The Lyre of Orpheus tct-3

by Robertson Davies

  In the case of Claude Applegarth, who was undoubtedly the most popular and widely read of New York critics, information was cast on stony ground, for Mr. Applegarth had been a critic of the theatre arts too long to be concerned with the background of anything. The wisecrack was his speciality; that was what his readers expected of him and was he not, after all, himself a popular entertainer? He would not have attended Arthur if it had not been that his annual visit to the Shakespearean portion of the Festival coincided with this opening so closely that it could not decently be neglected. Not that opera was his thing, at all; it was in the criticism of musicals that he was felt as a great and usually blighting influence.

  It was a different matter with Robin Adair, whose word on opera was—well, not law, but rather the judgement of the Recording Angel. A notable musicologist, a translator of libretti, a man of formidable culture, and—rarest attribute of all—a real lover of opera, he was avid for any information Darcourt could give him, and questioned like a cross-examiner.

  “The details I have received are just vague enough to provoke a thousand questions,” he said. “The libretto, for instance. If Hoffmann had gone no further than sketching the work, how much of a libretto existed? Had Planché any hand in it? I hope not. He ruined Oberon with his jokey nonsense. Is there a coherent libretto?”“I gather from Dr. Dahl-Soot that the word ‘sketch’ is somewhat too dismissive for what Hoffmann left in the way of music. There was a good deal of it, all of which is in the score. The basis of it, in fact.”

  “Yes, but the libretto. It can’t have been finished. Who has done it?”

  “As you will see from the program, I have.”

  “Ah? And on what basis? Original work of your own? You see, of course, that if this is to be considered as the completion of a work by Hoffmann—dead in, when was it, 1822?—the libretto is of greatest importance. There must be a congruity of style not at all easy to achieve. Do you think you have managed that?”

  “Not really for me to say,” said Darcourt. “But I may tell you this: by far the greatest part of the libretto is either drawn exactly from, or slightly adapted from, the work of a poet of undoubted genius who was Hoffmann’s contemporary and devout co-religionist in romanticism.”

  “And his name is—?”

  “I am sure that a man of your reputation for out-of-the-way scholarship will recognize his hand at once.”

  “A puzzle? How delightful! I love a puzzle. I shall see you afterward and give you my guess, and you must say if I am right.”

  “Do you think we might have just a little more champagne?” said Mr. Applegarth. “Now listen: whoever wrote the bloody words, there has never been a good play or musical about King Arthur. Look at Camelot. A turkey.”

  “A fairly tough old bird by now,” said Mr. Adair.

  “Nevertheless, a turkey. I said it then and I say it now. A turkey.”

  “Tell me something about this Cornish Foundation,” said Mr. Adair. “I understand it’s a man and a woman with a dummy board. They have ambitious ideas about patronage.”

  “They can’t have enough money for anything really big,” said Mr. Applegarth, who now had a second bottle of champagne and was somewhat less morose. “The modern Medici! That’s what they all want. Won’t work in the modern world.”

  “Oh, surely fine things have been done by patrons even during this year,” said Mr. Adair.

  “Listen,” said Mr. Applegarth. “Patronage only worked when artists were humble. Some of ‘em wore livery. An art patron today is a victim. The artists will crucify him and mock him and caricature him and strip him naked, if he hasn’t got the drop on them from the start. Only when the Medici or the Esterhazys had their heel on the artist’s neck did it work. Admit artists to equality and the jig’s up, because they don’t believe in equality. Only in their own superiority. Sons of bitches!” he said, gloomily filling his glass.

  “The Cornishes have tried very much to leave the artists to their own devices in this affair,” said Darcourt. “I must admit they feel that they have been somewhat shouldered aside by the artists.”

  “You don’t surprise me at all,” said Mr. Applegarth.

  “Ah, well—the artistic temperament. Not all sweetness and light,” said Mr. Adair, rather as though he felt he had a foot in the artist’s world.

  “I see that its half past six,” said Darcourt. “Perhaps we should be getting to the theatre. Seven-o’clock curtain, you know.”

  “I hate these early curtains,” said Mr. Applegarth. “They ruin dinner.”

  “Oh come along, Claude,” said Mr. Adair. “It’s for our benefit you know. Early curtain so the critics can make their deadline.”

  “Not on a Saturday night,” said Mr. Applegarth, who had passed from the morose, through the sardonic, to the combative stage of critical preparation. “Bloody Arthur. Why can’t they leave him in his grave?”

  “Nobody knows where his grave is,” said Mr. Adair, Scottish fount of information as he was.

  “It’ll be on this stage, tonight,” said Mr. Applegarth, obviously ready to assure that it should be so.

  Gwen had called the quarter-hour. From the dressing-rooms could be heard the humming, the buzzing, now and then the full-throated vocalization, of singers getting their voices under command. In front of the curtain early birds among the audience—the kind of people who like lots of time to study their programs—could be heard arriving. Up and down the corridors among the dressing-rooms walked Hans Hoizknecht, wishing the company good luck. “Hals und beinbruch!” he shouted, and if it was a man, he gave him a sharp knee in the rump.

  In the wings, out of earshot of Gwen Larking, Albert Greenlaw was about his favourite sport of instructing the gofers in the lore and tradition of the theatre. They stood about him, devouring the fine Belgian chocolates they had been given earlier by Oliver Twentyman, who believed in first-night presents, especially to the humbler members of the company.

  “I don’t know if I ought to tell you,” he said, “because it is not the thing little girls ought to know. But if you’re really set on a stage career—”

  “Oh yes, Albert. Be a sport. Tell us.”

  “Well then, honey-child, you ought to know about critics. There are some in the audience tonight who are of the cream of that very creamy cream. And you can tell those real ones from the fellows who are just from local papers by one infallible sign, and it is this.” His voice sank to a whisper. “They never go to the John.”

  “Not during the show?” said the prettiest gofer.

  “Not ever. From womb to tomb—not ever. Nobody has ever met a critic in the Men’s, anywhere on this earth.”

  “Albert, that can’t be,” said a dubious gofer, but in a tone that betrayed that she very much wished it to be so, and thirsted for marvels.

  “Would I kid you? Have you ever known me to kid you? I’ll tell you something that will be invaluable to you when you are all happy wives and mothers—or maybe just mothers, in these carefree days. When your child is born, take a look right away at where its teeny-weeny exit ought to be. If it isn’t there, honey, you’ve borne a critic.”

  “Albert, I don’t believe it!”

  “Fact. Medical fact. Imperforate anus, it’s called, in medical circles. And it’s the mark of the critic. The real, top-flight critic. They have two or three of them, pickled, in the medical museum at Johns Hopkins and there you can observe the phenomenon as plain as if it were labelled No Exit. The little fellows, they’re like you and me; they have the normal disposal facilities. But not the biggies. No, no, no. Remember your Uncle Albert told you.”

  “They say Claude Applegarth is here tonight,” said Schnak. She and Dr. Gunilla were in the small dressing-room reserved for the conductors. It was very close, for the Doctor was smoking one of her black cigars.

  “Who is Claude Applegarth?” she asked.

  “He’s supposed to be the most influential critic in New York. And I suppose that means the world,” said Schnak, who had all
the Canadian awe of New York.

  “I do not know his name,” said the Doctor. “And I blow my nose in his hair,” she added. This was to encourage Schnak, who was trying to dissemble her terror. Gunilla would conduct in the pit tonight, of course, but Schnak was to be offstage conductor; when the Chorus sang in the wings, it was she who must direct them, taking her time from a monitor on which appeared a ghostly, grey Gunilla. She must do this with an unwieldy baton that was, in fact, a small red lamp on the end of a metal stick, and her beat, never elegant, became ridiculous when she waved what the Chorus called her fairy wand.

  Conducting! Oh, conducting! Would she ever master it? Conduct the libretto, not just the score, Gunilla was always saying. Easy for Gunilla, tall, elegant, romantic figure. In the evening dress that Dulcy had rigged up for her, Schnak felt like a scarecrow. With a razor she had painfully hoicked the hair from her armpits, and now, in Dulcy’s creation, they did not show. But they hurt. At this moment, Schnak would gladly have forgone any future as a public performer.

  “Five minutes, please, ladies and gentlemen. Overture and beginners in five minutes.” Gwen’s voice, low and clear, came from the speaker on the wall.

  “Perhaps you should go to your post,” said the Doctor.

  “I haven’t anything until after the Overture.”

  “But I have,” said the Doctor. “And I should like to be by myself.”

  Darcourt, standing in the foyer, saw that at the five-minute call, which he could not hear but which he knew was being given, a special group of people arrived, and quickly dispersed themselves into twos and threes. There was nothing positively disturbing about them, but they seemed somewhat overdressed for the occasion. Of course, many of the people who had already entered the theatre were in evening clothes—dinner suits and dinner frocks—but several of these men wore full dress and white ties that spoke of antiquity. The ladies tended to be dressed in plushy materials, well worn and somewhat sprung in the seat. One had a plume in her hair, and another sported a metal headpiece studded with impressive, but not totally convincing, gems. It was the Yerko Claque, and in the midst of them Yerko rose like a mountain in shirt and tie that had grown yellow with time, and a coat, the tails of which hung to his calves; beside him was Mamusia, and it was she who wore the paste jewels and kid gloves that had once been white; they reached well above her elbows. The group comported itself with a stateliness rarely seen on the North American continent, and certainly never in Stratford.

  Yerko’s eye met Darcourt’s, without a spark of recognition.

  Well, God help us, here we go, thought Darcourt, and went inside to claim his seat.

  ARTHUR OF BRITAIN

  AN OPERA IN THREE ACTS planned and sketched by E. T. A. HOFFMANN and completed from his notes by Hulda Schnakenburg under the direction of Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot.

  CHARACTERS

  King Arthur of BritainHans Hoizknecht

  Modred, the King’s nephewGaetano Panisi

  Sir LancelotGiles Shippen

  MerlinOliver Twentyman

  Sir Kay the SeneschalGeorge Sudlow

  Sir GawaineJean Morant

  Sir BedevereYuri Vollmer

  Sir Gareth BeaumainsWilson Tinney

  Sir Lucas, ButlerMark Horrebow

  Sir Ulphius, ChamberlainCharles Bland

  Sir DynadanMark Luppino

  Sir Dagonet, the FoolNutcombe Puckler

  Sir PellinoreAlbert Greenlaw

  Sir PalomidesVincent LeMoyne

  Queen GuenevereDonalda Roche

  Morgan Le Fay, sister to the KingClara Intrepidi

  The Lady ElaineMarta Ullmann

  The Lady ClarissantVirginia Poole

  Ladies of the Court: Ada Boscawen, Lucia Pozzi, Margaret Calnan, Lucy-Ellen Osier, Appoline Graves, Etain O’Hara, Esther Moss, Miriam Downey, Hosanna Marks, Karen Edey, Minnie Sainsbury

  Heralds: James Mitchell, Ulick Carman

  Attendants: Bessie Louth, Jane Holland, Primrose Maybon, Noble Grandy, Ellis Cronyn, Eden Wigglesworth

  Costumes and settings designed by Dulcy Ringgold, and executed in the Festival workshops.

  Scenic Artist: Willy Grieve

  Head Carpenter: Dicky Plaunt

  Lighting Director: Waldo Harris

  Stage Manager: Gwenllian Larking

  Concert-Master: Otto Klafsky

  Répétiteur and Harpsichordist: Watkin Bourke

  Director: Geraint Powell

  Conductor: Gunilla Dahl-Soot

  The Libretto realized by Simon Darcourt, assisted by Penelope Raven and Clement Hollier.

  The public relations people had done their job efficiently. The house was decently full and not with an audience of despair, recruited from nurses’ residences and old folks’ homes. Darcourt found himself sitting next to Clement Hollier; he reflected that he had never seen Hollier in evening dress before, and the learned man stank pungently of some spicy toilet water or after-shave. This may be hard to endure, thought Darcourt. But he could not ponder long on this, for the house lights dimmed, and Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot strode into the orchestra pit, shook hands with the concert-master, and bowed elegantly to the audience.

  The audience responded eagerly. They had never seen anything like Gunilla, with her masculine good looks, her magnificent green tailcoat, and her ample white stock, and their expectations for the evening rose. The show, they felt, had begun.

  Gunilla raised her baton, and the first heavy chords, stating the theme of Caliburn, were heard, and gave way to a firm but melancholy theme, the theme of Chivalry, which was developed for perhaps three minutes, until the point in the score marked by Letter D was reached; then the splendid red curtains swept upward and back, to disclose King Arthur and Merlin standing on the brink of the Enchanted Mere.

  This was something for which the audience was wholly unprepared. Geraint, Waldo Harris, and Dulcy Ringgold had laboured faithfully to reproduce the stage dressing of the early years of the nineteenth century—the stage as Hoffmann would have known it. From the footlights—for there were footlights—the stage rose in a gentle rake which reached backward to the full forty feet of stage space, and on each side were six sets of wings, painted to represent a British forest in springtime as perhaps Fuseli might have imagined it; at the back, in front of a splendidly painted backcloth, the rollers which had been so much trouble a few days before were revolving silently, giving an impression of gently heaving water. It was a perspective scene in the nineteenth-century manner, designed to be beautiful and to complement the stage action, rather than to persuade anyone that it mimicked some natural reality.

  An “objective correlative” to the music, thought Al Crane, and scribbled a note in the darkness. He was not entirely sure what the phrase meant, but he thought it meant something that helped you to understand something else and that was good enough.

  The audience, which had never seen anything like it, burst into loud applause. Canadians are great applauders of stage settings. But Gunilla, who was not aware of this national custom, turned upon them with the face of a Gorgon. She gave a hiss of menace and waved a hand as if to quell the sound. Assistance came from an unforeseen quarter; there were gentle shushings, not angry but politely rebuking, from all over the house. Yerko’s Claque had moved into action and from then onward it directed the applause with fine certainty of taste. The clappers were quieted, and the voice of Oliver Twentyman, high and pure as a silver trumpet, was heard invoking the power of Caliburn to elevate and refine the life of Arthur’s Court, and to give a new meaning to Chivalry. Darcourt breathed with relief. A very tricky corner had been turned. He gave himself up to the music, and in time the curtains closed, and the Overture—for it was a true Hoffmann overture, employing the voices of singers—moved to its completion.

  When the curtains rose immediately on Act One, the scene was a hall in the Court of Arthur, and a fine sight, but not one that suggested chivalry, particularly; the Knights and their Ladies had not that look of stricken consecration which is associated
with chivalry on the stage. Nutcombe Puckler was, as Geraint had directed him, “horsing around and playing the goat” with a cup-and-ball, but not too distractingly. The Knights paid him little heed. The Ladies—Polly Graves’ splendid jugs well downstage and Primrose Maybon equally prominent—declared themselves, and their situation, in the best operatic manner. Darcourt was well pleased with the old ballad he had adapted to a theme of Hoffmann’s and which put the opera off to a somewhat folkloric start.

  Arthur our King lives in merry Caerleon

  And seemly is to see:

  And there he hath with him Queen Guenevere

  That bride so bright of blee.

  Thus sang the Knights. “So bright of what?” hissed Hollier in his ear.

  “Blee! You know—blee! Complexion. Shut up!”

  The Ladies took up the ballad strain:

  And there he hath with him Queen Guenevere

  That is so bright in bower:

  And all his brave knights around him stand

  Of chivalry the flower.

  The Knights, pleased with this handsome compliment, make what might be called a statement of policy, joined by the Ladies:

  O Jesu, Lord of mickle might,

  That died for us on rood,

  So maintain us in all our right,

  For we come of a noble blood.

  But they are not permitted to take their ease in this Kater Murr conception of their society. Preceded by four pages holding in check four very large Irish wolfhounds, King Arthur and his Queen appear, and Arthur tells them of the revelation at the Enchanted Mere:

  Leaf after leaf, like a magician’s hook

  Turned in a dragon-guarded hermitage

  By trees—dishevelling spirits of the air—