deliberately uncomfortable pause before he said: ‘I think we had better get straight to the point, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I am thinking of doing one last ballet. I am not sure yet to whom I will offer it—Covent Garden perhaps. I may even mount it myself. I haven’t decided. I want to commission you to write the score.’

  ‘You have a subject, Sir Daniel?’

  ‘Oh, “Dan”, please! Everyone calls me Dan.’ For some reason this did not make me feel much easier. I glanced at Marda who was sitting very upright, like an Egyptian statue. She did not even smile. ‘I want to do a ballet based on The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The film. Do you know it?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it, of course. I don’t think I’ve seen it. German . . . Expressionism?’

  ‘Yes, yes . . . Marda, would you fetch the video tape for Mr May.’ He pronounced the words ‘video tape’ separately with some disgust, as if he were holding them up for appalled inspection like a dead mouse. Marda rose in one fluid movement and silently left the room.

  ‘A ballet based on Caligari has been a cherished project of mine for quite a while now. We were discussing it when she had . . . the accident occurred.’ He indicated the portrait of Marda de Valli. ‘I was going to choreograph of course and play the character role of Dr Caligari. It was to be my last stage part. That’s more than twenty years ago. I couldn’t possibly now. . . . She was to dance the somnambulist Cesare. A male in the film, I know, but played by Connie Veidt, and obviously ambiguous. I commissioned the score from a man called Fisher. Alan Fisher? Did you ever hear of him?’ I shook my head. He smiled as if my ignorance was a relief to him. ‘Well, he died and his scores were lost, I think. That is the history. So now we are beginning afresh. Here’s to it, young Mr May.’

  He raised his glass. Marda entered carrying a videotape cassette which she handed to me.

  ‘There you are. Study it. But pay no attention to the ending. The ending—indeed the whole “framing device”, so-called, was not in the original scenario and is a subversion and evasion of the real story. Bear in mind that the principal character is not Francis or even Dr Caligari, but the somnambulist Cesare. She is to be the leading role. I will rename her Cesarine. Is all that clear to you? You look a little bewildered. Are you reluctant to undertake this, Mr May?’

  ‘No, no, no! And “Charles”, please. It’s just I am not quite sure what the . . . arrangement is to be.’

  ‘Ah! “The sordid topic of coin”, you mean?’

  Sir Daniel seemed amused by my confusion. Money was not exactly what I had meant, though that had come into it. So we discussed arrangements. He proposed a very decent advance payment and indicated the terms of the contract. I was to come to him every week with musical sketches and ideas for scenes. He would be providing me with a scenario: we would be working collaboratively. I cannot fully explain my unease, except that I disliked the idea of being responsible and beholden to Sir Daniel alone.

  Nevertheless I left his flat with a cheque in my pocket and the reassuring feeling that I would not starve, and that my career as a composer had taken a step forward. Words that I would say casually to my friends passed through my head: ‘Actually, I’ve been commissioned to write a ballet score. For Dan Vernon, you know.’ Mild shame at my own prospective boasting did not prevent the words from running through my head again and again, even while Sir Daniel and I were exchanging pleasantries.

  Marda, on Sir Daniel’s instructions, showed me to the door. In the half light of the passage she appeared rather more attractive than when I had first seen her. Her figure was certainly exquisite, and she moved beautifully. At the door she said: ‘I will be coming round to your flat tomorrow morning with the contract for you to sign and some notes about the scenario from Sir Daniel.’

  I wondered why it was necessary for her to visit me—why it could not be done by post?—but I said nothing.

  That night I played Sir Daniel’s video tape of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. I had to watch it several times before it began to take effect, but in the end it held me. On one issue I had to agree with Sir Daniel. The ending in which the whole story turned out to be a fantasy of the insane hero narrator, now consigned to an asylum, seemed to me to subvert all that had gone before in a way that was glib and banal. The imagined myth to me was truer than the reality. In the same way, the crooked, Expressionist dreamlike quality in the architectural landscape of the tale was somehow more real than the asylum to which the hero returned. I thought about this, but the more I thought the harder it seemed to conceive an appropriate music. Had my involvement with the film been more superficial, it would have been easier, or so I thought. I could have constructed a pastiche of, say Alban Berg, or Webern with a hint of Kurt Weill, and I believed myself thoroughly capable of bringing it off. But something stood in the way of my own facility, my own vanity, if you like. It would be so easy to show off, but my conscience was forbidding it. My mind split in two and a part of me was angry at my refusal to entertain the easy option. I finally fell asleep on the sofa while watching the film for the fifth time. Whole passages of finished music drifted through my dreaming head, but when I woke they had vanished.

  The doorbell of my flat roused me again after a fitful storm of dreaming and half waking had taken up the rest of the night. I opened the door to Marda. In Sir Daniel’s flat she had been wearing dull colours, now she was wearing soft pinks and greys and there was a discreet necklace of pearls and amethysts around her neck. They suited her. She seemed younger, almost as young as I was. As she stepped across the threshold of my flat I noticed that her nose wrinkled. There was a momentary expression of distaste on her face before it resumed her normal bland composure. These rapid flashes of feeling, replaced almost immediately by impassiveness were, I discovered, habitual and characteristic. I suppose my flat was untidy and perhaps may have smelt a little of unwashed socks and uneaten food.

  She refused the offer of a cup of coffee but cleared a space on my table to lay out the contract. I gave it a cursory glance and it seemed reasonable, so I signed it. As she bent over to witness the signature I saw the perfect curve of her long neck and felt an urge to kiss, even to bite it. The urge was momentary and did not result in an embarrassing action, but the aftershock remained with me. When Marda had finished signing she turned and smiled at me, but she gave no impression of having seen through to my confused thoughts.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, handing me an untidy sheaf of papers. ‘And these are some ideas for the scenario from Dan.’ She made rather a point of the abbreviated Christian name, as if I were now fully initiated into the circle of people who were allowed to call him Dan. I glanced at the papers which were densely covered with spidery writing in blue ball-point. I had expected something neater; some of the words were hard to make out.

  ‘You may have to translate some of this,’ I said to her with a smile. It was more of a test of her reactions than a serious request.

  ‘Oh, you’ll manage,’ she said coolly.

  ‘I can’t blame you for refusing one of my cups of instant, but there is a coffee shop round the corner which does a decent beverage. Won’t you join me?’

  There was a slight pause, then she said: ‘All right,’ in a voice that registered neither pleasure nor irritation. I have always been intrigued by indifference.

  Once we were seated and furnished with coffee I tried to interrogate her gently. She sat opposite me very upright, her neck tall and straight. It was a dancer’s attitude.

  ‘Do you still dance?’

  She smiled. ‘I teach occasionally.’

  ‘Why do you smile?’

  ‘Are you going to ask me a lot of questions?’

  ‘Yes. Do you mind?’

  ‘Why should I mind?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Is this a game or something?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is it?’

  All this was frustrating. She did a
nswer my questions but with the minimum information. She had been a dancer with the Royal Ballet; she had worked with ‘Dan’ for about a year. How had she come by the job? He had asked her, she told me. I smiled.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re not giving me very much information.’

  ‘Why do you want it?’

  We were back where we started. ‘Because I’m a naturally curious person,’ I said.

  ‘I see,’ she said and smiled herself. Was she making fun of me? Was she just genuinely amused? I had no idea. I gave up.

  After that conversation flagged. I tried to say something interesting about ballet and the latest trends in music but though she appeared to listen to what I said—rather dull as it happens—she made no comment. She nodded and smiled. At least, I thought, there was no hostility.

  As we rose to leave the café Marda said: ‘Dan says if you could call round next Friday for a drink about six. Play through any ideas you’ve had; talk further. Would that be all right?’

  I nodded. A part of me wanted to take hold of her and shake her, kiss her even: anything to break the remoteness, the absence of passion.

  ‘Will I see you there?’

  ‘I expect so. Why do you want to know?’

  This time it was my turn to be uncommunicative.

  Over the next few days I made a few sketches based on the scenario presented to me. Sir Daniel had sketched out a number of dance sequences: Francis—the hero—with Alan his friend and Jane, the woman they both love; the arrival of Caligari and his dispute with the town clerk; Caligari at the fair; Caligari and the somnambulist Cesarine. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed with Sir Daniel—I could not think of him as ‘Dan’—that Cesare should be a woman. The film could be seen as a meditation on the exercise of indirect and sinister power which made Cesare as a woman a doubly significant role. However, I could not help feeling that there had been something personal in Sir Daniel’s decision to change the gender.

  I was more apprehensive on my second visit to Sir Daniel than my first. It was a hot day and he greeted me in his shirtsleeves, but his trousers were those of a suit and he wore braces in Old Harrovian colours. Sir Daniel, I realised, was a stranger to the graces of true informality. As soon as we had gone into the sitting room he called for Marda to fetch us some tea. She did not appear but I heard her obedient assent from the kitchen. He showed me to the piano stool while he retreated to his armchair. Without saying anything he made a gesture that I should begin. I explained haltingly the themes I had devised for various sequences and played them. He received them in silence. I could discern neither liking nor disapproval. I was unnerved and began to talk more than I played simply in order to get a response. I had exhausted all possibilities when Marda came in with the tea.

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Sir Daniel as she laid down the tray, touching her arm lightly as she did so. Marda flinched and left the room.

  After we had decorously drunk a cup of tea I had the courage to ask him what he thought.

  ‘Well, it’s not what we’re looking for, is it?’ said Sir Daniel. I was puzzled by his use of the word ‘we’, but during the course of the evening he outlined what he was looking for. It was as I feared. What he wanted was pastiche: a score in the style of the Second Viennese School with a touch of German Cabaret and Kurt Weill to leaven the lump. I went over to the piano and produced a series of facile improvisations which appeared to satisfy him. It would not be true to say that he showed actual delight or enthusiasm but he did go so far as to say that this was exactly what ‘we’ were looking for. So I resigned myself to the secondary role of an imitative craftsman and gave up any hope of creating something new. I was, after all, being paid. When our session was at an end he asked me when I had last been to a ballet. I told him that it had been some time.

  ‘I have been given two tickets for Giselle at Covent Garden tomorrow night. I can’t go myself. It would be torture for me to see someone else’s Giselle, though I am sure, being the Garden, it will be perfectly adequate. Why don’t you take Marda?’ Marda had at that moment materialised in the room. ‘Marda, Charles here is taking you to Giselle tomorrow night.’ Marda simply inclined her head. Sir Daniel went over to a Louis XVI bureau which he unlocked and handed me the tickets. This appeared to be the moment when my session with him was at an end. He shook hands with me formally and told me to bring worked out versions of my improvisations to him the following week. Marda showed me out. I asked if I could give her dinner before the ballet the following night. She shook her head and said that we should meet outside Covent Garden tube at seven.

  It was difficult to know whether Marda was glad to be there with me or not. Her conversation was bland and non-committal. I gathered that she had seen Giselle before, which I had not. When I asked if she had ever danced in it she merely shook her head. She was like a sleepwalker, there and yet not wholly present.

  Our seats were in the stalls, excellent and perilously expensive. I am not used to ballet and spent some time in the first half adjusting to the event. It seemed that I had entered a new universe of strange powers and forces, dark kingdoms of the imagination. For all its superficial dissimilarities it did not seem that remote from the kingdom of Dr Caligari. During the first half I watched Marda as much as I watched the ballet. Her usually impassive features had taken on an animation I had never seen before. She seemed enthralled by the events on stage. I worried occasionally that she might notice I was looking at her, but she never did.

  Unknown to her I had ordered two very expensive glasses of champagne for the interval. I led her to the table in the Floral Hall where they reposed under the floor-to-ceiling mirror that makes the great glass basilica seem like a fairy palace. Men and women floated by with expressions that I took to be those of self-conscious grandeur and entitlement. I felt out of place, despite being in the best seats, and wearing a suit for the occasion. Marda received my glass of champagne politely, but not with the enthusiasm or gratitude that I had been hoping for.

  Before I could begin talking to her about the ballet I became conscious of a man occasionally eyeing us. He must have been in his sixties. He wore a plum-coloured jacket over a mauve polo-necked jersey on the breast of which reposed a gold medallion on a chain. His white hair, sparse and fluffy at the top but long at the back where it was tied into a pony tail. He was sipping from a large glass of red wine.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’ I asked Marda.

  ‘It’s Julian Spurling.’ I knew the name: he was the ballet critic for The Times. Julian Spurling, having noticed that we had observed him came over to us with an odd sideways movement, as if trying to insinuate himself into our presence without attracting undue attention.

  ‘Good evening, my dear Jane,’ he said. ‘And how is “the master”?’ I looked at her questioningly, but she ignored me.

  ‘Dan’s very well thank you. I’m sure he’d have sent his love if he had known you’d be here.’ She spoke with more animation and irony than I had yet encountered in her. Julian made a mock feint, as if taken aback by her remark.

  ‘Oh, I am sure he would, my dear,’ he said drily. ‘And who is your young man?’

  ‘This is Charles May.’

  ‘Ah! So this is the promising young composer that “the master” has taken up. I’m very pleased to meet you. Great things are being said of you. I do hope they are all true.’

  The idea that I was in any way famous or notorious, even in the confined space of Julian Spurling’s world was astonishing. Julian extended his hand and I shook it. It was very firm and dry. I caught a breath of the cologne he wore which was infused with the heavy scent of hyacinths. He did not have Sir Daniel’s good looks, but there was a resemblance between the critic and the choreographer, though I thought I could discern some genuine kindness in Julian’s curiosity about me. He kept hold of my hand, not to possess but to indicate comradeship.

  There was a fanfare over the speaker system and a request that
we should take our seats for the second act. Jane (as I will now call her) announced that she needed to visit the Ladies. I smiled at Julian and we began to drift with the crowd.

  As I was standing outside the ladies waiting for Jane and reflecting on her new nomenclature, I became conscious first of the smell of hyacinths, then of Julian’s purring voice. He was behind me. For some reason I did not turn round; I could see him quite easily in the mirror next to the door to the Ladies. He was fingering the gold medallion on his chest thoughtfully.

  ‘Charles, I am sure I don’t need to advise you to be very careful with Sir Dan.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Julian, what do you mean?’

  ‘A great man in his way, I suppose, but a dangerous one. You’re doing the music for his Caligari ballet, I gather?’

  ‘Well, yes, but I didn’t think it was generally known.’

  ‘Oh, you are not the first. One can only hope you are the last.’

  ‘I gather there was someone called Fisher?’

  ‘Yes. Fisher was the first. But there have been others.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘To the others, I know not. But Fisher of course died in the car accident. . . . You don’t know? The same accident in which poor darling Marda de Valli was involved. I must fly.’

  At that moment Jane emerged from the Ladies. Julian had disappeared as if by magic before she saw him. As we were going back to our seats, I asked: ‘Is that your real name: Jane?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jane what?’

  ‘Jane Fisher.’

  ‘Fisher?’

  ‘Yes. The composer. He was my father.’

  ‘Why does Dan call you Marda?’

  Jane merely shook her head.

  ‘I will call you Jane from now on.’

  Jane said: ‘All right, Charles, but not in front of Dan.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  In the second act Giselle has become a ghost and hovers about her own grave along with a host of jilted suicides in long white tutus. It was absurd, of course, like the story of Dr Caligari, but it held me. Adolphe Adam’s pleasant, slightly banal music, the soft-focus Gothicism, the stylised Romanticism, none of this was a barrier to my enthralment. The living still hold on to the dead.