The Lyre of Orpheus tct-3

by Robertson Davies

  “Well, yes; I don’t want to pour cold water,” said Hollier, “but as the least musical among you, I can’t forget that we haven’t a libretto. Assuming, as I am sure you do, that the Planché stuff is totally unusable. No libretto, and is there enough music to make an opera. Does anybody know?”

  “I’ve been to the library for a look,” said Arthur, “and there’s quite a wad of music, though I can’t judge what shape it’s in. There are scribbles in German on some of the manuscript which seem to suggest action, or places where action would come. I can’t read that old German script well enough to say much about it.”

  “But no words?”

  “I didn’t see any words, though I could be mistaken.”

  “Do you think we can really turn Schnak loose on this? Does she know German? I suppose she may have picked up some from her parents. Not poetic German, certainly. Nothing Romantic about the senior Schnaks,” said Darcourt.

  “I don’t want to nag, but without a libretto, where are we?” said Hollier.

  Powell was impatient. “Surely with all the brains there are around this table we can put together a libretto?”

  “Poetry?” said Darcourt.

  “Libretto poetry,” said Powell. “I’ve read dozens of ‘em, and the poetic heights are not enough to make you dizzy. Come on! Faint heart never made fair libretto.”

  “I’m afraid I’m rather the fifth wheel of the coach so far as music is concerned,” said Hollier. “But the Matière de Bretagne is right in my line, and I have a pretty clear recollection of Malory. Anything I know is at your service. I can fake a late-medieval line as well as most people, I suppose.”

  “So there we are,” said Powell. “Right on the pig’s back, as Arthur so Celtically puts it.”

  “Oh, don’t be hasty,” said Hollier. “This will take some time to establish, even when we’ve decided which of the Arthurian paths we are going to follow. There are many, you know—the Celtic, the French, the German, and of course Malory. And what attitude do we take to Arthur? Is he a sun-god embodied in legend by a people half-Christianized? Or is he simply the dux bellorum, the leader of his British people against the invading Saxons? Or do we choose the refinement of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes? Or do we assume that Geoffrey of Monmouth really knew what he was talking about, however improbable that may seem? We can dismiss any notion of a Tennysonian Arthur: he was wholly good and noble and a post-Freudian audience wouldn’t swallow him. It could take months of the most careful consideration before we decide how we are going to see Arthur.”

  “We’re going to see him as the hero of an early-nineteenth-century opera, and no nonsense about it,” said Geraint Powell. “We haven’t a moment to lose. I’ve made it clear, I think, that the Stratford Festival will allow us to mount ten or twelve performances of Arthur during its next season and I’ve persuaded them to slot it as late as possible. Late August—just a year from now. We’ve got to get cracking.”

  “But surely that’s absurd,” said Hollier. “Will the libretto be ready, not to speak of the music? And then I suppose the theatrical people will have to have a little time to get it up?”

  “The theatrical people will have to be got under contract not later than next month,” said Geraint. “My God, have you no idea how opera singers work? The best are all contracted three years ahead. A thing on this scale won’t need the biggest stars, even if we could get them, but intelligent singers of the next rank won’t be easy to find, especially for an unknown work. They’ll have to shoehorn this piece into very tight schedules. And there’s the designer, and all the carpentry and painting work, and the costumes—I’d better stop, I’m frightening myself.”

  “But the libretto!” said Hollier.

  “The libretto is going to have to hustle its stumps. Whoever is responsible for it must get to work at once, and be quick. The words have to be fitted to whatever music exists, remember, and that is tricky work. We can’t fart around forever with sun-gods and Chrétien de Troyes.”

  “If that is your attitude, I think I had better withdraw at once. I have no desire to be associated with a botch,” said Hollier, and took another very big whisky from the decanter.

  “No, no, Clem, we’ll need you,” said Maria, who still cherished a tenderness for the man who had—it seemed so long ago now—taken her maidenhead, almost absent-mindedly. Not that, as a girl of her time, she had possessed anything so archaic as a maidenhead, but the word was suitable to the paleo-psychological spirit of Clement Hollier.

  “I have a certain reputation as a scholar to protect. I am sorry to insist on that, but it is a fact.”

  “Of course we’ll need you, Clem,” said Penny Raven. “But in an advisory capacity, I think. Better leave the actual writing to old battered hacks like me and Simon.”

  “As you please,” said Hollier, with drunken dignity. “I admit without regret that I have no theatrical experience.”

  “Theatrical experience is precisely what we’re going to need, and lots of it,” said Powell. “If I’m to see this thing through, I shall have to crack the whip, and I hope nobody will take offence. There are a lot of elements to be pulled together if we’re going to have a show at all.”

  “As a member of the academic committee that is supposed to be midwife to this effort, I have to remind you that there is an element you’ve left out, that will have a big say in whatever is done,” said Penny.

  “Meaning?”

  “Schnak’s special supervisor. The very big gun who is coming to the university to be composer-in-residence for a year, for this express purpose,” said Penny.

  “Wintersen keeps hinting about that,” said Darcourt; “but he’s never mentioned a name. Do you know who it is, Penny?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s just been finally settled. No one less than Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot.”

  “Golly! What a name!” said Darcourt.

  “Yes, and what a lady!” said Penny.

  “New to me,” said Arthur.

  “Shame on you, Arthur. She’s acknowledged to be the successor to Nadia Boulanger, as a Muse and fosterer of talent, and general wonder-worker. Schnak is a very, very lucky child. But Gunilla is also said to be a terror, so Schnak had better look out or we shall see some fur flying.”

  “From what point of the compass does this avatar appear?” asked Arthur.

  “From Stockholm. Doesn’t the name tip you off?”

  “We are greatly privileged to have her, I suppose?”

  “Can’t say. Is she a Snark or a Boojum? Only time will tell.”

  6

  Etah in Limbo

  I like that man Powell. He has the real professional spirit. My God, when I think what it was like for me, getting operas on the stage in Bamberg, and even in Berlin, and sometimes wondering where I would find enough musicians to make up the orchestra we needed! And what musicians some of them were! Tailors by day, and clarinetists by night! And the singers! The chorus were the worst. I remember some of them sneaking offstage when there was no work for them to do and sneaking back in three minutes, wiping their mouths with the back of a hand! And wearing their underpants beneath their tights, so that the courtiers of Count Whoever-it-was looked as if they had just stumbled in from the wastes of Lapland. Things are much better now. Sometimes I can intrude myself into a performance of something by Wagner—Wagner who wrote so very kindly of me and admitted my influence in his splendid use of the leitmotif—and, so far as a shade can weep, I weep with pleasure to see how clean all the singers are! Every man seems to have been shaved the very day of the performance. Every woman, even though fat, is not more than five months pregnant. Many of them can act, and they do, even if not well. No doubt about it, opera has come a very long way since my days in Bamberg.

  To say nothing of money! The artists who appear in my Arthur will be able to go to the treasury every Friday night with confidence that a full week’s salary will be forthcoming. How well I remember the promises, and the broken promises, of opera finance in
my time. Of course, as director—and that meant conductor and sometimes scene-painter as well—I usually had my money, but it was wretchedly little money. These modern theatre people don’t know they ‘re alive, and when I consider their good fortune I sometimes forget that I am dead. As dead, that’s to say, as anybody in Limbo is.

  At last I begin to pluck up hope. I may not be in Limbo forever. If Geraint Powell puts my Arthur on the stage, and even five people stay till the end, I may win my freedom from this stoppage in my spiritual voyage, this mors interruptus (to give it a classical ring).

  My own fault, of course, if I died untimely, I must admit that I died by my own hand, though not as surely as if I had used the rope or the knife. Mine was death by the bottle, and by—well, enough about that. Death by Romanticism, let us call it.

  But by the Almighty’s great mercy, an existence in Limbo is not all tears of regret. We may laugh. And how I laughed when that woman professor—that is something new since my time, when a learned woman might be a bas bleu but would never have thought of intruding herself into a university—when that woman professor, I say, read those letters from Planché to Kemble.

  They were new to me. I remember his letters, and the high spirits and assurance they gave off like a perfume. He was so certain that I, who had not written an opera in some time—seven years, was it—would welcome his jaunty assistance. But these letters, in which he reported our exchanges to Kemble, were quite new, and brought back all that trouble in a new and funny light. Poor Planché, industrious Huguenot, with his determination to do his best for Madame Vestris and her magnificent limbs. Poor Planché, with his certainty that an opera audience could not be persuaded to sit still while anything important was being played, or sung. Of course his notion of opera was bad Rossini, or Mozart defaced by that self-loving brigand Bishop. His Covent Garden was a theatre where nobody listened unless one of the Great Necks was shrieking or trumpeting; where people took baskets of cold grouse and champagne to their boxes and stuffed themselves during the music; where those of the right age—between fourteen and ninety—flirted and nodded, and sent billets doux from box to box, wrapped around little bags of sweets; where the soprano, if the applause was sufficiently insistent, would pause in the opera to sing some popular air; after my death it was often “Home, Sweet Home”, which was Bishop’s monumental contribution to the art of music; where a soprano’s jewels—the real thing, achieved by lying complaisantly under the bellies of rich, old fumbling noblemen—were of as much interest as her voice; as the Great Neck declined, the Grande Poitrine became the object of interest, and the bigger it was the more diamonds it would accommodate. Service medals, jealous rivals called them.

  In Germany—even in Bamberg—we knew a little better than that, and we were at work to beget Romanticism, and bring it to birth.

  I wept—Oh yes, we can weep here, and often do—to hear my Undine again, done better than I ever heard it in my lifetime. How good orchestral playing is now; hardly a tailor to be heard in the music the bas bleu conjured out of her astonishing musical machine. Undine was my last completed attempt to draw opera forward from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. Not in the least rejecting Gluck and Mozart, but following them in our attempt to coax something more out of the unknown of man’s mind into his consciousness. So we turned from their formal comedies and tragedies toward myth and legend, to release us from the chains of classicism. Undine—yes, my wonderful tale of the water nymph who marries a mortal, and at last claims him for her underwater kingdom; what does it not say of the need for modern man to explore the deep waters that lie beneath his own surface? I could do it better now, I know, but I did it pretty well then. Weber—my generous, gentle friend Weber—praised the skill with which I had matched music to subject in a beautiful melodic conception. What praise from such a source!

  Now, at long last, Arthur may come to something. No libretto, they say. Only the wind-eggs that Planché blew about so confidently. Where will they turn? Again, I put my faith in Powell. I think he knows more about the myth of Arthur than any of the others, especially the professors. Dare I hope that my music, so far as I was able to sketch it in, will set the tone for the work? Of course. It must.

  I wish I understood everything they say. What does the bas bleu mean about a Snark or a Boojum? It sounds like some great conflict in the works of Wagner. Oh, this tedious waiting! I suppose this is the punishment, the torture, of Limbo.

  III

  1

  Simon Darcourt sat in his study at Ploughwright College planning his crime. A crime it undoubtedly was, for he meant to rob first the University Library, and then the National Gallery of Canada. Princess Amalie had left him in no doubt; the price of the information she had about the late Francis Cornish was possession of the preliminary studies for the drawing which she was now using to sell her new line of cosmetics. She offered that drawing to the public as coming from the hand of an Old Master—though no particular Old Master was mentioned. But the delicacy of line, the complete command of the silver-point technique, and above all the evocation of untouched but not unaware virginal beauty, spoke in unmistakable terms of an Old Master hand.

  Photographs of Princess Amalie had, for some years, appeared in the gossip portions of the fashionable magazines in which she advertised, and it was clear to anybody that this finely preserved aristocrat, perhaps in her fifties, was of the same family as the virgin child in the advertising picture. Of the same family, though obviously many generations separated them. Oh, the magic of aristocracy! Oh, the romance of family descent! How beauty passed, like a blessing, through four centuries! Aristocracy cannot, of course, be bought over the counter, but something of its magic might be imparted by Princess Amalie’s lotions and unguents and pigments. Ladies and, it was known, quite a few gentlemen hastened to put down their names for appointments with the Princess’s skilled maquilleuses who would (it took a whole day) discover precisely which Old Master (the range was large and came down as near to the present time as John Singer Sargent) had dwelt upon their special type of beauty and had employed colours to preserve it for the ages—colours which only Princess Amalie could duplicate in cosmetics. It was very expensive, but certainly it was worth it thus to associate oneself with the great world of art, and the great world that the greatest artists had chosen to paint. To be seen as an Old Master type; was not that worth big money? “Selling like hot cakes” was the coarse term the advertising geniuses used to describe the success of the campaign. Don’t wear the look of the latest fashion. Look like the Old Master subject you are, in your deepest soul, and at your exquisite best!

  Obviously, if it leaked out that the Old Master drawing of Princess Amalie’s ancestor was from the hand of a Canadian who had known her as a girl, millions of dollars would go straight down the drain. Or so it seemed to the advertising world. If some Nosy Parker, rummaging in the stacks of drawings preserved in the National Gallery of Canada, were to turn up preliminary drawings for the superb imposture, from the hand of the Canadian faker and scoundrel—he could be nothing less—the Princess, again in the idiom of the advertising world, would have egg all over her beautiful face. Or so it seemed to Princess Amalie, who was as sensitive as the world expects an aristocrat to be.

  The Princess wanted those preliminary sketches, and the price she offered was information which, she hinted, would be the making of Simon Darcourt’s life of the late Francis Cornish, connoisseur and benefactor of his country.

  Darcourt yearned for that information with the feverish lust of a biographer. Without the slightest evidence that the Princess could tell him anything important, he was convinced that she would do so, and was ready to dare greatly to find out what she knew. Surely—he felt it in his bones—it would fill in the great hole right in the middle of his book.

  Much of the book was completed, in so far as a book can be completed when important information is still missing. He had written the concluding chapters, describing Francis’s later years when he had returne
d to Canada, and played a role as a benefactor of artists, a connoisseur of international reputation, and a generous giver to the collection of contemporary and earlier paintings in the National Gallery. Indeed, he had left the Gallery all his portfolios of drawings, many of which were by undoubted early masters, and among which those preliminary sketches of Princess Amalie lay concealed. But a book about a collector and benefactor, however well written, is not necessarily a gripping story, and readers of biographies like their meat rare.

  He had finished the early part of the book, about Francis’s childhood and early years, and considering how little real information he had, it was a brilliant piece of work. Darcourt did not permit himself the use of the word “brilliant”, for he was a modest man, but he knew it was well done, and that he had made bricks of substantial value with the wrong kind of straw. It was his good fortune that the late Francis Cornish was a man who never threw away or destroyed anything, and among his personal possessions—those which now were in the keeping of the University Library—were several albums of photographs taken by Francis’s grandfather, the old Senator and founder of the family wealth. Old Hamish had been a keen amateur of photography and had made countless records of the streets, the houses, the workmen, and the more important citizens of Blairlogie, the Ottawa Valley town in which Francis had spent his early years. Every picture was carefully identified in the Senator’s neat Victorian handwriting and there they were—the grandmother, the beautiful mother and the distinguished but oddly wooden father, the aunt, the family doctor, the priests, even Victoria Cameron, the Senator’s cook, and Bella-Mae, Francis’s nurse. There were many pictures of Francis himself, a slight, dark, watchful boy, already showing the handsome, clouded face that had caused Princess Amalie to call the adult Francis le beau ténébreux. On the evidence of these photographs, which the Senator liked to call his Sun Pictures, Simon Darcourt had raised a convincing structure of Francis’s childhood. It was as good as much research, aided by Darcourt’s lively but controlled imagination, could make it.